Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender (review)

Re-Dressing the Canon, Alisa Solomon’s important new collection of essays on theatre and gender, confidently spans the history of Western theatre. Solomon, a veteran feminist critic whose writings on theatre and politics regularly appear in the Village Voice, addresses the continuing debates concerning the politics of producing and staging the classics and invigorates a critical discussion that for many has reached a standstill. Her book sets out to demonstrate the historical relationship between theatre and gender—along with the shifting cultural ramifications of this dynamic relationship—from antiquity to the contemporary scene. She is interested in producing “a feminist criticism that investigates the way in which particular plays, presented in particular theatrical styles, encourages us to think about—and think against—social conventions of gender” (10). From Aristophanes to Split Britches, Solomon argues, theatre and gender have commented upon each other’s artificiality, providing spectators ways of seeing and restructuring the distinct cultural investments that are upheld in each.

Solomon’s introduction unravels the links between gender and theatre and, in the process, provides a concise history of feminist theatre criticism. She rejects feminist criticism’s often unchecked enthusiasm for Lacan and psychoanalysis and prefers a methodology that combines a Brechtian-based political engagement with a more comprehensive attention to actual theatre practice. In the five chapters that follow, she offers detailed close readings of specific historical case studies: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, Yiddish theatre, and three contemporary American off-Broadway “canonical crossings.” Solomon’s lively discussions of these playwrights and periods include critical engagements with historical and archival materials and focused readings of select performances; she demonstrates a welcome concern with making both of these relevant to a contemporary audience.

Consider her discussion of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Solomon begins her account of the play’s multiple cross-dressings and multiple marriages by examining Declan Donnellan’s celebrated 1994 all-male production of the play with London’s Cheek by Jowl Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The chapter begins with a snapshot review of the production, which includes a discussion of the production’s staging, design, and acting; Donnellan’s interpretation of the play’s central motifs, ideas, and scenes; and an overview of the politics of staging Shakespeare in the 1990s. This provides the foundation for Solomon’s larger speculations on the effects of Renaissance stage conventions and their relation to gender and sexuality. Solomon’s ability to maintain her focus on a central thesis allows her to maneuver though the voluminous Shakespeare bibliography without getting lost in the metacommentary that often obscures contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. Such attention to the topic at hand—gender and theatre—pays off in her analysis of As You Like It’s famous epilogue:

Not only does the epilogue suggest that because men love women, the play should please both of them, in addition, the actor offers the play both as a mediator between men and women, and as an event that separates them from each other. It may even suggest that there is some territory, neither male nor female, between men and women, some non- or anti-gendered space that the boy-actress both occupies and signifies. Thus in the last forty lines, the play’s pretty endings come unglued, heterosexual closure is rendered suspect, and erotic options become diffuse again, even extending to the audience.

[25–26]

Subsequent chapters follow this model of historical scholarship combined with close attention to theatrical production.

Throughout Re-Dressing the Canon, I was struck by two things. First, I began to appreciate Solomon’s unwavering commitment to theatre. Her chapters are animated, enhanced by provocative readings of actual theatre events, many of which are contemporary revisionist adaptations of canonical works. In a brilliant chapter on Yiddish theatre, she discusses historical productions and performances such as Jacob Adler’s 1892 Jewish King Lear, various productions of Scholem Asch’s 1906 play God of Vengeance including its scandalous 1923 Broadway run, the controversial...