 | Linda Grass as Nurse and Michelle Morros as Girl Tales From Hospital poster for Ma7 1998 Unconcious Collective Production Photo by Mark Chalifoux. photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt of Unconscious Collective. |
ROSALIND KERR
This paper explores the 1998 Edmonton production of Tales from the Hospital, a new work comprised of four monologues by two employees and two inmates of a large, long-term care institution that bears certain resemblances to real life stories of medical experiments and sterilization practised on unfortunate inmates under the Albertan Protection of Life Act that was in place between 1928 and 1973. Timely because many of these individuals are still in the process of seeking compensation, Tales offers a powerful political message, implicating spectators in the power/knowledge systems that allowed such places to function. Through stage design that requires spectators to move from site to site, various narrative devices, and the gestic handling of hospital linens, spectators found themselves involved in the production of not only the theatrical, but also the wider political meanings of the event.
Cet article explore la production de Tales from the Hospital faite en 1998 à Edmonton. Cette nouvelle oeuvre consiste de quatre monologues de deux employés et de deux patients d'une institution de soins prolongés. Les histoires racontées mettent en cause des similitudes frappantes et les faits vécus par ces malheureux patients, victimes d'expériences médicales et de stérilisations, pratiquées entre 1928 et 1973 sous la loi albertaine de la protection de la vie (Albertan Protection of Life Act). Tales from the Hospital nous offre un puissant message politique qui est très actuel, puisque plusieurs de ces victimes sont encore à la recherche d'une compensation. En critiquant le système politique qui empêchait les connaissances publiques, ce qui permettait le fonctionnement de ces endroits, la pièce implique ses spectateurs dans un sens direct. À travers de plusieurs stratégies, comme une conception du décor qui exige aux spectateurs de circuler dans l'espace, les approches différentes de narration employées dans la pièce, les gestes de la manutention d'équipements hospitaliers, le publique non seulement assiste à la pièce, mais aussi se trouve impliqué politiquement à cet événement..
Trevor Schmidt, an Edmonton playwright who is becoming well known for his original scripts, directed members of his company, the Unconscious Collective, in Tales from the Hospital in May, 1998.1 As the title indicates, the play is made up of tales narrated by four inhabitants of a large state institution: two patients and two employees. As possible stand-ins for actual people, the narrators' tales of terrible mistreatment served as a timely reminder for Edmonton audiences that the painful after-effects of the Alberta Sterilization Act could not be easily forgotten, even twenty-five years later. For many years, stories had circulated about what had happened to the "unfit" in these institutions, but it was only in the 1990s that actual victims began to come forth to demand compensation.2 During the year that Tales was written, many such individual and class action cases were being covered in the local newspapers so that audiences who came to see the show already had an actual historical context in which to locate it. In addition, although no specific locations were mentioned in the play, audiences following the news could easily draw comparisons between the institution where Tales is set and such infamous Alberta Hospitals as Red Deer and Ponoka where forced sterilizations and other medical experiments were routinely carried on between 1928 and 1972 under the Protection of Life Act.3
Although the fictional characters are represented in sufficient depth to acquire a certain psychological reality, their individual tragedies are not of primary concern here. Schmidt chose to present their identities as deriving from the intricate web of social relations in which they were caught. Tales from the Hospital is best described as a play with a political agenda in that it shows how our identities are shaped by the power-knowledge systems that assign us a place in society. In this case, the lessons to be learned concern the ways in which certain defenceless members of society have been brutalized by the hospital system. It is possible to argue that Tales produces its meanings in the ways suggested by William Worthen in "Political Theatre: Staging the Spectator" in Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre. Suggesting that late modern theatre has moved beyond bourgeois realism with its ideologies of individualism, he proposes that contemporary theatre can "regain the ability to stage the activities of theatrical production (acting, action, participation) as parts of an explicitly political event, an event that produces individuals (actor, character, spectator) as subjects negotiating the terms of an immediate social and cultural order—the order of the theatre itself" (147).
This paper explores how the production of Tales that I attended at the Arts Barns in May 1998 employed some of the devices mentioned above to create a play with political agency. I begin by looking at the destabilizing of the audience through various fragmenting practices that "stage the spectator." Next, I examine the decentring of the actor/character's (re)presentations through different narrative devices present in the monologues.4 Finally, I closely examine individual and collective gestic actions employed by the actors/characters that demonstrate the public significance of their private situations.5
Schmidt, who also designed the show, "stage[d] the spectator" through a variety of devices and techniques. Even before the show began, spectators, limited to about thirty, were made to wait at the entrance to the room until a signal to enter was given. The venue, the largest room in the cavernous Arts Barns, a theatrical space converted from what had been storage space for city buses, was dark and unwelcoming. The four different sites were spread out in the space, but spectators could see only one at a time, and only move to the next site when they were cued by a change in the lighting. Seating arrangements changed from site to site so that no one knew where or with whom they would be watching. Spectators found themselves separated from one another and put in the position of having to negotiate their own relationship with each monologist in turn. At the same time, spectators were made aware of each of the stories as individual sites of entrapment. My own personal reaction to this arrangement was a sense of isolation and destabilization that made me aware that I could not gauge the reactions of other spectators who were undergoing similar experiences. As I attempt to recreate aspects of the performance in the sections that follow, I will frame my comments with reference to a generalized spectator in the hopes of capturing some sense of the operation of the mise en scène. My use of the past tense when I refer to spectator response is a deliberate attempt to indicate a particular performance.
The opening monologue began at a site furthest away from the entrance, and could only be reached by crossing through the darkened space where chairs were placed in front of a dimly lit patient's room. The sense of invading the privacy of the young inmate was created by positioning her either standing beside or lying down on her bed. Since her bed was represented by a sheet on the floor, spectators frequently had to look down to see her. Her vulnerability and confessional manner of speaking increased the sense that audiences were spying on her, much like her unwelcome caretakers. The relationship with this particular actor/character was only the beginning of a series of different subject positions that spectators had to inhabit as each new monologist was introduced.
When the first scene darkened and the signal came to move towards a naked light bulb hanging over another location, the next narrator, Nurse Blanche Mains, was lit up, her eyes caught in its harsh glare. Here spectators were offered seats within a few feet of the actor who spoke as if she were making a public address. Having been introduced to her and her vicious treatment of the patients by the young girl, they were prepared for her tale justifying the drowning of an old man.
At this point, spectators had to retrace their steps to the partially open hatch, which had been hissing and steaming throughout. As the trap door lifted and a fiery red light came up, a figure in a soiled uniform rose up from the steam, recognizable as the Irene whom Blanche had mentioned as her backup witness. Here spectators had to stand clustered around the open grate until she disappeared after hanging up the laundry.
The lack of any acknowledged moral centre in the play was brought home sharply by the last monologue spoken by a delusional patient whom Irene had helped to move to an upper floor. Invited to her room by the brightening of the golden light streaming through the only window on the set, spectators found themselves seated close to her hospital bed. But if the seating promised some intimacy, the character, who stood or jumped on her bed, was not accessible. When the play ended, spectators were faced with the realization that they had greater knowledge about what was going on in the Hospital than any of the narrators, but very little power to change anything.
As the above description indicates, the dialectical relationships between audience and stage were in constant process, changing with each individual actor/character's monologue. The monologues themselves created the narrative space that carried the main action forward with each actor/character into the discontinuous times and places playing inside their individual minds. According to Deborah Geis, the monologue of postmodern theatrical practice inevitably involves "the redirection of the audience's attention [because] . . . it forces the spectators to imagine things they cannot see yet is accompanied by the invisible exhortation that they ‘see' the speaker as a character in (or at least in the context of) the onstage action they have been witnessing up to that point" (13). Brecht's direction that actors present their characters quotationally can thus be served, as we see in the different (re)presentations of each of the four monologuists (Brecht 138).
For example, in the first monologue, the actor, the beautiful, dark-skinned Michelle Morros who played the young girl, was cast with the deliberate intention of challenging preconceptions of someone who was mentally slow6. The actor played the role with an ingenuousness that included demonstrating the character's scars by lifting up her gown as she explains,
i have a scar now from
side to side
and i know they're going to add another one
to bisect it from mouth to mouth
...
i can't figure out what they've left in me
and what all they've taken out.
A lung
Liver
Gall bladder
Spleen. ("White Hands" 1)
It did not take long before audiences could make comparisons between the story the character was telling and actual cases, such as that of Leilani Muirer who became famous in 1996 when she won her landmark suit against the government for unlawful sterilization.7 The sense that the actor was "quoting" the character was enhanced by the heightened imagistic language that the playwright used to convey the depth of her experience in words that she would not be expected to know. In mediating between actor and character, spectators had to consider their own place in the system that designated her as a "retard," just as she resists accepting the label from another patient:
And Berta cries
and i just let her
i use my foot to sweep
the hair-puffs under her bed
like dust-witches.
A retard wouldn't be smart enough
to think of that. ("White Hands" 8)
| Linda Grass as Nurse and Michelle Morros as Girl Tales From Hospital poster for Ma7 1998 Unconcious Collective Production Photo by Mark Chalifoux. photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt of Unconscious Collective. |
Ultimately, her monologue slides into memories of past abandonment, followed by revelations of her night-time search for sex with other inmates in order to have a "smart" baby. Beyond this point, the ability to accept her as a subject-in-process became contained in the group knowledge of the audience members; she has been sterilized and is beyond intervention while they were cast as both superior in intelligence and privy to privileged information.
On the other hand, the Nurse's monologue creates a sharp contrast because she was represented as operating on the assumption that any one hearing her story would back up her action of scalding the old man to death. The distancing effect of having to listen to such a horrifying story was further compounded by the appearance of its narrator, Linda Grass, who played her as a demonized killer-nurse. Bone-thin, bleached blonde, sharp-eyed, and immaculately dressed in white uniform, cap, and signature cardigan, her over-determined appearance underlined the character's obsessive replaying of the event.
Linda Grass as Nurse in "Cross" Unconscious Collective's production of Tales from the Hospital. Photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt & the Unconscious Collective. |
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Spectators were put in a position of having to listen very closely for possible gaps in the character's circular logic. By the end of her monologue, the audience had enough information to "see" beyond her version of events and to "hear" the voice of the silenced Mr. Flagg:
"You're wasting time.
Get yourself in there
and clean yourself off
you ought to be ashamed of yourself"
. . .
"Mr. Flagg"
a warning
he looks at me
his head shakes
"it's too hot, Ma'am"
and the way he says it
that one word
‘ma'am'
I freeze
cold
with the steam on my sweater
he is poised
naked . . . ("Cross" 6)
The grotesqueness of the third monologist, the laundry-woman Irene, was deliberately emphasized by the actor, Elizabeth Allison, through her large size, sweating face and body, and soiled white uniform straining at the seams. In this case, as with the first nurse, the hyper-realism of her appearance made her larger than life, and kept spectators aware of her particular embodiment of the "downtrodden saint" character she represented.
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Elizabeth Allison as Nurse in "Down". Photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt & the Unconscious Collective. |
Unlike the nurse whose lines all begin with "I," Irene's speeches obsess about "Them," "The Big Brass" whom she believes have banished her to the basement ("Down" 1). Listening to Irene offered spectators the chance to relate to her overwhelming generosity, but her endless recounting of her toils made her unreachable. By the end of her monologue, spectators knew that Irene's witnessing of Blanche Mains's murder of Mr. Flagg would have no repercussions:
They don't know
none of them
that I would never tell
never
I wouldn't risk my job
not for anything
how could i give up my children?
how could i leave them
who would watch out for them if i were to abandon them? ("Down" 5)
An ethereal, blonde actor, Angela Flatekval, played the fourth character, the religious hysteric, with the detachment of the insane. Her otherworldly appearance enhanced her character's messianic rantings and effectively closed off any easy identification. Behind her garbled promises of salvation, spectators heard conventional religious slogans that hinted at a moral order gone terribly wrong.
Angela Flatekual as Patient in "Rising". Photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt & the Unconscious Collective. |
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Although she was aware of Irene's benevolence, she was completely cut off from her. If spectators were in a position by the end to piece together a narrative line connecting the stories, the play itself did not build to any logical conclusion or tragic climax. As the monologues demonstrated, life in this institution was not susceptible to rational containment. Instead, the monologues operated as a metaphorical expression of "life" in a long-term healthcare institution (Geis 30). The theatrical effectiveness of each was greatly enhanced by gestic physical actions involving the appearance, such as the wearing and handling of hospital linen which accompanied the dialogue. Since hospitals are meant to be places of cleanliness, the condition of the linens in each monologue carried implications of the power relations at stake. In the first scene, the sterilized girl obsesses about Blanche's terrifying whiteness in contrast to the darkness of the patients' rooms:
At night
in the dark
in between the crisp sheets
I can hear the sound of her feet
padding down the hallway
. . .
I can picture the white shoes with their
thick white soles
the sweater across her stiff white shoulders
the starch sound of her uniform
rustling. ("White Hands" 1)
Operating dialectically with her vivid descriptions was Morros's unusual stillness, which she punctuated only by her interactions with a very long piece of white sheet—the only tangible object left to which she can relate. This sheet underwent constant transformations as she peeked from under it, walked on it, twisted it in to various shapes, and followed its length to the empty room where she met her phantom lovers. It became her escape route, her winding sheet, her hiding place, her lover, and finally, the imaginary baby she hoped to have.
For Linda Grass as Blanche Mains, all that was mobile in her frigid body were her "laser eyes" ("White Hands" 1). As her harsh, mechanical movements indicated, she could not bear to be touched or soiled in any way. Handling the dirty sheets of Mr. Flagg was unbearable, and touching his soiled body out of the question. Her unforgettable gest was the act of holding him upside down in the bath: "so I grabbed his ankles / hard / and held them into the air" ("Cross" 7-8).
On the other hand, Irene mitigated Blanche's murderous gests by spending all her working hours doing the laundry for her patients. First, she carried up the soaking wet laundry from the underground boilers, and then she wrung it out and hung it on the clotheslines.
Photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt & the Unconscious Collective. | 
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The series of gests that made up her tasks were accompanied by physical signs showing the impact of the labour on Elizabeth Allison's body as her dress became increasingly sweat stained, her face redder, and her fingers bleached and swollen. Unable to offer her healing touch, she imagines the linen as part of the living flesh of her patients. By the end, she had filled the clotheslines with various items ranging from sheets to diapers to night gowns, which she saw as "the thin ghosts / of the poor souls / that hover / up there / on other floors far away" ("Down" 2)
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Photo courtesy of Trevor Schmidt & the Unconscious Collective. |
In the final segment, the patient who stood on her bed and reached her hands up to the light was as disembodied as one of Irene's ghosts. The burdening down of Irene in back-breaking labour contrasted sharply with the praying girl's futile, frenzied jumping on her bed. No longer in contact with others, she has only her hole in the wall, the voices who speak to her, and the light to react to. Since she was unable to get off the bed because of the restraints, all of her tangible relationships were hospital furnishings that were in her reach. Her unforgettable gest was the repeated washing of her hands in the light:
There's only one window here
and it's so high
but the sun shines in
golden orange
and if I stretch
far far far
my fingers can fit
into the path
I wash my hands in the light
clean them
for my important work. ("Rising" 1)
Over all, the gests of patients and employees formed contrasting demonstrations of oppressive labour relations. As stage demonstrations exhibiting the actors' labours in constructing their characters, these re-presentations showed the audience a social order in process. The processes revealed that the identities of the inmates, whether employees or patients, were shaped by the power-knowledge systems operating in a long-term care institution during the time when forced sterilization of the "unfit" was a legalized practice. However, as I have attempted to show throughout, Tales is far more than a documentary about past abuse since it effectively "stage[s] the activities of theatrical production (acting, action, participation) as parts of an explicitly political event" by bring the serious issue of coercive biopower to the fore (Worthen 147).
In Schmidt's Hospital, the truly sadistic nature of biopower is no longer possible to deny because spectators have to witness its effects being practised on stage. While Nurse Blanche Mains talks about loving her vocation and needing her job, she has internalized her right to live over that of her patients whom she robs, kills, and maims in the name of self-protection. Mains's practices exemplify her interpellation into the rationale put out by the modern isopolitical state where "the sovereign right to kill appears in a new form; as an ‘excess' of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it" (Stoler qtd. in Foucault 52). She follows the doctrine that the more "degenerates" and "abnormals" who were eliminated, the more the lives of those who spoke out against them would be stronger, more vigorous, and improved (Stoler 85).
On the other hand, Irene's imperfect understanding of the slogan "kill in order to live" makes her dangerous enough that she must be consigned to the lowest most exploited status of the labour force. The submission that she practices in not speaking out about what she sees— even if she is doing it to be able to help in any capacity—reduces her to a state of subjugation similar to that of her docile charges
By showing only female inmates and caregivers, Tales emphasizes the inferiorized status necessarily assigned to the female gender in any theory of biopolitics, concerned as it is with the right to reproduce.8 This is not to say that it makes gender the only issue, as Blanche's murder of the old man shows that categories of "unfit" were not restricted to women. Irene, as the representative of the passive overworked caregiver, is realistically balanced by the superior Nurse Blanche Mains, who enforces the persecution of the others in order to keep her job. Having a woman presiding over the torture only reinforces the coercive nature of a system that turns the strong against the weak.
Tales from the Hospital succeeds as a piece of theatre that uses staging techniques, as well as decentred narration and physical gests, to expose oppressive relations. It forces us to recognize that we share in those ideologies that mask our right to kill in the name of our right to live. While it may be retelling stories about the era when the eugenics law was on the books, the practices it reveals are still with us, even if the law is not. The stage practices have revealed the ongoing social processes to us, but how we connect this transformative kind of theatre to a reconceiving and reforming of actual social practices is up to us.
NOTES
1. The cast of Tales from the Hospital was composed of Michelle Morros (Girl), Linda Grass (Nurse), Liz Allison (Irene), and Angela Flatekval (Patient). This group, with the exception of Michelle Morros, had worked with Trevor before in Unconscious Collective productions. Although this was the first in the series of monologues, there had been other productions with strong women's roles written by Trevor since the formation of the company in 1995. According to Trevor, the company works very closely together at all times, and the sense of ownership by cast members of both the individual pieces and the whole production is very high. Trevor encourages the actors to develop their own voices within and, in this case, insisted that they stage manage each other's pieces. He followed up Tales from the Hospital with The Watermelon Girls, a play about unwed mothers, which premiered in May 2000 at the Arts Barns. He won an Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for best new script for The Watermelon Girls.
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2. The most publicized case was Leilani Muirer, a young victim who made history when she won her suit against the government in 1996. As it turned out, she was one of thousands of unwanted young girls supposedly of below average intelligence who were slated for sterilization as "unfit for parenthood."
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3. Schmidt himself had grown up with more than a passing acquaintance with mental institutions as revealed in his
latest play, Treatment, which premièred May 200l. He has made it public that much of the material he used was
based on his mother's experiences when she was hospitalized in 1959. While various forms of war, murder, population
control, and selective breeding were in place around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the province of Alberta was the only jurisdiction in the British Empire to pass a Protection of Life, Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928—almost a direct implementation of the ideology of justified killing in order to improve the life of others. Section 5 especially refers to the "multiplication of the evil by the transmission of the disability to the progeny." Operated by an appointed board of two medical and two lay people who made the final decision for every single operation, this board succeeded in sterilizing over 2800 people before the law was repealed in 1973. Documents now show that many of them were not mentally disabled and that the sterilizing criteria to prevent the "transmission of evil," according to a later commissioned report (Protection of Life, Sterilization, Law Reform Commission of Canada, Working Paper 25, Francis C. Muldoon, Q.C. Chairman) included: St. Vitus' Dance, epilepsy, pauperism, alcoholism, feeblemindedness, and promiscuity (qtd. in "Letter from Betty Lambert to Bill Glassco," ts. 15 April, 1983, Lambert Archives, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia).
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4. Geis, Deborah R., Postmodern Theatric[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1996) 30, 33. I am indebted to her redefinition of the postmodern monologue as being able to go beyond traditional dialogic stage practices by introducing many narrative devices.
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5. Eagleton, Terry, "Brecht and Rhetoric." New Literary History 16.3 (Spring 1985): 634. The relationship he makes between Rhetoric and the Gest is applicable to this situation; he argues that Brechtian theatre deconstructs "social processes into rhetoric, which is to say reveals them as social practices. Rhetoric here means grasping language and action in the context of the politico-discursive conditions inscribed within them, and Brecht's term for this is Gest." (His emphasis.)
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6. In an interview, Schmidt said that he cast Michelle Morros as the Girl because he wanted audiences to be aware that being beautiful was no protection against sterilization. He also wanted to suggest that she might have been native, since a very high proportion of sterilizations were practiced on native women. Other casting was built around available performers from the Unconscious Collective. As my comments indicate, they were carefully chosen to evoke certain stereotypes.
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7. See endnote 3. Betty Lambert, in a letter to Bill Glassco (15 April, 1983, ts, Lambert Archives, Simon Fraser
University, British Colombia). Lambert, who was doing research for Jennie's Story, was working with the statistics released by the commission formed in 1973 to investigate the abuses. The victims fell very much into inferiorized gendered and racialized groups. Of the patients actually sterilized up to 1971, 64.7% were female. There were also inordinate discrepancies between the number of domestic sterilizations rather than professional, Roman and Greek Catholics rather than Protestants, and Indians and Metis rather than Caucasians (3.4%of population, 25.7% of those sterilized).
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8. Jimenez, Marina, "Alberta sterilizations victims also used as guinea pigs," National Post 28 Oct. 1998: A1. The article describes Muirer and the thousands like her, unwanted young girls supposedly of below average intelligence who were slated for sterilization as "unfit for parenthood." The same edition had several articles covering many details of the ongoing trials against the Albertan government.
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WORKS CITED
Brecht, B. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and Trans. John Willett. London: 1964.
Eagleton, Terry. "Brecht and Rhetoric." New Literary History 16.3 (1985): 633-638.
Foucault, Michel. "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme." Les Temps Modernes (Feb. 1991): 37-61.
Geis, Deborah. Postmodern Theatric[k]s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
Jimenez, Marina. "Albertan Sterilization Victims Also Used As Guinea Pigs." National Post 28 Oct. 1998: A1.
Lambert, Betty. "Letter to Bill Glassco," ts. April 15,1983. Lambert Archives. Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.
Schmidt, Trevor. Tales from the Hospital. ms. 1998.
—. Tales from the Hospital in Staging Alternative Albertas: Experimental Drama in Edmonton. Eds. Patricia Demers and Rosalind Kerr. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Forthcoming 2002.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke U P, 1995.
Worthen, William. "Political Theatre: Staging the Spectator." Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre. Berkely: U of California P, 1992. 143-193.