THEATRE OF DISTURBANCE
GENDER PERFORMATIVITY AND THE ALIENATION
EFFECT IN SELECTED PLAYS OF PAULA VOGEL
MAHTAB MAHDAVIFAR
FACULTY OF ART AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF MALAYA
KUALA LUMPUR
2015
THEATRE OF DISTURBANCE:
GENDER PERFORMATIVITY AND THE ALIENATION
EFFECT IN SELECTED PLAYS OF PAULA VOGEL
MAHTAB MAHDAVIFAR
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL
FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF
ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF MALAYA
KUALA LUMPUR
2015
UNIVERSITI MALAYA
ORIGINAL LITERARY WORK DECLARATION
Name of Candidate: Mahtab Mahdavifar
Registration/Matric No: AGF100017
Name of Degree: Master of English Literature
Title of Project Paper/Research Report/Dissertation/Thesis (“this Work”):
Theatre of Disturbance: Gender Performativity and Alienation Effect in Selected Plays of
Paula Vogel
Field of Study: English Literature
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Abstract
In this thesis, I focus on the embodiment of gender performativity in three selected
plays of Paula Vogel, namely And Baby Makes Seven, The Baltimore Waltz and
Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief in order to show how Vogel managed to practice
gender performativity in depicting her female characters in these plays. In writing her
plays, like many other feminists, Vogel employs Brechtian distancing techniques including
double-charactering, use of film and slides, manipulating the genres and use of non-linear,
episodic and collage-like structures. These techniques help her to create a theatre, which
transgresses the traditional representations of female characters and overturns gender
identities. Vogel interrogates, rewrites and revisions canonical works of literature in order
to stage a theatre, which as she wishes, makes the audiences feel uncomfortable. In her
plays, she focuses on the matter of gender and sexuality and depicts how gender as Butler
discusses
is
the
repetition
of
certain
i
acts
in
a
systematic
way.
Abstrak
Dalam tesis ini, saya memberi perhatian kepada penjelmaan kebolehlaksanaan gender
dalam tiga karya drama terpilih Paula Vogel iaitu And Baby Makes Seven, The Baltimore
Waltz dan Desdemona: A play about a Handkerchief untuk menunjukkan bagaimana Vogel
berjaya mengamalkan kebolehlaksanaan gender dalam melakar watak-watak wanita dalam
karya-karya tersebut. Vogel, seperti ramai lagi feminis yang menulis drama, menggunakan
teknik-teknik penjarak ala Brecht seperti perwatakan ganda, penggunaan filem dan slaid,
manipulasi genre, dan penggunaan struktur-struktur bukan linear, berepisod, dan ala kolaj.
Teknik-teknik ini membolehkan beliau mencipta teater yang melanggar norma-norma
tradisional watak wanita dan menterbalikkan identiti-identiti gender. Untuk mementaskan
teater seperti kehendak Vogel yang inginkan audiens merasa kurang senang, beliau banyak
menyoalsiasat, menulis kembali, dan menyemak kembali karya-karya sastera yang kanonik.
Teater beliau amat mementingkan soal-soal gender dan seksualiti, dan memaparkan
bagaimana gender (menurut Butler) merupakan pengulangan sebilangan tindakan-tindakan
secara sistematik.
ii
Acknowledgments
In preparing this dissertation, I am indebted to many people. I would like to express my
sincere thanks to my supervisor, Associate Professor Dr. Susan Philip, for her help and
guidance throughout the research process. Without her constructive comments and support,
this dissertation would have not been possible.
I do not have adequate words to express my gratitude to my wonderful family especially
my parents. Many sincere thanks are given to my supportive fiancé Pooria who encouraged
me throughout the whole process. Without him, this piece of work would have not been
written.
iv
To My Father
My Hero
v
Table of Contents
1.
Chapter One Introduction ............................................................................................... 1
1.1.
Introduction to Paula Vogel’s Theatre..................................................................... 1
1.2.
Research Objective .................................................................................................. 6
1.3.
Methodology............................................................................................................ 7
1.3.1.
Brechtian Distancing Effects............................................................................ 8
1.3.2.
Theoretical Influences on Butler .................................................................... 15
1.3.3.
Gender Performativity .................................................................................... 18
1.3.4.
Gender Failure ................................................................................................ 20
1.3.5.
The Limits of Performative Choice: Butler’s Wardrobe analogy .................. 23
1.3.6.
Gender vs. Sex................................................................................................ 25
1.3.7.
Deconstruction of Gender Identity ................................................................. 27
1.4.
Literature Review .................................................................................................. 28
1.5.
The Organization of Chapters................................................................................ 34
2. Chapter Two Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief Shattering the Ideal of the
New Woman......................................................................................................................... 36
3.
2.1.
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 37
2.2.
Themes................................................................................................................... 38
2.3.
Objectives .............................................................................................................. 38
2.4.
Synopsis ................................................................................................................. 40
2.5.
Shakespeare, Vogel, Bauer .................................................................................... 41
2.6.
Adaptation of Brechtian Distancing Effect ........................................................... 43
2.7.
Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 53
Chapter Three And Baby Makes Seven or How Fantasy Steals the Real World........... 55
3.1.
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 55
3.2.
Synopsis ................................................................................................................. 57
3.3.
Gender Performativity in And Baby Makes Seven................................................. 58
vi
3.3.1.
4.
Can Three Parents Make a Baby? .................................................................. 59
3.4.
Distancing Effects in And Baby Makes Seven ....................................................... 67
3.5.
Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 74
Chapter Four The Baltimore Waltz: Fun at the Funeral ............................................... 76
4.1.
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 77
4.2.
Synopsis ................................................................................................................. 78
4.3.
Themes................................................................................................................... 80
4.4.
Objectives .............................................................................................................. 82
4.5.
Brechtian Techniques: Distancing Effects in The Baltimore Waltz ...................... 83
3.4.1. Comic Distancing Effects ................................................................................... 84
4.6.
Structure................................................................................................................. 93
4.7.
Fantasy ................................................................................................................... 97
4.8.
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 101
5.
Chapter Five Conclusion ............................................................................................ 103
6.
Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 109
vii
List of Figures
Figure 1. Susan Bott and Constance Zaytoun enact a grizzly death in Paul Vogel’s And Baby Makes
Seven, directed by Marc Stuart Weitz at New Ohio Theatre (2014). ............................................... 65
Figure 2. The Baltimore Waltz: Main Street Stage, North Adam, Massachusetts, 2010 .................. 77
Figure 3. The Baltimore Waltz- Deep Dish Theater (2012) ............................................................. 97
Figure 4. Small Stage Theatre, Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, Firebug, Leisester ....... 49
vii
1. Chapter One
Introduction
If people get upset, it’s because the play is working.
Paula Vogel, Interview with Mary Louise Parker
If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a
disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show,
could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality
issues from a disappointed homosexuality?
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity
1.1.
Introduction to Paula Vogel’s Theatre
Paula Vogel profoundly concentrates on agitating the cultural mindset of her audiences,
gives them a “wake up call” and challenges them in various ways. The aim of her theatre is not
just to entertain but to arouse our awareness towards the world around us by interrogating the
way we think and the way we perceive personal and social phenomena, and sometimes that is
very shocking: “My play dramatizes the gifts we received from the people who hurt us”
(Griffiths 92). This ‘strategy’ is discussed in an interview with Jennifer Griffiths about her play,
How I Learned to Drive, the Pulitzer winning play written in 1997 in which Vogel re-visions
Nabokov’s Lolita, but this time through Lolita’s eyes. Vogel believes that since we are living in a
“culture of victimization”, and encouraging people via psychiatrists, social activists and social
icons to reside in their victim identity, she focuses instead on “the gifts inside the box of abuse”
(Griffiths 92) but certainly without denying the initial agony. In other words, instead of trying to
1
picture the female character as the victim of sexual abuse, she depicts the way that Li’l Bit
recovers and “survives” after.
In spite of placing women in the center stage in her plays, Vogel’s focus is not just on
women. She avoids solely taking the women’s side and does not fall into the bias of excluding
men. In How I Learned to Drive, although we may hate Uncle Peck as a child molester, Vogel
surprisingly arouses our sympathy for him. She tries to characterize him beyond his actions and
focuses on the point that Peck is the product of his society, as in the last act Li’l Bit expresses her
wonder: “Who did it to you, Uncle Peck? How old were you? Were you eleven?” (54).
Therefore, instead of blaming her characters, she attempts to show us how social systems
construct the individual as a child molester, porn writer or prostitute, and how the patriarchal
society uses different strategies to suppress women and silence them. In my dissertation, I will
focus on three of her plays: And Baby Makes Seven, The Baltimore Waltz and Desdemona: A
Play About a Handkerchief, in order to investigate gender performativity in these plays, to
explore how Vogel exploits Brechtian techniques to present gender subversion, and to show how
her female characters break the conventional gender representations presented by 1970s and ‘80s
feminist playwrights, resisting essentialist views of gender perception. The three plays selected
to be discussed in the present research are the most critically received plays of Vogel, written in
the first half of her career (along with The Oldest Profession). These works are received as a
ground for her next plays and the present study aims at making a ground for further studies on
her following plays, which are even more concerned with gender issues and the consequences of
gender bias including homophobia, domestic violence and pedophilia.
Although Vogel is categorized as a postmodern feminist playwright, she cannot be boxed
into one category of feminism. Starting her career in the time of the emergence of second-wave
2
Feminism, Vogel has less in common with the second-wave playwrights than with the thirdwave feminists. More concerned with issues of gender and race as well as social class, rather
than depicting women’s anger and victimization, Vogel’s feminism evades being easily
categorized. David Savran in the introduction to The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays declares
that Vogel’s feminism is the representation of the point of view that feminism means “avoiding
the easy answer – that isn’t really an answer at all - in favor of posing the question in the right
way” (Vogel xii). In other words, raising more questions instead of giving answers is Vogel’s
answer to social problems as a feminist. She herself claims that:
For me being a feminist does not mean showing a positive image of women. For
me being a feminist means looking at things that disturb me, looking at things that
hurt me as a woman. We live in a misogynist world, and I want to see why, and I
want to look and see why not just men are the enemy but how I as a woman
participate in the system. To say that men are the enemy is patronizing. It makes
me a victim and I am not comfortable as a victim (qtd.in Holmberg).
The representation of women in Vogel’s works is in sharp contrast with other feminist
theatre of the 1970s and ’80s. What Vogel tends to represent is neither angry women as victims
who are disappointed and helpless, nor valorized women who can beat the patriarchal structures.
At the end of the 1970s, feminist theatre shifted “From anger to affirmation, from showing
women solely as victims to showing how women can and have gained control of their own life”
(Chinoy 274). In the 1980s, feminist playwrights mostly tended to create a positive image of
women and show that women’s lives are as valuable as men’s. But Vogel’s theatre was not part
of this mainstream. Besides the fact that she is against creating embellished representations of
women’s lives and valorizing female characters, Vogel believes positive empathy does not
improve society by creating a more balanced status. In her interview with Marrian Brace, Vogel
declares that positive empathy cannot make social changes and it is negative empathy which can
3
help the society to be aware of the dark sides although “there's a great deal of resistance to
negative empathy. Americans don't want to think about the past, about death, about the ephemeral”
(Brace 1998).
Equally important, Vogel’s plays are highly concerned with ‘hot’ and disturbing social
and cultural issues like AIDS, pornography, rape, domestic violence and homosexuality which
are all highly related to women’s condition in society. Her plays never answer us, but raise more
questions specifically about why and how our sexual biases are formed; that is part of why her
theatre leaves the audience uncertain and unsettled. Vogel believes that a play should not
necessarily be enjoyable and make the audience “feel good”; rather, it should give the audience a
perspective to refuse to let social evils happen in their life (Holmberg, 1998). Vogel specifically
writes about the internalization of homophobia, racism and misogyny as the main themes of her
plays: “We’re taught racism the way we are taught homophobia and misogyny, it’s all
internalized” (1998). And theatre is her way to disturb the audience, to make them aware of the
social issues and the long-term internalization: “If people get upset, it’s because the play is
working” (1998). Her emphasis on the importance of social issues can be discerned from the
subjects of her plays and the way she represents them. Vogel shows that there is neither a onesided perspective nor a simple solution for social issues. Therefore, what she is doing is not to
simplify but to complicate our perception about social issues and to make people think deeply
and get them more involved with the social problems.
In order to get results from such a theatre, we need active spectators, more like
participants rather than passive audiences. In this sense, Vogel’s works are much like Brecht’s
theatre. Like Brecht, Vogel is a socialist in theatre who is concerned with what happens around
her as an artist and passionate to make changes in different ways. Apart from that, both Vogel
4
and Brecht want their audience to be active and to start making changes after leaving the theatre.
They both make their audience uncomfortable, by creating new representations and helping their
audience to transform the suffering experienced by their characters into action.
Similar to Brecht, Vogel expects her audience to respond and participate, to say no to
similar social problems in their daily life. That is why she chooses provocative subjects, those
which are close to everyday life and tend to be forgotten and ignored.
To locate the idea of disturbance, which is highly visible in Vogel’s plays, we should go
back to Brecht’s theory of verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) first presented in his article
“Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (1961), influenced by Russian formalists specially Victor
Shklovsky. According to Peter Brooker:
In both theories, the (proper) role of art is the enemy of habit. It renews, refreshes
our perceptions by “making-strange”. But while Shklovsky’s Ostranenie was a
purely aesthetic concept, concerned with the renewal of perception, Brecht’s
Verfremdung had a social aim. If the world could be shown differently, i.e., as
having different possibilities could it not be differently made? Brecht wished to
strike not merely at the perceptions, but at the consciousness of his spectators.
Shklovsky expressly denied the cognitive function of art. (70)
Vogel’s notion of disturbance is very close to Brecht’s theory of distancing effects as
their aim is strongly in the service of social change rather than pure aesthetic values which were
the main focus of Russian formalists. But in what ways does Vogel use theatre as a tool to get
her audience to look at the dark side of the life and not to ignore it?
As noted previously, the concept of sexuality is the main concern of Vogel’s plays.
Almost all of her plays tell the story of how our lives are drastically influenced by society’s
5
perception of gender and sexuality and how patriarchal society suppresses and pushes women to
the margin because of their sexuality. David Savran observes that:
Vogel’s fascination (with gender issues) is a result of her belief that gender is a
kind of floating signifier that can attach itself to bodies and text in unpredictable
ways. Her belief in gender transferability, moreover, is linked to her
understanding of the very being of performance, which she knows is more likely
to destabilize than fix identities, and of drama, which she knows to be the most
dialogical of all literary forms (187).
Therefore, although Vogel does not wish to overlook the tyranny of gendered norms, she
tries to use drama as a tool to prove the indefiniteness of gender identities. Trying to subvert
gender roles and showing how gender identity is not a fixed aspect, Vogel challenges the ways
canonical works of literature represent women, especially in their relationship with men. Her
works re-vision canonical plays written by men with stereotypical female characters who present
their gender identity in a patriarchal way. Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, The Oldest
Profession, And Baby Makes Seven and Meg respectively challenge William Shakespeare, David
Mamet, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard’s works. Thus, she not only disturbs our perception of
gender but also our response to classical and canonical literary figures and their representations
of female figures.
1.2.
Research Objective
As mentioned earlier, Vogel’s plays are heavily based on the issue of gender identity.
Generally speaking, her works represent the ways in which gender is constructed by society and
culture. In order to study this aspect of Vogel’s work, I use the theories of American philosopher
and feminist, Judith Butler whose theory of gender performativity had a significant influence on
6
the new perceptions of gender identity. This study investigates how Vogel attempts to shatter the
traditional representations of women and their relationships generated by feminist playwrights of
the 1970s and ‘80s as well as canonical figures like Shakespeare, Albee, Nabokov and Mamet. I
also explore how Vogel’s female characters, by experiencing the possibilities of subverting
heteronormative constructions, try to create moments of disturbance and failure of performativity
through theatrical moments of alienation. Moreover, I will explore the ways in which Vogel
breaks gender norms by putting her female characters in the position of the bearer of the gaze
which is by default taken by men. In order to analyze the formal aspects of the selected plays of
Vogel, I chose Brechtian theatrical theories of Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effects) and social
gestus, which I further explain in the methodology section.
1.3.
Methodology
Perhaps all the theories that call themselves Feminist share
a goal: a passionate analysis of gender in material social
relations and in discursive and representational structures,
especially in theater and film, which involve scopic
pleasures and the body.
Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory:
Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism”
Paula Vogel’s plays create their unique world, a world which presents our life from the
angle that transgresses our presuppositions especially about gender roles and identities. Her
works are based on representations of sexual identity and how our perceptions of gender identity
are constructed through society and culture. In this dissertation, I explore how Vogel’s female
characters break traditional gender representations considering the discourses of gender. My
central question is how Vogel breaks traditional gender representations generated by Feminist
7
playwrights of the1970s and ’80s in creating her female characters and their relationships. As my
subject, I take three of her plays which have received less critical attention (And Baby Makes
Seven, The Baltimore Waltz and Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief) in order to illustrate
how she shatters traditional gender representations of the mainstream through Feminist theories
with the focus on Butlerian gender performativity.
1.3.1. Brechtian Distancing Effects
Elizabeth Goodman in To Each Her Own: Gender and Performance (1993) discusses the
reasons both American and British feminists adopted Brechtian techniques in their works. She
points out that both Feminist theatre (she calls it “a fractured subject”) and Brechtian theatre
used to be called “alternative’ to the mainstream movements of their own time. Brecht focuses
strongly on breaking the conventional “framing of cultural and artistic standards” (17) in order to
overturn the “general habit of judging works of art by their suitability for the apparatus without
ever judging the apparatus by its suitability for the work” (17). Goodman defines “apparatus” as
“the structures and value systems by and through which artistic works are judged” (18). Brecht
believes that these values are the qualities by which society judges a work of art and considers it
as canonical and worth re-visioning for the next generations. Goodman tries to come to the point
that works of arts are labelled as good if they are found suitable and supportive of the “structures
and value systems”. Although, rather, the structures and value systems should be evaluated by
whether they live up to the values introduced in the works of art.
Goodman then argues that the appropriation of Brechtian theories by Feminists has two
reasons: “first, because both Brecht and feminist theatre foreground political agendas in what
might be called “platform theatres”, and second, because “the task of Brecht and also of feminist
8
theatre is to interrupt and deconstruct the habitual performance codes of the majority (male)
culture” (18). Therefore, as Brechtian theatre is political and demands change to the status quo,
feminists found his theories applicable in order to deconstruct the male-dominated framing of
artistic and cultural standards.
One of Brecht’s most influential techniques is verfremdungseffekt. The word Verfremdung
(which means ‘making something look strange’) was initially used in Brecht’s writing in 1936.
Since then, it has been translated in many ways, including alienation, A-effect, de-alienation and
defamiliarization; I find the last-mentioned more appropriate in describing Brecht’s techniques
as it carries the political connotations Brecht meant to bring about. He defined defamiliarization
as a technique “designed to free socially-conditioned phenomenon from that stamp of familiarity
which protects them against our grasp today”, through a representation “which allows us to
recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (61). In other words, Aeffects are a collection of techniques used to create a sense of defamiliarizing the common and
blindingly familiar, to prevent the audiences from being trapped in emotional engagement and
instead engage in discussion and employ their critical thinking strength, by reminding them that
they are watching a show and not real life.
According to Brecht “the A-effect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made
aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately
accessible into something peculiar, striking and unexpected” (qtd. in Brayshaw 108). The point
for Brecht in distancing his audience was to get them to experience the situations and think about
their judgment on the ideas which seem to be natural and familiar (meaning that the audience
would normally take these situations for granted, not thinking about them). In order to achieve
this goal, he used some techniques including non-linear structure, use of slides, music (used not
9
to enforce but to contradict the actions), dance, noise and voice, cross-dressing (which Feminists
widely exploited), use of puppetry and also parody, pastiche and genre manipulation.
To discuss why Epic theatre is useful for Feminist theatre, it can be observed that when the
audience has the capacity to separate familiar meanings and actions from the conventional
associations and understand the constructedness of ideas, they can also understand the social and
material construction of gender (Bial 82). Karen Laughlin in Brechtian Theory and the American
Feminist Theater (1990) explains that two aspects of Brecht’s ideas are essential to the evolution
of Feminist Theater: “an emphasis on historical context; and an epic structuring of dramatic
narratives”(147). In other words, firstly, the emphasis on the matter of history gives Feminist
practitioners the chance to review the historical text, situations and figures; and the episodic and
non-linear structure enables them to create narratives in different forms which help them to find
a way out of the mainstream. Therefore, as mentioned before, just as Brecht’s theatre spectator is
able to find out the constructedness of relations and gestures, these audiences will understand
how gender is constructed through repetition and is not natural and consequently is subject to
change. Defamiliarization, which Brecht adapted to alienation effects, is used to push the
audience to notice easily forgotten issues again. But Brecht added another aspect to it: politics.
Brecht’s theatre is political and that is part of what Feminists like Vogel are interested in. He
tried to show that what is considered as universal and consequently taken for granted is “the
product of human labor and history and thus subject to change”
Trying to justify how Brecht is useful for Feminists, I found Elin Diamond’s famous
essay “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism”, very
applicable. Diamond elaborates on a vivid relationship between Feminist theories and Brechtian
techniques:
10
If feminist theory sees the body as culturally mapped and gendered, Brechtian
historicization insists that this body is not a fixed essence but a site of struggle
and change. If feminist theory is concerned with the multiple and complex signs
of a woman’s life: her color, her age, her desires, her politics—what I want to call
her historicity—Brechtian theory gives us a way to put that historicity on view—
in the theatre. In its conventional iconicity, theatre laminates body to character,
but the body in historicization stands visibly and palpably separate from the ‘role’
of the actor as well as the role of the character; it is always insufficient and open.
(89)
Diamond then argues that “dismantling the gaze” is what the model of
Feminist/Brechtian theatre theory like Feminist film theory tries to offer in order to show how
the female body “resists fetishization and a viable position for the female spectator.” (qtd.in
Diamond 44) She discerns a parallel structure of major Brechtian theories (historicization, gestus
and Alienation effects) with Feminism’s major concern for “the analysis of gender in material
social relations and in discursive and representational structures” (Aston 89). In other words,
Diamond found Brechtian tools accessible to analyze female characters within the matrix of
gender, race and class.
Different versions of distancing effects are exploited to interrogate “the strictures of
gender”. By alienating or foregrounding gender, audiences are able to see gender as a sign
system (that is), a collection of words, gestures and appearances. As Elin Diamond observes:
Understanding gender as ideology—as a system of beliefs and behavior mapped
across the bodies of females and males, which reinforces a social status quo—is to
appreciate the continued timeliness of Verfremdungseffekt, the purpose of which
is to denaturalize and defamiliarize what ideology makes seem normal,
acceptable, and inescapable (Diamond, “Brechtian Theory” 82).
Many Feminists in England and America found distancing effects useful to enrich their
theatre. Among the British playwrights, Caryl Churchill who has been compared with Vogel, is a
highly significant figure. In her play Cloud Nine (1979), she uses cross-dressing (male characters
wear women’s dresses) as a Brechtian technique in order to criticize Victorian society’s
11
perceptions of sexual roles. In Cloud Nine, she shows her huge interest in “the possibility of
breaking down limiting sex role stereotypes through re-evaluation of the masculine precepts of
language, increased attention to body language and forwarding of the unstated” (Goodman 90).
And to achieve this goal, she adapted and later developed Brechtian techniques especially in her
plays like Vinegar Tom (1976), Top Girls (1982), Fen (1983) and Mad Forest (1990).
Sarah Daniels is another British playwright who has exploited Brechtian distancing
effects in her plays. Masterpieces (1983) is one of her works which accommodates episodic
structure and focuses on arguments to interrogate the idea of fairness. Thematically, the play is
about the condemnation of pornography, objectification of women and violence. It is against the
idea of “Let’s face it, alcohol and cigarettes can kill people, looking at pictures never hurt
anyone” (164). Later, we see that Rowena uses violence and commits a murder as a result of
exposure to pornographic pictures and feeling overwhelming insecurity after watching the movie
Snuff. Masterpieces, which is an issue-play and is considered didactic, is in this sense very
Brechtian: to use theatre in order to give a wake-up call to people and remind them to be alert.
Moreover it includes many direct addresses with informative essence enacted in Brechtian form.
Along with Caryl Churchill and Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems is another playwright who
tried the Feminist adaptation of Brechtian techniques. By using non-linear narratives in her
works like Camille (1984), Pam Gems “de-constructs the legends by making them metaphors for
contemporary women in terms of gender and the freedom of sexual orientation” (Godiwala,
xxiii). In Queen Christina (1982), she focuses on breaking the idea of the naturalness of myths
and shows that they are rather artificial and naturalized. An attempt to understand how gender
and sex are defined in relation with culture is the subtext of most of Gems’ plays including
12
Queen Christina. In the play’s opening, the king is declaring to his chancellor that his daughter
should be trained for the mantle of the kingship:
King: We do have an heir.
Axel: A girl.
King: She’s fit enough. Intelligent.
Axel: But the wrong sex! With a weak succession it’ll be anybody’s game,
we can’t have a woman.
King: Make a man of her then.
Axel: How?
King: Training. […] I want her fit, educated, able to lead an army if necessary
(qtd. in Godiwala 93).
Besides the British followers of Brecht, we can see many remarkable feminist
playwrights who adopted Brechtian theories in American theatre, in order to “denaturalize” and
“defamiliarize” what ideology likes to show as natural and normal: “a representation that
alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject but at the same time makes it seem
unfamiliar” (Brecht and Bentley 192). Anna Deavere Smith, especially in plays like Fires in the
Mirror (1992) and On the Road (1982,) used distancing techniques to enable her audience to see
with fresh eyes. Smith’s works are “seriously political and radically antithetical to conventional
realism” (Lyons and Lyons 59), although Smith is different in some ways, like choosing the
immediate moments rather than addressing a “distant historical moment”.
Focusing specifically on Vogel, we can see that Vogel’s approach in judging canonical
works is tremendously influenced by her reading of Brecht’s theories. Brecht’s ideas, which are
appropriated from Victor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization, are founded on the belief that
“we no longer see what is around us” (Savran, Baltimore xi) connoting that we need to refresh
and brighten our perceptions which get “habitual and automatic”. Savran continues that Vogel’s
theatre like Brecht’s tends to make the normal and obvious bizarre, giving the audience a chance
13
to revise the characters and embrace the element of fantasy that puts these relationships in shape.
Moreover, Vogel’s works are highly concerned with politics. Her plays do not just focus on how
women are suppressed and abused but the ways that characters like Desdemona have to
challenge, deconstruct, and recreate the roles they have been appointed.
As a socialist-Feminist, Vogel’s point of view in theatre mainly tends towards social
conviction. Her social view can be discerned not only from her choice of subjects but also in the
way that she represents her characters considering their social role and identity. In this sense
many scholars compare Vogel with Caryl Churchill, as both share the absurdist theatrical
essentials as well as using fantasy in their works. Vogel acknowledges this comparison and
believes that the use of humor along with fantasy and the absurdist elements is another similarity
of her theatre and Churchill’s.
Like many of the socialist-Feminist playwrights who have been using the elements of
Brechtian theater such as Verfremdungseffekt, gestic techniques of disruption (use of songs,
direct address to the audience) and structural elements like narrative structure, in order to create
moments of disturbance to the social system and to distance the audience from emotional
engagements with the characters (which will lead to inactivity and lack of critical power), both
Vogel and Churchill tend to take advantage of Brechtian techniques in Epic theatre.
Socialist/materialist feminists highly criticize Bourgeois and radical feminists and try to navigate
the oppressive systems within “the complex matrix of gender, class, race, ideology, etc” (Aston
69) and examine them in relation with their historical situation in order to make changes in
society. Elaine Aston in Introduction to Feminism and Theatre argues that feminist groups such
as It is Alright to be Woman Theatre or Women’s Street Theatre Group in the 1970s started to
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adapt their acting techniques based on an “anti-illusionistic performance aesthetic” (69) which
was in sharp contrast with realist theatre.
Vogel herself was asked several times about this comparison. In her interview with Sarah
Raskin in June 2003 she explains that:
In the same way I think Brecht skewed conclusions, so that an audience would go
unsettled, out into the street seeking their own catharsis in action - I try to pose
the problem theoretically in such a way that it gets under our collective skins.
Watching a play will “solve” nothing (qtd.in Ameling 4).
By saying that watching a play solve nothing, Vogel tries to make the point that we as theatre
audiences will not be able to solve the social crisis and make changes just by watching a play and
getting emotionally involved; rather we must be active spectators and get intellectually involved
with the issues. Vogel aims at creating a theatre not to amuse or entertain audiences but to make
them more concerned with society’s dilemmas in order to take action. Consequently in this
sense, their life may be disturbed, as they have to reconsider their presuppositions and revision
their perception of sociopolitical matters. In order to achieve this aim, she found the Brechtian
techniques highly useful.
1.3.2. Theoretical Influences on Butler
…perhaps all theories that call themselves “feminists” share a
goal: a passionate analysis of gender in material social relations
and in discursive and representation structures, especially in
theatre and film, which involve scopic pleasures and the body
(Elin Diamond, Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a
Gestic Feminist Criticism)
Since almost all of Vogel’s plays are plotted around the concept of gender formation, I
found Butlerian ideas of gender formation and gender performativity very useful to discern
Vogel’s characterization patterns in her theatre. Gender as an act of reiteration mostly came from
15
the 1990 book Gender Trouble in which Judith Butler articulated the ideas of gender
performativity and gender failure that are very essential to our discussion.
To elaborate Feminisms in general and Judith Butler’s theories in particular, we need to
discuss the ideas which led to Butler’s theories including the subject of Feminism or what
Feminisms mean to “women”. Biologically female individuals? Or socially constructed
individuals? Among the later feminists, Judith Butler is a prominent theorist. She has had an
enormous influence on different fields of social sciences including women’s studies, cultural
studies, and Feminism and Queer theories. Her writings mostly are to interrogate the idea of a
“universal experience of womanhood” and to inform about the exclusion of women. In the
beginning of Gender Trouble, Butler discusses the matter of “subject” in Feminism and asks
what it is that “constitutes” the category of women. She explains that:
For the most part, Feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing
identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates
feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom
political representation is pursued. But politics and representation are
controversial terms. On the one hand, representations serves as the operative term
within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women
as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of
a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true
about the category of women. (3)
Therefore, Butler opens Gender Trouble with criticizing the feminists’ assumptions
which try to universalize the category of “women” as an identity. Regarding the idea of subject,
Butler explains that representing women in a category without considering factors like race, class
and sexuality holds down the same subject for whom feminism is trying to advocate and set free.
Based on these ideas, my reading of Vogel’s plays is mainly informed by Butler’s influential
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book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) that is a revolutionary
work in the area of Feminism.
The notion of Gender Performativity that is bound with performance and agency
discussed by Butler is used in this research. To define her ideas of gender performativity, Butler
accommodates Simon de Beauvoir’s idea that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman” to
show that gender is by no means a “stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts
proceed”. Instead, she explains, that gender is an identity, which is gradually created through
time, “an identity, instituted through a stylized repetitions of acts”. She continues that “gender is
instituted through the stylization of the body” and therefore, it creates the ways “in which bodily
gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self.” Therefore, “the stylized repetitions of acts” (179) creates an illusion that gender
is a natural and not socially-constructed identity. But Butler explains that gender identities are
unstable, shifting and subject to change.
If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and
not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation
are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a
different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
(“Performative Acts” 519)
Another main theory of Butler which is dominant in Gender Trouble and is essential to
our discussion is the idea of subject as the doer. Influenced by Hegelian Spirit, Butler believes
that “there need not be a doer behind the deed, but that the doer is variably constructed in and
through the deed” (195). In other words, there is no pre-existing doer who does the acts but this
does not mean that Butler believes that there is no subject but she does not consider the subject
“behind” the deed. The subject is highly bound with the sequences of the acts that construct the
17
subject. This argument brings about the discussion of gender performativity, which will be fully
scrutinized in the next section.
1.3.3. Gender Performativity
To start the discussion of gender performativity, I say that Butler does not consider that
gender represents inner truths but she deals with gender as the product of “stylized repetition of
actions: Gender is Performance” (“Performative” 519). By using different theories of
psychoanalysis and phenomenological theories, Butler explores the ways that social reality
constructs gender “through language, gesture and all manner of symbolic social sign”
(“Performative” 519). In discussing this controversial concept, Butler exploits speech act theory
especially the work of linguist John Searle. John Searle’s used the term illocutionary speech acts
to encompass words that do something rather than merely representing the thing; or to put it
differently, words that do what they say (the famous example is I pronounce you man and wife).
Butler used these ideas as a basis for her ideas on performativity. In Butler’s opinion, there is no
identity that precedes language, which connotes that gender identity is constructed by language.
In other words, “There is no “I” outside language since identity is signifying practice and
culturally intelligible subjects are the effects rather than the causes of discourses that conceal
their working” (qtd in Salih 64). In other words, it is not the individual who creates the acts, but
the individual is created by social discourse without being aware of it. Extending it to the
discussion of gender, we can observe that the individual subject is constituted through the social
acts of gender.
In Bodies that Matter, Butler states that “within speech act theory, a Performative is that
discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names” (13). In this view, Butler states
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that by enacting social conventions, by our bodies, we make those artificial and fictitious
conventions seem real and natural. But by performing (repeating and repeating), we cannot
change them to become less artificial. Referring this point to “gender acts” in her article
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, she develops this idea and points to those “gender
acts” that similarly lead to material changes in one’s existence and even in one’s bodily self
(272). Gender acts are also linked to power in the sense that what hegemony needs is the
permanent repetition of those acts in our daily life and consequently, all we call personal acts are
actually scripted by social conventions and ideologies.
At this stage of discussing gender performativity, I wish to distinguish between gender
performativity and performance. Although Butler in Gender Trouble uses these terms
interchangeably and they slide into one another, we should notice that performance needs the
existence of a subject but performativity does not. In other words, for performance we have a
doer (agent) behind the deed but gender performativity, in Butler’s view, does not need to have a
doer. Gender performativity can be elaborated through the notion of repeated acts. Our gender is
what we do (act out) every day including a wide range of behavior; talking, walking, rituals etc.
And as Butler points out in Gender Trouble, according to J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with
Words, “within the inherited discourse of metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be
Performative that is constituting the identity it is purported to be” (qtd. in Butler 24-25).
Butler also exploits Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born but rather becomes a woman”
(qtd.in Butler 141). In this sense as she explains, “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus
of agency from which various acts proceeds, rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time,
an identity constituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (“Performative” 519). Therefore
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what Butler is trying to say is that when a subject identity is not a stable constitution, then we
may have the possibility of gender transformation.
1.3.4. Gender Failure
Gender failure is another point that Butler discusses thoroughly in “Performative Acts
and Gender Construction”. According to Butler and as explained earlier “gender is instituted
through the stylization of body and hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which
bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self” (519). On the other hand, modern culture relies on gender as “what humanizes
individuals” and consistently disciplines and corrects “those who fail to do their gender right”
(522). She continues her argument that the punishment and marginalization of those who refuse
“to perform the illusion of gender essentialism” (522) is a clue to the point that society is aware
that the “the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically
necessitated” (522).
Judith Halberstam in her book The Queer Art of Failure notes that
From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success.
Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure
often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not
succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. (4)
Gender failure in this sense, brings about the possibilities to construct a different gender,
as masculinity and femininity are shown to have failed. In other words, failure acknowledges that
there are alternatives planted in the matrix of power and it can show us what is beyond what we
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already know, and this is what Butler asserts to be her goal; the ability to find possibilities of
gender subversion or constructing different genders.
In the present research, I will examine the ways in which Vogel’s plays represent body
and sexuality as culturally constructed and shifting and relational positions, with a concentration
on female characters. By showing that gender is a position taken by the characters, Vogel breaks
away from the traditional representations of gender identity, those conventions through which
these categories establish their authority and introduce gender identity as innate and inborn.
Therefore Vogel’s plays are highly connected with Beauvoir’s point that “one is not born rather
becomes a woman”.
Beauvoir’s remark implicates the notion of process: “to become”, to reject “inborn” and
“innate” identity and to go further on an endless road (repetition and reacting), the road which
Vogel puts her characters on. On the other hand, since her characters are constructed through the
society in which they live, they have also internalized discourses of homophobia and sexism. As
Vogel in the interview with Arthur Holmberg states:
I am not here to make everyone else feel homophobic; I was brought up in this
country. I was taught to hate gays. I was taught to hate women. What we are taught
to hate unifies us as a society. Our communal bond is that we are all racist. We are
taught racism the way we are taught homophobia and misogyny. It is all
internalized. (Holmberg 1998)
But her characters not only enact these inequalities but resist them in different ways.
Homophobia and sexism are internalized in their mind but they also take the position of
resistance to those discourses. In her plays, Vogel resists representing gender and sexuality as
clear categories of identity but shows them as “shifting and relational positions”, as the “agent”
and “resistant”. According to Foucault, who highly influenced Butler, inside a social structure,
21
everywhere that there is power, there is resistance and “social and historical power relations
changed constantly through resistance and negotiation. Similarly, (gender and sexual) identities
are also in constant flux and therefore cannot be demarcated with clear boundaries and set in
binary opposition to one another” (168). Therefore, what Foucault likes to stress is that there is
no power without the traces of resistance, and gender identities are no exception.
In the last chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler says that “even within the theories that
maintain a highly qualified or situated subject, the subject still encounters its discursively
constituted environment in oppositional epistemological frame” (Gender Trouble 182). The
culturally enmired subject (she explains that culture and discourse mire the subject) negotiates its
constitutions, even when those constitutions are the very bases of its own identity. Therefore we
cannot consider subject as a prediscursive structure (like existential theories). She also questions
to what extent we as individuals are considered to be able to constitute our own identities. Butler
believes that talking about the subject is unlike theatrical acting since we cannot consider subject
as a fixed and stable identity that is able to perform different gender roles; rather, what
constitutes who we are is the very act of performing those roles. Therefore the notion of stable
identity in Butler’s view is “an illusion retroactively created by our performances” (qtd. in
Thurer 147).
Butler herself in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution states that “in opposition to
theatrical and phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be prior to its acts, I will
understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity but as constituting that identity
as compelling illusion, an object of belief” (271). Therefore, she focuses on the point that there is
no gender as a natural entity and it by no means lead to material bodily facts but is solely and
completely a social construction, a fiction which is consequently open to change.
22
In Performative Acts and Gender Construction, Butler discusses that the body is not what
we have, it is part of what we do every day and this doing is different from what the other does.
She refuses to consider body as a stable entity which is pre-existent in nature. In Gender Trouble
Butler even goes further and discusses that not only gender but also our perceptions about sex are
culturally constructed: The body is not a “mute facticity”, not a fact of nature but constructed by
discourses. Sarah Salih in her book Judith Butler discusses that “sex as well as gender can be
performatively reinscribed in ways that accentuate its factitiousness (i.e. its constructedness
rather than its facticity (the fact of its existence)” (62). In other words what should be
emphasized is the constructedness of both our perceptions of sex (body) and gender. Salih refers
to Butler and states that “there is no sex that is not always already gender” (Gender 25). All
bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence suggesting that there are no
natural bodies that pre-exist their cultural inscription.
In an interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (1993) Butler explains that after
Gender Trouble, since there was a misinterpretation about the existence of sex and the point that
most of the readers supposed that there is no sex and we just have gender, she decided to write
Bodies That Matter to give some explanations and include some responses. She refers to “the
category of sex, and to the problem of materiality and to ask how it is that sex itself might be
constructed as a norm” (qtd.in Cavallaro 179). In other words, Butler rejects the presupposition
of Lacanian theory that sex is a norm and tries to show the materialization of bodies by norm.
1.3.5. The Limits of Performative Choice: Butler’s Wardrobe analogy
But does ‘gender is Performative’ mean that the subject is free to choose whichever
gender she/he enacts? To answer this question, Butler brings in the analogy of the wardrobe. She
23
argues that “gender proves to be performance - that constitutes the identity it is purported to be.
In this sense, gender is always a doing though not a doing by subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (Gender 25). She refers to Nietzsche’s point in On the Genealogy of Morals
(1887) that “there is no being behind doing, acting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction
imposed on the doing. The doing, itself is everything” (Gender 20). Nietzsche’s statement
reinforces Butler’s point that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that
identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results”
(Gender 25).
Butler believes that gender is performatively constructed, but does it mean that you can
choose your gender and shift it every day? You have the freedom of choice in the same way that
your choice of clothes is limited and determined by your society, economy and the context that
you are situated in. Gender is assigned, constrained and defined by the power structures that it is
located in, but she adds that there are possibilities to subvert from within that structure, (enact
and resist). To elaborate her point, giving the analogy of wardrobe, she interrogates the freedom
of choice:
Since you are living within the law or within a given culture, there is no sense in
which your choice is entirely free, and it is very likely that you choose your
metaphorical clothes to suit the expectations or perhaps the demands of your peers
or your colleagues, even if you do not realize that you are doing so. (Gender 23)
And moreover the range of the clothes is determined by the network within which you
are located, like your culture, job and social status. But what if you decided to ignore your peers’
expectations by putting on a gender that is not in agreement with their views? “Even if you could
do that you could not simply reinvent your metaphorical gender wardrobe or acquire an entirely
new one” (Salih 50). Moreover, you are limited by what is available in the shops. Therefore, it
24
seems that your choice of gender is predetermined, so that the possibilities of subversion or what
she calls politics of subversion are limited and constrained.
To summarize the above discussion, Butler believes that although gender is Performative,
you are not totally free to choose your gender. Your freedom of choice is limited by the power
structure of your society. In other words, like your choice of clothes that is limited by your
wardrobe, availability and the tastes of society, your gender choice is also limited. But Butler
discusses that even with these conditions; there are some possibilities to subvert the gender
identity within the structure. In this sense, in this study, I will explore how or in what ways
Vogel’s female characters resist their gender identity and break the traditional representations of
gender identity.
1.3.6. Gender vs. Sex
The notion of corporeal fact of our existence or what we call bodily sex has been
differentiated from the notion of gender (social conventions that constitute masculinity and
femininity) for a long time by feminist theorists in the past. According to these feminists sex is a
category related to the biology and anatomy, since gender is linked to history and social codes.
But in her comprehensive discussion about gender and sex Butler argues that our perception of
corporeal sexual differences is influenced by social and historical conventions:
The construal of sex no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender
is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of
bodies. But it is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It
is not a simple fact or static condition of a body but a process whereby regulatory
norms materialized sex and achieve this materialization through a forcible
reiteration of those norms (Bodies 3).
25
From what she writes we can see that our perception of sex (corporeal sexual differences)
as a stable entity is not acceptable in Butlerian theories. Therefore, deviating from past feminists,
Butler emphasizes the point that even our apprehension of corporeal and bodily sex is culturally
and socially constructed. In the past, early Feminists pointed out the distinction between sex as
the corporeal acts of our body and gender as the conventions which regulate the differences
between masculinity and femininity. Although they also accept that in spite of the anatomical
difference, it is the social and cultural conventions which determine male and female behaviors,
Butler goes further and explains that “our gender acts affect us in such material and corporeal
ways that even our perception of corporeal sexual differences are affected by social
conventions.” The point that “sex is not a bodily given on which the construct of gender is
artificially imposed but… a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (Bodies
3)
is a paramount part of her theory. She explains that the perception towards body is
reproduced through certain patterns of behavior and judgments: certain behaviors which we learn
and are institutionalized by “normative heterosexuality” which is linked with our place within
language, convention and other institutions which surround us as individuals. Butler uses the
Lacanian term ‘subject’ rather than ‘individual’ in order to show her focus on the linguistic
nature of the subject. Consequently Butler has deviated from other Feminists who believed that
sex is a “bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed” (Bodies 2). Sex
for Butler is not a passive condition but rather a process: the reiteration of certain norms has led
to materialization of the body as a perceivable and changeable essence.
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1.3.7. Deconstruction of Gender Identity
As noted previously, although gender is Performative, we are not totally free to choose
our gender. Our freedom of choice is bounded by the power and cultural structures of the society
we are living in. but Butler believes that within the structure, we have possibilities to subvert our
gender identity. Paula Vogel’s plays are examples of how female characters subvert and
deconstruct traditional gender representations.
In Gender Trouble, Butler discusses that “there is no doer behind the deed” but that the
doer that is constructed through the deed (142). The example is putting on lipstick by a girl
(Kehily 460). Instead of considering the girl as the subject and the doer of the act, Butler
suggests that the action (putting on lipstick) has the role of constituting the subject. She
concludes that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is
performativity constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result” (Gender Trouble
25). In other words, the act of putting on lipstick makes the subject (doer).
Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane Kehily in their article Gender Undone: Subversion,
Regulation and Embodiment in the Work of Judith Butler (2006) ask but “what happens, we may
wonder, to our notions of gender if the lipstick the girl, in our example puts on is black, and used
to exhibit an alternative goth-girl identity, if she is what the media term a ‘lipstick lesbian’; or if
the girl is really a boy” (461). They continue that according to Butler “the incitement of
normative gender behavior and sexual codes of practice gives rise to an irrepressible
proliferation of other sex/ gender possibilities –the tomboy, the lesbian, the drag queen and so
on” (481).
27
Vogel’s theatre can be considered as a resistance to the mainstream of feminist theatre
which tended to depict female characters within the system of heterosexuality. In other words,
her female characters, who mostly fail to ‘do’ their gender, are the embodiment of the
possibilities of “incitement of normative gender behavior” or what is outside of a the
heteronormative matrix.
Reviewing the female characters of Vogel we find her deviation from hegemonic
discursive images of the dominant culture that are highly bound with the female body “as a
passive and decorative object of desire” (Shoemaker 45). In other words, in depicting women as
passive entities, the traditional images created a binary opposition of active vs. passive. And all
these binary concepts such as femininity vs. masculinity “render invisible all other in-between”
(Shoemaker 45) gender identities. Moreover, Vogel’s female characters deconstruct the clichéd
images of women’s life in their relationships especially in And Baby Makes Seven in which she
portrays a homosexual love triangle, or in Baltimore Waltz which portrays the unruly relationship
of Anna and Carl as a brother and sister. In the future chapters, as mentioned earlier, I will
investigate how Vogel creates those moments of subversion which are disturbing to the social
norms.
1.4.
Literature Review
Taking a short look at the research done on Paula Vogel’s plays, we find just a few
important works deeply related to her theatre. These works of scholarship mostly are academic
dissertations which categorize Vogel’s works under the name of feminist theatre. The most
research has been done on The Oldest Profession, Hot N’ Throbbing and the Pulitzer Prize
winning play How I Learned to Drive. But rarely have scholars studied the present dissertation’s
choice of plays, which are significant works and valuable examples of how Vogel’s point of
28
view deviates from the norms of feminist theatre of the 70s and 80s. These norms include a
perspective which has tried to practice slogans like “let’s celebrate our womanhood” in order to
represent women as the controllers of their own lives or as powerful society members. In other
words, in most of the literature reviewed, we see that the authors discuss feminist aspects of
Vogel’s works as a central idea but most try to celebrate her female characters as representatives
of strong and uncontrollable women. Following is a literature review of criticism on Vogel’s
plays which help me to find my place within existing scholarship on And Baby Makes Seven,
Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief and The Baltimore Waltz.
Carrie Ellen Amelling in her dissertation Theatre of Transgression: Power, Sexuality and
the Body in Paula Vogel’s Plays defined feminist theatre as the theatre of resistance. The term
‘transgression’ shows that she focuses on the notion of unsettlement, a kind of aesthetic that
shakes our grounded beliefs. She provides a literary analysis of three plays of Vogel, How I
Learned to Drive, Hot N’ Throbbing and Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, by using
feminist and Foucauldian analysis. She initially reviews different opinions about Vogel’s plays
and concludes that in the majority of criticisms on How I Learned to Drive different scholars
focus more on how Lil Bit was victimized rather than her empowerment (15). Moreover, in her
third chapter, Ameling points to the problem of domestic violence and quotes from Donna
Shalala to call it “terrorism in the home”. She looks at depictions of The Woman (in Hot N’
Throbbing) and Li’l Bit (in How I Learned to Drive) stating that “Vogel characterized the
Woman as a strong-willed person unlike more typical portrayals of powerless female victims of
domestic abuse” (124).
Circularity is another aspect of Vogel’s plays that Ameling reviews in her work. There is
a cycle of abuse, a cycle that Lil Bit could break in How I Learned to Drive but not The Girl in
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Hot N’ Throbbing, as is revealed from the girl’s actions and words after her mother’s death. “The
girl’s theatrical metamorphosis from a young adolescent to a middle-aged replica of her mother
suggests that the Girl will repeat the Woman’s mistakes with her own version of man”, in
relation with the Man (125). Ameling also examines why Vogel has such a “disparaging view”
towards domestic abuse.
Moreover, Ameling shows how Vogel deconstructs the idealized female character. She
compares Paula Vogel with Virginia Woolf, another well-known English feminist writer who
largely “challenged the model for ideal Victorian womanhood” (Ameling 177). Woolf used the
title of a 19th century poem “the Angel in the House” in which the poet Patmore described a
perfect wife. As a feminist writer Woolf knows that every woman has an angel inside and her
suggestion is to kill that internalized and idealized woman. “I turned upon her and caught her by
the throat. I did my best to kill her…” (qtd.in Ameling 178). Ameling suggests that she finds the
objectives of Vogel and Woolf parallel: “Vogel creates female characters who transgress the
legacy of the unattainable and oppressive angel model” (180). Both as female writers know that
those idealized patriarchal images of women never let them to grow and always hurt rather than
help. From the social view both believe that the angel is not given the right to encounter the
social problems freely.
The dissertation Re-visioning Bodies: Feminist Brechtian Theory in Paula Vogel Plays
by Shannon Kay Hammermeister is one of the rare analyses exploring The Baltimore Waltz and
Baby Makes Seven. Hammermeister shows how Vogel used comic effects to distance her
audiences from emotional engagement. Hammermeister connects Vogel to Brecht and shows that
Vogel “adapts” some of his techniques like distancing effect, social gestus, historicization and
episodic structure to “re-vision constructions of gender, sexuality and feminine desire to re30
define American theatrical canon…” (3). In the third chapter, “Who is not afraid of Virginia
Woolf: Feminism and Families in And Baby Makes Seven”, she points out that Vogel “recovers
and engages dialectically” with an earlier text, that is Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf. She specifically concentrates on how Vogel interrogates the concept of American family
and its structure. It should be mentioned that the present work benefits from Hammermeister’s
dissertation in some ways although applying the notion of “gender performativity” is unique in
the present study. In other words, showing how Vogel’s female characters perform their gender
on stage in order to show its ability to be performed (performativity) and consequently changed
and manipulated is the gap trying to be discussed in the present study.
Laura Wagner is another scholar who worked on Vogel in the Brechtian context, pointing
out the function of theater “as a site where dominant culture and heterosexual community
contend for social influence” (4). In her dissertation Acting out, Discourse, Performance Theory
and AIDS in Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz, Wagner declares that the gender mainstream shows
heterosexuality as the default position, with the few homosexual representations based on gay
and lesbian relationships as “psychological instability”. But in the 1980s gay and lesbian writers
tried to use fantasy to “reconstruct gay and lesbian experience in a position of power” (4). For
such dramatists, political definition of realism innovated by Brecht has been used as an
alternative for conventional representation of realism (4). Moreover Brecht’s distancing effect
also has been used to create such a fantasy via the use of film and slides “to place homosexuals
in a position of power in culture” (5).
As mentioned before, Vogel’s plays are connected to the canon of literature since many
of her works rewrite texts by prominent figures like Shakespeare (Othello), Shepard (A Lie of the
Mind), Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf), Mamet (Duck Variation) and Graham Greene
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(The Third Man). Joanna Mansbridge in Camp, Canon and a Performative Burlesque: Paula
Vogel’s Plays as Literary and Cultural Revision reviews the ways that Vogel “rewrites” the
canonical theatre. She believes that to study Vogel is to engage with the canon of theatre and
literary studies (4). On the other hand she mentions that Vogel’s plays employ a “dramaturgical
strategy’’ that she calls “performative burlesque” and defines it as “a writing strategy that strips
bodies and texts of their accumulated cultural connotation; a comedic blending of high and low
forms; … an extension of a historical theatre practice that continues to inform the cultural
meanings around women in performance, both on and off stage.” (5). Like many of her peers
Joanna Mansbridge shows that Vogel centralized women in her plays.
In the introduction of her dissertation The Portrayal of Gender and a Description of
Gender Roles in Selected American Modern and Postmodern Plays, Bonny Ball Copenhaver
starts her discussion with Hedda Gabler (1890) by Henrik Ibsen as an example of a play about
women’s lives, with a focus on the subject of gender roles in society - although on the surface it
seems to tell the story of an unhappy woman - and more importantly those roles affect not only
women’s life but also men’s. Copenhaver believes that before the time when gender roles were
explored by science “Ibsen explored the impact of society's views about gender” (13) and it
shows more how essential is the role of playwright in exploring humanity and society. Later, she
investigates Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive as the representation of long-term effects of child
molestation. She asserts that although child abuse is the first subject and gender roles became
secondary in terms of importance, it is very essential to us for our discussion: in the family of Li'l
Bit, the gender roles are based on traditional lines. How I Learned to Drive shows how her
family’s codes define the appropriate behavior for men and women based on these standards. But
among the family members it is Uncle Peck who tries to tell Li'l Bit another version of the world
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that is different from all her family. The point that he “does the dishes” or “appreciates” Li'l Bit’s
mind or most importantly shows her how to “drive like men”: “Men are taught to drive with
confidence—with aggression. The road belongs to them. They drive defensively—always
looking out for the other guy. Women tend to be polite—to hesitate. And that can be fatal” (35).
In her dissertation Queers, Monsters, Drag Queens, and Whiteness: Unruly Femininities
in Woman’s Staged Performances, Deana Beth Shoemaker examines “unruly femininities which
subvert narrative understanding of gender and transform systems of representation” (vii).
Shoemaker defines unruly femininities as the breaker of its external rules. In other words
“femininity is a historically and culturally shifting heteronormative construct, typically but not
exclusively applied to women, to reinforce and perpetuate dominant discourses of gender” (7).
To elaborate, it should be mentioned that the notion of unruly femininities is defined as those
representations that deviate from the discourses of gender performed on different stages. She
studies how women might represent themselves in more transgressive ways within the public and
elaborates how popular culture and mass media reinforce heterosexism, homophobia, ageism and
other discrimination:
My interest in critiquing dominant (Western) norms of femininity through
performance arises from a celebration of certain models of femininity in
mainstream popular culture and mass media today that implicitly or explicitly
reinforce heterosexism, homophobia, ageism, white privilege, racism, and a
rigidly binaristic system of sexual differences (4).
Shoemaker employs another work of Vogel, Desdemona: A Story about Handkerchief as
one of her subjects to show the representation of unruly femininities. She herself directed
Desdemona in Texas in 2001 with a concentration on using the idea of female-as-spectacle. She
also explores “how theatrical elements such as lighting, sound, costumes, multimedia and
gestural works can operate collectively to achieve a feminist mimesis of representational
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practices in performance” (39). In the chapter of Desdemona, she explained how the notion of
‘nice girls’ or “ruly” defined as amenable to control, female characters in western cultures are
defined as “obedient, orderly”. In the conservative forms of femininity representation “the
female body is ideally constructed as a passive and decorative object of desire and the female
voice is muted to preserve the binaristic notions of masculinity as active, expansive, pubic and
authorative” (45) and all these can be referred to binary oppositions that the western culture is
based on.
To sum up, this review of literature presents a look at the works which discuss Vogel’s
plays regarding the theories of gender and sexuality and also Vogel’s techniques to create a
feminist aesthetics. Concerning the gender ideas, the present study exclusively is going to work
on the combination of gender performativity, failure and gaze which are absent in the previous
works of scholarships and, tie them to Brechtian theories which, in the preceding studies have
been used to exemplify feminist appropriation of these techniques, and in this study I will
explore these appropriations as highly revealing about how Vogel deviates from the mainstream
of feminist theater in 1970s and ’80.
1.5.
The Organization of Chapters
In chapter two, I explore the Butlerian theory of gender as performance which is
discussed as the repeated acts of individuals, and also homosexuality as a means of gender
subversion, through Brechtian distancing effects in And Baby Makes Seven, which is a comedy
about a love triangle among two lesbians and a homosexual. Moreover, in this chapter, I try to
answer the question as to how Vogel, by assigning double characters, gives Anna, Ruth and Peter
the possibility to shift their gender.
34
The third chapter addresses gender performativity in The Baltimore Waltz with a
concentration on the notion of gaze. As a default, men are the bearer of gaze and women are the
object. Vogel in The Baltimore Waltz characterizes Anna, who is spending an imaginary trip in
Europe with her diagnosed-as-HIV-positive brother, as the bearer of the gaze in her relationship
with the men with whom she has sexual affairs. In this chapter, I study the male gaze based on
Laura Mulvey’s theories of gaze and pleasure and the use of fantasy as a means of homosexual
theatre based on Brecht’s Epic theatre.
In chapter four I study Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief as Vogel’s main
deviation from the Feminist playwrights of the 1970s and ’80s in depicting women as either
victim or valorized. Moreover by focusing on the concept of New Woman, I will explore how
she breaks the illusion of the ideal heroine in Shakespeare’s Othello.
In the last chapter, which is my conclusion, I will review whether Vogel is successful in
creating moments of disturbance by adapting Brechtian techniques in order to show gender
performativity. I will also explain how Vogel focuses on posing more questions rather than
finding the answers for her audiences in order to extend the boundaries of their thinking.
35
2.
Chapter Two
Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief
Shattering the Ideal of the New Woman
Desdemona: My heart subdued,
even to the very quality of my lord:
I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,
And to his honors and to his valiant parts
Did I my souls and fortunes consecrate…
William Shakespeare, Othello
Desdemona: I remember the first time I saw my husband and
I caught a glimpse of his skin, and, oh, how I thrilled. I thought,
-aha!- A man of a different color. From another world and planet. I
thought if I marry this strange dark man, I can leave this narrow
little Venice with its whispering Piazzas behind- I can escape and
see
other worlds.
(pause)
But under that exotic façade was a porcelain white Venetian….
Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief
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2.1.
Introduction
Paula Vogel wrote Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief (1979) when she was a
Ph.D. student at Cornell University. In the same year, she did a staged reading at Cornell but it
did not receive a production till 1993 at Bay Street Theatre Festival in Sag Harbour, New York
directed by Gloria Muzio; J Smith Cameron played Desdemona in that production. As the title
reveals, the play is about Desdemona, one of the most idealized heroines of Shakespeare’s plays.
But ironically, Vogel in this play transforms Desdemona into the whore Othello imagines. This
transformation is not just for Desdemona but for Bianca and Emilia as well. Trying to overturn
the stereotypes of sexuality, she depicts the prostitute Bianca as a “proud woman secretly
harboring middle-class aspirations” and Emilia as an “emblem of piety” (Adler 374). Vogel
describes her motivations to write Desdemona as follows:
In 1970, when I had read Othello, I was struck by the fact that my main point of
my identification, my subjectivity, was a man who is supposedly cuckolded, that I
was weeping for a man who is cuckolded rather than for Desdemona. And of
course, at that point in the seventies, in terms of women studies, there was all the
virgin/whore analysis coming out and it wounded me a great deal that Desdemona
is nothing but an abstraction, that I didn’t find any way of identifying with her.
(qtd. in Adler 374)
Therefore, since Vogel found Shakespeare’s heroine so unreal and difficult to identify
with, she created a character through negative empathy, expecting audiences to identify with her
not as an idealized or a victimized woman but as an bold woman who deconstructs the traditional
representation of victimized woman.
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2.2.
Themes
Desdemona is a highly imaginative play within a play. The significant themes of the play
are the relation of women and men (although the play is deprived of male characters, and we
only become acquainted with them through the female characters), women’s liberation and the
idea of the New Woman. The play was written based on the question of what if Desdemona was
not innocent and virtuous as depicted by Shakespeare. By allocating the whole stage to the
female characters, namely Desdemona, her maid Emilia and her friend Bianca, Vogel shifts the
entire focus from Othello and Iago to the women.
By focusing on the idea of the New Woman, Vogel not only shatters the traditional
images of women but also interrogates the New Woman revived by the second wave of
Feminism. Bianca is Desdemona’s New Woman because besides sharing “the desire to know the
world” (Scene 11), they seem to be in agreement in their aversion to marriage. Bianca is
regarded as a new woman because she does things like “mak(ing) her own living in the world”
and scorn(ing) the marriage for the lie it is” (Scene 11).
2.3.
Objectives
In this chapter, I will explore the relationship between the three characters of the play
with a focus on gender performativity and the ways Vogel represent this idea. Moreover, I focus
on how and why in this play, Vogel deconstructs the notion of New Woman as an ideal woman
in Feminist theories which “invoke an historic link to this and early twentieth-century female
figures” (Mansbridge 102). According to Susan Glenn, New Woman can be defined as follows:
The New Woman was a social reality and a cultural construct. Coined at the end
of the nineteenth century, the term was used from the 1890s to the end of the
1920s to describe women who experimented with new forms of public behavior
and new gender roles. . . . At the turn of the century, ambitious, educated middle38
class women, many of whom eschewed marriage and dedicated their lives to the
cause of social reform and political agitation (including women’s rights) were
labeled New Women. By the time of World War I, the term described a younger
generation of independent women who demanded not only economic, political,
and intellectual opportunity, but also sexual fulfillment. (6)
Glenn continues that new types of femininity were emerging in the theatre; the stage was
one of the first arenas to present various types of femininity. On the other hand, the time of the
emergence of the idea of the New Woman also coincided with the time of the success of classic
burlesque (Mansbridge 102). Glenn also discusses that “in the era of New Woman, playfulness,
parody and burlesque constituted the core of an expressive culture that could be used to achieve a
mocking distance to criticize, to converse - or simply to be enjoyed for its own sake” (120).
Moreover, as Rachel Shteir in her book Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show
discusses, the New Woman “demanded freedom to express her sexuality” (87). Hence, we can
see that in the discourse of Feminism, freedom and sexuality are both brought in together;
however, historically, a woman who seeks sexual freedom is considered as bound for
prostitution. In this chapter, I will show how Vogel deconstructs the images and expectations tied
with the idea of the New Woman, to overturn this ideal of feminism. I will also show how she
presents each of the three female characters in a challenging way, with each presenting a
different version of femininity which they have constructed by themselves.
In order to analyze the formal aspects of the play, as in my previous chapters, and to
elaborate the techniques which Vogel uses to deconstruct and re-vision Shakespeare’s female
characters to show “gender-as-appearance, as the effect, not the precondition of regulatory
practices” (Diamond 46) and to shatter the ideal of free woman - New Woman - I examine the
use of Brechtian theatrical devices. Moreover, in this chapter, I will explore the methods,
39
structures and forms employed in the service of content. Vogel believes “form is content” and
uses short cinematic “takes” with no intermission, to provoke expectations among the audience,
and later overturn those expectations to show a different aspect of the subject.
2.4.
Synopsis
Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief takes place in the backroom of the palace in
Cyprus. The play opens on the day Desdemona is killed by her husband Othello, who never
appears in Vogel’s version. As the story unfolds gradually, we find out that the storyline, unlike
many other adaptations of Shakespeare, is the same as in the original, except that this time
Desdemona proves Othello’s accusation to be true: she has slept with Iago’s whole camp
(ironically except for Michael Cassio). In the opening scene Desdemona is frantically looking for
her famous handkerchief while conversing with Emilia to convince her to help search as well.
The audience is informed that Emilia took the handkerchief away a week ago.
As the play continues, we find out that Desdemona is waiting for Bianca, a lady of the
night and Desdemona’s closest female friend, to come and pay her for her work as a prostitute
for “last Tuesday’s customers who paid on credit and to arrange for next Tuesday” (192). Emilia
warns her if Othello finds out about the affairs, he will cut her throat. But ironically Desdemona
declares that she is the sort that “will die in bed”. While Desdemona is waiting for Bianca there
is a knock on the door. They think that it is Bianca but Othello is at the door. Desdemona
“arranges her face into an insipid, fluttering innocence, then girlishly runs to the door”. After few
seconds we can hear the sound of a very loud slap. She returns closing the door and holding her
cheek. We are never directly informed about the reason for the slap, but whether it was because
Othello has found out about Desdemona’s Tuesday night job or her decision to run away with
her cousin Ambassador Ludovico, the scene functions as a reminder of the presence of men in
40
the female characters’ lives. Later in the absence of Desdemona, Emilia warns Bianca not to
involve herself in Desdemona’s affairs, reminding her that “there is no such a creature, twothree- or four-legged as “friend” betwixt ladies of leisure and ladies of the night” and continues
that “there is no such thin’ as friendship between women”. In the play, Vogel shows us proof of
Emilia’s words through Bianca’s declaration that she is in love with Cassio and wants to marry
him. Bianca shows them the gift from Cassio which is nothing but Desdemona’s handkerchief.
When Bianca finds out the handkerchief is Desdemona’s, (passed to Cassio by Iago, through
Emilia, to accuse Desdemona of having an affair with him), she threatens to kill Desdemona and
calls her “whore”. After a very comical fight scene, Bianca leaves but not before telling Emilia
that Iago was one of Tuesday night’s customers. The play closes with Desdemona’s plan to go
home alone and Emilia’s confession about her conspiracy with Iago to destroy Desdemona.
2.5.
Shakespeare, Vogel, Bauer
Vogel adapts Othello by giving the role of the narrator to Desdemona along with Bianca
and Emilia and provides Shakespeare’s helpless female characters a voice and space to create
their own history; however they will meet the same destiny at the end of the play as in
Shakespeare’s original, “suggesting an unsettling inevitability to Desdemona’s fate. Whether or
not, she is in fact a whore, her sexuality remains circumscribed by the male fears and fantasies
that define it” (Mansbridge 43). In other words, what rules the life of these women is their fears
and fantasies created by the patriarchal society in which they are trapped.
Instead of a victimized woman who is killed innocently, Vogel depicts Desdemona as a
bold and vulgar woman from the upper-class who tries to lessen the boredom of her aristocratic
lifestyle by working in a brothel as a prostitute. Therefore, as Vogel declared before, she is not
41
able to ignore the notion of class in her plays, so in Desdemona as well, she tries to highlight
how female sexuality is defined and produced in connection with class position.
But as Vogel borrows the plot from Shakespeare, she owes its style and structure to
Wolfgang Bauer, the Austrian writer. In the notes to directors, Vogel mentions that Desdemona:
A Play about a Handkerchief is a tribute to, or as she says a “rip-off” of, Wolfgang Bauer’s
work, Shakespeare: The Sadist. Vogel’s Desdemona owes much to Bauer’s infamous play in
terms of formal innovations. Vogel’s play was written in “thirty cinematic takes” that present the
scenes as short tableaus; this is greatly emphasized as an essential feature of the play - Vogel
encourages the directors to follow the takes “in such a way as to simulate the process of filming,
with jump cuts and repetition” (Baltimore 176). Shakespeare: The Sadist (1977) which features a
pornographic film, has a character (played by one of the four characters of the play) who
identifies himself as Shakespeare. The play is a surreal, sexually charged piece in which film
fantasy shapes the consciousness and behavior of figures who themselves lack substance.
Shakespeare: the sadist is formed based on forty-nine takes with black-outs taking four to five
seconds (a technique Vogel has not used). But like Vogel, Bauer emphasized the point that
directors should use technical film devices including music, slides and slow and accelerated
motion scenes (He used the MGM lion during black-outs). Christopher Bigsby in Contemporary
American Playwrights discusses the rationale of the two playwrights for using the cinematic
form:
In Bauer’s play the style of presentation reflects the content, since film is not only
enacted in the sadistic porno extract, in which a woman is tortured, raped and
decapitated, but discussed throughout. The rationale for Vogel’s use of cinematic
structure and methods is less clear, not least because the play’s theatricality is
emphasized in the first ‘take’, in which spotlights pinpoint Desdemona’s lost
handkerchief and the figure of Emilia, who discovers it, in a prologue which,
paradoxically, given her instruction, ends in a black-out (299).
42
Bigsby then continues comparing Shakespeare: The Sadist with Desdemona and
discusses that they are both “suffused with sexuality” although Vogel did not go that far in
aggression and also her use of violence is different. But what is more important for Vogel to
adapt from Bauer is “an alienating technique, a sexualised narrative, a fast-paced collage of
scenes and a foregrounding of the processes of the art in which she is involved” (299) - all
techniques which have been discussed earlier as part of the Brechtian distancing effect.
2.6.
Adaptation of Brechtian Distancing Effect
Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief is Vogel’s most defamiliarized and estranged
play. She uses Brechtian distancing effects not only in deconstructing the contents, and concepts
like fidelity, but also in characterizing her female characters, assigning more space for them, and
distancing the audience from the poetic language of the Bard, as they may be so familiar with the
text that they can mouth the lines along with the actors. Starting from the title, Vogel refocuses
the play from the name of a male character (Othello) to a female character (Desdemona) and
extends this defamiliarization to the physical exclusion of men. In order to describe Vogel’s shift
from a male tragic protagonist to female, darkly comic and sexually subversive protagonist,
Shannon Kay Hammermeister discusses that:
Instead of watching Shakespeare’s Othello’s disintegration from
“honorable” soldier to insanely jealous murderer, we watch Emilia attempt
to wash out the “maidenhead blood” from Desdemona’s wedding sheet,
the resulting stain which, of course is not Desdemona’s but a “old hen on
crutches” supplied by Bianca who swears its blood will wash out as “clean
as maiden head or baby dropping” (127).
This description and many more scenes, like Desdemona’s pedicure by Emilia, Bianca’s
dirty jokes while drinking with Desdemona, and Emilia’s fight with Bianca, all help to distance
the audience, making them re-watch Shakespeare’s heroines through Vogel’s eyes. This helps
43
the audience to stop thinking of them in the archetypal way in which Shakespeare presents them
(virgin/whore) and also makes more rounded and realistic characters.
But in what ways does Vogel exploit distancing effects in order to represent gender as a
performative construct? Vogel actively places women in the centre of her plots and her stage and
although they participate in the creation of culture, yet they resist full identification in its
conventional sense. Carol-Ann Tyler in Female Impersonation notes that foregrounding the point
that acts are constructed and reproduced within a patriarchal symbolic is the most impressive
way of presenting the performative acts of femininity (qtd. in Mansbridge 50). On the other
hands, when a male-authored text is rewritten and recast with women, it gives the possibilities of
making femininity more obvious and this is what Vogel does in most of her plays.
Marianne Novy in “Saving Desdemona /or Ourselves” (2002) discusses Vogel’s main reason to
pick this particular text of Shakespeare and declares that it is not the genre but “Othello’s unique
interrogation of gender relationships, and perhaps, more importantly in Shakespeare’s creation of
active, sexual and desiring female characters” (qtd.in Hammermeister 110). She explains that
many Feminists playwrights in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to re-interpret Shakespeare’s
plays in order to 1) find a way for the characters to “escape plots that doom them to an
oppressive marriage or to death” or 2) to “demythologize myths about male heroism and also
about female martyrdom” and 3) to “imagine stories for figures who are silent or demonized in
Shakespeare’s version” (qtd.in Hammermeister 147). To empower the objectified women and
give them more subjectivity. Vogel in Desdemona makes another narrative for the silent women
of Shakespeare’s Othello, who are Desdemona, Bianca and Emilia. Moreover, not only do the
female characters in Vogel’s Desdemona carry the narrative and express their feminist aesthetics
and experiences, but they also hardly have any similarity with Shakespeare’s female characters.
44
One of the most practical embodiments of distancing effects in Vogel’s play is
reinventing the female characters. In depicting Desdemona, who is portrayed in Othello as highly
chaste and tender, Vogel instead characterizes her as an unchaste woman who not only has
affairs outside her marriage but has also literally slept with (almost) the entire camp – except,
ironically, for Michael Cassio:
Desdemona: Where is she? It’s getting late. He’ll be back soon and clamoring for
me. He’s been in a rotten mood lately… Headaches, handkerchief, accusations and of all people to accuse - Michael Cassio!
Emilia: The only one you haven’t had…
Desdemona: And I don’t want him, either. A prissy Florentine, that one is. Leave
it to a cuckold to be jealous of a eunuch - (Baltimore 183).
Thus, Vogel depicts Desdemona as unfaithful, sexually adventurous and passionate about
experiencing a variety of sexual relationships. In sharp contrast with Shakespeare’s Desdemona,
who fully satisfied her sense of adventure with her marriage with Othello and the move to
Cyprus, Vogel’s Desdemona is too ambitious to be satisfied with her marriage. In Scene 11,
Vogel artistically reveals Desdemona’s ambitions to explore the world and to gain freedom with
images of travelling, and contrasts this with her current condition as a married woman living in a
“narrow and small world” described with images of “purdah”:
Desdemona: oh, the world! Our world narrow and small, I’ll grant you; but there
are other worlds - worlds that we married women never get to see!
Emilia: Amen - and don’t need to see, I should add!
Desdemona: if you’ve never seen the world, how would you know? Women are
clad in purdah, we decent, respectable matrons, from cradle to the altar to the
shroud… bridled with linen, blinded with lace… these very walls are purdah
(Baltimore 193).
Desdemona describes other worlds, which are kept away from married women and in her
opinion the reason is purdah. The image of purdah, which is to cover woman’s body, suggests
the aim of hiding women from the masculine gaze and is described as Desdemona’s restriction in
the patriarchal society which uses purdah as a strategy to suppress women. The image connotes a
sense of trap for married women who are objectified, marginalized and silenced.
45
But one of the most striking speeches of Desdemona regarding exploring new worlds and
liberation is when Emilia jealously tries to convince her that Bianca is not quite what Desdemona
thinks she is, and then Desdemona talks about her moments in Bianca’s brothel:
Desdemona: Bianca is nothing of the sort. She and I share something common in
our blood - the desire to know the world. I lie in the blackness of the room at her
establishment… on sheets that are stained and torn by countless nights and the
men come into that pitch-black room - men of different sizes and smells and
shapes, with smooth skin, with rough skin, with scarred skin. And they spill their
seeds into me, Emilia - seeds from a thousand lands, passed down through
generations of ancestors, with genealogies that cover the surface of the globe. And
I simply lie still there in the darkness, taking them all into me. I close my eyes and
in the dark of my mind - oh, I travel! (Baltimore 194).
Besides revealing the soul of Desdemona’s desire in life, the poetic language is very
distancing from the language of the whole play. Although, in Desdemona, Vogel avoids the
Bard’s language in order to defamiliarize the audience from the very familiar masculine text of
Othello and to create a Feminist aesthetic in a different language and structure, in the speech
above Vogel uses a poetic language very close to that of Shakespeare in Othello, to “reveal not
only a sensual appreciation of the human body, but also Desdemona’s connection of sexual
promiscuity and adultery with a viable form of liberation” (Hammermeister 121). It is easy to see
Desdemona as just a whore enjoying sex for the simple pleasure of it, or for the money it gives
her. But this speech implies that what she really wants is freedom - the men seem almost to be
symbols of travel and liberation. This, perhaps, is the only way in which a woman of
Desdemona’s class and status can experience freedom. She frees herself from the marriage bonds
(purdah) by having sex with multiple partners. But she does it for the sense of freedom, not
because she is a slut. Thus, she does not conform to any socially-constructed identities
(whore/virgin) but is actively constructing her own.
46
Apart from departing from the usual characterization of Shakespeare’s Desdemona,
Vogel’s portrayal of Bianca is also in sharp contrast with Othello’s Bianca. She depicts Bianca as
more than a minor character and gives her a different place by picturing her as the woman
Desdemona wishes to become. The first introduction of Bianca to the audience is when she is
mentioned as coming to “settle accounts” with Desdemona, as Desdemona has worked in her
brothel recently. This is when the audiences realize that Bianca has more connection with
Desdemona, compared with Shakespeare’s Bianca who has no contact with her and very little
with Emilia. In contrast with Shakespeare’s Bianca who is depicted as Cassio’s mistress and
whose character is therefore bound with his, Vogel depicts Bianca as the only woman in the
whole of Cyprus who works for a living. She is portrayed as an independent woman who is the
New Woman for Desdemona. Desdemona expresses her desire to be like Bianca on many
occasions; when Emilia tells her that she does not understand why Desdemona is “all fired up to
catch Cyprus Syph and exotic claps”, her answer reveals her desire to extend her friendship with
Bianca, as she is able to understand her:
Desdemona: Of course you don’t understand. But I think Bianca does. She is a
free woman - who can make her own living in the world, who scorns marriage for
the lie that it is. (Baltimore 194)
In creating the character of Bianca, Vogel departs from the feminists of her time. As
noted previously, Vogel, through Desdemona’s talk, defines the New Woman as “free to make
her own living in the world, who scorns marriage for the lie that it is” (Vogel 194) but as Bianca
enters we see her as a naïve character and not powerful enough to resist the patriarchal society
around her, as she expresses her desire to leave her profession, save money for a dowry and get
married. In other words, Vogel pessimistically smashes the idea of the New Woman; Desdemona
sees Bianca as the empowered New Woman, but Bianca wants nothing more than to adhere to
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the ideals of a patriarchal society, and end up as a respectably married woman. We see that
unlike her peers in the 1970s and 1980s who tried to create an idealized woman in their writings,
Vogel has no easy solution to get away and escape from the patriarchal system. Therefore, Vogel
distances the audience from identifying with a feminist heroine by proposing the same plot as
Shakespeare’s for the most unpretentious (and I think most honorable) character of the play who
is Bianca. In Scene 23, which is fantastically and darkly comic, when Bianca and Desdemona are
drinking wine and Emilia is “saying her beads”, Desdemona asks Bianca if she is “the type that
wants to get married”:
Bianca: Wot’s wrong wif that? Aw’m still young, an’ Aw’m got a tidy sum all
saved up fer a dowry. An’mlord Cassio’s only got t’ arsk fer a transfer to th’
garrison ‘ere. We’d make a bleedin’ jolly life of it, Aw c’n tell you. Aw get us a
cottage by th’ sea, wif winder boxes an’ all them kind of fings, an’e could go to
th’ tipple’ouse as much as e’ likes, wifout me sayin’ nay. An’ then … then Aw’d
be bearin’ im sons so’s to make ‘im proudEmilia: (Triumphantly): There! There is your new woman, m’lady! Free! Does for
herself!
Bianca: Why, that “new woman” kind o’ fing’s all hogwash!
(Emilia nods her head in agreement)
All women want t’get a smug, it’s wot we are made for, ain’t it? We may pretend
different, but inside ev’ry horn one o’ us want smugs an’ babies, smugs wot are
man enow t’ keep us in our place (Baltimore 214).
Ironically in the play, Vogel shows that Bianca (as Desdemona’s wish-to-become) is “the
negative image of the upper-class Desdemona” (Hammermeister 127). In other words, Vogel’s
Desdemona’s ultimate desire is to leave her domestic responsibilities and her married life and set
herself free to follow her own desires, journeys and relationships. We think that this is what
Bianca has in her life but ironically what Bianca wishes is to escape from the scandal and shame
of her profession and start a new respectable life by getting married; and this smashes the
idealized picture made by Desdemona.
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Figure 4. Small Stage Theatre, Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, Firebug, Leisester
(Photo Courtesy of Pamela Raith)
Therefore, Vogel depicts Bianca as a character who is not going to be a feminist ideal as her
fantasies and desires all lead to having a good dowry and “a nice cottage by the sea” which are
the embodiment of patriarchal will for women. Through Desdemona, Vogel has distanced the
audience from the archetypal image of the innocent, blameless wife. She shows that Desdemona
is a passionate woman who wants freedom and finds it the only way she can. But she does not
just paint a picture of female empowerment. She also shows that women are entwined in the
patriarchal system. That is why Bianca wants to be a good wife. So Vogel is using the diatancing
effects to also make the audience question feminist thoughts. She is demanding that people think
in more complex and realistic ways. As Hammermeister discusses:
It is one of the truly tragic ironies of Vogel’s dark comedy that although Bianca is
free of the patriarchal, heterosexual marriage system – or purdah - in which
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Desdemona and Emilia are trapped, she attempts to buy her way into this system
with a “dowry” saved selling her own body (127).
The last female character in Desdemona is Emilia, Desdemona’s fille de chambre. In
contrast with Shakespeare’s good-natured, devoted Emilia, Vogel portrays her as a bitter and
grumpy maid who is highly jealous; this character helps Vogel to deconstruct the idea of the
female bond and to challenge the Feminist idea of empowering women through women’s bonds:
“There is no such thing as friendship between women” (Baltimore 199). In other words, this was
a response to the feminist playwrights of 1970s and 1980s who tried to show that one of the ways
to empower women to gain control of their lives is to be united and to create women’s coalitions
and groups with common policies. This view which Butler calls “phantasmatic” is shown by
Vogel to be simplistic and a way of ignoring the radical variety of women’s lives. And that is the
reason she breaks this bond in Desdemona in a very impressive way.
By devoting the whole prologue to Emilia where Vogel shows how Emilia picks up
Desdemona’s handkerchief and “stuffs the linen in her ample bodice” (Baltimore 177), Vogel at
the beginning sheds light on Emilia’s character as deceptive. The prologue helps Vogel to
distance the audience to reconsider Emilia’s intentions in handing on the famous handkerchief in
Shakespeare’s play. This also helps the audience to reconsider the relationship between
Desdemona and Emilia.
In depicting Emilia’s character, Vogel highlights her concern with the material and
economic aspects of life. That is one of the reasons why Emilia accompanies Desdemona to
Cyprus. She is not motivated by loyalty or love for Desdemona; she comes to Cyprus because
she was promised a promotion from “waiting woman” to “fille de chambre”. Emilia keeps quiet
about Desdemona’s affairs just to get valuable rewards like her expensive ring or barely used
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dress, or promotion for Iago (for whom she has no love). Emilia describes her reasons for
remaining in her marriage:
Emilia: You see, Miss, for us in the bottom ranks, when man and wife hate each
other, what is left in a lifetime of marriage but to save and scrimp, plot and plan?
The more I’d like to put some nasty rat-ridder in his stew, the more I think of
money - and he thinks the same. One of us will drop first, and then, what’s left,
saved and earned under the mattress of th’ other one? I’d like to raise a bit in the
world, and women can only do that through their mates - no matter what class
buggers they all are. I say to him each night “I long for the day you make me a
lieutenant’s widow” (Baltimore 187).
The choice of words like “scrimp”, “save”, “plan” and “plot” all shows Emilia’s strong
concerns about the material life. The language is very close to commerce and this function to
show how Emilia sees marriage as a contract like any economic one. On the other hand, unlike
Desdemona who wants to escape from purdah, Emilia is safe and happy with it and feels quite
secure to be locked up. This portrayal distances and defamiliarizes the audience from
Shakespeare’s Emilia who is wise and devoted to Desdemona.
Along with deconstructing three female characters who distance the audience from
Shakespeare’s familiar and long-known characters, Vogel distances the original plot of Othello
in order to drag the audience’s attention to the immediate problems of the society regarding
women by looking at the unseen moments of Shakespeare’s play. In Brecht’s theory this is called
historicization which he explains in “Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of
Observation” as follows:
Imagine all that is going on around you, all those struggles
Picturing them just like historical incidents
For this is how you should go on to portray them on the stage:
The fight for a job, sweet and bitter conversations
Between the man and his woman, arguments about books
Resignation and revolt, attempt and failure
All these you will go on to portray as historical incidents.
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(Even what is happening here, at this moment, with us, is something you
Can regard as a picture in this way)
(qtd. in Hodge 104)
By concentrating on Othello’s silenced and suppressed female characters, Vogel
historicizes the issues in order to show that while the time is centuries past, social issues
regarding gender transcend historical context, and gender inequalities persist. Vogel’s
Desdemona is the reading between the lines of Othello when women rarely had the chance to
defend themselves and were divided into two categories-whore and virgin. The space that Vogel
gives the female characters is a back room that does not actually let them to be heard by the
architects of their suppression. By using techniques of defamiliarization such as distorting the
basic characteristics of Desdemona, Bianca and Emilia and undermining the idea of the female
bond and friendship, Vogel makes her audience wonder if these female characters can escape
from their doom:
Certainly, gender relations have improved since the Renaissance. But women are
still subordinated by many of the same oppressive forces as were present in
Shakespeare’s time. In today’s society, heterosexual women, like Desdemona,
who marry are perceived as “normal’ females whereas unmarried or lesbian
women are characterized as “masculine” or “unnatural”. Women’s positions are
not as confined to the domestic sphere as they were in Renaissance, but women
still do most of the domestic labor and are still defined in terms of their biology
(Ameling 174).
As a textual example of this defamiliarization, Vogel distances the scene of confrontation
between Othello and Desdemona by informing the reader through the stage description that
someone is knocking the door. Desdemona thinks it is Bianca but Othello is at the door. In the
Shakespeare’s version, the scene is a main scene as it shows the first physical violence of Othello
after his suspicions of Desdemona’s adultery; without actually staging the violence, Vogel
informs us about a loud slap. Therefore like a cinematic scene, the focus of camera from Othello
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as the subject of this action shifts to Desdemona to turn her “from a helpless weeping object to
an active (albeit almost weeping) subject”.
Another example of Vogel’s distancing the audience in order to create a feminist
aesthetics is backgrounding the play with scenes related to female experiences of domestic
chores like mending the clothes, washing the dishes, scrubbing the sheets and discussing sexual
relationships. Vogel refocuses our attention from a very “manly” atmosphere bound with
military and governmental experiences as seen in Shakespeare’s play, to experiences, which
seem to be totally related to female characters. Emilia and Desdemona’s scene mostly revolves
around domestic activities although when Bianca enters, the scenes tend to be embodied more
extravagantly, such as drinking to get drunk (reminiscent of the drinking scene with Cassio) or
the masochistic sexual behaviors of Desdemona and Bianca. Thus Vogel breaks the perception of
female experiences and lets the audience see the other experiences of her female characters.
Along with the mentioned points, manipulating the genre from tragedy to comedy is
another Brechtian technique to distance the audience from what is commonplace and familiar as
a Shakespearian tragedy in spite of the same doomed fate for her female characters.
2.7.
Conclusion
Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief accommodates the Brechtian qualities
of distancing effects in order to break the traditional stereotyped characters of one of the most
appreciated of canonical works. Along with shattering the canonical representations of three
women of Shakespeare’s play, Vogel interrogates the binaries which have lasted for thousands of
years, and breaks the binary oppositions of whore/chaste and free/trapped.
Vogel in this play challenges the feminism of the day whose emphasis was on
empowering women. In Desdemona women are in the profession where they can be seen as
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being exploited and victimized but they treat it as a platform of power. But in the end, Bianca
who is the most successful does not want it and Desdemona who wishes to have it, is killed.
In order to wake the audience up from an anesthetized sleep of being too familiar with the
lines, Vogel deconstructs Othello in many ways including distancing from poetic language of the
Bard, distorting and adapting the female characters of the play, changing the center (from a
male-centered play) to margin (a female-centered play), giving voice to the silenced and
suppressed and subjectivity to the most objectified.
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3. Chapter Three
And Baby Makes Seven or How Fantasy Steals the Real World
Performance […] is the site in which
performativity materialized in concentrated
form, where the concealed or dissimulated
convention of which acts are mere repetitions
might be investigated and re-imagined.
Elin Diamond, “Unmaking Mimesis:
Essays on Feminism and Theatre”
3.1.
Introduction
And Baby Makes Seven (1984), one of Paula Vogel’s most witty plays, was written in
1984 and first staged in the same year by Theatre with Teeth in New York City. The play, which
is about a gay family who are awaiting the impending birth of their baby, was considered highly
radical and subversive at that time. Although at first sight, the focus may appear to be on the
subversiveness of the fact of a gay family, Vogel brilliantly diverts the attention of the audience
to the relationship between adults and their inner child as the two women in the play, Anna and
Ruth, constantly and without notice, shift roles to play the parts of their three imaginary children.
Apart from this the play, as David Savran holds, is about narrative, “about the stories that people
make up to construct their identities, to deal with the people they love, and to divert themselves”
(Vogel, xiv). The presence of the children is a vital part of this construction of identity through
story, as the three main characters find out over the course of the play. Anna and Ruth, who are
skilled storytellers and manipulators of stories, accept Peter’s (Anna’s bisexual partner)
suggestion to dismiss the imaginary children before the arrival of the real one. Therefore, three
different well-structured plots are made to kill them. Along with showing the significance of the
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fantasy, the way Anna and Ruth use fantasy to deal with each other and also with Peter is
brilliant:
…(the play) is a celebration of narrative, of the power of theatre to make fantasy
real. It commemorates the childhood one never had, the friends wished for but
never gained, the desire never acknowledged. In their very different ways, all of
these plays are acts of commemoration, both exhuming and reimagining the past Paula’s past for sure, but also that of the culture of which she is a part (Savran,
xv).
And Baby Makes Seven as Vogel herself explains is inspired by her own desire to have a
child: “I wanted to have children badly. That’s why And Baby Makes Seven was written. I went
through planning having a baby with my best friend and my lover at the time, and when it fell
through I wrote this play” (qtd. in Herrington 236). The play revolves around overturning the
heterosexual norm in terms of the family structure. Vogel in this work depicts a gay ménage a
trois as a happy, functional family who are eagerly awaiting their new baby. She deconstructs the
concept of the nuclear family and reshapes it with a weird combination of two lesbians and one
gay that sometimes seems shocking and not easy to accept. Although Vogel creates a family
arrangement in which all the characters fail to adhere to the gender roles assigned for them by
society, she is highly successful in showing that this combination can work, thus destabilizing
the position of the heteronormative nuclear family as the only viable and acceptable option.
Elin Diamond in her essay “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory” suggests reading
Brechtian and Feminist theories intertextually. She labels these theories as “moving, changing
discourses and open to multiple readings” (82). She calls Verfremdungseffekt “the cornerstone”
of Brecht’s theories: a “representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its
subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Prentki 30). These distanced
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representations defamiliarize the audience with the subject, in order to help them to re-consider
the subject in an unfamiliar context. It is in this crossing point of Brechtian and Feminist theory
that we find them working together to expose the constructedness of identity. Diamond defines
gender as “the words, gestures, appearances, ideas and behaviors that dominant culture
understands as indices of feminine or masculine identity”. Gender in fact provides a perfect
illustration of ideology at work, since feminine or masculine behavior usually appears to be a
natural – and thus fixed and unalterable - extension of biological sex. However by alienating (not
simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, the ideology of
gender is exposed and thrown back to the spectator.
3.2.
Synopsis
Anna, Ruth and Peter are lovers. Anna and Ruth (lesbians) decide to have a baby and
naturally they need Peter (their gay partner) as the sperm donor. On the other hand, as Anna
declares it has been Peter’s wish from the time they were together in college to have a baby. The
three characters enter into a contract giving them all equal rights in the upbringing of their baby.
Apart from the real baby, Ruth and Anna also have three imaginary boys who are an integral part
of the family dynamic, and ultimately prove to be irremovable from the family. For a long time,
Ruth and Anna have played the roles of three children (Cecil, a genius; Henri, a French boy
borrowed from the movie Red Balloon; and Orphan, who stutters). Peter feels the roleplay is
unhealthy, especially since the real baby is almost there. Therefore, after a long struggle, the
women make up their minds to kill the three children. (Even though the children are imaginary,
they have to be killed rather than Anna and Ruth just stop playing them. This is a sign of how
real they are). But ultimately, the play closes with their return at Peter’s behest, to make a family
of seven as the title suggests. The title ironically refers to the phrase “baby makes three” which
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refers to a heterosexual nuclear family. Consequently, from the very beginning, Vogel tries to
shatter our presupposition about the representations of the traditional family structure that we
may expect to encounter in the play, displaying a new structure that is largely based on fantasy
and role play.
3.3.
Gender Performativity in And Baby Makes Seven
Butler’s ideas of gender performativity can be consistently applied in some of Vogel’s
plays. Vogel adapts these ideas to show the possibilities of gender subversion, to revision gender
construction and to break the traditional representations of gender structures. She does this in
And Baby Makes Seven by using Brechtian distancing techniques. These possibilities to subvert
gender identities and to overturn the long-established portrayal of heteronormative constructions
are what I seek in And Baby Makes Seven by analyzing the female characters, as well as their
relationship with the male character and the imaginary children. By using Brechtian distancing
techniques in order to rethink and reconstruct ideas of gender and family, Vogel creates moments
of disturbance, unsettling her audience and forcing them to look again at ideas that are taken too
much for granted, and thus not thought about critically.
Vogel’s play demonstrates that gender is “the stylized repetition of acts” as noted by
Butler in Gender Trouble. In other words, Vogel’s inclusion of the factor of game and fantasy in
the constant shift to and from adult to child of the opposite sex (as a Brechtian technique)
embodies this idea that gender is performed, as we see the characters being performed on the
stage. It is also a clear example of Brechtian distancing, as the imaginary characters fail to
perform what society assigns to them in terms of gender, thus defamiliarizing the whole notion
of fixed gender. Butler suggests that punishment and marginalization of those “who fail to
perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level, there is
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social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense
ontologically necessitated” (“Performative” 527). Vogel’s portrayal of the unusual family
arrangements in this play as both functional and necessary, underlines this idea of the falsity of
socially compelled gender identity.
3.3.1. Can Three Parents Make a Baby?
And Baby Makes Seven like many of Vogel’s plays is the result of interrogating a
canonical literary work. She rewrites, reconstructs and revisions Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(1962) which is Edward Albee’s first full-length play. Vogel’s play is a dialectical recovering of
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf which rather than “mastering” the original text tries to
“alienate or foreground those moments in a playtext in which social attitudes about gender could
be made visible” (Diamond 91). In other words, to make a feminist aesthetic in her theatre,
Vogel highlights the mechanisms by which patriarchal ideology presents and constructs gender
identities, and to achieve this goal, she turns to a canonical text like Albee’s. The title Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, like And Baby Makes Seven, plays with a commonplace phrase (who’s
afraid of the big bad wolf) to ask who among the audience is afraid of women and feminism.
Like And Baby Makes Seven, Albee’s play revolves around the notion of family. Martha
and George (a middle-aged couple) have two guests (a young couple, Honey and Nick) whose
marriage, at first impression is, in contrast with George and Martha’s, filled with love and
compassion. But as they get more and more drunk during the dinner party, they reveal more
shocking secrets about their life. The play in this sense is an analysis of the corruption of the
American nuclear family. The family depicted by Albee is wrecked by disgust, alcoholism,
dissatisfaction, bullying and lies; George and Martha repeatedly refer to their son, whom we later
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find is imaginary. Their son, constructed in their past, is paralleled with Anna and Ruth’s three
children, and the killing of Sunny Jim (as George calls him) reminds us initially of the killing of
Henri, Cecil and Orphan.
In depicting the female characters, Albee takes a misogynistic view. He depicts both
female characters, Honey and Martha, based on negative patriarchal representations of women as
either passive or destructive. Honey, Nick’s wife, is depicted as a very delicate and sensitive
woman. She is portrayed as a “particularly misogynist caricature - a vacant-headed lush who
traps men into marriage” (Hammermeister 52). She prefers to be very passive and instead of
speaking out for change, or being effective in her relationships with the three other characters,
she merely acts as the chorus to their words. Albee never gives Honey any opportunity to speak
for herself, as she maintains a passivity which can also be considered deliberate. The statement
which reveals the ‘depth’ of Honey’s character is when she declares “I’ve decided I don’t
remember anything” (Albee 211).
In contrast with Honey, Martha is a “large, boisterous woman” looking somewhat
younger. She is aggressive, tough and vicious-tongued and apparently does not have a good
relationship with her husband, George, who considers her destructive and satanic. In Martha’s
characterization, Albee makes a complex portrait of a woman that is multidimensional although
more in destructiveness, who is frank, tough, straightforward, vocal and smart. Her first marriage
was annulled by her father, since the man did not fulfill her father’s expectations. And in the
marriage with George, she cannot find satisfaction.
The hatred she seems to have towards George shows Martha’s self-hatred, representing
her as a “destructively contradictory character” (Hammermeister 54). She is a product of
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patriarchal society, a product of her close relationship with her Daddy (psychologically speaking,
her Father figure) and with George as a man who cannot fulfill her expectations (if we assume
that she knows what she wants). Therefore Albee depicts Martha in chaos, a character who is
strong enough to destroy but not to build her life and marriage. Moreover, like Honey who is
given no chance to defend herself, “the element of choice is removed from Martha’s world
almost completely…” (Hammermeister 54) and the audiences as well are not given any chance
to see Martha as a woman with her own choices for her life. In other words, what would she be if
she was free to choose, to pursue her ambitions and not just function as the agent of what her
Daddy wants her to be.
But the heteronormative binary characterization is not just allocated to Martha and Honey
but as Claire Virginia Eby suggests, Albee characterizes George and Nick as “two competing but
interdependent models of heterosexual masculinity” (Eby 601). In other words, heterosexuality is
not only imposed through the characterization of the female characters but also by depicting
George and Nick as agents of the ideology of patriarchy. Patriarchal ideology not only demands
certain behaviours of women within normative social structures but there is also competition in
the social arena for men, and if they do not fulfill society’s requirements, they will be the losers
in the combat. Therefore, George and Nick as they also are working in the same college (the play
presents them as rival rather than friends or colleagues), they are constantly engaged in verbal
combat that shows their competition.
The heteronormative family structure depicted in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as
corrupted, trap-like and abusive is in sharp contrast with Vogel’s depiction of a non-normative
family in And Baby Makes Seven as healthy and fruitful. Vogel revises the concept of family by
shifting from George and Martha’s psychologically imbalanced marriage to a lively union of two
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lesbians with a gay partner who is the biological father of their child. In other words, Vogel tries
to break heteronormative structures, including the representations of family, by showing the
healthy, functional ménage a trois of Anna, Ruth and Peter and puts her play in a dialogue with
Albee’s that “highlights sex-gender configurations as they conceal or disrupt a coercive or
patriarchal ideology” (Hammermeister 54). The play disturbs our perception of traditional
pictures of nuclear family as the first and most important social structure by not only putting in
homosexual characters but also replacing the traditional two partners with three; further, she
brings up the question of why the ‘natural’ family structure in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
does not work, and is nowhere near as functional as the family structure that society considers
non-normative and deviant. Thus Vogel, besides deconstructing the traditional family
arrangement, depicts this strange arrangement as a healthy and functional combination in which
the members are able to respect each other’s rights, have conversation over problematic issues
and are more ready than many other nuclear families out there.
The play starts with Peter’s request to Ruth and Anna to cease playing the roles of the
imaginary boys; he finds the practice “unhealthy” given the imminent arrival of the new baby.
He believes that the girls go into the characters almost all the time and it is becoming an
“obsession”, but Ruth is not very happy with his perception:
Ruth: Peter, if they go, I go!
Peter: look, this is nothing to get emotional about.
Ruth: this is something between Anna and me.
Peter: not any more, it’s not. We entered into a contract: now the three of us have
equal say in the bringing up our child.
Anna: honey, Peter doesn’t think we’re…well.. that the way we talk to our
children is healthy.
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Peter: Imaginary children.
Ruth: what do you mean not “healthy”?
Peter: I’ve just noticed that you’re both doing it a lot more. Going into character.
Now whenever I’m around those… kids are always with us.
Ruth: well Peter, you’re one of the family now. Isn’t that right Anna?
Anna: Honey, I think Peter has a point- we are doing the kids more often. All the
time now.
Peter: Yes. It becomes an obsession.
Ruth: I wouldn’t call it that.
Peter: but you are doing it all the time.
Ruth: So what? And it’s not all the time. It’s just a way of releasing the
anxieties….
Peter: Don’t you think it would be better to address those anxieties directly? (67)
Later, Vogel depicts the painful death of Cecil, Henri and Orphan, although they do not
stay dead. At the end of the play, when Anna and Peter’s real son, Nathan, is also present, the
three children ironically are brought back by Peter.
Compared to Martha and George’s imaginary son who was the source of inspiration for
Vogel, Ruth and Anna’s sons are an “integral part of the on-stage action. The partners slip in and
out of the characters effortlessly” (Herrington 236); but what is Vogel’s reason for portraying
them so vividly and giving them so much space in the play? For one thing, it helps to bring a
layer of light humor to the play (unlike the dark humor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). For
example, the scene where Ruth fights over the peanut butter sandwich comes to a hilariously
slapstick climax as Ruth conducts a bizarre “Dr. Strangelove battle with her other hand, fighting
for the possession of peanut butter and jelly” (79). It also, importantly, gives a kind of physical
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depth to the idea that the children are ‘real’. The vividness with which three boys are portrayed
strongly adds “a level of fantasy and play” to the dynamics of the family (Herrington 236).
Joan Herrington in The Playwright’s Muse draws a comparison between the deaths of the
imaginary sons in Vogel’s and Albee’s plays. As she explains, in both plays, the deaths are
depicted prominently, although in And Baby Makes Seven, the murder is not “a retaliating act
perpetrated by one partner upon the other” (Herrington 236). It is more an act of understanding
Peter’s anxiety that the line between reality and fantasy is “getting dangerously thin”. In other
words, the murder is “a result of a mutually agreed upon decision between the three characters”
(237), while on the other hand, the murder in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a “shocking
trauma” which puts an end to the play as the illusion and fantasy fade away. Martha and
George’s son’s death is a sudden act but in And Baby Makes Seven, each of the sons’ deaths has
been planned in detail by Ruth as she wishes to get “the last inch of fantasy out of them”
connoting the significance of fantasy in the family’s dynamics:
Ruth: Orphan, the first to go, succumbs to Rabies. Henri, like his film counterpart
is carried away by a flock of red balloons. Cecil, in a fittingly noble act “runs his
sword” while reciting lines from Julius Cesar (84).
But along with emphasizing the role of fantasy, Vogel’s stress on the boys’ death lies in the fact
that she wishes to show the real-ness of these characters in Ruth and Anna’s lives. The point that
they “cannot change the narrative in the middle of the story” is another emphasis on the
importance of dealing with their deaths as real ones. Orphan who was raised by stray dogs in the
Port Authority Bus Terminal “succumbs to rabies” because he wanted to save a lame dog at
which the street boys were throwing stones and this makes Orphan mad because he knows how it
hurts when you are mocked for having a disability. Cecil, who is the last one to go, is the closest
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and dearest to Ruth as she declares “just don’t make me be here when Cecil has to go”. He has a
more dramatic death with emphasis on his nobility. He is a genius and this is reflected in his
death as well. Henri’s death is less painful (this is Anna’s wish) and more impressive. He is
taken by the balloons from the movie, Red Balloon, going back to the place he always wanted to
return.
Figure 1. Susan Bott and Constance Zaytoun enact a grizzly death in Paul Vogel’s And Baby Makes
Seven, directed by Marc Stuart Weitz at New Ohio Theatre (2014).
(Photo Courtesy of Steven Schreiber)
The reappearance of the three children at the end of the play is another considerable
difference between both plays. As mentioned before, Albee’s play closes as the levels of fantasy
and illusion are cleared away but in And Baby Makes Seven the characters finally “acknowledge
and accept the pleasure that fantasy and play can provide” (Herrington 237). Peter, who initially
made a fuss over the boys’ presence, ironically brings them back in the final scene, which is set a
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short time after, Nathan, their real son, is born. The family is getting ready for dinner, chatting
about mundane, boring things since there are no more imaginary children to spice up their
conversations. Peter, getting gradually agitated and peering at his glass of water with no obvious
reason, “falls from the chair and rolls on the floor” shouting “Orphan! Revenge! Oorrrphannnn!”
(Vogel 121). The scene shows that Peter, by reviving the children, finally acknowledges the
importance of fantasy in life, underscoring the possibility of the coexistence of reality and
fantasy. Herrington extends this coexistence to the structure of the play and explains that “In fact
this coexistence is what also grounds the structure of the play. The free play of fantasy in which
the characters engage creates a fluid sense of characterization and a constant fluctuation between
fantasy and reality” (237). This allows Vogel to go beyond what we perceive as reality and gives
her the space to performatively create non-heteronormative identities. On the other hand, Vogel
influentially exploits fantasy as a distancing element in the play. She shows how fantasy can be
another reality which helps us to review our perceptions about life.
Vogel’s representation of female characters also allows her the space to re-construct
gender identities, by distancing the audience from the notion of accepted or acceptable gender
identities. Vogel’s characterization of Anna and Ruth as the main female characters of her play is
in contrast with Albee’s depictions of Martha and Honey. Unlike Martha and Honey, Vogel
makes Ruth and Anna lively women who opt to perform their gender identity in the way that
they like. They both are lesbian and choose to have their own baby: not only their biological
child, but also the three whom they have created out of their imaginations, whose roles are no
less important than their ‘real’ counterparts in the play (in many productions the three boys steal
the show). The characterization of Anna and Ruth gets more complicated since Vogel exploits
the techniques of doubling. Both Anna and Ruth play the roles of the three boys (Anna plays
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Cecil and Ruth plays Henri and Orphan); Vogel shifts from one character to another without any
notice or comment, leaving the audience to think through the dialogue and figure out who is
speaking at that point. As in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Vogel’s play is filled with games,
which strengthens the notion that social norms are performative, that they are ‘played’ and
created rather than inherent. As a final point, it can be concluded that Vogel successfully
managed to depict that a three-parent-family can work if that is the choice of its members. In the
following section, I will explore the ways in which she adapts Brechtian techniques in creating
her characters and moments of subversion.
3.4.
Distancing Effects in And Baby Makes Seven
In order to show the overturning of gender representation and the re-forming of a new
kind of family, Vogel uses the distancing effects developed and popularized by one of the theatre
figures of the 20th century. Like many other feminist playwrights including Caryl Churchill,
Sarah Daniels and Anne Deavere Smith, Vogel adapts Brechtian distancing techniques to make a
theatre which deviates from the heterosexual mainstream. Exploiting techniques such as nonlinear structure, use of music, dance, double characters and pastiche (even in characterization),
Vogel generates a theatre which tries to alienate the audiences from what is familiar,
recognizable and commonplace, in order to see with fresh eyes; what she presents might be
distancing and alarming, because it deviates from and questions what is ‘accepted’.
Materialist feminist playwrights like Vogel found Brechtian techniques and theories very
applicable and useful in showing the constructedness of gender as shifting positions rather than
as natural identities. Because it has its roots in socialism, material feminists use Brechtian
techniques to reconsider the “material conditions of gender behavior (how they are internalized,
opposed and challenged)” and their “interaction with the other socio-political factors…” (Reinelt
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151). In other words, material feminists scrutinize social factors like gender, race and class in
interaction and relationship with other factors to re-examine how each of these factors has effects
on the others.
In And Baby Makes Seven, the shifting of characters in different roles defamiliarizes the
spectator and creates a gap between the character, the spectator and the actor. Moreover, it leaves
spaces for the playwright to bring out social and political issues and draw the audiences’
attention to them. For example, in the prologue of the play we see the three boys discussing how
“babies are made”. Cecil the genius is explaining the process quite scientifically while Henri and
Orphan “vote” for eggplant theory. Vogel’s references to political and social matters like Wall
Street or democracy in this prologue, show how she always tries to bring the audiences’ attention
to the social problems even if the main concerns of the play are quite personal. Vogel’s
technique is to create moments of dissociation from the main theme of the play, and thus to
direct the audiences’ attention to the social issues and build up new associations for them:
Henri: wait a minute Cecil, Are you telling us that the baby comes out of the lady’s weewee hole?
Cecil: it’s not a wee-wee hole. It’s vagina.
Henri: Do you expect us to believe this?
Cecil: It’s the truth.
Henri: Orphan! What do you vote for?
Orphan: I vote for th-the eggplant.
Henri: okay, that makes two votes for the eggplant. You’re wrong, Cecil.
Cecil: you can’t vote down the truth.
Henri: yes, we can… this is a democracy. (63-64)
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The boys’ argument stop when Uncle Peter enters and they get him to explain to them
how babies are made. The first traces of queer appear in the last lines of the prologue to Act One
when Henri hugs Peter “from there” and expresses his desire to “have his baby” (Vogel 66).
Thus from the very beginning, Vogel brings up the question of gender construction as seen in the
simple minds of the children; their openness to difference shows us how we are taught to conceal
the realities of gender and sexuality. This can be interpreted as what Diamond asks the
playwrights to do: to foreground the “moments in a playtext in which social attitudes about
gender be made visible”. In other words, Vogel tries to deconstruct the idea of naturalness of
gender and emphasizes gender as a cultural trope. The moment when Henri declares “I want to
have your baby” is the point at which none of the traditional definitions for understanding gender
can help to clarify the situation. Fantasy in this scene helps Henri to act beyond the constraining
boundaries of gender binaries, and justifies his sexual attachment to Peter.
But the main use of Brechtian techniques is displayed in Vogel’s characterization of
Anna and Ruth, the lesbian couple who have three imaginary children as the counterparts of their
characters. Besides the fact that the female characters, Anna and Ruth, do not fully adhere to the
traditional representations of girls (gender failure in Butlerian terms) and try to break the
representational images of women in a patriarchal system, the intervention of Cecil, Henri and
Orphan in almost all the scenes and without any notice alienates the audience from Anna and
Ruth as women; instead they watch them act as three little boys. Vogel’s use of cross-gender
characterization (women play the role of boys) helps the audience to see gender performativity as
the “repetition of acts”. In other words, by playing the boys, Anna and Ruth become the boys.
They are not pretending or playacting the boys. Therefore, the audiences watch them as
sometimes boy and sometimes woman and this makes them ask what is real and what is not real.
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And the audiences also see that Anna and Ruth are whatever they are performing, or in other
words, they are performatively creating the gender they want to be at any given moment.
A very innovative scene that shows this point is Scene 5, when Henri and Orphan are
arguing over a T-shirt off-stage while Anna and Peter are trying to settle the clash about the
existence of the three boys:
Henri (offstage): I get to wear that shirt! That’s not yours, Orphan.
Orphan (offstage): N-now it is.
Henri (offstage): you take it off!
Orphan (offstage): M-m-make m-me, Frog Boy.
Peter: it’s very hard to talk around here sometimes.
Henri: don’t call me Frog Boy
Anna: Look, I’m always ready to listen to your point of view.
Peter: Okay, then just want to explain why I think we should stopHenri (offstage): I AM GOING TO KILL YOU ORPHAN!
Anna: Ah, excuse me Peter
Cecil: listen you two, will you please grow up? What is your problem?
Cecil: well then let Orphan wear that shirt today. Henri, you can wear my Fiorucci
shirt with fishHenri (offstage, delighted): all right! (83).
The fact that we have three actors on stage who are playing six characters forces us to
swing between their real world, and their fantasy that is as strong as their real world, jars the
audience into re-evaluating how we as a part of society construct gender realities and roles. The
scene provokes this question because we ask which world of these characters is their real world?
and on another level, we ask which gender is real? In other words, are the characters women or
little boys, masculine or feminine? It changes, depending on how they are in different moments
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on the stage. Vogel very successfully shows that as Ruth and Anna are playing the boys, they are
performing their gender as women. They are acting their gender or doing their gender, just as
Butler explains “gender is … doing” (Gender 33) rather than a being. And Vogel shows this by
using Brechtian techniques of distancing to force us to question the ‘realness’ of gender
identities.
Another important scene showing this critical distance is Ruth’s sandwich making scene,
which leads to Henri and Orphan’s battle to get the PBJ (peanut butter and jelly) in Scene 4. The
scene starts with Ruth reciting the sandwich recipe in French; but she also swings from being
Ruth, to being Henri, to being Orphan, and back again. Even the language that Ruth uses,
French, and the pronoun that Vogel chooses for Ruth when she is He, are used as a tool of
alienating and separating Ruth from Henri and the audience from the characters, so that we begin
to distance ourselves from our common perceptions and begin to see Ruth and Henri as separate
individuals:
Henri: and now pour le dejeuner. A little Poisson? Or peut etre- a little poulet- cordon
bleu? Or may be steak Dijon?
(Stands in front of refrigerator door, contemplating the choices, He opens the refrigerator
doors and gasps in disgust) peanut butter and jelly! Peanut butter and jelly! Avec
Wonderbread!
Ruth (calls to the offstage Anna): Anna, you want a PJB?
Anna (offstage): No thanks. I’m going to take a nap.
(Ruth becomes Henri again) (79).
Later the scene continues with Ruth shifting from and to Henri and Orphan, and making a
mess eating the PBJ. She takes a huge bite of the PBJ as Orphan and is punished by Henri.
Vogel’s constant shift of the characters does not allow the audience to ever get comfortable with
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any one of the characters, to ‘get used’ to them, so the audience is therefore constantly
questioning and alert, and cannot lapse into the comfort of thinking ‘I know who this character
is, I know what he/she is going to do next’.
Along with the techniques of double-charactering and game, Vogel also uses social
gestus, another Brechtian technique. Social gestus is defined as “the gest relevant to society, the
gest that allows conclusion to be drawn about the social circumstances” (Thomson 219). Social
gestus is the combination of gestures with special social meanings; that is, to perform those
gestures and movements connotes special social meaning. The social gestus relates to the idea
that the repetition of movements and acts can connote special meaning. Acts related to gender
identity are strong examples of the fact that by repetition of specific acts or what Butler calls
“stylized repetition of actions” these acts can come to seem natural, even though they are not. In
other words, no body movement or act on stage has innate meaning and the repetition of those
movements in a social context gives a special meaning (as repetitions of gender acts give it
special connotation). Jill Dolan in her article “The Feminist Spectator as Critic” declares gender
representation as plastic or artificial:
In the lesbian context, where the heterosexual assumption becomes discarded,
gender as representation gets detached from the real and becomes as plastic
and kitsch as the little man and woman balanced on a wedding cake. Gender
becomes as social gestus, a gesture that represents ideology circulating in
social relations (Dolan 143).
Vogel in the play artistically uses social gestus to show gender performativity or gender
as the repetition of acts. The best example to be mentioned in And Baby Makes Seven is after the
argument over getting rid of the boys, when Peter is back from spending some time with “the
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boys”. In a talk with Anna, Peter’s confession that he misses breasts makes Anna offer him her
own:
Peter (shyly): I just wanted you to know… I really miss breasts.
Anna: really? That must be awful…
(Anna looks down and stroke her breasts)
Peter: it’s so alien to me. That softness…
Anna: well, you know, Petey, whenever you get hit by the urge, you can always
feel one…
Peter: can I?
Anna: of course you can. Be my guest. Go ahead, it won’t bite you…
(Peter hesitantly puts out his hand to stroke Anna’s breast. Ruth, still half-sleep,
enters in her pajamas)
Ruth: Petey? Are you home? You okay?
Peter: Yes:
(He starts to remove his hand, but Anna holds it to her breast)
Ruth: what are you two up to?
Peter: I’m stroking Anna’s breast.
Ruth (totally unconcerned): Oh. That’s nice.
Anna: There is room for one more here.
Ruth (enthused): Okay
(Ruth goes to Anna’s other side and gently puts her hand on Anna’s breast. Peter
and Ruth look at each other. Ruth smiles. Anna smiles and sighs.)
Anna: Ahhh… (74).
The scene can be considered as a simple love scene but it connotes social implications which are
merged with the gesture of stroking Anna’s breast. It is clear that in this scene instead of being
veiled or denied as unfeminine, her body is a site of togetherness. She is ‘unfeminine’ because of
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being lesbian. But her body is desirable to a man who is gay and that dismantles the idea of being
gay. Therefore, Vogel distances the audiences from representational descriptions of being
homosexual by presenting blurred identities, which disrupt received notions of gender and
sexuality. Moreover, the playwright creates a love triangle without the most clichéd aspect of it.
When Ruth sees Peter stroking Anna’s breast she does not show any jealousy. They all three are
satisfied and happy in this relationship, which makes a functional family, in sharp contrast with
George and Martha’s heteronormative but dysfunctional family.
In other words, this short comic scene displays subversive relationships with Anna’s
body that has been used as the place of reunions of friends and lovers. In this shocking and
comic scene, Vogel tries to get the audience to question their long-held sexual assumptions.
Through the social gestus represented by this scene, she complicates and undermines traditional
representations of and assumptions about gender identities.
3.5.
Conclusion
From many angles, And Baby Makes Seven can be seen as a response to Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf, which showcases the damaging effects of a life based on hallucination and
illusions. Vogel’s play not only, as mentioned earlier, uses fantasy to reconstruct gay and lesbian
gender identities but also, as opposed to Albee, shows how fantasy can be used to help us to
connect with those we love rather than to alienate and separate us from them. Moreover, Vogel
often expressed her contribution as a feminist playwright by linking it to the notion of making
space to interrogate the social and personal prejudices or expanding the boundaries of thinking.
She certainly does not claim to have answers for social problems believing that her responsibility
is to ask more questions rather than trying to “solve” problems. This view helps her to extend not
only the possibilities of her theatre in the social context but also her contribution to feminism.
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Vogel declares that “I don’t speak for all lesbians and I don’t want to” (Drukman). And Baby
Makes Seven is a productive site to see how gender subversion is possible and how moments of
breaking the traditional representations and presuppositions can be extended to make social
changes. Vogel presents moments of gender failure (which Butler sees as the ground for politics
of subversion) through her use of Brechtian distancing effects, to show how within the system of
social and political status-quo, there are some possibilities beyond the boundaries of binaries of
female/male or homosexual/heterosexual.
In summary, Vogel was highly successful in her use of Brechtian techniques to show how “the
stylized repetitions of acts” which in this case are gender acts can give us this hallucination that
they are natural and inborn. She specifically used game in female characterization in order to
display how the female characters of her play are not sticking to gender norms of the society but
in
a
comic
way
subverting
the
traditional
representation
of
patriarchal
society.
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4. Chapter Four
The Baltimore Waltz: Fun at the Funeral
Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sorts of things. Victims? Don't be
melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots
stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped,
would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots
you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you
can save money nowadays.
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
Harry Lime: I’ll be straight with you. I can give you the drugs but it won’t help. It won’t help at
all. Your sister is better off with that quack Todesrocheln - we call him the Yellow Queen of
Vienna - she might end up drinking her own piss, but it won’t kill her.
Carl: but I thought you had the drugs.
Harry Lime: oh, I do and they cost a pretty penny. For a piece I can give them to you. At the
discount for old times but you have to know, we make them up in my kitchen.
The Baltimore Waltz, Paula Vogel
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Figure 2. The Baltimore Waltz: Main Street Stage, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2010
(Photo courtesy of Main Street Stage)
4.1.
Introduction
The Baltimore Waltz was written in 1989 and first produced in February of 1992 at the
Circle Repertory Company off-Broadway, directed by Anna Bogart; it won the Obie Award for
Best New American Play. Vogel wrote the play in memory of her beloved brother who had died
one year before of AIDS. In the playwright’s note, Vogel mentions that in 1986, Carl, knowing
that he was dying from HIV, invited Paula to a “joint execution” in Europe. She declined his
invitation due to lack of time and money. Carl died at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore,
Maryland two years later. She wrote the play in her head while visiting Carl during his first
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hospitalization. Vogel acknowledges that writing a play about her brother at that time was a
“survival technique” to release her anxieties and fears.
Fantasy plays a vital role in this production. Stage directions strengthen the sense of an
alternative reality or an imaginative journey as the lighting is “highly stylized, lush, dark and
imaginative” and Anna is costumed in a negligee and trench coat while Carl wears flannel
pajamas and a blazer. Vogel gives detailed stage directions and comprehensive guides for
production. Moreover, in the playwright’s note, Vogel mentions her brother’s requests on “the
production value of (his) ceremony” and also permits “all the future productions to reprint Carl’s
letter since she likes him to speak to us in his own words” (4). In the letter, Carl “directs” his
funeral in detail, saying that he wants it to be filled with art, music and poetry. Gloomily, he
states “well, I want a good show, even though my role has been reduced involuntarily from
player to prop” (6). The “juxtaposition” of this piece of real life (Carl’s letter) and her
introductory text gives us the sense of the uneasy balance of fantasy and reality, predicting the
comic and tragic themes of The Baltimore Waltz. Thus, an uneasy balance reminds us of
“inappropriate moments of humor at funerals”. Vogel herself describes it as:
My family had the most inappropriate moments of humor at funerals. Maybe it’s a
survival strategy. Some people say that this comes from Jewish genes… for me
combining sadness and comedy heightens both. The collision of tones makes both
more extreme (qtd.in Holmberg).
4.2.
Synopsis
The play tells the story of Anna, a schoolteacher who suffers from ATD (acquired toilet
disease) which she contracted by sitting on a children’s toilet (ATD is apparently parallel with
AIDS). When Anna knows that her disease is fatal, she decides to travel to Europe with her
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brother Carl, who always carries a stuffed bunny, to find black market treatment. In Europe,
Anna decides to enjoy the sensuality of sex and food as she believes that lust is one of the stages
of accepting death, while Carl tries to find a cure for her malady; this is when The Third Man
comes into the play. The Third Man in the play takes the role of many characters: waiter, doctor,
and over twelve minor roles. At the end, when Anna receives Carl’s belongings, such as his
European brochures, it emerges that the Europe journey only happens in Anna’s imagination as
she is sitting beside her brother’s deathbed. Fantasy was her only tool to take a leave from the
present reality, the reality of Carl’s death from AIDS.
Like Vogel’s other plays, The Baltimore Waltz responds to a literary text or a movie. The
play has direct references to The Third Man directed by Carol Reed in 1949. Not only the
character of The Third Man but also some themes are directly taken from this Hollywood movie.
In 1949, The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed was released in England. Written by Graham
Green, the movie is a detective story about a man, Holly Martins who is promised a job by his
old friend, and goes to shattered post war Vienna which is divided among the French,
Americans, Russians and British. But on arriving he finds out that his friend, Harry Lime, has
been killed in a car accident. Trying to unfold the secret of his friend’s death, Holly who is an
American pulp Western writer, discovers that his friend was in the black market for penicillin.
With the questions of Harry’s death that drives the plot of the story, Holly learns that Harry is
alive and he himself is the Third Man of the fatal scene of the accident. Getting the motivation
from visiting Harry’s black market victims, talking to Harry himself and trying to do the right
job, Holly Martins helps Major Colloway to catch Harry and he himself shoots him dead.
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4.3.
Themes
The play revolves around AIDS although Vogel defines it as more a “way of talking to
(her) dead brother, being able to spend time with him” (qtd. in Herrington 241). The play is full
of “discriminatory attitudes circulating in the discourse regarding the disease” (Herrington 241).
Vogel once expressed that she selected the categories of “single elementary school teachers,
classroom aides, custodians and the playground drug pushers” as a reaction to the phrase
“innocent victims” when it comes to AIDS/HIV implying that some people get the disease
innocently and the rest deserve it. In Scene 3, Carl complains about the apathy which surrounds
this disease, an apathy which comes to the fore with reference to some categories of victims of
AIDS such as gay men, prostitutes and drug users:
Carl: If Sandra Day O’Connor sat on just one infected potty, the media would be
clamoring to do articles on ATD. If just one grandchild of George Bush caught
this thing during the toilet training, that would be the last we’d hear about the
space program. Why isn’t someone doing something? (12)
But what causes this theme to stand out bold and distinctive is Vogel’s trick to have
infrequent and minimal references to the theme of discriminatory ideas around HIV/ATD. She
believes that “as cultural animals, we don’t forget because something is hidden, we forget
because something is in our face and we don’t see it anymore” (qtd. in Herrington 242). And that
is the reason why Vogel does not overexpose the audience to the matter of AIDS. She instead
invents ATD to get the audience to sympathize with Anna, and then wonder why they do not
sympathize with the HIV positive.
The Baltimore Waltz is without doubt about death and loss. We can feel the sorrow
Vogel experienced at the loss of her beloved brother – a loss so heavy that she shared it with the
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whole world. In the 1960s, a Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969), carried out
research on ill people in their final stages and found a pattern which she summarized in five
stages known as the grief cycle. As the play goes on, we discover that Anna is going through the
grief cycle, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Vogel added hope and
lust as the final stages.
But what makes The Baltimore Waltz outstanding is the use of fantasy and comedy in
dealing with loss and death. The whole journey of Anna and Carl is a fantasy. Like And Baby
Makes Seven, in this play also, Vogel uses fantasy first as a tool of evading reality through
reversal of roles or “releasing the anxiety” in two levels. Anna is spending the last moments with
her brother when she uses fantasy as “a technique of survival”, making a fantastical journey in
which she is suffering from a fatal disease and Carl is seeking the cure. But in addition to using
fantasy to give Anna relief from reality, Vogel as the playwright uses it to express the reality of
disturbing issues like AIDS; the reality of an issue that had been denied for a long time, and over
which the government chose silence and inactivity instead of addressing the crisis1. Twisting the
fantasy with a comic tone and comedic farce is Vogel’s way to present such distressing issues as
AIDS, death and loss; but Vogel gets her audiences to come and see the play with an open mind
by distancing them from the usual attitudes and biases towards AIDS. She knew that most people
had very strong attitudes about AIDS, and if the play were presented as being about AIDS, they
would not necessarily get rid of their attitudes in order to listen to Vogel’s words. Therefore,
instead of bringing AIDS on stage, she invents a disease without baggage: ATD.
1
In a press briefing at the White House in 1982, a journalist asked a spokesperson for President Reagan “…does the
President have any reaction to the announcement – the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an
epidemic and have over 600 cases?” The spokesperson responded - “What’s AIDS?”
81
4.4.
Objectives
In this chapter, I will seek to show how Vogel uses gaze and fantasy as tools to subvert
gender representation. To elaborate more, the playwright tries to shatter the idea of “men as the
bearer of gaze” by characterizing Anna as the carrier of gaze. According to Laura Mulvey in
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, since heterosexual men control the cameras in cinemas,
female characters are the object of their cameras on two levels: for the male character and for the
spectators. But in The Baltimore Waltz, in which Anna is the narrator, Vogel artistically succeeds
in showing that Anna is the bearer of the gaze by characterizing her as a woman who seeks to
fulfill her desires fully and with no fear. Moreover, by deconstructing the idea of men as the
bearer of gaze, Vogel practices Butlerian gender performativity.
On the other hand, as another mean of subverting gender roles and practicing gender
performativity, Vogel exploited fantasy as a medium of homosexual theater. During the 1980s,
homosexual dramatists tried to undermine the natural connection between realism and
heterosexuality imposed by the dominant culture and to achieve this goal they used fantasy as a
tool to deconstruct gay and lesbian experience, placing them in a position of power. Therefore, in
The Baltimore Waltz, fantasy functions as a site to represent the reality of homosexual life.
But what techniques did Vogel use to bring this all to reality in The Baltimore Waltz? In
this chapter, I intend to show how Vogel in The Baltimore Waltz, as in her other plays, exploited
Brechtian techniques of distancing to “restore visibility” and to make the ordinary things strange,
to help her audience to notice them again. As mentioned before, she believes that as “cultural
animals” we forget the visible things which we see every day because they are in our face.
Therefore, in order to give her audience the chance to see the most visible issues with fresh eyes,
she estranges them with distancing effects including a non-linear structure spiced up with fantasy
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and comedic farce scenes, bringing in films and slides to break the familiar and commonplace,
and using historicity as one of the major points of the play.
4.5.
Brechtian Techniques: Distancing Effects in The Baltimore Waltz
David Savran in the introduction of her plays states that “Paula’s method of critiquing, or
if one prefers, deconstructing the work of her forebears comes from her reading of the theories of
Berthold Brecht” (Introduction x). He continues comparing Brecht and Vogel in terms of making
the commonplace strange, and adds that “Paula writes from a deeply rooted political sense” (xi).
As mentioned before, in The Baltimore Waltz, Vogel makes the personal, political, using a
memorial text that seems to be very personal, to draw our attention to the crisis of AIDS and the
myths around it, which are highly related to issues of sexuality. In an interview, she states that
ordinary subjects which are “out there” should be used in theatre:
Shklovsky says you can use any contemporary subject, the subject is unimportant.
The importance is that it’s out there in the public view, and therefore, it’s ripe for
forgetting. So the interesting thing is to remember to expose that which is in the
public view. What is in the public view? AIDS, pedophilia, child molestation,
domestic violence, homosexuality. All of these subjects people may say are
sensationalized - sensationalism is another way of avoidance and denial (qtd. in
Savran 274).
To elaborate the point, Vogel’s spectators like Brecht’s audiences encounter what they
are exposed to every day “out there” but this time they are not just seeing the issues but
participating, and thus avoiding the comfortable catharsis of dramatic Aristotelian theatre.
Vogel’s spectators are not allowed to deny the existence of social realities and crises like AIDS,
pedophilia and child molestation; rather they are expected to participate in this instruction or
Epic theatre. This is what Vogel tries to depict in The Baltimore Waltz by using Brechtian
techniques in representing the question of AIDS.
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3.4.1. Comic Distancing Effects
The most remarkable appropriation of distancing effects in the play is certainly the use of
comedy to estrange the audience from what is already familiar and mundane. Vogel herself
describes the effect of using comedy as uncovering any protective covering. The characterization
of Anna as a comic figure is freed from the cliché of the sister who should take care of her
brother. Anna’s desire to have several sexual relationships with men from different cities like
Amsterdam, Paris and Hamburg to escape from the reality of her fatal disease is shocking and
awakening. The comic moments when Anna makes love to different men also reveal Vogel’s
attempt to represent men as the object of the gaze and leads to overturning and subverting the
“male gaze” which creates comic effects.
Laura Mulvey in her article tries to “demonstrate the way the unconscious of patriarchal
society has structured film form” (qtd.in Jackson 217). To achieve this goal she goes back to
Freud and his three essays on sexuality. Mulvey describes that scopophilia (the pleasure of
looking at naked bodies or the bodies engaged in sexual activity) is one of the pleasures that
cinema, as a social institution which has much to do with the unconscious dominated by
“dominant order”, gives you. As she states Freud separated this kind of pleasure (scopophilia)
“as one of the component instincts of sexuality” by which you objectify people and subject them
to a controlling and curious gaze. Therefore that constructs a relationship between the subject (a
person who looks) and the object (who is being looked at without noticing) which is based on
pleasure. Mulvey’s concern with cinema is at the level at which, although it seems that what we
see on screen is obviously shown, “the mass of mainstream film and the conventions within
which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically
indifferent to the presence of the audience producing for them a sense of separation and playing
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on their voyeuristic phantasy” (qtd. in Penley 60). In other words, benefiting from the spectators’
position towards each other and the illusion of looking at a totally private world, cinema is a site
of scopophilia.
In the section on “women as image, men as the bearer of the look”, Mulvey describes that
in the world of “sexual imbalance” scopophilia highlights active/male and passive/female
relationships: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and
displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (qtd. in Penley 62).
Mulvey continues that in cinema women are objectified on two levels: as objects for
characters and as objects for spectators. She believes that in these heterosexual and sexually
imbalanced relations “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (Mulvey
63) and in cinema (like theatre) man as the reluctant side of being looked at is the active side
who “forwards the story and makes things happen”. So the male character not only is the bearer
of the look but also the bearer of the incidents.
But in The Baltimore Waltz along with putting Anna in the position of the bearer of the
gaze, Anna’s character “perfectly illustrates the connection between the woman’s hunger and her
sexual desire” (Mobley 127). Jenifer-Scott Mobley in Female Bodies on the American Stage:
Enter Fat Actress describes that Anna is depicted as a first grade schoolteacher who “has lived a
very modest humdrum life” and “has spent her life controlling her appetite and eating bland,
convenient, pseudo-healthy prepackaged food” (127), which can be a metaphor for her sex life.
But when they travel through Europe, Anna’s desire to sleep with different men awakens. Vogel
comically relates Anna’s sexual desire to her appetite for food. In the sixth scene, which implies
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the peak of provocation of Anna’s sexual desire, when the French Garçon is explaining the
desserts for Anna, she answers him erotically and we see that in the next scene, she is in bed with
the Garçon who offered her “la specialité de la maison”. Vogel comically juxtaposes Anna’s
tryst with the Garçon , with Carl’s browsing at the Louvre:
CARL: Exercise: la carte. La specialite de la maison.
Back at the hotel, Anna samples the Garçon’s specialité de la maison while her
brother browses the Louvre.
(Anna and the Garçon are shapes beneath the covers of the bed; Carl clutches his
stuffed rabbit)
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot lived from 1796 to 1875. Although he began his
career by studying in the classical tradition, his later paintings reveal the influence
of the Italian style.
ANNA (muffled): Ah! Yes!
GARÇON (also muffled): ah! Oui!
CARL: He travelled extensively around the world, and in the salon of 1827 his
privately lauded techniques were displayed in public.
ANNA: Yes- oh, yes, yes!
GARÇON : Mais oui!
CARL: before the academy had accepted realism, Corot’s progressive paintings,
his clear-sighted observations of nature, revealed a fresh, almost spritely, quality
of light, tone and composition.
ANNA: yes-that’s right-faster- (23).
The scene brings us to the idea of how Anna is in charge of “gaze” in a very different
way from Carl. Carl is “gazing” at the painting while browsing the museum in a very intellectual
way. He is looking at things which are static and unchanging while Anna who is in charge of the
gaze in her sexual affairs in bed is active and physical.
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As the play goes on, the scenes related to Anna’s sexual relationships with men from
different cities helps the audience to see the subversion of gender roles in the play. An attempt to
show the unnaturalness of gender stereotypes (performativity) and to resist the apparent relation
of masculine gaze with realistic theatre guides Vogel’s choice of Anna as the narrator of the play
and the character who is in charge of the audiences’ gaze. Contrasted with realistic heterosexual
theatre, in The Baltimore Waltz, Anna is the narrator and the audience sees the play based on her
female view. Anna’s point of view, her desires and her needs and also the last stage of her
disease (lust) drive the play. Vogel herself in answer to the question of why she characterizes
Anna with “behavior typically stereotyped as masculine” replies:
In my plays I want to present women as desiring subjects, which means that men
sometimes become the object of the female gaze. [in Baltimore Waltz] I wanted to
pay homage to my brother’s desire for men. In order to do that, I used a woman
subject desiring the male body. I wanted the audience to appreciate how beautiful
the male body is. Some women automatically do that, so I used a woman, and
through a female subject, straight men who are homophobic would go, yeah, I can
see how she finds him beautiful. And if I’ve got them there, I’ve got the entire
audience understanding that the male body can be desired object. And then I am
half way there in terms of overcoming our homophobia towards men on stage
(Holmberg).
Therefore Vogel chooses Anna to have the responsibility of desiring the male body. The
peak of this theme is when Anna in the last stage of her disease is having sex with Garçon:
(She kisses the Garçon’s breast. The Garçon stirs.)
Garçon: Encore?
Anna: what is the word- in French-for this? (she fingers his breast)
Garçon : for un homme: le sein. For une femme: la mamelle.
Anna:le sein?
Garçon : oui. Le sein.
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Anna (she kisses her neck): and this?
Garçon : le cou.
Anna: Et ici?
Garçon: bon. Décolleté.
Anna begins to touch him under the sheet.
Anna: and this? (24)
While having sex with Garçon, Anna is reducing him to his various body parts and
looking at him as an object just as women often are in cinema. Since Anna is in charge of the
gaze, the way she objectifies the Garçon reminds us the way women are always have been
looked at in cinema, being looked at through their bodies.
In The Baltimore Waltz, it is Anna who moves the story backwards and forwards. In the
café, Anna and Carl are eating their lunch “when the Garçon reenters with the dessert tray, Anna
ogles him” and from this moment on, it is the Garçon who is the object of Anna’s gaze. Later in
their lovemaking, it is Anna who leads and controls their sex:
Anna: Yes –that’s right- fasterGarçon: plus vite?
Anna: fasterGarçon: encore! Plus vite!
Anna: wait!
Garçon : attends?
….
Garçon : maintenant?
Anna: lower-faster-lowerGarçon : plus bas- plus vite- plus bas88
…
Anna: yes, I- I- I- IGarçon : je- je! Je! Je (23)
The point that the Garçon only repeats what Anna says and the way that Vogel presents
him with no existence or purpose beyond what Anna demands of him strengthens Anna’s
dominant status in this short-lived relationship. In other words, Vogel bolsters Anna’s dominance
and status as gaze bearer by giving the Garçon no voice and character, which is in contrast with
the real world’s status of women in their sexual relationships.
Another example of this feminine desire, related to the notion of feminine gaze which has
distancing qualities and heightens the comic effects of her theatre and historicizes the incidents is
in Anna’s lovemaking scene with Garçon. To elaborate this point, this juxtaposition is best
depicted in Anna’s description of her object of desire:
Anna: In lovemaking, he’s all furry and heat. His North Sea, pounding against
your Dreamer. And when you look up and see his face, red and huffing, it’s hard
to imagine him ever having been a newborn, tiny, wrinkled and seven pounds.
That is, until afterwards. When he rises from sleep and walks into the bathroom.
And there he exposes his soft little derriere, and you can still see the soft baby
flesh (45).
The juxtaposition of distancing linguistically (from first person I to second person who is
narrative You) and Anna’s desire towards her objects which are Garçon, the Little Dutch Boy at
50, the Munich Virgin and the Radical Student Activist estranges Anna’s experience. In a
nutshell, by putting Anna in the position of narrator, Vogel gives her the role of driving the story.
Vogel’s resistance to stereotyping gender roles is another possibility within the system of
heterosexual theatre which leads to gender subversion. Anna as Vogel claims is depicted in a
dominant position and by behaving in a masculine way and desiring Garçon ’s body she suggests
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that the male body too can be objectified as the female body has been for a long time in
heterosexual theatre. In other words, Anna by desiring sexual relationships, initiating sex, giving
instructions (in French Garçon’s case), describing and examining her lovemaking partner’s body
gets us to look at these men’s body rather than at her.
Another use of comedy in The Baltimore Waltz to “restore the visibility” and to give the
audience a wake-up call is Vogel’s changing of AIDS to ATD. Catalina Florina Florescu situates
the play between two known dramas on the subject of AIDS: The Normal Heart by Larry
Kramer (1985) and Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner
(1995) and explains that unlike the other two plays, in the Vogel’s work “there is no compromise
reached through a counterfeit happy ending” (60). ATD which is allegorically used for AIDS is
characterized through the myths, misconceptions, and the hidden truths that surprise the
characters and the audiences as well (the same myths and hidden truths around AIDS). In Scene
2, Medical Straight Talk, we find out that Anna is infected with ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease),
a disease which comes from “toilet seats” and has been seen in many elementary schoolteachers.
Vogel transforms from a potential AIDS tragedy to an ATD comedy in order to estrange the
perceptions of AIDS issues. She also uses fantasy to reinforce the comic themes of the play and
to concentrate on how the government and medical institutions are inefficient and goes further to
show how the perceptions of dominant culture need to be reconsidered. The scene goes on with
Anna’s bewilderment about why no one knows about this disease, which refers to the slowness
of the Reagan government in dealing with AIDS. Robert Onorato in That’s Not Purple, Mary,
That Color up There is Mauve: AIDS and the Evolution of Fabulous Theatre explains the
situation of public fear and government inactivity in dealing with AIDS:
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When the Times finally published a 6,000-word comprehensive article about
AIDS in its Magazine in February 1983, there were 958 diagnosed cases among
many more risk groups than just homosexuals. The governmental response to
AIDS was also slow for the same reasons. Many gay activists vilified New York
City mayor Ed Koch and President Ronald Reagan for their lack of public
sympathy for AIDS patients or allowance of funds for research (1).
In Scene 2, when Anna is trying to get some information about ATD, she wonders why
no one knows about the disease:
Anna: …why hasn’t anybody heard of this disease?
Doctor: well, first of all, the Center for Disease Control doesn’t wish to inspire an
all-out panic in communities. Secondly, we think education on this topic is the
responsibility of NEA, not the government. And if word of this pestilence, gets
out inappropriately, the PTA is going to be all over the school system demanding
mandatory testing of every toilet seat in every lavatory. It’s kindling for a political
disaster (11).
Thus the doctor clearly explains how medical institutions, which are responsible for peoples’
lives, sacrifice these lives by hiding the disease from the public in order to avoid political
disaster. And this is another reason that Vogel artistically brings in the technique of manipulating
genres, using the detective genre to show that the AIDS-related deaths should be considered as
murders by governments and medical institutions. Moreover, the doctor talks about the ignorance
of medical institutions on the issue: “I’m afraid that medical science has only a small foothold in
this area” (10). This can be considered as an example of how Vogel shows medical institutions
and government being responsible for the AIDS-related deaths, pointing out that if they do not
take action properly, they are the murderers of these victims.
AIDS criminalization is another point Vogel considers in her play. According to many
jurisdictions in the US, a person diagnosed as HIV-positive who engages in sexual relationships,
donates blood, HIV-infected organs or tissue, or even spits or transmits bodily fluid is considered
to have committed a crime. Although the HIV activists believe that these are severe sentencing
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for behaviors with little to no risk of transmission, the US government still is enforcing this law.
In Scene 8, when Carl and Anna are getting ready to go to bed Anna express her fear so clearly:
ANNA: (Continues to stare in the mirror): It doesn’t show yet.
CARL: No one can tell. Let’s get some sleep, honey.
ANNA: I don’t want anyone to know.
CARL: it’s not a crime. It’s an illness.
ANNA: I don’t want anybody to know.
CARL: it’s your decision. Just don’t tell anyone…what… you do for a living (17)
Accordingly, although this is the only time Vogel brings up this idea, the effect is
powerful. Joan Herrington believes that “direct references to the discriminatory or apathetic
attitudes towards HIV/ATD-positive people in The Baltimore Waltz are infrequent which causes
them to stand out distinctly when they occur” (284). On the other hand, Vogel, by using the
detective genre, puts the blame on the government, saying that the people diagnosed with HIV
are not criminals; it is the government which has committed a crime by using the wrong
strategies in dealing with the crisis. Vogel’s references to The Third Man bring out the question
of whether the government’s indifference and inefficiency can be considered as crime. In other
words, Vogel generates questions around AIDS by drawing the audiences’ attention to the
detective genre, whose main elements are mystery and probing to get the audiences to ask who is
responsible for thousands of deaths from AIDS, just as Holly Martins (Harry Lime’s friend)
asked the same question in relation to the penicillin issue.
Another myth around HIV is that it is a gay men’s disease and consequently they are the
biggest group to transmit the virus. For this reason, Vogel distracts the audiences’ attention from
the HIV patient, a homosexual librarian who teaches children how to make a rude gesture with
their middle finger singing “this is the way we go on strike…”, to a heterosexual schoolteacher,
who would never have been considered as high risk for AIDS but is in the high risk category for
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ATD. This distances the audience from preconception of who is likely to get AIDS, and why,
thus forcing them to rethink their homophobic stereotypes and to gain some perspective on the
issue.
4.6.
Structure
The use of episodic and non-linear structures is one of the most significant appropriations
of Brechtian techniques in The Baltimore Waltz. Roberta Sklar applied episodic structure along
with other Brechtian techniques in her famous play Electra Speaks (1980), explaining how
episodic structure can express the sequence of feeling that is not logical:
What interests me about the episodic structure has to do with the expressing the
inner life… at any given moment things are happening sequentially as well as
simultaneously… feeling don’t happen in logical sequence… episodic structure
fits that understanding of reality: that, as every woman knows, life is a constant
three-ring circus rather than some linear tale of adventure (qtd.in Bial 221).
This “understanding of reality” as expressed through episodic structure is what many
feminist playwrights use in their works. Similar to a large number of feminist playwrights who
object to realistic dramaturgy and choose non-linear narrative structures over traditional male
dramatic structure, Vogel also used the episodic form: the play consists of thirty short scenes and
fragmented, surreal and cinematic narrative with the same start and end point (a hospital lounge
in Baltimore, Maryland) to provide a means of capturing the inner life. As one of the hallmarks
of epic theatre (in contrast with dramatic theatre), episodic structure takes the audience of The
Baltimore Waltz into the inner realities of the protagonists’ lives, their dreams and desires and
simultaneously distances and estranges the audience from the events on stage.
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In Brechtian terms, episodic structure “challenges the assumption that one thing
necessarily follows on from another”, and aims to characterize “each scene for itself” as focusing
on an idea or “self-contained part”. Brecht not only adapted the narrator figure of the ancient
epic, but also the structure which was non-linear; this helped him make juxtapositions with the
aim of highlighting “the contradictions and changeability of humankind”, and also to present “an
interrupted, not necessarily linear action-flow, and similarly, therefore, the individual’s
alterability” (Mumford 78). Episodic structure, which consists of short scenes and intentional
juxtapositions to break the audience’s emotional engagement, tends “towards flux and breadth
rather than unity” (78). That is why different types of unity including time, action and place are
avoided “to explore the diverse exploits of multiple characters over a great sweep of time and
place” (78). Compared with the dramatic theatre in terms of structure, in episodic structure,
theatrical elements such as lighting, music and text are relatively independent of one another. Or
in other words, the elements do not strengthen the main idea of the play in a traditional way, but
leave more room for the audiences to analyze and think.
As mentioned earlier, Vogel’s choice of structure in The Baltimore Waltz is very close to
the Brechtian episodic structure. A non-linear narrative with high degree of avoidance of unity of
time and place helps Vogel allocate more space for analysis rather than emotional involvement.
She used short and fragmented scenes, which are dream-like and with no intermission to keep the
consistency of fragmentation of this collage, abruptly shifts the scenes, brings in film and slides
(“the largest hint is dropped when Anna shows slides of their trip to Europe where each frame
exactly looks like Baltimore”). Vogel herself once mentioned that she “stole” the plot of The
Baltimore Waltz form “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce which has a
highly episodic structure as well:
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I though all I have to do is steal the plot form and I knew what plot form I had to
steal. I stole the plot form of the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. You can either call it homage or you can call it
stealing. I think it’s very important to pay homage to the authors who have given
us this abundance so that they are read by young writers, so that they are
continuing the conversation (qtd. in Herren 12).
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”2 is the story of a man just before he is hanged due
to an attempt to demolish the bridge. He has flash backs and imagines what would happen if he
were to spring into the stream and get back to his wife and children. The story goes on to show
him now at home, getting lured into a trap by a soldier who persuades him to sabotage the bridge
(later we find the soldier is a Union scout). When he is hanged, the rope breaks and he plunges
into the river. Trying to swim and knowing that the soldiers are shooting at him, he makes it to
dry land. After miles of walking to get home, he feels a weird transformation in his body and
hears strange voices. He falls asleep and when he wakes up he sees his home, and his wife
standing outside the house. Running forward to her, he abruptly feels a fiery pain in his neck and
everything goes back to the starting point of the story with a flash of white light. At the end, it is
shown that he never could escape at all, and he has in fact been hanged. Vogel’s play, in the
sense of going back to the initial point and having a circular structure, is very close to Ambrose
Bierce’s short story; the point of this is to get the audiences to focus on the course rather than on
the final point. In other words, Vogel deconstructs the traditional male-influenced linear dramatic
structure by creating a play which is “the montage of the scenes that alternate between the
burlesques of The Third Man, travelogues, language lessons, riffs on psychiatric models of grief
and satiric political reference to AIDS, art funding and medical care” (Mansbridge 330).
As Bierce’s most anthologized story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” initially was published in San
Francisco Examiner in 1980 and one year later, in Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. It is known for irregular
time sequence and surreal and fragmented narrative. Robert Enrico made a short film based on the story in 1962.
2
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Although the center stage presents the relationship between Anna and Carl, with the help of a
film-like structure (as one of the defamiliarization techniques) and parodic humor, Vogel inserts
AIDS in the background of the play. On the other hand, by waltzing between reality and fantasy
and by clouding the line between memory and reality, Vogel tries to reach to the point of
deconstructing the ideas of gender and also overturning the myths around hot issues like HIV.
She creates a world in which it is hard to distinguish real from fantastic. Besides, through a filmlike structure, she shows how gender-related issues can be revised as performative acts, as other
so-called-natural and real can be reviewed in the light of fantasy.
But more importantly, non-linear structure is a platform to fantasy which is the most
artistically presented feature of The Baltimore Waltz. The extraordinary fantasy of the play,
which is in sharp contrast with the cold and bitter reality of death, HIV and Anna’s suffering was
best depicted in a non-time-bound sequence of actions.
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4.7.
Fantasy
Figure 3. The Baltimore Waltz‐ Deep Dish Theater (2012)
(Photo Courtesy of Jonathan Young)
As mentioned earlier, during the 1980s, gay and lesbian drama frequently used fantasy in
order to create a theatre different from the heterosexual theatre mainstream, which is rooted in
realism. In order to overturn traditional gender representations, the gay and lesbian theatre
employed fantasy as a tool to construct their identities. Laura discusses the idea that:
While no single definition of fantasy exists among gay and lesbian performance
theorists, their construct of fantasy is most often used to represent homosexuality
out of the mainstream heterosexual culture, free from homophobic stereotypes
and assumptions. For these dramatists, Berthold Brecht’s innovative political
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definition of realism3 has been instrumental in creating an alternative to
conventional realism (12).
Many of the feminist playwrights of the time found Brechtian techniques very useful to
make fantastical scenes to create a theatre free from the stereotypes related to homosexuality.
Vogel wrote The Baltimore Waltz based on a fantasy which not only has the function of breaking
the reality but also helps the play to be a site to stay away from biases around AIDS and
homosexuality. Fantastical elements in this play are reinforced by Brechtian techniques. By
emphasizing the theatrical “what if”, Vogel creates a fantasy trip to Europe which should have
occurred before Carl’s death.
By means of a character like The Third Man from Carol Reed’s film Vogel creates a
distancing quality through the fantastical features of the play. By using The Third Man, Vogel
informs the audience about the practice of pretence and lies (represented in the film by the Black
Market), through presenting AIDS rather than penicillin, and criticizes “the familiar discourse of
the medical community and government bureaucracy” to bring the myths around AIDS into the
light as well as to show how homophobia can influence social attitudes about AIDS. But it is not
only a society suffering from homophobia but also the medical institutions, which are
responsible for the deaths of AIDS patients. Vogel in the play shows “how institutions created to
help people with AIDS watch them die through neglect, greed and politics” (18); and even worse
is that for some of these institutions, AIDS made lots of money The scene from The Third Man
3
New problems loom up and demand new techniques. Reality alters; to represent it the means of representation
must alter too. (Brecht on Theater: A Development of an Aesthetics, 110)
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when Harry4 accepts his participation in penicillin dilution brings out the idea that Vogel intends
to highlight, namely the fault of the government in dealing with the disease:
HARRY LIME: I’ll be straight with you. I can give you the drugs- but it won’t
help. It won’t help at all. Your sister’s better off with that quack Todesrocheln we call him the Yellow Queen of Vienna - she might end up drinking her own
piss but it won’t kill her.
CARL: but I thought you had the drugs.
HARRY LIME: oh, I do and they cost a pretty penny. For a price, I can give
them to you. At a discount for old times. But you have to know, we make them
up in my kitchen.
CARL: Jesus…
HARRY LIME: Why not? People will pay for these things. When they’re
desperate people will eat peach pits for aloe or egg protein - they’ll even drink
their own piss. It gives them hope.
CARL: how can you do this?
HARRY LIME: listen, old man, if you want to be a millionaire, you go into real
estate. If you want to be a billionaire, you sell hope. Nowadays, the only place a
fellow can make a decent career of it is in Mexico and Europe.
CARL: That’s…disgusting! (50)
Thus by creating an episodic structure and arranging the scenes in such a way that the
search for the cure for AIDS juxtaposes with Third Man scenes, Vogel draws our attention
towards how the AIDS crisis became a profitable business for the government and institutions
which instead of finding the cure are selling “hope”.
In sum, we can see that Vogel is distancing the audience from the AIDS discourse, taking
them into a dream-like, whirlwind trip to feel the urge to ask questions such as ‘if we sympathize
with an ATD patient, why we do not have the same feeling for AIDS patients? Is it not just a
4
In This play, The Third Man who takes different roles from the French Garçon to the Doctor has been borrowed
from Orson Welles’ character of Harry Lime who cooperated in the penicillin black market. Harry Lime in Vogel’s
play is depicted as the same criminal who makes homemade (better to say kitchen‐made) drugs for ATD and
declared that they are not going to work.
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matter of gender bias? Is it not our homophobic bias which makes us inactive or even aggressive
towards the AIDS crisis? Therefore, Vogel in this sense draws our attention to gender issues: if
we change a homosexual patient who has been represented as criminal with a heterosexual
woman who got an unheard-of disease from “innocent” children at school, should it make any
difference in the urgency to act and help or at least understand the disease? Therefore, gender
performativity can best be presented in the fantastical world of the characters especially due to
the fact that they believe “in fantasy, gender does not determine one’s actions as it does in
realistic drama, which confirms the assumptions behind gendered roles” (Wagner 26). Hence
using fantasy is one way to show that gender roles are performative.
Reminded by Butler’s theorization on gender identity as a performative entity, gender
acts are just actions, not innate qualities; the repetition of these actions forms our gender. In The
Baltimore Waltz, along with the fact that Vogel intends to show that AIDS is not just a ‘gay’
disease, she manages to represent in the fantastic world of her play that her characters’ actions,
not their inborn qualities, determine their gender. In other words, most of the Brechtian
techniques Vogel uses are to estrange her audience from the so-called real world’s connections
with gender which is perceived as a natural entity.
Another example of Vogel’s attempt to adapt alienation effects to show “the
unnaturalness of gender stereotyping” lies in her use of language. Vogel’s use of language,
especially her use of pronouns, is not consistent and settled. Her characters frequently pace out
of their existing actions, address their audience and by doing so, they succeed in breaking the
illusion of realistic theatre’s fourth wall. As an example, Carl, talking about himself, using “you”
instead of “I” speaks from the stage side:
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Carl: You are not permitted to play with dolls; dolls are for girls. You played with
your sister’s dolls until your parents find out. They gave you a stuffed animal – a
thin line was drawn. Rabbits were an unacceptable surrogate for little boys. You
named him Jo-Jo… (24).
The importance of Carl’s short monologue lies in showing the audience why the rabbit is
so important for him that he self-identifies with it, and reminds us that the play has different
layers of seriousness. Here, Vogel refers back to a long lasting trauma. This unconventional
choice of pronouns helps to show that the linguistic choice of gender is also arbitrary and not
natural, as with gender itself. In other words, because Carl chooses to narrate his childhood
trauma story from a second person point of view instead of directly acting it out, Vogel depicts
that neither gender stereotyping nor forcing boys to have fluffy rabbits instead of flaxen haired
dolls is natural. Moreover, it should be mentioned that what Carl is saying is really what society
has said to him, it reflects the ways in which society tries to construct and control his gender
identity. But by saying ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ Vogel suggests that Carl feels distant from these rules
– so they don’t really work for him.
4.8.
Conclusion
Like many feminist playwrights, in The Baltimore Waltz Paula Vogel benefits from
Brechtian techniques in theatre. Although she herself believes that she diverges from Brecht in
staying an experimentalist as well as a social realist, she is one of the Feminist playwrights who
exploits Brecht’s theories in order to show how theatre can help us to have a social-political
dialogue in society. Vogel in this play deals with highly social and political issues like AIDS and
homosexuality even in a personal memorial play. Vogel’s adaptation of Brechtian techniques is
employed to subvert gender stereotyping especially in this play. She exploits distancing effects
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such as using short and fragmented scenes which are dream-like and with no intermission to
keep the consistency of fragmentation of this collage, abruptly shifting the scenes, using fantasy,
bringing film and slides and giving Anna the role of narrator and bearer the female gaze who
drives the play by her desires and actions.
What is unique in the play is the use of comic effects to estrange the audience from what
they see every day, which Vogel manages by creating comic figures and a fantastical world and
juxtaposing certain scenes. Vogel’s characterization of Anna as a comic figure, free from the
clichéd image of the stereotypical sister who should take care of her brother is formed by the
elements of comedy. Anna’s desire to have several sexual relationships with men from different
cities like Amsterdam, Paris and Hamburg to escape from the reality of her fatal disease is
shocking and awakening. Comic moments of Anna’s making love with different men reveal
Vogel’s attempt to represent men as the object of gaze. Vogel herself describes the use of
comedy as removing any protective covering; this is what she does in The Baltimore Waltz,
uncovering the social taboos like AIDS and subverting the stereotypes around it which are highly
bound with gender issues.
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5. Chapter Five
Conclusion
As discussed in the last four chapters, Paula Vogel adapted Brechtian dramaturgy in order
to demonstrate how gender identities are not fixed, and to practice gender performativity. In And
Baby Makes Seven, she revisions the American nuclear family, overturns the idea of nuclear
family as the only acceptable structure, and creates a ménage a trois which is highly joyful and,
more importantly, functional. Like most of her plays, fantasy is a foothold to show how it is
possible to subvert gender identities. But when it comes to fantasy, the most astonishing of
Vogel’s plays is The Baltimore Waltz: the embodiment of the slogan the “personal is political”.
Vogel focuses on one of the most disturbing political issues of the end of the millennium, AIDS:
her only brother died of AIDS and she creates a play to drag the audience’s attention to the issue
without the initial biases that most of the audiences possess in encountering the issue of AIDS;
she forces the audience to ask the question “what if” a heterosexual primary schoolteacher
instead of a gay is suffering from a deadly disease? As discussed in chapter three of this study,
Vogel successfully managed to employ circular structure as a feminist/Brechtian tool to show
that everything related to the issue is the same and at the same time tremendously subject to
change. I call Desdemona: A Play About Handkerchief Vogel’s most feminist play, not due to
the exclusion of men on the stage but because it gives voice to Shakespeare’s heroines and
allows them to be “the playwright” of their own stories. But their end remains the same as what
the Bard wrote for them: “they are the playwright who attempt to write their way out of difficult
situations and script more creative, bountiful lives” (Chinoy 117). Moreover, interrogating the
concept of the New Woman in a play effectively reassures us that rather than giving solutions,
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resolutions and answers, Vogel’s feminist theatre is to ask questions and extend the boundaries
of our lives as cultural animals.
In order to elaborate on Vogel’s relationship with the canon, David Savran in the
introduction to The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays retells a story about Vogel’s mother which
I found very intriguing as a metaphor to describe Vogel’s strategies in making a transgressive
theatre in response to the canonical texts. Savran writes that:
When Paula was thirteen years old, her mother, recently divorced and with
a reputation for being something of a trouble-maker, complained to the
Board of Health about the trash collection - or lack of I t- in their
apartment complex. The Board investigated and, sure enough, conditions
were unsanitary and the landlord was charged. As might be expected, the
Vogels were promptly delivered an eviction notice, but rather than contest
it, they found another apartment. The night they moved into their new
lodging, however, Phyllis bundled the children into the car and drove back
to their old flat. Once in the empty rooms, Phyllis pulled three
screwdrivers out of her purse and instructed the two children to unscrew
every screw in the apartment. She then drew an imaginary circle on the
living room rug and asked them to place the screws inside the circle.
Without damaging anything, they deftly unscrewed all the lights and
electric sockets, unhinged all the doors, took apart all the kitchen cabinets,
the refrigerator and oven. Every fixture, every appliance in the apartment,
was carefully disassembled and every door, every switchplate, was neatly,
almost loving, lined up against the wall. On the living room rug,
meanwhile, grew a mountain of screws a mountain of screws of every
shape and size. Finally, when everything was dismantled, Phyllis drew a
piece of paper from her purse, wrote “SCREW YOU” on it in bold letters,
and artfully positioned in on the top of the pile (Vogel ix-x).
Savran explains that what Vogel’s mother did is similar to how Vogel reacts to the
prominent texts: energetically “responding to, critiquing it and dismantling someone else’s
work” (Vogel x). All of Vogel’s plays, except for The Baltimore Waltz which is considered a
memorial play, is “an act of retaliation”. She re-visions a text to overcome its assumptions
related to gender, sexual identity, family, domestic violence and love. Like many other
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contemporary feminists, Vogel chooses to adapt and employ the Brechtian distancing effect. Her
rationale lies in her belief that “as cultural animals, we don’t forget because something is hidden.
We forget because something is in our face and we do not see it anymore” (Herrington 242).
Therefore, habit and numbness affect our perceptions in a way to make them not to see the very
important issues anymore. The role of art, as Shklovsky5 the Russian formalist emphasizes, is “to
restore the visibility” and to defamiliarize the commonplace so that we notice it again. Hence,
distancing effects bring the already forgotten issues into a new light.
On the other hand, Vogel as she declares many times is a devoted feminist, who writes
from a political root. David Savran describes Vogel’s feminism as “a complex phenomenon”
which is strongly against the feminist playwrights of 1970:
As these plays suggest, she reacted strongly against the first wave of feminism
theatre that surfaced during the 1970s, the “let’s-celebrate-ourselves-as-women”
brand of feminism that Paula regards not just as simplistic and ahistorical but also
as exclusionary because certain kinds of women (depending on their class or
racial or occupational position) inevitably get left out of the celebration (Vogel
xi).
Therefore, Vogel’s feminist theatre looks not just at how women are suppressed in the
society but how men are also suffering from gender inequality. Though writing in response to
different times, as Virginia Woolf wrote against the ideal woman of the Victorian era believing
that the “angel in the house” should be killed by women in order to liberate them, Vogel writes
against the idea of New Woman revived by 1970 Feminists, trying to show that formulating
“what to do” for women is very simplistic and exclusionary. In comparison, they both break the
patriarchal portrayal of women in their writing to show that how women need to extend their
5
Brecht purloined distancing effects from Shklovsky and Vogel is also very interested in his art theories.
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lives by interrogating the social structures in spite of all the limitations and suppression. She
focuses on the point that “feminism means being politically incorrect” suggesting that there is no
easy answer:
It means avoiding the easy answer - that isn’t really an answer at all - in favor of
posing the question in the right way. It means refusing to construct an exemplary
feminist hero. It means writing speculative rather than polemical plays. It means
turning Desdemona into a whore for real, or constructing two lesbians who use
imaginary boy children as the conduits for their desires, or showing a woman
titillated not just by writing pornography but by using her own children as the
bases for her sexual fantasies (Vogel xii).
But what I found appealing in Vogel’s works is not only their content and subjects but the
way she structures her plays. Believing that form is content, Vogel shows that she is one of the
masters of form among women playwrights of her time whose plays are remembered due to their
strong structures. In addition to being well-written, form in her plays is the mirror of the content
where “new problems loom up and demand new techniques” (qtd.in Seldon 81). In her plays, she
provocatively creates surreal, fragmented and dream-like scenes with fragmented collection of
past genres, which are always privileged from intertextual devices. She believes that by looking
at the past we are able to “historicize our immediate concerns that we don’t want to look at and
therefore actually create empathy, bring us closer” (Savran 1999). Hence using a pastiche-like
form and adding her own voice, Vogel confronts the controversial subject matters by creating a
safe text for her audience as it is safe in the surface dealing with a far historical narrative.
In this thesis, I specifically focused on how Vogel uses structures fit to deal with the
disturbing issues regarding sexuality and gender identities. As mentioned earlier in this study, in
order to deal with perplexing social issues and to show that gender is to be performed and
consequently to be subverted, Vogel avoids using structures related to realism which highly
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dominated the heterosexual theatre. As a lesbian feminist playwright, she uses structures which
can be seen as a foothold for the homosexual theatre, and are sometimes very far from so-called
realism and more close to a pastiche-like fantasy which alienates the audiences and subsequently
presents the possibilities of gender subversion. From the fantasy of a journey to Europe which is
Anna’s wonderland and which vanishes upon her brother’s death, to the fantasy of three
imaginary boys played by two women whose deaths are even more dramatic than the main
narrative, to a whore Desdemona who is everything except “a maid so tender, fair and happy”, as
described by the Bard, Vogel’s aim is to show that there are true possibilities to subvert gender
identities and those who fail to do their assigned gender roles do not deserve a punishment.
One of the most important results of subverting the traditional images and portrayals is
reconstructing the spectatorship and to help the audience to improve their position from passive
consumption to active involvement in the questions posed. As Vogel herself declares, she has a
huge focus on spectators and to make them more active, she creates techniques that alienate the
audience from what is already commonplace and familiar.
Mary Louise Parker, who played the role of Li’l Bit in How I Learned to Drive, in an
interview with Vogel, asked her a question regarding the audiences’ reactions to her plays:
Mary Louise Parker: Do you ever find yourself getting mad at the audience?
Paula Vogel: Yes, that happens a lot. I can’t stand it when they’re not responding
to the actors. When they’re being hard, stubborn. Saturday night audiences who
come in with their dates and go, “Okay, this better be good. Show me. Prove it to
me.” What I like to hear is a breathing back and forth between the actors and the
audience. Have you ever been on stage when an audience got furious at the play
and at you? Isn’t that exhilarating?
MLP: Thrilling, in a way.
PV: Yes! The problem is that audiences have become too polite. I find it very
bracing at times when people boo because they’re upset at the play (Parker 2004).
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Therefore as mentioned previously in this thesis, Vogel tries to disturb the comfort and
comfort the disturbed in order to accelerate social changes through theatre. Although she
declares that making people upset by her plays is not done on purpose and just comes out in her
writing, what she calls herself in connection with the audience is “deliberately provocative, a
provocateur”:
…In essence, I think audience members have to write the play themselves,
we should be arguing as we go into the lobby after the play. One of the
essential things, and it’s a subjective thing, is that I have to feel that when
I’m watching a play that I’m seeing truth telling. And truth telling makes
me uncomfortable. That’s the other thing, the reason there’s such an attack
on theater is that we’re now uncomfortable with truth telling. Instead of
enjoying being uncomfortable - theater could make us enjoy being
uncomfortable, that’s why it’s dangerous (Parker 2004).
And that is what Vogel thinks a playwright should be in order to help the society to
change in different levels. Maybe that is why in response to the question of how change happens,
she directly draws attention to the audiences, because her aim is to create a theatre which moves
the audience towards social change.
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