Autobiography and Difference in Performance

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Autobiography and Difference in Performance1 John H. Lutterbie A production entitled The Unclean, which examined the effects of bigotry on people who, through no choice of their own, have been labelled society's unclean, provides the starting point for this investigation. In this production the performers presented personal experiences in which they felt themselves to be the victims of prejudice or to have victimized others. The subjects explored included anti-semitism, sexism, racism, child molestation, gay bashing, coming out, and AIDS. The generally positive response to the piece encouraged me to think about the processes of signification at work in defining the other as untouchable and the value of the autobiographical gesture in challenging the effects of difference within the economy of a political theatre. The theoretical basis of this investigation is an essay by Umberto Eco in which he identifies three central questions to approaching a semiotics of theatrical performance: what happens when a performer is ostended as a sign; what changes when the performer begins to speak; and how the context affects the process of signification. Eco's paradigm not only provides a structure for understanding the processes of signification in terms of signs, context, and the attribution of meaning but serves as a bridge to understanding the effectiveness of The Unclean. Thus, in exploring these questions, I have had to look not only at The Unclean but at moments in which my own prejudices have come into play. The question I am attempting to answer is: of what value is autobiographical material in developing a theatre of social change. We created The Unclean through a collaborative process involving myself and students from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.2 Our decision to develop the piece arose from our awareness of a growing intolerance in this country toward difference. Our initial efforts involved the attempt to develop a glossary of reasons why certain people are relegated to the margins of society. A series of videos enhanced our discussions; these videos, presented on New York/New Jersey Public Television (WNET) in 1991 during Gay and Lesbian Month, explored questions of hate and prejudice and their effects on communities.3 The background provided by these broadcasts and the students' willingness to share their experiences with bigotry became the 165 166 John H. Lutterbie material with which we developed the production. The cast wrote and performed autobiographical monologues and evolved a dis-topic context in which to present them. We created a performance landscape which included clowns, initially innocent but gradually tainted by a violent culture; movement pieces (short narratives of physical actions and gestures derived from the urban experience); and masked figures who regularly spray-painted words and images of hate on white flats. One sequence in the production, by way of example, began with children reciting nursery rhymes while jumping rope, clapping hands, and playing with dolls. A performer stepped out and in a direct address to the audience told of his experiences as a child of color—of washing his hands until they bled because a classmate asked him why he was always dirty. The games resumed after the monologue, now accompanied by variations of the nursery rhymes that reinforced images of prejudice and stereotyping; thus, we replaced "catch a tiger by the toe"with the version I remember learning, "catch a nigger by the toe." The clowns entered and began parodying the activities. As a bell summoned the children into class, the clowns began playing with dolls from their own collection of props. At first they excluded the clown who picked up a black doll but joined him when he began abusing the toy; the doll was steam-rollered, used as a baseball, and finally treated as feces. As the sound of an ice cream truck cued their exit, the clowns left the doll hanging from one of the thirty-six lengths of chain that formed the set—as if lynched. Responses to the performance exceeded our expectations. The two hundred-fifty seat auditorium was filled to capacity for every performance; and regularly, one-half of the audience—people of different racial backgrounds, ages, and sexualities—remained to hear about the creative...