'No somos la misma persona': (auto)biografía, (auto)representación y la performatividad brechtiana en "Well", de Lisa Kron

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 45-62 “WE ARE NOT THE SAME PERSON.” (AUTO)BIOGRAPHY, (SELF)REPRESENTATION, AND BRECHTIAN PERFORMATIVITY IN LISA KRON’S WELL1 MARTA FERNÁNDEZ-MORALES Universitat de les Illes Balears marta.fernan[email protected] KEYWORDS Brechtian theater; performativity; (auto)biography; (self)representation; health and sickness PALABRAS CLAVE Teatro brechtiano; performatividad; (auto)biografía; (auto)representación; salud y enfermedad ABSTRACT: Well is defined by its protagonist as “a multicharacter theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community” (12). An unusual initiative for Lisa Kron, whose career has grown through one-woman shows and her participation in the Five Lesbian Brothers collective, this Brechtian creation stems from the personal and extends onto the political, using (auto)biography to discuss issues of bodily and social health while questioning the boundaries between author and character, character and actor, character/actor and audience. Through an interdisciplinary approach that activates concepts from Gender, Theater, and Performance Studies, this article intends to prove that autobiographical feminist performance is a living form, constantly updated and refreshed by committed artists; and that performed life stories contain a great potential for efficacy in the narrative of, and consciousness-raising about, issues of health and sickness in the 21st century. RESUMEN: La protagonista de Well define la obra como una exploración teatral con varios personajes sobre asuntos de salud y enfermedad, tanto a nivel individual como comunitario (12). Iniciativa poco frecuente para Lisa Kron, que ha construido su carrera a partir de espectáculos tipo “solo” y de su participación en el colectivo Five Lesbian Brothers, esta creación brechtiana parte de lo personal y se expande hacia lo político a la vez que cuestiona los límites autora-personaje, personaje-actor, personaje/actor-público. Con un enfoque interdisciplinario que activará conceptos de las áreas de Estudios Teatrales, de Performance y de Género, este artículo pretende demostrar que la performance feminista autobiográfica es una forma viva en 1 Part of the research for this paper was conducted at the “Instituto Franklin de Investigación en Estudios Norteamericanos” thanks to a “Margaret Fuller” research grant (July 2011). The author would like to thank the institution for its support and its interest in the field of U.S. theater. 46 Marta Fernández-Morales Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 45-62 constante actualización por parte de artistas comprometidas, y que la puesta en escena de historias de vida contiene un gran potencial de eficacia en la narrativa de y toma de conciencia sobre asuntos de salud y enfermedad en el siglo XXI. INTRODUCTION Since the inception of feminism in the Western world there has been an ongoing connection between this egalitarian political project and the literary genre of autobiography. As Brodzki and Schenck stated more than two decades ago in Life/ Lines (1988), autobiography “localizes the very program of much feminist theory – the reclaiming of the female subject” (1). Furthermore, in the postmodern context, when all givens of identity have been shattered, the dialogism between gender-conscious theories and autobiographical manifestations becomes even more relevant, in that life stories also foreground “the central issue of contemporary critical thought – the problematic status of the self” (Brodzki and Schenck 2). For a movement that has insisted on claiming that “the personal is political,” no genre could have been more appropriate to articulate the struggle for subjecthood. In her revision of the evolution of female autobiography, Heilbrun identifies 1973 as a turning point. Before this moment, the canon and the social conditions of women imposed a type of text based on the idea that there was beauty in pain; a sort of story that would transform anger into spiritual acceptance through the act of writing. The publication of May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude in 1973 is “the watershed in women’s autobiography,” according to Heilbrun (13), because for the first time a female author deliberately sets out to express her rage as an integral part of a life narrative. The fact that the book saw the light in the context of the second wave of the feminist movement cannot be overlooked, since this political initiative would contribute to the creation of artistic forms where women’s expressions of discontent would have a place of their own. Because of its public nature, and in coherence with the development of autobiography, theater was not a usual medium for female life narratives before the birth of the Women’s Liberation program. As Heddon recalls, “prior to the feminist movement of the 1970s the ‘personal’ remained firmly private” (Politics 134). It was in that decade, and in the framework of a consciousness-raising tendency shared by most feminist collectives, that the potential of theater to politicize women’s autobiography became obvious. Heddon summarizes the importance of autobiographical performance as it was realized back then: women as subjects of their own art elaborated a new set of self-representations, re-defining the category ‘woman’ in the process. They transformed their lives into creative products, revealing previously silenced experiences and making it clear that the previously considered neutral art of performance was, in fact, gendered. Adopting a proactive attitude, female performers in the 1970s –continues Heddon– explored alternative ways of acting and narrating, proved that it was economically viable for them to be We are not the same person… 47 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 46-62 relevant members of the theater business, raised the consciousness of the spectators, and used theater to engender community (Politics 134-5). In this respect, the women that decided then –and those who do it today– to put their lives on stage took an authoritative stance, because “the act of women speaking their stories publicly thus radically challenges notions of agency, spectacle and spectatorship as female performers move their voices and bodies from the background to the foreground” (Carver 16). Several critics (Gammel 1999; Heddon 2008; Reinelt 2006; Satin and Jerome 1999) have identified some risks of women performing solo and/or selfcentered pieces, such as: 1) the lack of recognition of their authority in androcentric contexts; 2) the menace of postmodern individualism taking over; 3) the ghost of essentialism in the creation and representation of their identities; 4) the trivialization of life stories within a spectacularizing, media-dominated world; or 5) the labelling of autobiography as a lesser genre precisely because women have growingly appropriated it. Nevertheless, the autobiographical genre has continued to be alive in the English-speaking countries, with key figures of feminist theater like Rachel Rosenthal, Laurie Anderson, Peggy Shaw, or Lois Weaver cultivating it systematically.2 The main reason for this resilience was partially hinted at by Carver in the quote reproduced above: the possibility that autobiography provides to promote agency within a micro-universe (the world of theater) that still maintains women and minorities in the margins, and at the same time within a macro-scenario (the world at large) in which female citizens are not yet fully first-class. Assuming her optimistic idea that “performance can be a transformational act” (Autobiography 3), this article presents an in-depth case study that supports Heddon’s defence of the potential of the dramatized autobiography as a form of cultural intervention, where the performed life story “might be an act of reclamation, reinvention, transformation or survival” (Politics 133). In a framework conditioned by the influence of the mass media and the excessive presence of confessional forms like reality TV, talk shows, or personal blogs, Heddon identifies the need for a new wave of formal experimentation in the field of feminist autobiography, in order to guarantee the political value of the personal testimony. In at least two of her works on the genre, she exemplifies this necessary experimental movement through the play that will be analyzed here: Lisa Kron’s Well (2006), where space, the exploration of multiple character possibilities, or metatheater feature high (Politics 142; Autobiography 153-6).3 Using her and other performance experts’ work as theoretical background, this essay will try and prove two main theses: on the one hand, that autobiographical feminist performance is a living form, constantly being 2 For a more comprehensive list of female performers that consistently use autobiographical material in Anglo-American theater, see Heddon’s Autobiography and Performance. 3 Kron’s play premiered in 2004. However, I will be using the date of publication as a reference (2006), since my study will be based on the Theatre Communications Group’s edition. 48 Marta Fernández-Morales Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 45-62 updated and refreshed by committed artists; and on the other hand, that performed life stories contain a potential for efficacy in the narrative of, and consciousnessraising about, issues of health and sickness. The latter point –health and sickness as rooted in and represented through female bodies– is, like the preoccupation with individual and collective identities, a motif in feminist performed autobiography. The second wave of Anglo-American feminism extended one of its branches onto the Women’s Health Movement (WHM), an initiative that, from 1969 onwards, developed as a political project but also as an epistemological revolution: as Tuana explains, WHM members demanded access to knowledge about their own bodies, as well as new ways of creating and expanding that knowledge (2). From the beginning, the WHM identified performance as a productive strategy within its activist repertoire. Thus, for instance, in 1971 health activist Carol Downer performed the first public cervical self-examination, quite literally taking her body into her own hands in an example of what Morgen has called “gynaecological guerrilla theater” (23).4 Downer’s gesture fulfilled the main condition of guerrilla theater defined by Brown, i.e., “putting the language of the dominant culture to subversive use” (167), in this case twisting the conventions of traditional medical practice. Other good illustrations of the crossover between feminist health activism and performance are: 1) the Social Art Network Ariadne’s projects around rape, which produced dramatized events like Three Weeks in May and In Mourning and in Rage (Los Angeles, 1977); 2) the ACT UP-WHAM! coalition’s action Stop the Church at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York (1989), which included drag, performance, and a dramatic die-in to denounce the church’s resistance to women’s control over their own bodies;5 3) the creation of an affinity group of ACT UP focused specifically on the issue of abortion that uses performance as a form of reaction against Operation Rescue: The Church Ladies for Choice; 4) 1990s autoperformances about cancer like Linda Park-Fuller’s A Clean Breast of It, which the author described as a piece combining “an educational impulse, a sociopolitical impulse, and a performative impulse” (213);6 5) the interactive performance that 4 I have studied Downer’s transgression in “In Sickness and in Health. ‘Performativity’ and ‘Autopoiesis’ in U.S. Feminist Theater,” forthcoming in the Journal of American Studies of Turkey. 5 ACT UP stands for “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power”, a collective of health activists that was at the peak of visibility and participation at the end of the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis. WHAM! means “Women’s Health Action and Mobilization”, and it was the name of a feminist group that ascribed to the wider WHM and that largely disbanded in 1995. Information about the former can be found on the ACT UP Oral History Project’s website (www.actuporalhistory.org/). For a scholarly perspective on the activities of the latter, Carroll’s Grassroots Feminism: Direct Action Organizing and Coalition Building in New York City, 1955-1995 is the best reference as of today. I discussed the theatrical initiatives of Ariadne, ACT UP, WHAM!, and the Church Ladies for Choice (mentioned below) in a paper presented at the 4th International Conference on American Drama and Theater (Seville, 2012), entitled “Our Bodies, Our Shows: Performing (Her)Stories of Health and Sickness from a Feminist Perspective”. 6 I have studied Park-Fuller’s work in “The New Breast Cancer (Im)Patient,” included in the volume Performing Gender Violence. Plays by Contemporary Women Dramatists (2012). We are not the same person… 49 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 46-62 opened the exhibition EveryBody! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009, elaborated by SubRosa, a self-defined “cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work”;7 and, ongoing as this article is written, 6) Eve Ensler’s plays about the female body (The Vagina Monologues; The Good Body; I Am an Emotional Creature) and their activist spin-off articulated around theater: V-Day.8 All the examples mentioned above and the one that we are going to focus on here have several elements in common: first of all, as we can infer from Ensler’s titles, they take the suffering/sick/healing/dying female body as a starting point for their mise en scène, which tends to foreground issues of (self)representation. Secondly, they place women at the center of the performed narrative and in the position of an agent/subject that politicizes her own (auto)biography, frequently rebelling against the social and/or medical establishment, as is the case of Park- Fuller, who explains that she composed A Clean Breast of It “as an intervention against the dominant medical discourse that privileges abstract knowledge over individual stories about cancer” (215). Finally, all of these performances, as well as Kron’s, make frequent use of Brechtian strategies intended to promote consciousness-raising among the audience, as we can see with The Church Ladies for Choice, in whose theatrical actions the activists wear “drags whose seams are intended to show” (Cohen-Cruz 92), thus making the actor behind the character intentionally visible. All in all, the corpus approached in this introduction is characterized by one main feature: its performativity, as this term is conceived by Fischer-Lichte, i.e., as a combination of Austin’s and Butler’s theories applicable to theatricalized events: in these projects the sick and gender identities are created as we go; that is, the performers do gender and do health (or the lack thereof) in the process of staging their plight. In this respect, these theatrical proposals –like Austin’s performative utterances– are constitutive, “in so far as they bring forth the social reality they are referring to” (Fischer-Lichte 24), and they are also performative in a Butlerian sense, since the process of (auto)biographical (self)representation makes it obvious that identity is “brought forth by the continuous constitution of bodily acts [. . .] [engendering] identity through these very acts” (Fischer-Lichte 27). The primary text selected for his paper is Lisa Kron’s Well, which received its world premiere on March 16, 2004, at The Public Theater in New York, with Kron herself in the main role. The text was included in the anthology Best Plays of 2004-2005, and the show got one Drama League nomination and one Outer Critics 7 Source: www.cyberfeminism.net. Accessed 13 June 2012. 8 For more information about V-Day and its use of theater, see “When Theater Becomes a Crusade against Violence: The Case of V-Day” (in Violence and Gender in the Globalized World, 2008), or browse www.vday.org. 50 Marta Fernández-Morales Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 45-62 Circle Best Play nomination. Two years later it opened on Broadway, still with Kron as the protagonist and directed by Leigh Silverman, and it was nominated for two Tony Awards. Reviewers have repeatedly called it “Pirandellian,” highlighting a radical metatheatrical discourse that will be analyzed below (Brantley 6; Cole 1; Feingold 1; Isherwood 1; Stevenson 672). One actress involved in the production of the work (Kathleen Brady, playing Ann Kron for the Denver Center Theater Company) has described it as a “brilliantly crafted piece of chaos,” and has compared it to an artichoke, with many layers that are peeled off in the process of staging, until the heart is revealed.9 Scholars have pinpointed in it the influence of the WOW Café, “one of the longest-running women’s theatres in the United States” (Rehm 114), which Kron herself acknowledges (Preface xi; Straight 53).10 In a quiltlike exercise of creation and mise-en-scène, Kron “fuses autobiographical solo performance, memory play and traditional theatre to create a complex net of identifications and disrupt the boundaries between representation and reality” (Saddik 208). She questions the canonical dichotomies playwright/performer; author/character; actor/character, and she makes the audience participate in a process of meaning-making that takes place before their very eyes, as such a performative piece calls for. “THIS IS NOT A PLAY ABOUT MY MOTHER”: (AUTO)BIOGRAPHY, (SELF)REPRESENTATION, AND SICKNESS According to the stage directions, Well opens with the protagonist, Lisa, taking center stage and talking directly to the audience.11 Stage left is Ann, her mother, “sleeping in a La-Z-Boy recliner” (11). In a didactic manner, Lisa explains to the spectators that they are about to see a play that “deals with issues of illness and wellness,” asking questions like “[w]hy are some people sick and other people are well?” (11). In the subsequent minutes, the project unravels in three different spaces that coexist on stage: 1) the “here (and now)” where Lisa is trying to develop her idea and Ann is constantly interrupting her: a domestic environment, “a slice of Lisa’s parents’ living room” (8); 2) the section that Kron’s directions define as “flexible” (8) and that incorporates the neighborhood meetings and the Allergy Unit where Lisa was institutionalized when she was a student; and 3) Lisa’s “special 9 Source: “A Well Made Segment,” a Denver Center Theater Company video about the production of Well (www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_pO27Lxh- I&list=PL765F68D350CF25F1&index=1&feature=plpp_video; accessed 14 June 2012). 10 For general information about Kron, see her web www.lisakron.com, the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Facebook profile, and academic materials like Greene’s Women Who Write Plays (2001), Fisher’s ‘We Will Be Citizens’. New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theater (2008), or Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers. Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (2010). 11 To avoid confusion, I will always refer to the character as “Lisa” and to the author/performer as either “Kron” or “Lisa Kron”. We are not the same person… 51 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 46-62 light,” defined in the initial instructions as “literally a square of isolated light that Lisa retreats into when she feels it necessary to have a private conversation with the audience” (8). This fragmented use of the dramatic space hints at the different theatrical forms that Kron will combine in Well: 1) the traditional theater production where characters have regular conversations; 2) the memory play that takes us to the protagonists’ past and conflicting versions of their own lives; and 3) the autobiographical performance, which moves here beyond the one-woman show and puts the author/character in a difficult position when it comes to explaining her staging decisions. Kron has tried to disentangle this complex web of strategies by stating that “Well is an actual play. But the nature of its dramatic structure is absolutely informed by my history of doing solo work” (in Weisman 36). Thematically speaking, the work deals explicitly with health and the lack thereof by presenting Lisa’s struggle with allergies and Ann’s ailment: severe allergy with chronic fatigue on top. Implicitly, Well is about the process of creating an (auto)biographical piece that involves other people. Although Lisa insists that “[t]his play is not about my mother and me” (11), the process of staging it comes to be about the two of them and their relationship with each other and with the community, foregrounding a recurrent aspect in Kron’s theatrical career: “the ethics of representing others in the moment of self-representation” (Heddon, Autobiography 153). As the author affirms, “[w]hen you write about other people in a direct way, it is always a moral gray area” (in Weisman 36), and the text uses this as an integral part of the theatrical conflict. Thus, Lisa’s mother soon begins to question her daughter’s intentions and her role within the narrative: “You’re not writing a play about me are you?” (16). As somebody who has acquired a sense of her own agency after years of community organizing in an integrated neighborhood, she rebels at the thought of being treated as an object in someone else’s autobiographical account. “Who are you using to explore it [your health issue]?,” she wants to know. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘using’,” responds Lisa, aware of her own responsibility as a narrator (16). Her justification is that she will be activating autobiographical material, but just as a means to an end: “ultimately this is an exploration of a universal experience” (17). In the process, however, Ann and the characters of the actors that Lisa has hired to perform her piece will end up forming an unexpected intratextual coalition that will resist the playwright’s authority, progressively revealing the paradox behind Lisa’s definition of Well as “a solo show with other people in it” (16). Self-representation, they will prove, is still representation, and others do not go untouched when an individual puts her own life on stage, because “the self is always relational. It is not only a historical and cultural construct but it is imbued with, and indeed is inseparable from, others” (Heddon, Absent 113). By the conclusion, Ann and her accomplices will have destroyed Lisa’s intentions of avoiding the “emotional minefield” that she foresaw at the beginning (18), and all the characters will have gone through the “messy 52 Marta Fernández-Morales Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 45-62 carefrontation” imagined by the protagonist when she set off to perform her story. As Pitt has written, then, “Well uses comedy to expose the violence inherent in trying to tell someone else’s story, even when that story is part of your own history” (275). Ann’s earliest disturbance of the peace comes immediately after she wakes up on her La-Z-Boy, when she insists on treating the audience to drinks and snacks, which she ends up throwing at them, in a radical breach of the fourth wall (15). She then questions Lisa’s chronological organization of her autobiographical material (“You were having problems long before that” –19), her style, which seems to leave out important chunks of the mother’s experience (“That seemed awfully compressed” –25), and her retelling of her words and actions. She repeatedly vindicates her own voice (“Honey, just let me tell this story” –36), and she ends up stealing the focus from the alleged protagonist: one of the “actors” dismisses Lisa with a patronizing “Hang on a second, honey. I’m talking to your mom” (37). When Ann begins addressing the “actors” directly (32) the show goes through a turning point with no return: they start by confessing that they find Lisa’s proposal “a little confusing” (33), they cross over from their side of the stage to Ann’s area (38), they encourage Lisa to modify the script (51), they criticize the emotional tension they perceive (64), and they condemn Lisa’s setup as “[m]anipulative and wrong” (66). The main character finds an explanation in her lack of experience (“I was a solo performer for a long time, you know. It’s a lot easier to do your own thing than dealing with a bunch of ‘characters’ criticizing what they really don’t know anything about” –67), but she is adamant that “[t]his whole thing is gonna come together” (68). Kron’s play does come together despite the characters’ mutiny, thanks to the presence of health and sickness as a unifying principle. Her theatrical alter ego acknowledges in one of her first monologues that she comes from a family where everyone is ill. In her context, Lisa says, lack of health “is the norm” (13). Some of her relatives have been diagnosed with “recognizable, identifiable illnesses like cancer and heart disease”; others, like her mother, suffer from “the family mystery illness – the general inability to move, to physically cope, to stay awake” (13). Her personal need is to explore the differences between those types of disorders and, above all, the great irony that Ann “is a fantastically energetic person trapped in an utterly exhausted body” (15). In spite of her condition, the mother managed to conduct an active life, leading neighborhood projects and being key to the racial integration of their area of Lansing. Her health issues, however, were passed on to Lisa, who was labelled as allergic early in her life and went through a series of trying treatments, including enemas (20), constant surveillance of her bodily functions (21), absurd water testing (26), and fasting (41). In Well, individual health issues are placed side by side with social wellbeing, exploring the paradox of Ann being able to heal a community, but not We are not the same person… 53 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, nº 16 (2012) Seville, Spain, ISSN 1133-309-X, 46-62 herself. The narrated past and the narrative present of the play are alternately used in order to help the audience establish meaningful connections: what the show tries to do, explains Lisa, is “looking at some scenes back and forth from the neighborhood and from when I was in the Allergy Unit to see if we can find some resonances and some parallels between those stories of healing” (18). The process of making oneself well as a person and/or as an active member of a certain social group is the organizing thread that lies underneath the apparent confusion. Within Kleinman’s taxonomy, Kron’s conceptualization of her mother’s and her community’s issues fits into the field of sickness, that is, “the understanding of a disorder in its generic sense across a population in relation to macrosocial (economic, political, institutional) forces” (Kleinman 6). This differs from illness, defined as the way “the sick person and the members of the family or wider social network perceive, live with, and respond to symptoms and disability” (3), which would characterize Ann’s approach, with its emphasis on the incapacitating physical signs of her allergies; and from disease, i.e., “what the practitioner creates in the recasting of illness in terms of theories of disorder” (5), a term that would be appropriate to explain the Head Nurse’s construction of Lisa’s problem. In this sense, Ann’s sickness is presented as part of a wider social malaise that manifests itself in racism and discrimination and that impinges on the following generations. Looking back at her time as a patient, adult Lisa is very sceptical about the diagnosis and treatments that she was put through. As her mother’s child, young Lisa had bought into the dominant medical discourse unquestioningly, but things have changed by the time she devises her autobiographical exploration: “at the time I went into the Allergy Unit,” she explains ironically, “I believed in allergies” (22). Retelling the stories of her institutionalization, however, she makes it clear that even as a teenager she had tried to escape from the sick role that doctors and society had defined for women like her: “when I got to the Unit I was confused and miserable. Because I was a nineteen-year old college student, and almost all of the other patients on the Unit were middle-aged ladies. And I remember thinking to myself: I am sick, and you are sick, but I am not like you” (19). Lisa seems to know, probably because of her mother’s chronic health troubles, that the sick role, like racial prejudice, “is primarily a description of social expectations” (Freund and McGuire 131), and she is not willing to fulfil them as she has seen Ann do. When in their first meeting the Nurse treats her like a child and offers her milk of magnesia in a fake happy tone, Lisa sheepishly responds “[s]ounds fantastic” (22). But not long after that, having spent some time with other women and observed what their obsession with allergies is doing to them, she starts to use humor as a resistance strategy. When fellow patient Kay asks her “what kind of symptoms do you have?,” she replies: “I don’t have any symptoms, actually. I’m just here for the enemas” (27). 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