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chapter 3 : The Autobiographical Play and the Death of the Playwright sarah kane’s 4.48 psychosis When Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive opened in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1999, the playwright celebrated a homecoming. Hailing from the same suburban Maryland town in which her play is set, Vogel had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the play; her longtime collaborator , Molly Smith, had just been named artistic director at Arena Stage; and Vogel herself had been named playwright in residence there. The company I was working with, The Theatre Conspiracy, had recently produced Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, and Arena was following Drive with Vogel’s Hot ’n’ Throbbing, and later her play A Civil War Christmas . The importance accorded to Vogel’s identity as a local playwright was central to this publicity; her biography was readily available to any D.C. theatergoer who was interested. And yet despite the celebration of Vogel’s life story, and despite the explicit invocation of the historical time and actual place of her own childhood in the narrative that Drive presents, critics were, and have remained, loathe to make connections between Vogel ’s play and her life. The closest reference one might find is Washington Post critic Lloyd Rose’s connection of Drive to other “plays in which the writers try to forgive their families” such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night or Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.1 Certainly, Vogel’s own disavowals of the play’s autobiographical nature hold some weight here.2 But why, we might ask, would a playwright who has already presented semiautobiographical work (in 1990s The Baltimore Waltz), write a play with a child protagonist, set in her own hometown in the era of her own childhood, if she were not interested in at least risking autobiographical readings? The denial of such a connection, while 91 admittedly equivocal, still suggests a critical reflex against the autobiographical reading of plays about women’s traumas that is deeply conflicted , conditioned by equal parts poststructuralist theories of authorship and a broader cultural squeamishness about representing women’s rage. Plays that risk such autobiographical identification abound, of course, and they range from the overtly autobiographical, like Lisa Kron’s Well, Emily Mann’s Anulla: An Autobiography, or Vanessa Redgrave’s performance of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, to more tenuous connections , like those to be found in How I Learned to Drive or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, which serves as this chapter’s test case. Certainly, theater’s collaborative nature helps undermine such connections between playwright and character, a point I discuss in the following chapter on biography plays: directors, designers, and actors all mediate the construction of a character in such a way as to at least dilute an efficacious sense of present selfhood onstage. And yet I would suggest that there are ample and important reasons to follow the impulse to interpret these performances through the lens of autobiography, particularly in the case of women’s narratives of trauma, violence, and anger, even when critical orthodoxies point us in precisely the opposite direction. Among the most charged of such critical discussions around the place of autobiographical readings of scripted plays we find Sarah Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis. Sarah Kane, as every biographical portrait of her notes, burst onto the London theater scene in 1995 with her play Blasted, which made the radical statement that a rape in a Leeds hotel room had something to do with civil war in southeastern Europe. The play was controversial enough to be tabloid fodder, and so her similarly explosive follow -up plays, including Cleansed in 1998, received publicity based as much on their shocking subject matter as their formal innovation or rich language, despite the fact that theater luminaries such as Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter declared themselves fans. When Kane committed suicide in 1999, she left behind 4.48 Psychosis, a “play” with no stage directions , characters, or even much in the way of recognizable dialogue. It is a fragmentary, poetic, often muddled and just as often brilliant piece of writing. First produced by the Royal Court Theatre in June 2000, the play received the unabashed critical success that her work (particularly her earliest plays) rarely received in her lifetime. Two critics who initially responded with outrage to Kane’s first play, the Independent’s Paul Taylor...

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