Re-Membering Our Selves: Acting, Critical Pedagogy, and the Plays of Naomi Wallace

Pace:

It wasn't just you and me.

Dalton:

It was something more.

—Naomi Wallace, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek

In 2009, I taught a course in the theatre arts department at the University of Louisville called "Community Based Acting" that introduced critical pedagogy in the acting classroom through a process inspired by the work of Kentucky-born playwright Naomi Wallace. A playwright who identifies herself as a public intellectual, Wallace wrote in a 2008 essay for American Theatre titled "On Writing as Transgression" that "we need more engaged and dissenting writers in theatre. We need more writers who envision theatre as a space for social and imaginative transformation" (100). Wallace's plays are full of moments of embodied teaching and learning, in which characters remember and repeat the movements of others to transform their bodies to fit particular social roles. Significantly, teachers and pupils in these plays are also actors who manage to change their worlds through performances that combine real bodies and history with courageous acts of imagination; they suggest that social transformation can happen through performance, teaching, and learning when we recognize that developing an "identity" does not mean privileging the individual over community. In an interview with Tony Kushner published in Women in American Theatre, Wallace stresses that "[w]e are not only ourselves. We are who we interact with" (441).

While Wallace's essay is about teaching writing, I investigate questions about training student actors inspired by concerns very similar to the ones she voices: How can actors be encouraged to understand that they are embodied public intellectuals who hold a great deal of potential power in their communities? How can they open up their work to share that power in a way that gives them and their audiences a renewed sense of hope and possibility? I hope to show here how this course succeeded and failed at getting past an academic/practical division to encourage student actors to imagine themselves as creative artists and embodied intellectuals, and also to emphasize the importance of community and history in the development of identity and illuminate the ways by which actors and audiences transform their worlds together.

The process we studied included exercises in which actors re-membered the bodies of other people through performance: they interviewed people from the local community, and combined sections of those interviews with other texts in the framework of solo "character-study" compositions. At the end of the semester, we put together an evening of these character studies interspersed with scenes from Wallace's plays and performed it publicly. The local resonance of the plays became immediately evident, because of the theatre in which we were performing: the Thrust Theatre of the University of Louisville is plagued by the noise of railroad tracks that run directly behind the building. This circumstance is completely appropriate for The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, in which trains and the tracks that carry them provide the imposing physical and metaphoric setting for the play. As we rehearsed in the theatre, a few students expressed surprise that this play had never been performed here, right next to tracks that actually lead to the trestle from which it takes its title. It was a rare case in which we acknowledged the world surrounding our theatre and invited in a reality that we usually ask our audiences to temporarily forget or ignore; this awareness of the outside world and our consciousness of its history enriched our experience in the theatre. The combined reality of the tracks and our theatrical performances transformed a less-than-perfect space into an ideal one—an apt metaphor for our efforts.

Pace and Dalton, Re-Membered

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek takes place during the Great Depression in "a town outside a city" in the United States. The characters live in a world defined by needs that go unmet, because of a lack of resources and connection, fear of more loss, and diminished opportunities. Fifteen-year-old Dalton Chance is in prison, accused of murdering his friend Pace Creagan. The play moves...