Abstract
In Naomi Wallace’s play In the Heart of America (1994), set during the Gulf War (1990–91), the character Remzi poses this question to Craver, his fellow soldier and soon-to-be lover: “Let’s say I’m lying over there, dead as can be, and then you see it’s me, from a distance. But you still have to walk over to my body to check it out. So, how would you walk?” In this scene, the first scene in the play between the two men, Remzi is asking Craver to define their relationship. He is also asking Craver to travel the distance between them, a distance delineated by race and class—Remzi is Palestinian-American and Craver is self-described “White Trash” from Kentucky. It is a distance, furthermore, created by the military ban on same-sex relationships then in effect. In what follows, the two men improvise, revise, and negotiate the most appropriate physical representation of their relationship.
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Notes
- 1.
Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America, in In the Heart of America and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 88.
- 2.
In 1990–91, the US military still officially banned gay men and lesbians from service. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the controversial policy that allowed homosexual people to serve in the military, but only if they kept their sexuality a secret, went into effect on October 1, 1993.
- 3.
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 44.
- 4.
Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essay on Theater and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 74.
- 5.
Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 47.
- 6.
“Rehearsal,” OED Online, accessed Aug. 14, 2010.
- 7.
The Oxford English Dictionary Online lists as its first definition of performance, “The accomplishment or carrying out of something commanded or undertaken; the doing of an action or operation” (“Performance”). This use of the word dates from at least 1487. The idea of performance as an instance of presenting a work of art dates from somewhat later, around 1611, and clearly draws on the earlier definition’s emphasis on “doing”: “The action of performing a play, piece of music, ceremony, etc.; execution, interpretation” (“Performance”). The idea of performance as involving falsehood, acting, or deception creeps into later definitions, dating from at least the late seventeenth century and leading up to the nineteenth-century usage of “performance” to indicate such occurrences as “a fuss, a scene,” and thus a specifically theatrical (and, by extension, false) scenario (“Performance”). The emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of the discipline of performance studies shifted the discussion from the more historically recent idea of performance as a falsification or exaggeration of reality back to the earlier definition of performance as a doing. This does not mean that questions about artificiality or theatricality disappear; the questions, however, become different. Performance studies allows us to consider that everything we say and do can be construed as a performance of sorts, which deeply troubles notions of surface and interior, origin and copy, real and artificial.
- 8.
Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 104.
- 9.
Schechner, Between, 48.
- 10.
Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 42.
- 11.
Mary Overlie, “The Six Viewpoints,” in Training the American Actor, ed. Arthur Bartow (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 209.
- 12.
Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, 100–101.
- 13.
“The Method” is the name given to the system of Stanislavski-inspired actor training developed by members of the Group Theatre, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, and is perhaps most specifically associated with Strasberg. While there are significant differences between these three approaches to acting, they share as their central tenet the aesthetic ideal of “truth on stage.” See Rosemary Malague, An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
- 14.
Elizabeth Hapgood omits the Pushkin reference in her translation of Stanislavski.
- 15.
Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work: A Student Diary, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 53.
- 16.
Some argue that a Stanislavski-based process of building a character does not involve empathy, because the character does not exist as a distinct “other” with whom one can empathize. This, for instance, is the position taken by John Wesley Hill in a correspondence with Rhonda Blair, published in TDR. My position on this is more in line with Blair, who takes the position that the “self” is no more a stable construction than the character; rather, “self [is] a process or an ever-adjusting, fluid, ‘mental’ construction,” and thus that actor and character can neither be thought of as “one” or as “separate” in simple, binary ways (10). See John Wesley Hill and Rhonda Blair, “Stanislavski and Cognitive Science,” TDR: The Drama Review 54.3 (Fall 2010): 9–11.
- 17.
Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 280.
- 18.
In Stanislavsky in Focus, Sharon Marie Carnicke argues that “living” or “living in” a character is a mistranslation of the Russian word perezhivanie, which would be better translated as “experiencing.” She offers a nuanced analysis of Stanislavski’s multifaceted use of this term, concluding that, ultimately, a revisiting of this term will dismantle our notion of what “truth” means in Stanislavski-based acting and “unequivocally break[] the assumed but inaccurate link between the multivalent training System and the aesthetic of Psychological Realism” (147). Because the notion of “living in” a role has long held sway in the USA, however, it is still relevant to the discussion at hand. Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century. 2nd edition. (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
- 19.
Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), 122.
- 20.
Malague, An Actress Prepares, 13.
- 21.
See Rhonda Blair, “Reconsidering Stanislavski: Feeling, Feminism, and the Actor,” Theatre Topics 12.2 (2002): 177–190, as well as her book The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Routledge, 2008). See Malague, An Actress Prepares, 189.
- 22.
Reevaluations of the two artists’ relationship have abounded in the past 15 years. See, for example, Jean Benedetti, “Brecht, Stanislavski, and the Art of Acting,” Brecht Then and Now/Damals und Heute, Brecht Yearbook 20, ed. John Willet, The International Brecht Society (1995): 101–111; Michael Morley, “Brecht and Stanislavski: Polarities or Proximities?,” I’m Still Here/Ich bin noch da, The Brecht Yearbook 22, The International Brecht Society (1997): 195–203; Duane Krause, “An Epic System,” Acting (Re)considered: Theories and Practices, ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): 262–274.
- 23.
Anna Deavere Smith, Introduction to Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), xxvii.
- 24.
Ibid., xxvi.
- 25.
Ibid., 142.
- 26.
Ibid., 141.
- 27.
Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 2nd edition, trans. Adrian Jackson (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 16.
- 28.
Amy Steiger, “Re-membering Our Selves: Acting, Critical Pedagogy, and the Plays of Naomi Wallace,” Theatre Topics 21.1 (March 2011), 21.
- 29.
I saw Things of Dry Hours at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009 and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, produced by the Eclipse Theatre Company, in Chicago in August of 2011.
- 30.
Wallace, Heart, 111.
- 31.
The name William Calley suggests that Lue Ming was killed in the infamous My Lai massacre. William Laws Calley, Jr. was the commander of the US Army Division charged with the murder of civilians in My Lai on March 16, 1968 (numbers vary, but the total number of those killed may be as high as 400). Of the few soldiers charged, Calley was the only one convicted. His initial life sentence was widely protested by many who felt he was a scapegoat, or that his actions had been justified. Nixon responded to public pressure, commuting his sentence to house arrest. Calley’s sentence was reduced multiple times, until he was ultimately released on parole in 1974.
- 32.
Wallace, Heart, 128.
- 33.
Ibid., 91.
- 34.
Ibid., 93.
- 35.
This is true, at least, of what Brecht characterized as “social” gestus. See Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 86, 104, and 198.
- 36.
Wallace quoted in Greene, 466.
- 37.
Wallace, Heart, 90, 91.
- 38.
While my primary focus in this chapter is on the gestus created by Remzi and Craver, because it most closely resembles the work of actors in rehearsal, it is important to note that the women in the play are not reduced to gestic representations of victimhood. Both Lue Ming and Fairouz undertake quests for retribution and justice, a fact that Emily Rollie explores in her astute analysis of this play, which I had the good fortune to hear at the 2011 Women in Theatre Preconference in Chicago, IL.
- 39.
Wallace, Heart, 88.
- 40.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989), 1. Smith also alludes to empathy as a kind of bridging between self and character. See Smith, “Introduction,” xxix.
- 41.
Ibid., 90. Remzi’s scenario begs the question of whether or not Craver is only able to entertain the possibility of their friendship under the condition of Remzi’s death, his absence. Even if this is so, that imagined future paves the way for friendship and love in the present.
- 42.
Ibid., 87.
- 43.
Wallace, Heart, 88.
- 44.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 197.
- 45.
Wallace, Heart, 90.
- 46.
Ibid., 88.
- 47.
Ibid., 89.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid., 90.
- 50.
Wallace, Heart, 88.
- 51.
Ibid., 89.
- 52.
Sommer actually argues that readers intent on empathizing with the minority subject perceive that subject as passive and accessible, when, in her analysis, minority writers might actively work to refuse this easy intimacy, targeting “those who would read in the presumptuous register of ‘If I were a…,’ and forget how positionality affects knowledge” (9).
- 53.
Augusto Boal, The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, trans. Adrian Jackson (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 42.
- 54.
Ibid., 27.
- 55.
Poland, 90.
- 56.
Katz, 25.
- 57.
Diamond, 53.
- 58.
Dolan, 5. See also Shannon Baley, “Death and Desire, Apocalypse and Utopia: Feminist Gestus and the Utopian Performative in the Plays of Naomi Wallace,” Modern Drama 47.2 (Summer 2004): 237–249.
- 59.
Wallace, Heart, 89.
- 60.
See, for example, Boal’s discussion of the difference between suggesting and performing in Forum Theatre in Theatre of the Oppressed, 139.
- 61.
I am alluding, here, to Derrida’s work in The Politics of Friendship (1994), in which he suggests that the call to friendship both anticipates and recalls the friend who can hear and respond to this call—what Derrida refers to as the “future anteriority” of friendship (249). In responding to the call to friendship we are already caught up in the responsibilities of friendship, having accepted our interpellation as potential friends. Derrida associates the responsibility of friendship to respect and to the distance required for both: “[R]espect and responsibility, which come together and provoke each other relentlessly, seem to refer, in the case of the former, to languages of the Latin family, to distance, to space, to the gaze; and in the case of the latter, to time, to the voice and to listening. There is no respect, as its name connotes, without the vision and distance of spacing. No responsibility without response, without what speaking and hearing invisibly say to the ear, and which takes time” (252). Derrida’s account of the response to the call to friendship informs my reading of Craver’s response as the first step toward friendship. Derrida’s work, of course, is part of a larger body of contemporary scholarship on friendship drawing on both ancient and early modern writers like Cicero and Montaigne, a great deal of which focuses on the imbricated nature of male same-sex desire and friendship, as well as the relationship of friendship to death and mourning—both of which are relevant to the present case study. For more of this subject, see a special issue on friendship from GLQ edited by Jody Greene (issue 10.3 (2004)), as well as Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (London and New York: Verso, 1997) and The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
- 62.
Wallace, Heart, 118.
- 63.
Ibid., 99.
- 64.
Ibid., 95.
- 65.
Wallace quoted in John Istel, “In the Heart of America: Forging Links,” American Theatre 12.3 (1995), 25.
- 66.
Wallace, Heart, 113.
- 67.
Wallace, Heart, 134.
- 68.
Wallace quoted in Istel, 25. Butler’s theories on the relationship between vulnerability and sociality can be found in numerous texts, including Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), and “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” Differences in Common: Gender, Vulnerability and Community ed. Joana Sabadell-Nieto and Marta Segarra (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014).
- 69.
Wallace, Heart, 93.
- 70.
Ibid., 87. Scenarios, of course, refer to Diana Taylor’s work. See Chap. 3.
- 71.
Ibid., 119.
- 72.
Ibid., 130.
- 73.
Diamond, 97.
- 74.
Wallace, Heart, 136.
- 75.
Butler, Undoing Gender, 35.
- 76.
Wallace, quoted in an interview in Alexis Greene, Women Who Write Plays: Interviews with American Dramatists (Hanover: Smith and Kraus, 2001), 471.
- 77.
We continue to get closer. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2010, ending the ban on service by gay men and lesbians. There are still rules that bar transgender people from serving, and violence against all non-normative, non-conforming, and minority persons has certainly not ended.
- 78.
Wallace, Heart, 135.
- 79.
Wallace, Heart, 96.
- 80.
Ibid., 139.
- 81.
Wallace quoted in Greene, 464.
- 82.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 137.
- 83.
Wallace quoted in Greene, 463.
- 84.
Wallace, Heart, 138.
- 85.
Scott T. Cummings, “Introduction: The Discourse of the Body,” in The Theatre of Naomi Wallace: Embodied Dialogues, eds. Scott T. Cummings and Erica Steven Abbitt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15.
- 86.
Wallace, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek in In the Heart of America and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 281.
- 87.
Ibid., 327.
- 88.
Erica Stevens Abbitt, review of The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Theatre Journal 54.3 (2008): 148.
- 89.
Wallace, Trestle, 153–154.
- 90.
Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 116.
- 91.
Wallace, Trestle, 293.
- 92.
Ibid., 317.
- 93.
Ibid., 301.
- 94.
Ibid.
- 95.
Drawing on trauma theory, one might read Pace’s repetitions as attempts to access repressed aspects of Brett’s death. This interpretation would suggest that Pace has not cognitively processed the event yet. While there is value to this line of inquiry, it strikes me as significant that Pace does remember Brett’s death, and speaks about it to Dalton in detail. She does not repeat compulsively, but rather consciously and deliberately, attempting to break the cycle that brought Brett to his end, although she does so by confining herself to the very scenario that brought about his death. What we can draw from trauma theory is a sense that Pace’s actions are an attempt to “work through” her memory of Brett, as Dominick LaCapra might say. See, for example, Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1998).
- 96.
Wallace, Trestle, 303.
- 97.
In this respect, Pace and Dalton’s rehearsals have the quality of children’s play. Educational psychologists argue that play is important not only because it develops creativity, but also because it is a means for children to experience and negotiate control, as well as the limits of that control. A report from the American Academy of Pediatrics explains, “Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears… Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, and to learn self-advocacy skills” (Ginsberg et al. 183). Thus, while play on the one hand increases a sense of mastery, when it involves others it also teaches us that our mastery is not complete. See Ginsberg, Kenneth R., The Committee on Communications, and the Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, “The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” American Academy of Pediatrics, Pediatrics (2007), 182–191. pediatrics.aapublications.org, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2006-2697, accessed February 16, 2015.
- 98.
Wallace, Trestle, 311.
- 99.
Ibid., 305.
- 100.
Ibid., 289.
- 101.
Ibid., 309.
- 102.
Ibid., 327.
- 103.
Sean Carney, Brecht and Critical Theory: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 27.
- 104.
Wallace, Trestle, 310.
- 105.
Ibid., 327.
- 106.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 26.
- 107.
Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willet (London: Methuen, 1965), 24.
- 108.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 71.
- 109.
Ibid., 187.
- 110.
Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 52.
- 111.
Wallace, Trestle, 323.
- 112.
Ibid., 337.
- 113.
Gwendolyn N. Hale, “Absence in Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Spring 2007): 156.
- 114.
Wallace, Trestle, 310.
- 115.
Ibid., 341.
- 116.
Ibid., 342.
- 117.
Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 106.
- 118.
Butler, Undoing Gender, 22.
- 119.
Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67.
- 120.
Wallace, Heart, 134.
- 121.
Wallace, Trestle, 287.
- 122.
Butler, Undoing Gender, 36.
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Cummings, L.B. (2016). Rehearsals: Naomi Wallace and the Labor of Empathy. In: Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9_4
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