In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, and: 1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels
  • Troy Dwyer
Theatre And Autobiography: Writing And Performing Lives In Theory And Practice. Edited by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman . Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006; pp. 352. $24.95 paper.
1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, And Travels. By Tim Miller . Edited by Glen Johnson . Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006; pp. xxxi + 277. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Even when a performance is not billed as biographical or autobiographical, audiences intuit that the creator has drawn from lived "true" experience—either her own or someone else's—in order to portray a resonant story. The potential presence of this truth is alluring and difficult, especially when a performance is acknowledged to be auto / biographical. On the one hand, it promises to reveal highly specific real-world data; on the other, it conjures a disruptive suspicion about fictions that may surround a nugget of perceived fact.

As is illustrated in two recent books—Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, edited by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, and 1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels by performance artist Tim Miller and edited by Glen Johnson—it is precisely the tension between notions of truth and fiction that charges auto / biographical material in a peculiar and productive way. Both books make clear that, when it's good, auto / biographical work does neither what it promises to do (tell you The Truth) nor what it swears it won't do (lie to you). Instead, its most valuable meanings are often largely inadvertent and are released by reciprocal transaction between performance and spectator.

A compendium of articles by a diverse array of thinkers and artists, Theatre and AutoBiography serves as an ambitious survey of current critical inquiry into the intersection of performance and auto / biography studies. In the hands of editors / contributors Grace and Wasserman, both of the University of British Columbia, it also succeeds at something that may have been unintentional: elegantly embodying the subject of critical auto / biography (in this case, a glimpse into the cultural history of Canada) while simultaneously addressing it.

For instance, Paula Sperdakos's excellent essay, "Untold Stories: [Re]Searching for Canadian Actresses' Lives," identifies the difficulty (and, to the Canadian researcher, the personal stake) in chronicling the history of a turn-of-the-century Canadian theatre diminished by a tradition of exodus of actors to the United States and Great Britain. Sperdakos's passionate commitment to the project of reconstituting Canada's cultural memory reflects one tactic among many presented in Theatre and AutoBiography. Ric Knowles probingly explores the embodied tactics of artists Djanet Sears and Guillermo Verdecchia while at the same time positing a postmodern standard for appreciating a specifically Canadian discourse about the politics of race, sex, and difference. Joanne Tompkins adds to this discussion by deftly applying a Lacanian interpretive model to two plays inspired by "infamous" Canadian events (124). Appearing in the final section of the book, playwright / actor Joy Coghill's short essay on Song of This Place, her play about eccentric Canadian artist Emily Carr, offers practical insight about the theatre practitioner's personal responsibility to articulate "truth" in biographical performance. Here, Coghill articulates an emergent two-part theme that resounds throughout Theatre and AutoBiography: that "truth" in art is distinct from "fact," and that any biographical endeavor is just as revelatory about the point-of-view of its creator as its subject. Delightfully, in respect to the book in which her essay appears, Coghill could well be describing Theatre and AutoBiography itself.

Beyond "filling in the blanks" about Canadian theatre, what is particularly satisfying about Theatre and AutoBiography as an anthology is the unexpected congruency of insight among the articles. This is especially apparent in respect to the function of time in auto / biographical performance. A recurring concept throughout the book is that the "truth" to which Coghill alludes can be understood by attending to a particular kind of temporality specific to auto / biographical texts.

For example, Richard Lane describes this temporality as a moment in which "what the subject was coincides with...

pdf

Share