Un-"blocking" Hedda and Medea through Feminist "Play" with Traditional Staging Forms

Hedda walks to the center of the room clutching to her belly a gun wrapped loosely in red and gold leaves. She sinks to the floor, her black satin dress ballooning around her. Only feet away, the audience can see her expression and interpret her thought process. Hedda looks vaguely around the space for an exit. She responds to Judge Brack (Ibsen 246), her focus less on him than on the gun which she lets rise to her line of vision, trailing leaves as it comes. She raises it slowly to her head and pulls the trigger, then falls gently to the floor. Red leaves fall from her pelvis, stark in contrast against the black of her dress.

—Hedda Gabler, act 4, Loyola University Chicago (2006)

As Jason races to the front door for revenge, Medea takes control of a camera filming the event. Her image is projected in large dimension across the house façade. Jason rails and beats the wall, but he cannot touch or hurt her. Defeated, Jason crumples in despair and the action downstage suspends. Medea's image fades and she stands in the doorway of her home clutching two bloody babies to her belly. She walks slowly across her yard, beyond the front gate of the white fence, off the stage and up the aisle of the auditorium. The door of the theatre slams behind her as the chorus chants its final ode, reminding us that the gods do not give us what we expect.

—Medea, final scene, MacAninich Arts Center, College of DuPage (2007)

Introduction

In 2006–07, I had occasion to direct Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at Loyola University Chicago and Euripides' Medea as a guest artist at the College of DuPage.¹ Both of these plays revolve around a central female character who is trapped in circumstances that ultimately lead her to kill offspring and depart the scene through death or other-worldly intervention. The women assert creative power through acts of destruction; they mark the physical world as they destroy part of it and then leave it. In an early article on feminist performance theory, "Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts," Sue-Ellen Case argues that female characters in ancient Greek theatre, and by extension the Western tradition that it founded, are predicated on the subversion of female creative, sexual, and political authority. The application of Case's argument to considerations of the theatre stage and auditorium allowed me to highlight the conflicts surrounding female creativity through nontraditional treatments of space and reversals in the language of performance at the point of dramatic climax. In short, I explored how applying feminist theories in the physical terms of production can empower female characters whose creativity is limited by the social conventions of the time in which they were written and by the dynamics of the theatrical spaces in which they originally appeared. On one level, I called attention to the masculinist bias inherent both in the texts and in the staging conventions of the originals, and on a second, I manipulated these original spatial conventions to expand the space for the female—in a sense, to make room for her. In what follows, I relate the paths to conceptualization for these productions and describe the characteristics of the staging that resulted. I conclude with a look to possible extensions of these physical experiments toward inventing theatrical expressions that can include female creativity without necessitating destruction or departure.

Inspirations from Early Feminist Theory

I began to think of the theatre space in feminist terms after teaching theatre history using Case's article as a revisionist lens by which to re-view the historical conventions and canonical plays we covered.² Case argues that Greek theatre and thus the Western tradition it engendered are predicated on the exclusion of actual, "real" women, and the creation of a male-represented "Woman." Her arguments for this include reference to a transition in religious structures from Gaia to Zeus; a shift in the god of fertility from Gaia to Dionysus (a male not born of woman...