REID GILBERT
Following Erving Goffman's suggestion that "markers and regulators" run across any "strip of discourse" forming a "track" to regulate focus, the paper discusses frames-both in scene and language-that demarcate icons of gender. Set, deixis and the semiotic segmentation of text control the audience's reception, both to establish traditional images of the male and female (and of sexual relationships) and to deconstruct these images. The result is to build scenography which urges the consideration of gender issues-indeed, to make set, acting technique and costume synecdochal-so that theatrical frames not only contain action but themselves become part of the cultural coding of gender and power. In this context, costume, tears, dreams, movement and language become keys to definition and, when employed to resist or subvert, become overt or coterie signs of redefinition.
Erving Gofftnan estime que les "marqueurs" et les "régulateurs" répartis dans le discours forment une trame qui oriente le thème. Dans le présent article, l'auteur examine les paramètres qui délimitent les représentations du genre, tant du point de vue de la scène que de la langue. Le décor, la déixis et la segmentation sémiotique du texte orientent les attentes de l'auditoire afin d'établir les images traditionnelles du masculin et du féminin (et des rapports sexuels) tout en déconstruisant ces images. L'objectif est de concevoir une scénographie qui prenne le genre en considération afin que le décor, le jeu théâtral et les costumes soient des synecdoques. Dans ce contexte, le costume, les larmes, les rêves, le mouvement et le dialogue sont des clés en vue d'une définition: utilisés pour résister ou pour subvertir, ils se transforment en déclaration codée et repensée.
In Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman outlines a model for the assessment of interplay within a theatrical world. He posits a central "track" in which "activity is framed in a particular way."1 Framing devices within this channel serve to establish the events of the action, to situate the play in time and space, to furnish characterization and so forth. He then sees a second (and one supposes a third or fourth) track filled with action which is "out of frame" and which the audience must "disattend," (202) but by which, of course, it is affected. Using Bateson's term,2 Goffman suggests that "markers and regulators" run across any "strip of discourse" forming a "track" to regulate focus. These "regulators"3 act as directional signs, not unlike punctuation marks in fiction, to link the various central strips and in the process create a "back channel,"4 the heard but ignored overlaps or simultaneous utterance of spoken communication. Taken all together, these strips and regulating tracks and their "disattended" "back channels" form a complex, overlapping field which supports (and prompts) received meaning for the spectator.5 Naturally different spectators perceive different elements of this field, such that the total effect of any play differs from viewer to viewer (or, to some extent, from group to group of viewers). The subject-position of each viewer becomes significant in her viewing; it also renders the attempt at any analytical generalization extremely problematic. Nonetheless, it may be possible to suggest certain signifiers, indices and ritual actions as theoretical keys to iconographic recognition.
Among these regulators are theatrical signifiers like costume, set design and body movements (such as crying, swaggering, cringing, thrusting), literary signifiers such as coterie language, and signs which are formed in both the theatrical and literary fields such as narrated or acted out dreams and the soliloquy. Together the interplay among such strips and tracks forms the iconic representations that constitute the theatrical and at their intersections appear to prompt particular responses; these responses likely differ in magnitude (but not in kind) depending on the subject matter (or implicit subject matter) of the play.
Gender identity6 seems particularly susceptible to a complex semiology and to an array of "out of frame" channels and "back channels" overlaid upon its heavily iconic surface track. The frames in which a play places its men and women, then, serve to establish sexual identity, to comment upon it, and often to deconstruct it. When characters vary from gender norms, the thematic discussion is intensified. In an effort to control and normalize, or to celebrate variation from the norm, framing devices become more vivid. For those who share their meaning, "out-of-frame" comments and intertexts become more emphatic. Language, itself, takes on regulating significance, creating what Umberto Eco calls a "semiotic enclave" in which "a new code used by one person/writer is understandable to only a limited audience ...[creating an] idiolect"7 which pulls resonances from "out-of-frame" into the main track but only for certain listeners: in such plays the "back channel" fairly hums.
In a number of Canadian plays, a discussion of gender identity runs parallel to other thematic and narratological concerns but appears to be the real issue behind the play. Bearing in mind the very real restraints on performance criticism and reception theory, it is possible to suggest provisional analyses of plays such as Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, Tremblay's Hosanna, Pollock's Blood Relations, Jee's Powder Blue Chevy, Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, Dubois' Being at Home with Claude and the Bloo Lips/Split Britches collaboration, Belle Reprieve, which, while not a Canadian play, functions in my argument as a powerful framing device. The problem in analyzing such plays in terms of the regulators which frame iconography-except for markers embedded in the language itself-is the problem for all performative criticism: one can comment knowledgeably only upon plays one has seen; stage directions can only be taken as possible indicators of action and, therefore, only as guideposts to iconic regulation; assumptions based on indices of the body depend on the particular actors in each performance; assumptions about audience reaction are conditioned by the subject position of the critic. Discussing a range of plays (with male and female, hetero- and homosexual characters) intensifies the problem of analyzing reception. In these plays, however, a set of framing devices appears remarkably consistent, offering a perspective from which to view the iconography of gender.
Gender appears to be framed to a large degree by costume and stance.8 Although spectators will react differently to presented body language, stock postures of gender in realistic plays likely trigger one of a set of culturally established responses.9 John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes,10 for example, displays a set of highly clichéic gender icons, but they seem still to express variations of male identity crisis. The film version of the play,11 by employing a naturalistic setting, by stressing realist performance as the narrative develops, and by slanting the political comment more toward social documentary and less toward sexual didactic, eventually reduces the stylization of these icons from that suggested in the stage directions in the play, but presents similar emblems.
At its opening, the film accurately captures the iconic images suggested in the stage directions. Here we are introduced to types of gender: the young Smitty-semiotically identified by his Everyman name and very precisely described by Herbert as a mixture of the boy next door and the future executive (an image perfectly captured by Wendall Burton in the film)---confronts his need for friendship in a nightmare world where the options are repugnant. Despite the guard's claim that "names don't mean a damned thing in here" (92),12 the names do convey the choices. So do costumes and body postures: the guard goes on to say that "Actions mean everything" (92).
Rocky, in his jeans, "stretched on his bed like a prince at rest" (9) is, in the film, a complex double icon of the tough male and the effeminate hustler, his carefully coiffed hair, perfectly arched eyebrows and somewhat feline postures contradicting his hard body, assured voice and strut. Once beaten by Smitty in the shower room which previously (ironically) signified forced and illicit sex, Rocky is displayed in a classic image of crucifixion, his naked body bent at the knee, his arms outstretched, his head turned to the side. His head, however, abuts a toilet: this is an inverted crucifixion not of Smitty's saviour but of the devil who teaches him the knowledge of evil that operates within the prison. Immobile, he is also a rather small and delicate boy. The social comment is clear, but so are the mixed frames around gender. In this world, the appearance of masculinity counts, but under its trappings are confused youths who actually seek love and who, in repose (or death), cannot maintain the indices that regulate their self-conscious identities.
Queenie, who "can't feel sexy in rags" (22) camps about, the tall body of Michael Greer aggressively inscribed under the indices of hair curlers and the cliché mugging of a drag queen to contradict the initial male sign. By accepting traditional signs of the woman and exaggerating them, Queenie exemplifies (and parodies) the prison's strict codes of the male and female to exist entirely as icon and, therefore, to be free. In the film's burlesque scene, Michael Greer enters from a window up above the stage floor, lit by a spot and at the top of the long ladder which he descends. Shot almost entirely from below, Queenie is elevated in status and in physical size and also inscribed under the sign of the "star." Her flamboyant bump and grind drowns out Mona's recitation of Sonnet 29; but Mona has already signified that her contribution is to be discounted by her costume-a drab, grey habit whose hood obscures her face. For some spectators in the auditorium, the costume and the poem by Shakespeare may suggest Portia, raising another interesting comment on male and female roles and one which might threaten the stage audience's view of women were they to consider it; but their analysis is more immediate: the recitation signals non-male interests-poetry, intellectuality and (most important) romantic love-and it cannot be allowed in this world. Queenie's strip, on the other hand, supports entirely a view of woman as object of the gaze and is, therefore, welcome. The auditory channel becomes extremely complicated at the conclusion of this scene. Queenie's song rises above the foot stomping and catcalls of the men which, in turn, drown out Mona's poem. Nonetheless, each is heard and each resonates, pulling the viewer back and forth among channels, under- and overcoding the visual icons of gender. The soundscape becomes even more dense as guards and the warden threaten Queenie and order her taken to "the hole" (conflating a "previous" strip tease mentioned in the play and the Christmas pageant into one event). Again, the film ends its scene in a comment upon the authoritarian penal system, but for many viewers, the play's gender debate still echoes among the various strands of sound.
It is around the character of Mona that the gender debate centres. It is not surprising, then, that this character is backgrounded through much of the film, and used in the conclusion to alter the theme, reducing the sexual comment. In the film, Mona (whose name suggests the enigmatic Mona Lisa, moans of pain following gang rape and sexual moans) hides in foetal position in the corners, rather than leaning "against the wall of bars" (9), even more passive and part of the architecture of imprisonment than the play requests. Neil Carson argues that Mona (in the play) has a sufficiently strong "sense of identity" to separate what he appears to be-the pathetic figure Queenie derides-from what he really is. Mona realizes that to accept Smitty's advance would be "to accept Smitty's image of him-the 'sight' of him that Smitty 'throws back.' Rather than surrender his conception of himself, Mona prefers to suffer."13 To survive, Mona "separates" (89): in diction, in posture, in costume, and in stage space as well as in metaphoric (literary) terms.14 In the first production in New York in 1967, Mona's position as outsider was intensified by casting a black actor in the part.15 Audience reaction to the actor's colour would undercode reaction to the character's homosexuality, creating a complex semiosis and inviting a wide variety of response. In the film, where Mona's position as icon of submissive and assaulted woman is underplayed, the actor's small stature signifies his social position, as inferior to the taller Queenie. Here the iconographic framing is less complex, arguably because the theme is less controversial than the original. Once again, it appears that issues of gender identity evoke more complex iconography than do other issues.
At the play's conclusion, Smitty tries to break through the barriers to feeling created by these images of maleness, to enter the world to which Mona says he belongs, "the world I dream in" (89). By admitting that "I made the pass . . ." (94) he opens himself to the "derisi[ve] laughter (94) of his cell mates who cannot accept man-to-man friendship because it would dismantle their elaborate social structure and empower the female. If the stage directions are followed, the opening posture of Mona is recalled as Smitty "contorts in pain . . . spread-eagled across the upstage bars" (96), making his choice. As "he rises slowly out of the hunched position to full height. . . His face seems to be carved of stone, the mouth narrow and cruel and grim, the eyes corresponding slits of hatred. He speaks in a hoarse, ugly whisper" (96). Such body language, by restoring the icon of the tall, hard male, announces that he will not break through into any new sense of himself; instead, he has learned a new identity by accepting the direct link between identity and power. Again, audience response will vary: for some his decision is the necessary one for a heterosexual male; for others, his refusal of love will be painfully familiar. For all, the icon he chooses is known and it is one which frames much response to men in North American society. Kym Bird points out that Linda Griffith fails to transform it in The Darling Family, where "the inequality between 'She' and 'He' is sustained by his social supremacy and her preoccupation with what he wants and how he feels ... [creating] an ending which equates adult sexuality ... with heterosexuality and sentimentalizes the unequal relations between the sensitive woman and the man whose practicality ultimately holds sway. The ideology of heterosexual romance still has her begging him for love, still ,, has 'She' subjected to 'He'.16 Mona unintentionally evokes such traditional female submission in his choice of Sonnet 29 for the pageant. Drowned out by derision, his dream of "thy sweet love" whispers in a secondary channel some poetic resolution to loneliness, but by continuing "[him]self almost despising" (90) Mona maintains the image of "She" as incomplete without "He."
Refusing any inscription as "She," Smitty limits his subjection by becoming "Baldy's boy," retaining his masculine image by becoming the boyfriend of the most powerful prisoner. The sexual role he will play for Baldy is forgiven by their high status: to be subservient to Baldy is still to be more male than Rocky, and, of course, much more than Mona. Smitty recognizes that his choice is destructive to self, but he also recognizes that it is demanded of him in this microcosm of a phallocentric world; hence, he threatens not only his cell mates, but the audience and its belief system: "I'm going to pay them back. I'll pay you all back" (96). He has entered the dream (or nightmare) world of the prison, rejecting Mona's invitation to become a phantasm in his dream world. Were he to accept Mona's offer of friendship, he would shatter his own roster of male signifiers-and his view of the significance of being male. He cannot enter Mona's world unless he accepts the indices it would require of him (and the resulting loss of power within the institution) but he also cannot enter it because he cannot picture himself within its framing signs. He is convinced that to enter this world would be to inherit a set of womanly attributes like those displayed as cautionary talismans by Queenie. He chooses to adopt the signs previously employed by Rocky, even though he sees them as false. To maintain a more healthy friendship with Mona/Jan would require not that he enter her dream, but that she leave it and, together, they leave the enveloping frame of the larger prison nightmare to exist as two male lovers free of ender stereotyping. Neither has the courage to join Hosanna and Cuirette 17 in that bold move, and the overpowering central frame of the prison set, the drab colours, the uniforms, the tattoos, and the drag also refuse to picture it. Indeed, in the film, by giving the crucial line, "I made the pass," to Mona rather than to Smitty, and rendering Smitty an accidental victim, the possibility of leaving the dream is sidestepped. Here, the documentary images of an actual prison setting frame symbols of entrapment, injustice and victimization but defuse radical restatements of gender. For Mona to attempt to take on Smitty's punishment and shame is to continue to operate within her identity as bruised woman, not to escape its formative signs; indeed, as Queenie says in the film's final line: "If you weren't such a martyr I could like you."
In Kiss of the Spider Woman,18 a similar, misogynistic dream permeates the entire action, luring the spectator into a culturally induced typology (and mythology) of gender so that the final moment of tenderness occurs completely within the frames of gender politics. Molina desires a submissive role as female, asks Valentin to "do what you want with me, because that's what I want" (907), and is, ultimately, destroyed for daring to love a real man. But in leaving the prison, Molina never leaves his dream. He can wear her clothes and spin her tales, but he cannot become the black widow spider; the man clothed in patriarchal indices (even when a prisoner and beaten) can never be killed by a transvestite.
The dream as psychic space in which sexual identity can be iterated or altered also serves to frame Lizzie's self identity in Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations.19 Lizzie's final challenge to the audience echoes Smitty's, though the iconography is reversed. The figure of the masculine woman, with her "jowly jaw" (17) and scabbed knees (36) is intensified with the presence of a lesbian lover, and contradicted by her "ladylike" manners and agility in the tea ritual. Lizzie is tormented by the besetting question, "Did you do it, Lizzie? Lizzie, did you?" Her final answer, "You did," directed at the audience, seems to suggest that the spectators' expectations of what a girl should be and what a woman might be capable of doing-however transferred to the stereotype of the weak but domineering father, the selfish and controlling mother or the male jury-is largely responsible for the ax murders or, at least, for the myth of Lizzie Borden which frames feminine behaviour. Lizzie's dreams, which are beautifully expressed in soliloquy, display the psychological stress in which she is placed by social expectations and the restrictions on her sexuality.
Goffman discusses two kinds of soliloquy: "oratory and musings," as well as "direct (or extradramatic) address" to the audience (231). All three styles of talking to the house affect frame and express aspects of self-identity. In the direct address, "a character steps slightly out of frame, often in the direction of the stage line, and addresses a few remarks to the audience" (231) often giving stage directions. Such asides are important in metadrama; in Blood Relations they are crucial to the audience's understanding of the multiple playing areas, the double identity of the Actress/Lizzie and the two points in time in which the action occurs. The soliloquy proper (whether musings aloud which do not rend the main narratological frame, or a formal oration which breaks reality but substitutes a convention which the audience will "attend"), allows a character to collapse various secondary tracks into the main track-often in literary terms by a dense concentration of images from patterns throughout the play. In Blood Relations images of blood, birds, cows, horses, circularity, heat, and imprisonment converge in the carousel speech in which Lizzie enunciates her dream and brings the two time lines, the deaths of the birds and the parents, and her cry for recognition as a woman into the main action.
In the Vancouver Arts Club production,20 two acting spaces helped to frame Lizzie's split identity. Movement from the kitchen set with its signs of domesticity and servitude to the living room underlined Lizzie's movement from maid to daughter, from girl to chatelaine (within her daydream of living "up on the hill in a corner house" [28]). Movement outside (and, indeed, off stage in the Vancouver production) took Lizzie to the world of her birds which are metonymic of many strands of her multiple identities. Movement upstairs, by means of an imposing staircase stage centre at the Arts Club, suggested her escape from the prison of the kitchen and parlour but led, of course, to the nightmare world where (allegedly) she murders. It also served to elevate Lizzie's status in a manner reminiscent of Queenie's positioning in the film of Fortune and Men's Eyes. Lizzie gained power from isolation and elevation within the proscenium frame as she gained power from the established iconography of the star ascending a central stair. Again, the costume and posture of a traditional gender identity were contradicted by a physical framing within set and by body movement. The screeching sound effect called for in the directions would heighten audience attention to this climactic scene, pulling spectators back to the central track but overlaying it with a powerful auditory second track. It is, of course, in the sound of this track-a purely theatrical sign-that the play makes its points about frustration, death, and liberation. It is also in this horrible sound that spectators' physical responses miffor Lizzie's psychological pain, creating a theatrical synthesis between actor and spectator which heightens audience identification with Lizzie and foreshadows collective guilt.
In Wen Jee's Powder Blue Chevy, a co-production of The Firehall Theatre and Tamahnous Theatre in Vancouver, 21 the set immediately presented the realities of life for the immigrant Chinese woman whose marriage has been arranged in a brief, introductory scene. She was shown to the audience in traditional signs of the female: she wore a 1960s boucle suit and pillbox hat, white gloves and purse. She was shown at a café table in Hong Kong which later becomes the table in her Canadian kitchen-her only legitimate space and the sum of her expected role. After marriage, a second space was lit for her to occupy-indeed, her new husband insisted that she occupy it immediately: a large bed, forward, stage left. In this bed the young husband demands "his rights," reminding her of her "duty." For her, the bed represents submission and pain. In the most evocative business in this production, the young wife wiggled out from under her husband who continued his inexperienced and callous thrusting in the bed. Already inscribed as rapist, he now becomes a kinesic (and pathetic) sign of the male driven to perform and afraid, as an earlier scene makes clear, that he might not "measure up" to the larger Caucasian men who now surround him, a concern vividly discussed in Hwang's M. Butterfly-where it is again intensified by the presence of a transvestite and alluded to from a female point of view in Griffith's A Game of Inches.
This scene is an important example of differing response among spectators to polyvalent signs. Female viewers may well respond more to the signifiers of rape; men to the signs of urgency and performance. It is certainly possible that many spectators will register some signification from both subject-positions.22 The design of the play, however, encourages the audience to respond to the woman's position by carefully framing her with a series of gender inscriptions. She is spatially framed, centre stage and alone, where she dances, conveying pain, hate, rebellion but-more poignantly-her own personal and sexual desire, a desire which has little to do with the roles set for her by Chinese culture and defined by the bed. She is framed also by a set of auditive signs in the music to which she dances, music which conveys her loneliness and longing but also separates her from the world of the bed with its creaks and sexual cries. She is framed also by the aesthetic signs of the dance with its connotations of grace and discipline, physicality and romance. She is, most important, framed by the behavioural sign of the play's title.23 Stage right, the front seat of a Powder Blue Chevy suggested freedom, power in the New World and-since it is owned by another young Chinese-Canadian for whom she develops a constrained love-romance and desire quite dissimilar from her nightly humiliation. It is clearly impossible for this woman, with her sense of who she is or may be, to consummate her love for her friend: adultery in a car is unthinkable. She bursts into tears, but no other action is possible.
Tears are multicoded signs of lack of power, pain and frustration, but also of will-to-power and change; they are always powerful on stage because they involve the spectators directly, sympathetically and empathetically-that is, in and "out of frame"-and because they intermittently sob over dialogue, intensifying the "back channel" and expanding the semiotic soundscape in a manner similar to the screeching in Blood Relations.
Through her crying, the wife comes to a decision: in a climactic speech, she calmly states that her husband is never to hit her again, and that she will no longer submit to marital rape. But by doing so, she redefines herself in her own mind, in his, and in the mind of her daughter, as "hard" and unloving. In order to gain control of herself, she imprisons herself in a repressed identity as restricting as the social identity she rejects. Her sense of self comes into conflict with culturally induced norms of gender identity, norms which are identified in the production by theatrical frames of costume, set, protocol, ritual action, acted out dream and tears. Her triumph as a woman is asserted thematically against the theatrical devices which imprison her in the central track while providing her escape in secondary tracks. Women in the audience (and many men) may well attend the pain of the "back channel," the pain expressed in essentially non-narratological signs of dance, posture and tears.
For older Chinese-Canadian spectators, the secondary channels must be powerful. The pain of this immigrant's sexual loneliness may be intensified by the shells of the set-within-a-set whose outer frame announces a bucolic British Columbian outdoor scene with its promise of land and freedom while the major, inner set signifies the poverty and hard work which faced new arrivals. The innermost sets-the bed, the empty space and the Chevy-mirror these icons of freedom and submission, overlapping them with conventional signs of the male and female, of phallic power and domestic acquiescence. It is these signs which frame the female protagonist's real psychological identity and establish her as more complicated than her initial coding in simplistic gender icons suggests. Equally, the two male characters-protagonist and antagonist-are also developed by undercodings and resonances in the "back channel": one is trapped in the prison of cliché male signifiers which many in the audience might feel to be unsatisfying and false; the other is shown as greater than the sum of his images of self. They are both, however, still trapped by these signs, by societal expectation, by cultural perceptions of gender and self identity.
This entrapment is eloquently framed in every semiotic field by the set, cross-dressing, body movements,speech patterns, stage business, and parody, of a co-production of Split Britches Company (New York) and Bloo Lips (London)-Belle Reprieve. This camp production reinvents Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire,directly confronting traditional representations, and suggesting a new construction of gender. It is a play,however, which relies entirely on accepted icons of gender to question the validity of such generalizations.
In the production at the Alice B. Theatre in Seattle24 the notion of gender as a function of costume and stance was visually introduced. The characters were brought onto stage by Mitch inside huge packing boxes: in effect, various possibilities of gender were delivered to the audience, establishing the stage as an arena for discussion and prompting the debate which both the Williams play and the highly metadramatic new structure invite. Set played a direct role by refusing any suspension of disbelief and by displaying, one after another, icons which the North American audience has learned to associate with sexual identity. The shipping crates which transported these variants of gender into reality turned on their ends to become steamer trunks. From inside them were taken costumes, props, and-when Stanley thrust his hands inside-female blood. Wings and curtains marked off rooms of the housethe place of the women from which Stanley is barred. Stella and Blanche were seen in the bathroom, preparing themselves for the male gaze: the lesbian actor-who is the "real" woman-quite naturally arranging her easy good looks, while the transvestite woman manqué worked feverishly to look glamorous, layering vestimentary sign upon sign. Indeed, in a central scene, a humiliated Blanche, reduced to leotard and her male body not only retreated into the bathtub but descended out of view inside it to emerge in yet another costume change, an incredible creation of tulle and net which captured the icons of the woman in her bath and of the ballerina. Meanwhile, Stanley, also humiliated and dirty, splashed water in his face, disdaining the bath and all that it represents. Hanging above the bathtub, Mitch, in a tutu and strumming a ukulele, was revealed behind a scrim, an outrageous Cupid who was, in all senses of the word, a fairy. The sum of these people was displayed by signs and positioning; they do not exist beyond their iconic rendering.
The boxed arrival of the players also foregrounds the idea of the prison both as the delineating milieu in which to learn sexual self-image and as the ghetto into which deviates are placed. Again, an iconography of imprisonment -as Foucault points out-parallels an iconography of gender, the one establishing and relying on the other.
The dialogue immediately establishes that those who question traditional roles belong to a nether world: Mitch states that the contents of the boxes are "what is left of a dream at 4:30 in the morning,"25 and Blanche when she emerges insists that she has a right to be here, displaying the British Passport of the male actor (named Betty Bourne) who is playing her in drag, a document in which the Queen-her title itself a pun with polysemic signification-not only "requests" but "requires" that Blanche/Betty be "afforded ... such assistance and protection as may be necessary." It is immediately clear that this Blanche, even more than Williams's character, will need both assistance and protection: she is the double icon of fluffy womanhood and of the transvestite: both despised characters who, Kate Millet suggested long ago in Sexual Politics,26 are defined by the loathing and fear with which men view them. That she is best contained within a wooden crate is telling; that she can emerge from prison onto the larger frame of the stage underscores the role of drama to project hidden desire into iconic identity,27 if not true reality. That she is the product of dreams and is, herself, locked in one, underlines the central role of dreams as vehicles for personal identity and as escapes from compliance. Whether Blanche has a right to invade the world of the audience's beliefs28 and to render concrete the world of her dreams and fantasies29 is the substance of the discourse as it is of Mona and Stanley's dialogue or Molina's recitation of his imaginary world. It is a question which arises whenever transvestite, transsexual or highly effeminate male characters appear. As has been mentioned, Tremblay's Hosanna manages to move toward a positive sexual identification, but only when her fantasy world rejects her. His Manon/Sandra remains more painfully caught between the two worlds, trapped by her Roman Catholic doxology. Queenie in Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes dares to flaunt herself, but the belief structure of the prison world into which she swishes is already at a remove from the dominant creed of most audiences. Like Blanche, Mona, in Fortune and Men's Eyes, cannot finally annunciate her fantasies to a world she finds overwhelmingly hostile except in language itself as coded as that of Shakespeare's sonnets. Count Vallier in Bouchard's Lilies: or the Revival of a Romantic Drama realizes his fantasy only in the moment of a merging of the real and imaginary, as-in a more realistic manner-LUI of Dubois' Being at Home with Claude escapes his. The same question is, of course, also asked of non-effeminate homosexual males and of heterosexual people, as it is, for example, mutely posed by the framed bed throughout Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. It is also asked of female characters who dare to articulate their dreams and nightmares or to question the borders of reality and fantasy: "She" in Griffith's The Darling Family, Lizzie in Pollock's Blood Relations, Clark's eponymous Moo.
If the womanly man is a well known icon, she/he seems rarely to threaten the larger identity, probably because the effeminate man is always presented as helpless or as a self-buffooning drag queen who, it is implied, will take off the makeup and resume a "normal" life after the show. The old drag tradition of pulling off the wig at the end of the travesty is a startling example of what seems to be frame breaking, but is more likely, and more insidiously, an assurance that theatrical illusion is ultimately powerless in a gesture that supports the general identity of the audience by exposing the artifice by which the theatrical dream was supported. More threatening to convention, to return to Belle Reprieve, is the lesbian body which contains the persona of Stanley.
The muscular Peggy Shaw perfectly captures and, therefore, explodes the images of maleness which sum up Stanley, attract Stella (a caricature Marilyn Monroe played by an actress whom the audience knows to be lesbian), and both frighten and attract Mitch, the figure of the weak but decent man who, in this production, is meant to be straight but displays the cliché body movements and pouts of the effeminate homosexual.
In a moving scene, Stella and Stanley perform an erotic verbal and physical pas de deux in front of a curtain, closer to the audience's domain than the main playing area and outside the fictive world of Williams's characters, Stella is at once passive and writhing, her blond hair and black slip proclaiming her as manipulated and manipulating woman and, simultaneously, as false. Stanley, awkward and driven, is stripped to the waist and on his knees in front of the image of the woman which controls him. Seen directly from behind, Stanley's back maintains the illusion, but from the sides of the auditorium, or as he turns, the audience glimpses female breasts, breaking the effect so carefully framed by an elaborate set of movie allusions, costume clues and proxemic coding: this is, after all, a female Stanley and her need is for another woman. The audience struggles to remain in the central track, but quick, repeated ruptures in the frame snap the illusion, pull in significances from various secondary frames, restore the illusion, now altered and extended, only to snap it again. Because these switches in perception are so rapid and so short lived, they merely overlap upon the dominant illusion buttressed by the intertexts; their power lies more in the "back channel" than in any identifiable track.
Metadrama relies on a resonance in the "back channel" in a way the realist theatre does not. The "horizon of expectation" of the audience, however, is still most often conditioned by the predominance of realistic theatre, especially in North America. Peggy Shaw30 notes that this scene consistently causes embarrassment in the audience. The company explains this phenomenon in political terms, in the argument that we are not accustomed to viewing female sexuality except as responsive to male power or displayed for male gratification. There is also, I think, a theatrical explanation which complements the feminist one: it may be that the awkward reaction is also due to the complex semiotics of the scene and its position within the larger drama. The company has spent so much energy establishing the identities of the characters-and especially of Stanley and Blanche-that this set of breaks within a set piece removed from the main plot is almost more than the audience can assimilate, especially as it is not comic. When Betty Bourne breaks the illusion in a complementary scene by stopping a ridiculous dance of the actors dressed as Japanese paper lanterns to despair that she wants a "real play; What's wrong with a beginning a middle and an end?", the whole situation is so absurd that laughter forgives the metadramatic rupture, especially as Betty is voicing the audience's own frustration. Indeed, Betty so easily slides in and out of reality throughout the play, parodying herself, that the audience is cued to respond quite differently here than it does in the intensely erotic and political comment of the women's apron scene. Betty goes on to wail that her mother "wants me to play Romeo before it's too late," a line which voices the jaded wit of one who lives outside the norm and the pathos of a man who wants desperately to fulfil the role he believes his mother might have dreamt for him: to be a romantic hero full of impulse, braggadocio and tenderness. It also highlights, in this metadramatic deconstruction, the pointlessness of seeking to play a hero borrowed from a differing construction of gender, family values and human love. In a theatrical context, it raises the irony of the actor-as-himself, aware that he has failed some standard of male performance by appropriating the assigned iconography of the female rather than impersonating a male hero and the simultaneous realization (since the performance can start and stop and roles can be changed), that this iconography is, itself, an arbitrary frame to identity and, therefore, false. When the other actors offer her the chance to live out this aspiration, removing her lantern costume and leaving her without the protection of signifying clothing and confronted with the real potential violence of Stanley and of her situation-as woman, as drag queen, as man, and as actor suddenly on stage without a script-she shies away, stunned by her own recognition that she-in fact, he-has moved entirely out of theatrical illusion, and must confront himself.
The image of the male-as-Stanley is a potent icon in North American cinema, television and theatre. In plays with gay male characters, especially when played before gay male audiences, it can become a particularly coded icon, displaying a complex set of parody, inverted drag, self-repudiation, self-love, negative political comment, positive political comment, tribalism or longing, depending on the degree to which a spectator "reads" the undercodings or "hears" the "back channel." It is an index framed by costume-particularly leather, jeans, boots and tee-shirt-by gait and posture, by speech pattern. It is these indices which frame the gender discourse of a number of Canadian plays dealing with gay male characters.
In Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love,31 the set carefully marks off playing areas which also represent possible identities for the hetero- and homosexual characters of the play. In the centre, a huge bed dominates the visual semiosis. It is the world of the masochistic prostitute, Benita, and it offers a fantasy identity to any who enters it. For Candy it allows a lesbian experiment, and an apparently successful heterosexual coupling which collapses in her betrayal. For Kane it represents a chance for sexual expression with David under the cloak of alcohol and drugs and the normalizing presence of a woman who, he is assured, was his actual partner. For the psychopath Bernie, it allows proximity to his best friend, David, whom, in his moment of crisis, he admits to love, but whom he can approach intimately only when drunk and supposedly by accident in his sleep, "throwing [his] arm over [David's] shoulder every five minutes and dig[ging his] erection into the small of [David's] back" (17). The bed takes on thematic and, even, mystical significance, as does the figure of the prostitute as goddess of the perverse, as outsider dressed in black lingerie and garter belt, so complete in her own identity that she exists as icon rather than as human. By prompting the "secondary score" (Production Note) of whispered fragments which forms a constant acoustic "back channel," she directs the positive and negative explorations of sexual identity (with resonances which will, of course, differ from hearer to hearer), finally prompting David's climactic admission to both his friend, Candy, and his boyfriend, Kane: "I love you." The action is moved from the vortex of the bed to the domestic scene of David and Candy's apartment and it is within this set frame that the characters allow themselves to love. This articulation of a real emotion releases David from a false identity as "professional faggot" (64) to become simply a man who loves. No longer can he hide behind glib, gay jokes and gender reversals:
David: You must be Rhonda
Robert: Robert.32
No longer can he hide behind simple descriptions of his sexual practices"You tell this guy I take it in the face?" (55)-rather than honest descriptions of himself. No longer can he define himself exclusively by membership in a homosexual community:
David: So--Candy tells me you're a lesbian.
Jerri: That's right.
David: I'm queer myself...(Pause) Well, that seems to have exhausted that subject.
An urban family is formed, but not one with artificial "mothers" and "old men" like the prison family of Fortune and Men's Eyes (though here, too, an "idiolect" speaks to many gay audience members). This family more resembles the affirmative bonding of Ira and Harry at the conclusion of John Palmer's A Day at the Beach or the new family which has rejected the icon of man-as-Elvis in Joan Macleod's Toronto, Mississippi. Indeed, the death of Bernie, who kills women and seeks to bond with David because "We're the ones with the brains man. The ones with power.... The power to use them" (98), severs the identification of manliness with power and sexual performance. The blood which covers Bernie signifies the opposite of the blood which binds Lizzie to her father or Peggy/Stanley to her lover/Stella; its shedding ends violent bloodletting and ushers in birthing. David is reborn-though in an entirely anti-romantic manner-and Kane is born into his identity as a man who loves a man. That he is young---"some cute boy" (98)-has exposed him to manipulation, as it does Smitty: in a powerfully iconic stage image he is ordered to bare his buttocks to David and the audience, inscribing himself as homosexual and submissive. But his youth now offers hope he may live out a life of positive sexual identity.33
In René-Daniel Dubois' Being at Home with Claude,34 the set, once more, frames the audience's perception. In a judge's office in the Palais de Justice in Montréal, surrounded by the apparatus of institutional society, a young hooker indexed by his jeans and tee-shirt confronts the audience's expectations and those of his interrogator with silence. The set is equivocal: it presents a sign of authority and establishment and, as the prostitute's story unfolds, it registers as a sign of potential scandal. He refuses to give his name-the touchstone of identity-and is presented only as LUI: He is "him," the male in the objective case who receives-desire, money-but appears to take no nominative action. After a long confrontation the hard surface identification is shattered. In a brilliant and very long soliloquy, LUI, now identified as Yves, tells the truth of his self-identification as prostitute, his self-disgust at being "un s'rin,"35 who must constantly project a false image of desire and desirability, his need (like David's) for anonymous, "short and sweet" sex (94) to bury his need for human contact, his sense of his inferior social position and, most important, his dreams. Walking the trails of Mont Royal looking for quick encounters, he fantasizes himself as a hero from "des films de cow-boys," as "Robin des bois," as "un soldat en territoire ennemr' (97): all iconic renderings of the male available in the majority Canadian culture to be borrowed. The intersection of these dream identifiers from mainstream pop culture with the slang term(s) from a gay idiolect urge the transfer of response from one track to the other, urging different members of the audience to respond with recognition and then to transfer the signification (where possible) into the other track. The physical indexing of LUI, which places him in a subculture, throws into high relief his dream desires for icon-identities from the larger culture. Spectators who are unfamiliar with the promiscuous actions described, or offended by them, may attempt to "disattend" the details of LUPs narrative, but the conventions of the soliloquy, the set which dwarfs the boy but focuses attention on him, and the hermeneutics of the detective narrative which engage the audience, work against such disattendance. Again, a group of framing devices attempts to control response, leading the spectators to Dubois' thematic statement but, on the way, exploring variants of gender identity. The Inspector assumes the boy was drugged: Yves finally breaks down to admit "J'étais pas stoned. C'tait pire que ça: j'tais en amour" (95). His fantasies have come together in the moment in which his lover embraces him when he returns to the apartment. Not aping "la tendre épouse accueillant son mari qui rentre du travail," not "la mére dans la famille Stone" (99), but "un gars. Un garçon, j'veux dire" (99), the friend offers love, acceptance without qualification, and a highly realistic male "family." Yves/LUI, however, is too lost to himself to trust this identity; he expresses his relief and happiness the only way he knows how, in sex, but his dreams converge on the potential new reality. A knife from the table which signals their domesticity and on which they spontaneously make love "que c'est la seule fois d'ma vie que j'l'ai faite" (103) falls between them. It is a literary symbol which can be interpreted in a number of ways depending on the attitude of the viewer. It is also a key iconic signifier within the depictions of the male: the knife/phallus as phobic/fetish object. In a grotesque dream ballet, Yves consurnmates his love, and murders his lover. The ending is stark and powerful, unlike the poetic but highly romantic murder of the icon of St. Sebastian in Michel Marc Bouchard's Lilies: or the Revival of a Romantic Drama.36 In Dubois' play, the audience draws its conclusion from the frame of the court room, from the deixis of interrogator and prisoner, from the expanded semic coding of signifiers of domesticity and commercial sex. In Bouchard's piece, the audience is told how to respond within an old-fashioned intertext of martyrdom: "Oh Lord. One must kill one's love that it may be reborn, seven times more ardent" (67). The imagery of Yves' speech convinces the auditor that this final moment is positive, though the slumped body and final word-"J'lâche" (110)-suggest defeat. The word, however, means not only "to slacken," but "to release" and in letting go of his false image, Yves triumphs, as do David and Kane, Lizzie and her Actress, Harry and Ira, Hosanna and Cuirette.37 Although one supposes he will go to prison (if one extends the narrative), he has escaped the larger prison of a false and arid identity and in the representation presented nothing more occurs; it is only our conditioning to privilege the narratological that suggests future consequence to a portrait which is iconic rather than documentary.
LUI has a key to the judge's office, How he came by it and what scandal he might engender by exposing his contact is a major question within the detective plot. But in surrendering it at the play's conclusion and after he has "release[d]" himself, he gives up a potent sign of the relationship between masculinity and power.38 He gives up-or excises-the very notion of what it is to be male which has prevented him from loving up to this point. He has learned what, for him, it means to be male and he has rejected the ready-made social image in which, up to now, he has hidden himself.
The frames of set, movement, costume, text, intertext, coterie language, enacted and spoken dreams and the soliloquy establish the complex semiology of gender on the stage. By presenting variants to traditional sexual iconography or by deconstructing them, many Canadian plays past and present explore new ways for men to be men and women to be women. By exaggerating images of the female and male, these plays display the artifice which bolsters them, inviting the spectators to redefine themselves. What is most encouraging is the suggestion in these plays, often made in strikingly unsentimental terms, that what ultimately frames sexual identity is the capacity to love.
NOTES
1 ERVING GOFFMAN, Frame Analysis; An Essay on the Organization ofExperience (Harvard: Harvard Univ Press 1974, p 210)
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2 GREGORY BATESON, 'A Theory of Play and Phantasy,' Psychiatric Research Reports 2. Rpt.
in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine 1972, pp 177-193). Qtd in GOFFMAN p
213
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3 Which PAUL EKMAN and WALLACE V. FRIESEN develop at some length as essential to the
repertoire of nonverbal behaviour in 'The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behaviour: Categories, Origins,
Usage, and Coding' (Semiotica 1 (1969): 82)
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4 VICTOR H. YNGUE, 'On Getting a Word in Edgewise,' in Papers from the 6th Regional
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago: Univ of ChicagoPress 1970). Qtd. in GOFFMAN 214
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5 Cf. also the notion of "multiple messages" suggested by Abraham Moles. Moles sees a
spectrum of channels or a spectrum of modes of use of a channel as creating a "perceptual synthesis" among actors and spectators. See ABRAHAM MOLES, trans.,
Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press 1966, p 171)
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6 This paper will adopt the diction common in much contemporary criticism in which the term sex is used to identify the biological differentiation between the female and male animal and/or aspects
of the sexual act, while the term gender is used to refer to the culturally or socially defined states of being either woman or man. Sexual identity is used to imply sexual preference or a self identity in which the biological reality of the subject's body is registered simultaneously with an awareness of a complementary or conflicting cultural or social congruity
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7 PATRICIA GENTNER, 'Breaking into a "semiotic enclave": How art critics refer to the
works of Rothko and Bacon' (Semiotica 79 (1990): 271)
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8 I elsewhere discuss the notion, suggested by Judith Butler and others, that gender is entirely a
construct of "the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and
maintained." (JUDITH BUTLER, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York and London: Routledge 1990)) See my "'And that's why I go to the gym": Sexual
Identity and the Body of the Male Performer,' forthcoming in Theatre Journal. The later
discussion in this paper of Belle Reprieve expands this notion
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9 It is this assumption that motivates much resistance theatre in which, for example, stock female
bodies are presented in parody. Cf. SHAWNA DEMPSEY and LORI MILLAN, Mary
Medusa, in Canadian Theatre Review 76 (Fall 1993): 42-57
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10 JOHN HERBERT, Fortune and Men's Eyes (New York: Grove Press 1967). All further
references to this script will appear parenthetically in the text
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11 Dir. Harvey Hart. With Wendall Burton, Michael Greer, Zooey Hall, and Danny Freedman.
MGM, 1971
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12 Indeed, as Brian F. Tyson points out, an elaborate coterie nomenclature establishes a "semiotic
enclave" in this play. See 'This Man's Art and Man's Scope: Language and the Critics in
Fortune and Men's Eyes' Canadian Drama 4 (1978): 34-39
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13 NEIL CARSON, 'Sexuality and Identity in Fortune and Men's Eyes' Twentieth Century
Literature 18 (1972): 217
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14 Tremblay's women and transvestites consistently do the same, sometimes, as in Damnée
Manon Sacrée Sandra, dividing into two defined characters, sometimes as in Les Belles
Soeurs, trapped in the drudgery of their identity as wives, daughters and mothers, dividing "this
stupid, rotten life" into workdays and the evening, when "we watch TV" (15) and escape into
dreams of lottery winnings and freedom
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15 Robert Christian. fp. The Little Room at the Actors Playhouse, New York. 23 Feb. 1967
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16 KYM BIRD, 'He and She: Linda Griffith's Gendered Family' Canadian Theatre Review 69
(1991): 43
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17 MICHEL TREMBLAY, Hosanna, trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco (Vancouver:
Talonbooks; 1974)
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18 LEONARD SCHRADER, Screenplay, Kiss of the Spider Woman (New York: Faber 1987).
Based on MANUEL PUIG, Kiss of the Spider Woman, trans.T. Colchie (New York: Knopf
1979). Rpt. in W.B. Worthen, The HBJ Anthology of Drama (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt 1993 pp
890-911)
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19 SHARON POLLOCK, Blood Relations and Other Plays (Edmonton: NeWest 1981). All
further references to this script will appear parenthetically in the text
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20 Dir. Larry Lillo. Set design, Ted Roberts. Arts Club Mainstage, April 1983. The didascalia calls for such a set
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21 Produced at the Firehall Theatre Centre, 1989
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22 As, for example, varying critical response to M. Butterfly suggests that feminist critics read the
play very differently than male critics, that gay male critics read it yet differently again
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23 Cf. Pierre Guiraud's two broad categories of social signs: signs of identity and behavioural signs, in PIERRE GUIRAUD, Semiology (London: Routledge 1975, pp 84-90). See also
ELAINE ASTON and GEORGE SAVONA, Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and
Performance (London and New York: Routledge 1991 p 154)
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24 October, 1991
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25 Dialogue which appears as quotation in the discussion of this play is, in fact, paraphrase from memory, as I have not had access to a script. The quibble on "requesting" and "requiring"
was confirmed by reference to a United Kingdom passport
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26 KATE MILLET, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday 1970, Chap. 8)
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27 See KEIR ELAM, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen 1980, p 22) for a discussion of "iconic identity" as apart from the "icon"
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28 What Bertrand Russell termed the "doxastic" world
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29 Russell's "oneiric" world
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30 In an interview in the programme
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31 BRAD FRASER, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Winnipeg:
Blizzard Press 1990). All further references to this script will appear parenthetically in the text
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32 David's rude greeting is an example of what Guido Almansi and Simon Henderson call a
"rhetorical mode of interrogation." See GUIDO ALMANSI and SIMON HENDERSON,
Harold Pinter (London and New York: Methuen 1983). The language is designed to distance
and to gain power over Robert to whose heterosexual manhood David feels inferior, or to
indicate that within the frame of this apartment, gender identities are assigned by David, who is
in control
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33 In To B What U R, Morris Panych also presents an adolescent as sign-vehicle for confused
sexuality in the figure of Cab, who alternately decides to be straight or gay as he gropes toward
a multi-faceted identity. [Unpub. fp. Green Thumb Theatre, Vancouver East Cultural Centre,
10 April 1992.1
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34 RENÉ-DANIEL DUBOIS, Being at Home with Claude, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Montréal:
Lemdac 1986). All further references to this script will appear parenthetically in the text
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35 A canary: in English gay parlance, a "chicken." In the English version of the film (Trans.
Cinélune. Prod. Films du CERF and the National Film Board of Canada, 1991), Yves uses the
word chick here.
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36 MICHEL MARC BOUCHARD, Lilies: or the Revival of a Romantic Drama, trans. Linda
Gaboriau(Toronto: Coach House Press 1990)
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37 In the film version of the play, Dubois has made Yves tougher and older and more
contemporary in his attitude to his sexuality. Roy Dupuis as LUI/Yves is heavily indexed in
black jeans, black tee shirt, net singlet, cowboy boots and a set of chains dangling around his
waist, crotch and buttocks. He captures the alternating swagger of the emotionless hustler and
the softer, gentler facial expressions and lingering touches of the man capable of falling in love
with Claude. Indeed, his body carries much of the gender discussion in the simplified film
script. His body, as he throws the judge's keys onto the desk, for example, conveys perfectly
the expression 'J'lâche" which is incompletely translated as "I give up." The rich connotations
of this word in French, suggesting "cowardice," "baseness," "unreliability," "telling the truth,"
and "paying up," as well as "being set free" and "giving up" are each carried by Dupuis' body,
gesture and face at points throughout the film
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38 I am indebted to Robert Nunn for bringing this sign to my attention
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