Performing the Aging Self in Hugh Leonard's "Da" and Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa

As humanities scholars continue to work toward attracting the same attention to age that has been afforded to such categories of identity as gender, race, class, and ability, approaching age as performance and performative has become a major thread in the international critical conversation.¹ Because any age can be performed, viewing age as performance contributes to the broadening of the field of aging studies to become age studies, linking explorations of youth, middle age, and older ages as points on a spectrum rather than binary oppositions, and combatting the marginalization of criticism regarding either childhood or old age, the "marked" ends of the life course.² Among the arts, drama is especially ripe for examining the performance of age, as issues of age and aging arise in all aspects of a play, from the script to casting and staging choices. These issues too often have been overlooked in drama criticism; in particular, the memory play has not yet garnered the attention it merits. The memory play stands at the intersection of drama, performance, memory, and age studies; this article focuses on the foregrounding of age performance in the memory play's conventions. From The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman to M. Butterfly, memory-play characters change ages in the space of a moment, without any provision for the actors to alter their physical appearances. Just as critics of gender, race, class, and other categories of identity have found significance in aesthetic conventions, I contend that the conventions of memory plays illuminate the nature of self-construction regarding the category of age. Moreover, attending to these conventions results not only in a reconsideration of canonical plays, but also in recognizing plays that have not previously attracted academic criticism. This article examines two successful memory plays, one that has gained scholarly attention and one that generally has not. I suggest that the performance of age in the contemporary Irish plays "Da" by Hugh Leonard and Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel points to a tension in contemporary construction of the aging self, exhibiting both a sense of ageless self and the recognition of a fragmented aging self-concept.

The sense of an ageless self is reflected in the common experience of countless seniors who claim to feel no different from when they were young, that they remain unchanged "inside." They frequently report a sense of alienation from their aged bodies, to the point of a flash of misrecognition of their mirror images. Kathleen Woodward theorizes this reaction as the mirror stage of old age, an inversion of Jacques Lacan's mirror stage of infancy. While Lacan's mirror stage focuses on the infant's embracing and identifying with the seemingly whole, pleasing mirror image—leading to an illusion of a stable self—Woodward points out that the mirror stage of old age is a rejection of the mirror image, representing the aged person's reluctance or refusal to enter the realm of the senior citizen. She writes, "What is whole is felt to reside within, not without, the subject. The image in the mirror is understood as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration and nursling dependence of advanced age."³ Leni Marshall builds on Woodward's terminology to label the alienation from the mirror image "méconnaissance."⁴ This term removes the explicit "old age" parameter, expanding the possible timing of instances of the second mirror stage to middle age. Moments of méconnaissance can begin to crack the illusory stable sense of self, sometimes leading to a strident denial of aging and a more determined attempt to proclaim the ageless self.

The broader application of the term "méconnaissance" rings true onstage, as the misrecognition of the aging self can occur in portrayals of earlier ages, perhaps manifested as the refusal to acknowledge any outward signs of aging. The physical act of looking in the mirror, or of confronting one's own aging self in the reaction of another, need not be portrayed directly in the play itself in order to provide the experience...