Daisy Violet the Bitch Beast King: Framing Chaos and Ritual

In the fall of 2018, I directed a rather resistant workshop production of Sam Collier's Daisy Violet the Bitch Beast King for the Ground and Field Theatre Festival (GFTF) in Davis, California. Daisy Violet dances on the razor's edge between feminist utopia and dystopia, zinging rapidly back and forth from comedy to horror to family psychodrama. As a director, I sought to find the balance of these disparate elements in this startlingly violent play. I wanted to use both horror and comedy to achieve what Jill Dolan calls "the soaring sense of hope, possibility, and desire that imbues utopian performatives."²⁰ I needed to frame these chaotic moments in a way that would not only allow the audience the joy of experiencing them in the moment but also invite later, deeper reflection. The result was an example of what a feminist future onstage could be.

In the opening scene of Daisy Violet, sisters Henrietta and Josephine decide to conjure up a sister on whom they can blame everything. Much to their surprise, their spell works, and they name their golem-sister Daisy Violet. As Josephine and Henrietta attempt to navigate in a world where grown-ups are continually telling them what little girls should be, Daisy Violet feels free to indulge in her appetites and her angers, eating checkerboards, cats, and eventually the grown-ups who are attempting to gender-police her and her sisters. When the sisters grow up they must deal both with the aftermath of their violent childhood and with the patriarchal structures under which they and Daisy Violet still live.

One of the first frames I needed to find to balance the horror and the comedy was the perfect actor for Daisy Violet, but the casting added another, unexpected element to the framing with which I would need to reckon. GFTF functions both as a new works festival and as a concentrated conservatory experience for students at UC Davis. From a company of mostly white students, I cast two white actresses as the sisters Josephine and Henrietta. For the demanding role of Daisy Violet, I needed someone with whom the audience could fall in love. I cast an actress of color because of her energy and comedic talent and because she was charismatic enough that the audience would root for her even after she literally bit someone's head off. The grown-up roles were all played by a nonbinary person of color whom I had seen perform some brilliant gender code-switching in a recent production of Boy. I had concerns about casting a person of color as a character who committed multiple acts of violence and who was referred to as a "monster" by the characters being played by the white actresses. The students in the cast pointed out that the casting of the grown-up roles was also problematic. All of the acts of violence were committed on the grown-ups as Daisy Violet attempted to protect her sisters. We were, through the casting of the show, representing a colonialist practice of white people using nonwhite bodies to enact and bear violence. As a group, we determined that we were comfortable moving forward with this color-conscious casting for a few reasons. Daisy Violet, far from being a simple "monster," is at the end of the play the most grounded, self-aware adult in the room. While Henrietta and Josephine are still needing to employ a variety of tactics to process or outright deny the violence of their past, grown-up Daisy Violet enters spattered with blood and proclaims, "Walking around with the blood on my face is an act of compassion and love for humanity."²¹ She wants the world to acknowledge the violence that is all around them. Josephine's response is, "I'd rather put kindness into the world."²² With our casting, this moment became overlaid with the white person's privileged position of being able to deny the violence that is not threatening their body.

With the specter of colonialism now part of the story we...