Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

Preface

preface In the spring of 1998, performance artist Karen Finley stood on the steps of the Supreme Court after arguments for National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley et al. and told the world that Senator Jesse Helms had been sexually harassing her through his political attacks on her and other artists— Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck—now known as the NEA Four. After being denied government funding from the NEA in 1990 based on “general standards of decency,” the four autobiographical performance artists filed suit on First Amendment grounds, winning damages in 1993 in the amounts of their proposed grants. The case generated a great deal of publicity on both sides, with conservative politicians like Helms taking the offensive, while arts and free-speech advocates rallied behind the performers . The NEA (under the Clinton administration) appealed the lower courts’ verdicts, and the case went to the Supreme Court in 1998. When the verdict in that now infamous case came down against the artists that summer, Finley interrupted her autobiographical show Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman to hold a press conference, a blurring of the lines of life writing and life, of making history and of history making. Finley’s coplaintiff in the case, Holly Hughes, would go on to perform her account of the trial two years later in her show Preaching to the Perverted. In that moment, feminist and queer performance stood at the center of the spotlight in the national conversation on art, in large part because of the very political work that these performers were undertaking in their performances . These artists performed narratives of their own lives largely to open up a conversation about the language that constituted constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality; the cultural nerve that their performances hit tells us just how important that political work was, and it indicates in clear terms the significance of the autobiographical narrative strategies that structured this art. The 1990s saw the culmination of a practice of staged feminist life writing—women’s theatrical performances of real lives—that began with the growth of feminist theater and performance art during the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and reached its peak during the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. I was fortunate enough to find myself situated within a particular nexus of creativity and power, one where I could witness, and in small ways contribute to, this practice. In the summer of 1998, Jennifer Ambrosino, producing director for The Theatre Conspiracy (TTC)—a Washington, D.C., feminist theater company for which I served as literary manager—joked that she was tired of directing plays about real people, that she wanted a little fiction in her life. And no wonder . She was at that point directing a staged reading of Allison Pruitt’s The Trial of Susan B. Anthony for the Source Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., had just finished with TTC’s run of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies (a life of fin de siècle iconoclast Isabelle Eberhardt), and had helmed Lynn Kaufman’s Shooting Simone (about Simone de Beauvoir) the season before. And I had experienced the same phenomenon. As coordinator for TTC’s Emerging Women Playwrights Series that summer, I read more than fifty scripts from around the country, and of these, at least fifteen were biographically oriented. One of them, Jamie Pachino’s Theodora: An Unauthorized Biography, became a featured reading for the series. In addition to the four feminist biography plays that either Ambrosino or I helped produce, the Washington area hosted Studio Theatre’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, the Source Festival’s Soulmates: The Passion of Petra Kelly, by Nancie Carraway, and Horizons Theater’s partially improvised In Good Company, which featured several historically prominent women, all produced within a short span in the late 1990s. The Theatre Conspiracy was a small company of theater artists, many of whom were friends of mine from my undergraduate days. The first iteration of the company was articulated as a “Generation X” project and was driven by queer male artists who were riding a boom in queer theater inspired by the activist prominence of ACT UP, Queer Nation, and Queer Campus, and of theatrical successes like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America . When the core members of that company began to go their separate ways, a small group of women who had been peripherally associated with it seized the opportunity to refocus the...