Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

4. Staging Women's Lives, Staging Feminist Performances

chapter 4 : Staging Women’s Lives, Staging Feminist Performances In the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol, a visitor can stroll along a parade of great men, admiring the busts, standing figures, and horsed figures carved in Italian marble and other polished chunks of stone. The parade marches on in traditional style until it reaches the suffragists , a memorial to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Immediately the visitor notices the stylistic and ideological incongruities of the suffragist memorial amid the phalanx of polished soldiers that surrounds it: Mott, Stanton, and Anthony are incompletely carved, their bodies rising from a partially formed, seven-ton slab of marble ; rising behind them, taller than the three, is an unformed figure, the beginnings of a fourth feminist yet to be realized. I was introduced to the statue, a gift of the National Woman’s Party, by a friend of mine, herself introduced to it by a friend who insists that every young feminist she knows take a photo in front of the statue as an image of her potential to become that as yet unformed fourth figure. In a sense, this sculpture is an excellent metaphor for the biographical plays examined in this chapter, as well as the larger tradition of feminist life writing that has flourished over the last thirty years. Like these plays, the memorial is working to represent a life through a feminist framework. That is, feminists staging biographical plays face much the same parade of great men (Shakespeare’s histories come to mind) as did Adelaide Johnson, the sculptor of this piece. Like the sculptor, feminist playwrights find the gendered tradition of biography (constructing a life into art) problematic in its ideology and insufficient in its capacity to adequately recover feminist lives without compromising their feminist politics .1 Instead, in order to claim their places in the footlights of history, feminists must find a new way to represent their own. And they have: just as 117 these suffragists are incompletely carved and overtly sculptural, many staged feminist biographies show the process of representing a life while they present the life itself; they show their subjects in communities and not as discrete entities; and they do so in a way that makes the lives of the past templates for the lives of the present and the future, all notions I’ll discuss in this chapter. Like the memorial, staged feminist biographies respond to the imperative to place women in the pantheon of history, but in a very specific fashion. These plays as a group seek to avoid the gendered trappings of the biographical tradition by contextualizing and calling attention to the construction of their narratives and the performativity of the lives they narrate, and in doing so, they project the significance of their biographical subjects’ lived performances into the present and the as yet unformed future. There are also, however, significant differences between the sculpture in the Capitol Building and the feminist biographies that populate today’s stage. One is simply quantity. As I noted in the introduction to this study, 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 form, despite an interest in biographical work within theater historiography itself.2 The narrow critical attention paid to this emergent category, which brings the same project to the stage that feminist theater historiographers have undertaken in their work, seems singularly odd given the explosion of texts and performances available to examine. It is precisely my project here to pay that attention , to examine feminist biographical drama as a category that speaks not only to feminist playwrights’ stagings of subjectivity but also to their negotiations with history. Nonetheless, Adelaide Johnson’s sculptural feminist biography gives us an important analogy: in offering us that fourth unformed figure, she emphasizes not what Stanton, Mott, or Anthony were but rather what they did. In a more traditional biographical model, the artist might seek to recover and reclaim from history’s oblivion a personage and the identity she staked out for herself; Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony might themselves be held up as role models. While this is certainly a feminist project—indeed, one that defined much second-wave feminist scholarship—it follows certain objective and objectifying conventions of the traditional male biography, which hold up the “great man” as an unattainable ideal. Yet while...