Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage by Ryan Claycomb (review)

Ryan Claycomb’s Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage draws together two approaches to staging feminist histories: autobiography (which he defines as a “first-person autodiegetic narrative of one’s own life experiences”) and biography (“the narration of another’s life experiences”). Noting that both have constituted a rich fount of source material from which feminist theatre artists have drawn, he crafts a study that explores how and why feminist performers and writers in the late twentieth century so frequently took the material of real life as their subject (16). He finds a partial answer in Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, observing that “feminist theater artists are frequently performing real life precisely to reveal real life as performative” (2; emphasis in original).

Aptly, Claycomb threads his own autobiography into the book’s preface. In a gentle defense of his position as a man writing about women who write about women’s lives, he describes a formative experience when, between 1995 and 2001, he worked with Washington, D.C.’s The Theatre Conspiracy (TTC), serving as the literary manager for its Emerging Women Playwrights series. There, he first encountered a handful of the plays that he chooses to examine in the book, including Timberlake Werten-baker’s New Anatomies (1981) and Lynn Kaufman’s Shooting Simone (1993).

In the introduction, Claycomb acknowledges two influential edited volumes that have already mapped out part of the terrain his book covers: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002) and Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman’s Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (2006). He also weaves together a theoretical framework that draws from an expected set of scholars: Jill Dolan, Della Pollock, Hayden White, and, of course, Butler. With their aid, Claycomb attempts to unpack how feminist writers and performers take the auto/biographical material of real life as their subject in order to “complicat[e] the structures of narrative, identity, body, voice, history, and community that define [a woman’s] very presence onstage” (2). He is only partially correct, however, when he notes that “despite a long tradition of historical life narratives told on the stage, little theory of staged life writing exists that attempts to recognize these paradigms precisely because ‘truth’ is held to be especially undermined by the artifice implicit in performance” (4). One wishes that Claycomb had built on the body of writing, including Freddie Rokem’s Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (2002), that has already explicitly taken up the slippery problem of theatricalizing history, albeit not from the feminist standpoint he assumes.

Part 1, titled “Autobiography: The Body and Self in Performance,” is a useful synthesis of the thinking of Marvin Carlson, Charlotte Canning, David Román, and Linda Kauffman (among others) on the role of autobiography in the solo performances of familiar figures, from Karen Finley to Annie Sprinkle. In chapter 3, “The Autobiographical Play and the Death of the Playwright: Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis,” Claycomb takes an interesting detour, considering Kane’s play as a text that oscillates between autobiographical confession, often conceived as the province of solo performance, and the fictive veil of dramatic composition. Throughout this chapter, Claycomb challenges the reader to confront her own resistances to autobiographical analyses of plays like 4:48 Psychosis (or Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive) as a “critical reflex … deeply conflicted, conditioned by equal parts poststructuralist theories of authorship and a broader cultural squeamishness about representing women’s rage” (92).

Part 2, “Biography: Staging Women’s Lives,” is more groundbreaking than the first part, as it enters into the important (though understudied) arena of women writing biographical plays. Here, Claycomb notes, quite rightly, that “plays about real women proliferate, almost as common to feminist playwrights as autobiography has been for feminist performance artists. And yet little critical attention has been paid to the...