Editorial Comment: Neoliberal and Other Scandals

Editorial introductions to general issues always seem to me a bit like those creative writing exercises in which students are given a list of disparate items and asked to make a coherent story out of them. Many of the items involved in the current exercise, of course, are very serious, and I have no wish to trivialize them. The list includes: the inner parlors of seventeenth-century Venetian convents and the gates of hell (no problem linking them); the rights and rules of standup comedy (one could probably fit those in as well); a musical and a video game about Japanese American internment (offering both more difficulty and more seriousness); horizontalist performance in reconstruction Buenos Aires; and, perhaps most shockingly, the bodies of suicidal workers caught in nets at the Foxconn electronic factories in China.

But the issue opens promisingly with “This is a story . . .,” and perhaps what holds the story of this issue together is scandal. The story that Shannon Steen introduces at the outset of the issue, “Neoliberal Scandals: Foxconn, Mike Daisey, and the Turn Toward Nonfiction Drama,” indeed tells disturbingly of two scandals, one involving the 2010 worker suicides at Foxconn (supplier to Apple and other electronics giants) and the other the fabrication of facts related to the working conditions that caused those suicides by Mike Daisey in his “nonfiction” play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, together with Daisey’s forced performance of confession on Ira Glass’s television show, This American Life. Steen’s goal is to demonstrate the ways in which these two performative scandals are linked to, and illuminate, contemporary neoliberal systems of governmentality.

What her essay proceeds to offer is an acute exploration of what she calls “four distinct modes of neoliberalism’s theatrical life”: its use of the performative as a mode of seduction, as exemplified by Apple’s “think different” advertising campaign (“Act innovatively! Act independently”); new and extreme forms of protest required by its emergence (“suicide as protest performance”); the role of scandal in shoring up its domain of expression (“the disruption of truth and fiction”); and “its surprising manifestation in nonfiction theatrical forms created with the goal of its critical evaluation.” What she convincingly argues is that “[p]erformance . . . does not merely exist alongside neoliberalism, but it forms a core repertoire through which neoliberalism is activated and moves from ideological project to material reality.”

Christine Scippa Bhasin’s “Prostitutes, Nuns, Actresses: Breaking the Convent Wall in Seventeenth-Century Venice” deals with different sorts of scandal in a different time period altogether. Bhasin writes about the scandalous and technically banned public, often secular performances by prostitutes-turned-nuns in Republican Venice. The actors in these performances had been equally scandalously abandoned by their consorts and confined, along with the “excess daughters” of aristocratic families, to nunneries, which included the “Convertite,” an Augustinian monastery founded in 1530 where “repentant prostitutes” took mandatory vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As Bhasin notes, her story complicates “received notions of the actress-as-prostitute through the historical reality of prostitutes turned nuns-as-actresses.” The nuns played roles ranging from virgin martyrs to “fallen women” in plays written by the major (male) playwrights of the day, they cross-dressed (at a time when their professional counterpoints could not), and they performed before both men and women, including upper-class patrons and foreign visitors who were seasoned theatregoers. They themselves occasionally “escaped the cloister” to attend the professional theatre elsewhere, and they hosted professional performers in their own parlors.

Bhasin’s essay tracks some of these activities, but it also provides, for the first time, evidence of some of the plays performed by these nuns: sacred plays, comedies, tragedies, morality plays, and musicals by the likes of Luigi Grotto, Francesco Coli, Fabio Glissenti, and Giacinto Andrea Cicognini that often reflected, sometimes ironically, on the prostitutes-turned-nuns’ own positions and lives. Bhasin also argues convincingly for the use of the convents’ inner parlors as performance spaces, with spectators gazing at them from the outer parlors through their grated windows (recalling both the typical theatrical staging of the plays of Plautus and...