Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama by Jenn Stephenson (review)

In Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama, Jenn Stephenson argues that autobiography is not merely a backward-looking narrative of self-reflection but also a forward-looking radical act of self-creation. Deftly integrating autobiography theory by Philippe Lejeune and Nancy K. Miller with performance criticism by Ric Knowles and Susan Bennett, Stephenson makes an engaging contribution to autobiography and theatre studies alike. Her methodology reflects this dual perspective; in addition to examining the plays as theoretically rich texts, she uses Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume’s producible interpretation methodology of approaching plays from a director’s perspective in order to interpret the different possible production choices and meanings. In short, Stephenson opts for a production analysis of multiple interpretations rather than a performance analysis of one specific event. The book is divided into five chapters and analyzes seven Canadian plays that range from trauma narratives to marionette shows by Canadian playwrights such as Timothy Findley, Daniel MacIvor, and Judith Thompson.

Chapters 1 and 2 take us into the worlds of self-loss and trauma in Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, Michael Healey’s Drawer Boy, and Michael Redhill’s Goodness in order to consider the significance of the author-subject’s memory as well as the ethical responsibility of the audience as a witness to narrated trauma. Stephenson convincingly asserts that memory mediates the self by connecting the past subject and the present author. She goes on to argue that “the combination of theatre-making and self-making” enables healing. Stephenson is also quick to point out that the success and trajectory of autobiography depend on the willingness of the audience to accept the life narrative and to respond to traumatic events. These chapters offer a fitting start to a book on autobiographical performance because they call into question the autobiographical author-subject’s relationship to the narrative methods as well as to the audience.

Stephenson’s third chapter builds on her discussion of the responsible witness by considering an audience’s potentially damaging effect on the autobiographical subject’s narration, namely, through language and silence, in Anton Piatigorsky’s Eternal Hydra and Timothy Findley’s Shadows. Chapter 4 shifts us from a consideration of voice to an examination of the body in Ronnie Burkett’s marionette showpiece Billie Twinkle. This chapter, as well as the introduction, would benefit a reader new to autobiography studies because Stephenson outlines the different worlds and subject positions at work in an autobiographical performance. Stephenson engages with Lejeune by exploring how metatheatrical techniques can separate and thereby call attention to the distinct roles of the author-subject, narrator, and protagonist. For instance, in Billy Twinkle, the author-subject puppeteer is physically distanced from the marionette protagonist. Moreover, Stephenson uses two distinct bodies – the actualworld human subject and puppet doppelgänger – to illustrate what Susan Bennett describes as the “chiastic” temporal structure at work in autobiographies, that is, a simultaneous movement back into the lived past (through memory) and forward into the future (through a reinvented self).

Chapter 5 integrates autobiography (life-writing) with autothanatography (death-writing) by claiming that death is an inevitable element of any life narrative. Although death is unknowable insomuch as it cannot be remembered or retold, Stephenson uses Daniel MacIvor’s In on It to investigate the inevitable haunting significance of death and of endings in autobiographies. Further developing the preceding chapters’ discussion of self-development and time, the final chapter asserts that life needs to understand death just as the present self needs to understand the past self.

Stephenson’s coda offers an innovative conclusion by examining two case studies of autobiographies that fail to have a political impact and that thereby challenge the book’s argument that autobiographies can effect positive real-world change. At times, the political component to the book’s main thesis – that autobiographies are radical acts of self-creation – gets overwhelmed by the examination of selfhood and theatrical strategies. The coda, as a result, is a welcome addition because it focuses exclusively on...