Comment

As seems to happen so often in general issues of TJ, the essays brought together here engage each other both within and across several different categories. In her discussion of Sally’s Rape, Deborah Thompson considers how the onstage intera ction between the African American playwright and performer, Robbie McCauley, and her white collaborator, Jeanne Hutchins, provides paradigms for a positive re-production of interracial relationships. But Thompson also examines at length two of the tropes of a violently negative historical experience that this performance confronts—blackface and rape.

As Thompson notes, such tropes figure painful sites of cultural memory that must be revisited and re-visioned before the theatrical space can be cleared out for new configurations. And few playwrights have revisited these and similar sites of ra cial and sexual oppression more obsessively than Adrienne Kennedy, as Claudia Barnett demonstrates. But Barnett, too, is concerned with the political work that can be accomplished by artistic form—with the ways in which the distorting mirrors of Kennedy’ s plays fragment deeply rooted identity positions, confronting her spectators with the return of repressed historical memories that, too, must be re-staged before they can be cleared away.

Stephen J. Bottoms is also concerned with the possibilities of such re-staging. He examines three recent theatre pieces that seize on the historical figure of Roy Cohn, not to represent the person but to figure the self-producing performance of a repressive social and sexual “normality.” In the three pieces Bottoms describes, “Roy” becomes a figure for the equally violent regulation of the self and of those others whose performance of the contradictions it represses threatens to fragment it . At the same time, all three pieces attempt to re-vision “Roy” as an icon figured in a dramaturgic or performance form that can make it return a painful cultural memory so that it can be confronted, if not cleared away.

With Natasha Korda’s discussion of the significant role played by women in Philip Henslowe’s pawnbroking business, the issue takes a turn both in terms of historical period and methodology. Korda’s analysis reminds us how ready newly developing metho dologies may be to carry old ideological baggage. Her discussion of the relationship between pawnbroking and the outfitting of theatres also provides eloquent testimony to the fact that the theatrical institution has material as well as ideological foundations. Paul Yachnin continues this testimony by demonstrating how a material object like a handkerchief—bearing the traces of the pawnbrokers and the second-hand dealers’ shops onto the theatre’s material stage—gets taken up into the theatre’s ideo logical apparatus. In a discussion that should prove heartening to this journal’s readers, Yachnin also suggests how the mediation of materiality and ideology performed by a particular national theatre at a particular historical moment has been obscured s ince by the efforts of a different ideological apparatus—“literature.”

Yachnin’s example also raises questions that bring the issue full circle. For if Desdemona’s handkerchief, and her body, function as fetishized commodities, so does the body of the black slave—more literally and more brutally. The high-culture erotics of literary wonder and the low-culture erotics of blackface minstrelsy may be played out on different stages, but these sites of cultural memory do not stand that far apart. As Thompson points out in one of her notes, Othello was a favorite object for parody by blackface burlesque. !— This document was created using BeyondPress(TM) 2.0 -440366. —>