Bloody Aprons: Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation

Abstract

On Wednesday, 19 March 2003, I saw Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York City. With the image of Hester Smith’s bloody apron still in mind, I hailed a taxi for Penn Station. My Lebanese cab driver had his radio on and we both grunted in disgust at the breaking news that George W. Bush, President of the United States, had ordered the bombing of Iraq in arrogant disavowal of months of mass protests around the world. The link between Parks’ play about maternal suffering and revenge, poverty and political violence in a nameless, postcolonial backwater and my feminist optic on Bush’s policy of blood and global disaster was, at the very least, complexly mimetic. Bush disguised violent aggression with patriotic cant and hid from public view the political complexities, economic costs and, as it would develop, the bloodied remains of his war’s victims. Feminist theatre at its best works against such mystifications, exposing social contradictions in order to interrupt critically and subtly the seeming inevitability of acts like the Iraq war (which Bush justified with the never substantiated claim that Iraq’s government was behind the ‘terror attacks’ on New York City and Washington on 9/11). Unlike Bush’s revenge rhetoric, the stage blood in Parks’ Red Letter Plays (Fucking A, 2000 and In the Blood, 1999) and in Deborah Warner’s production of Medea (opening in Dublin in 2000 and New York in 2002) proved to be complexly referential: it signified the irrational causality of the revenge play, but worked dialect-ically against type, as though the act of infanticide undertaken by women who are mothers had to be understood both as a terrible consequence of converging acts and as a component in the real business of killing — as though events on stage were detachable to other sites and times.