Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance

6. Invisible Wounds: Rehearsing Trauma on the Contemporary Stage

117 6 Invisible Wounds Rehearsing Trauma on the Contemporary Stage A black play is a white play when the lights go out. —Suzan-Lori Parks In the dark? how would you see that in the dark? —Harper in Far Away In Adam and Adrienne Kennedy’s nightmarish memory play Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996), the brutal beating of a young black man by a white policeman repeats itself over and over, both in narrative and before our eyes. These remorseless loops seem out of the conscious control of the narrating characters that conjure them into being. Interspersed with the horror, fragmented scenes of college students rehearsing a production of Hamlet unfold. Yorick’s grave haunts Sleep Deprivation Chamber as a spectral presence both inside and outside the action; Hamlet is at once text and intertext, contents and envelope. What does it mean to rehearse within and beyond a scene of trauma that is itself an imitation of the real thing? What is the relationship between trauma and theatrical representation? Contemporary anglophone playwrights frequently address collective traumas that transcend individual suffering: genocide, war, sexual abuse, terrorism, natural disasters, and other calamities.1 Indeed, Christina Wald has posited “Trauma Drama” as a distinct genre that has evolved since the late 1980s.2 Staging trauma poses a representational conundrum because 118 • Dark Matter trauma confounds chronology and eludes comprehension. According to Judith Herman, “Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the new form of vivid sensations and images.”3 Trauma confuses cause and effect; in the words of Allen Meek, “[T]rauma’s temporality constitutes an event that is always displaced in space and time. Trauma may not be consciously registered at the time of its occurrence but it returns in the form of intrusive memories, nightmares, compulsive acting-out and flash-backs.”4 A trauma-effect follows the trauma-event in time but precedes the trauma-event in terms of integration into the psyche, thereby raising the question of whether such “unclaimed experiences,” as theorist Cathy Caruth calls them, can count as history or truth. Trauma is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly , in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.”5 Further, “[W]hat returns to haunt the victim . . . is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known.”6 As a memory of something that has not (yet) happened to the subject, trauma disrupts both narrative and epistemology. That archetypal image of postmodern trauma, Mouth in Beckett’s Not I, is an endless and recursive stream of words that emerges from and descends into babble. If trauma’s shattering force eludes comprehension by the speaking subject , the value and even the possibility of mimesis are called into question. Staging unclaimed experience carries the risk of reproducing its characteristic structures and affect without transforming, working through, or otherwise making it usable for an audience. Indeed, reproducing such experience would seem to resist catharsis or cure, inviting helplessness at best—Not I’s Auditor raises arms “in a gesture of helpless compassion”—and voyeurism at worst.7 In perhaps the archetypal traumatic scene of postclassical Western drama, the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth, the doctor of physic (who in Ibsen would be the raisonneur) concedes that Lady Macbeth’s disease is beyond his practice. The dream-logic of Lady Macbeth’s hallucinatory rambling anticipates Mouth’s logorrheic repetition-compulsion. With these challenges, psychic trauma haunts contemporary Anglo-American theater. It occupies the stage less as a bounded event, locatable within individual bodies and subjects, than as an invisible field that saturates bodies like malignant radiation. Contemporary theater artists have departed from what might be called Invisible Wounds • 119 the standard (Freudian) model of theatrical trauma: the return of the repressed . Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) enacts this return as both neurotic symptom and hereditary disease: the sins of the father, Captain Alving, are visited on his syphilitic son Oswald while Mrs. Alving looks on in horrified and helpless witness. In this model trauma is a repressed, secret history that remorselessly comes to light until no secrets remain from the audience. Two tropes for this secret history recur over and over. The first is the dead or buried child familiar from Ibsen, O’Neill, and Shepard. The...