With(holding) the Knife: Representing the Unrepresentable (Wo)man in Anna

With(holding) the Knife: Representing the Unrepresentable (Wo)man in Anna ROSALIND KERR When the Toronto-based feminist Company of Sirens approached me in December t 994 to act as dramaturge for Anna, I found myself confronted with a script which problematizes many of the traditional stage codes surrounding the representation of gender. This article is an attempt to encapsulate some of the key moments in the dramaturging-workshopping process with which I as both an academic and a theatre practitioner continue to grapple in trying to bring Anna, a new play written by April Hubert, to performance.' Anna recites/resites scenes from the life of Anna, a young woman in her twenties, who was raped and murdered in a Toronto park exactly a year earlier . The intricately layered, often macabrely funny dialogue which weaves together a multitude of stories about Anna works to bring her memory back to life with a poignancy that is greatly enhanced by its fragmented presentation. For audience members, forced to listen to the multiple and disjointed versions of Anna's story which her distraught survivors keep remembering and reremembering , the point is driven home that we too must share in reconstructing her story so that her life can be given some value' At the same time, the stories also attempt to devictimize her by disrupting and altering the endings of therape narratives which have been built up around her death.3 In brief, the two male characters, Anna's brother "Michael," and her husband "Ray," come to the park on the eve of the anniversary of her death to reenact the last hours of her life by putting themselves (actually) in her shoes, in the hopes of coming to some understanding as to why she was unable to protect herself from the sexual assault which ended with her savage murder. Armed with the knives that were used against her, they intend to rewrite her story by changing its outcome - if only in retrospect. Superficially, Anna could be classified as a fantasy text which mimes the canonized tragic revenge plot where menfolk undertake the "noble" task of avenging their female relative 's rape. The creation of such sensitive, caring male characters, distraught Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 566 With(holding) the Knife with grief, working against'cultural stereotype of the male who remains strong and silent in the face of death, provides the play with its strong dramatic punch - the shattering of the glamour of sexual violence. In writing this to remind us of This is for you, Anna,' Hubert has stated that she had a clear political agenda in mind - an(other) interrogation at the site of the inscription which continues to condone violence against women. In her efforts to make Anna a serious social commentary which deliberately blurs the boundaries between (forgettable) private tragedy and (unassumed) public responsibility, Hubert disrupts generic expectations and erases recognizable markers which usually delineate character traits and plot motivations. I shall outline some of the pertinent issues involving gender representations which April (and I) discovered during the script-polishing process, and then expand outward to consider some of the as-yet-unsolved problems which creating characters with opaque or non-existent gendered referents has resulted in at the performance levelS The use of male characters is probably the first issue to consider, since such a choice confirms the fact that women seldom get to speak on their own behalf. Hubert was highly conscious that in creating male characters she was contributing to this devoicing. but her ultimate solution was to insist that the parts be played by female actors. What she had discovered when she first attempted to write the play for female characters as lovers or relatives of Anna was that they became tainted with Anna's victimization. The ironizing humour needed to distance the audience from the material could not be spoken convincingly by any female characters that she could imagine. In her experience , as I understand it, the discourses of rape seemed to belong to male voices. In general, overwriting negative representations of "aggressive" females as demonized "others" or doubly "false-men,,6 proved to be very difficult . Despite the rise of feminist theatre, female characters...