Peeling Away the Tropes of Visibility: Lesbian Sexuality and Materialist Performance Practice

Peeling Away the Tropes of Visibility: Lesbian Sexuality and Materialist Performance Practice Jill Dolan This is an essay about sexuality and visibility, about theatre and location, about performance and community. The trajectory I want to chart starts in a production experience I had last Spring, and also originates in a recent realization that the desire I've written so much about in my scholarship had somehow become a figure of speech. The first stirrings of my own desire were felt for actresses, whom I revered at my local theatre classes as a girl. Watching these women perform, I felt a charged exchange of presence—or mutual presentness—that necessitated I be there to witness their visibility, to hear their words, to protect, in some chivalrous, latently butch way, their vulnerable live-ness. This painful, pleasurable, and mostly unarticulated desire came to be replaced over the years in my writing about theatre by a passionate theorizing that fed me instead. The charge of those old seductions flickered now and then, but sitting with my critic's pen in hand, the desire that once unsettled my body, mediated by cultural mores and family taboos, was now mediated by desire: the trope, and didn't feel quite the same. I was caught, differently, in the excisions of deconstruction. Then, last Spring, I simply started doing theatre again and, to my surprise, have found myself caught by the possibilities of a reconstructive moment. My work as co-director, with my UW-Madison friend and colleague Phillip Zarrilli, on a postmodern, revisionist, gender-bent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, rekindled a history of identifications (to borrow Elin Diamond's evocative term) with myself, of falling in love with women across the stage space. Working with Phillip, and assistant directors Stacy Wolf and Michael Peterson, and a cast of twenty students, and four designers, to fashion those moments of presentness multiply exchanged between actors and actors, actors and spectators , and spectators and spectators, I remembered that desire has a body. This essay is meant to evoke for readers what became for me an epiphanic experience, one in which theory and practice really did meld in production. I 41 42 Jill Dolan learned things from Midsummer about the stakes involved in performing lesbian theories. The production and its process taught me to revalue the power of theatre to engage local communities; taught me to respect the imagination and courage of actors willing to embody their own social constructedness, to deconstruct it, and reconstruct something else; and moved me to remember that these moments of strangers and friends, actors and spectators, crew and ushers sharing a vision in the crucible of theatre really do resonate outside the institution's walls. In his book JVo Respect, Andrew Ross suggests that live entertainment can't be considered through mass culture frameworks, because its movement through cultural distribution networks is of necessity limited. But I think theatre can exploit its lack of a mass audience, its specific localities, its communities, to recuperate the too often derogatory term "community theatre" and escape the constraints of a perhaps more elitist avant-garde. There's something in theatre's presentation of the live, palpable, endangered body onstage, viewed by live, palpable, equally endangered audiences, that retains a certain power. I had taught Midsummer for several years in a class called "Theatre and Society," which allowed me to engage Shakespeare's comedy with feminist theories of homosocial exchange. In addition to reading the text as ripe for the deconstruction of its gendered orderings, complicated as it is by its own history as a cross-cast production, I found the text already self-reflexive about its status as representation. The mechanicals' rehearsals for their performance before the court are very wry and pragmatic about how representation produces itself, about the creation of the real as false and the false as real. The text's theatrical metaphors extend into its insistent heterosexual couplings to suggest that the principal characters' shifting desires and allegiances, their state-ordered or drug-induced dalliances, can also be read as performative. If these sexual relationships are performances as crude as the mechanicals' before the court, the genders and desires that...