JENNIFER HARVIE
Examining Judith Thompson's most recent stage play, Lion in the Streets, this paper treats the play first as a unified realist text which refers to a 'knowable' reality and second, as a text which foregrounds its own construction and problematizes a perception of reality as essential and static. The first approach posits the play as a mimetic representation of a current social reality and reads the play to identify some contemporary social problems, particularly problems of oppression related to perceived social differences. The second approach reads the play as discursively produced text and examines the way the play supports an understanding of all apparent realities as fiction. The second approach problematizes the stability of perceived realities, encouraging us to view problems identified in the first reading as not intractable but subject to change. In combining these two approaches I hope to show that they may be seen as compatible, as well as politically expedient, when what appears to be an 'essential' reality is considered within an anti-essentialist framework as a necessary but provisional fiction.
Je me propose d'étudier ici la dernière pièce de Judith Thompson, Lion in the Streets (Lion dans les rues), d'abord comme un texte réaliste cohérent qui se réfère à une réalité 'vécue' et, deuxièmement, comme un texte qui met en scène sa propre construction et qui met en question la perception d'une réalité qui serait par essence immuable. La première approche considère la pièce en tant que représentation mimétique d'une réalité sociale contemporaine et cherche à identifier les causes d'un certain nombre de conflits sociaux, particulièrement des problèmes d'oppression, oppression souvent vécue, à tort ou à raison, comme la conséquence d'inégalités sociales. La seconde approche est une lecture de la pièce en tant que texte construit rhétoriquement, ce qui nous permet de comprendre comment il est possible d'envisager toute réalité sous l'angle de la fiction. Cette seconde stratigie de lecture remet donc en question la notion de pérennité de la réalité telle qu'elle est pervue, et nous encourage d'envisager les problemes soulevés par la premiere approche comme sujets à caution et la réalité comme susceptible d'être transformée. Par la conjugaison de ces deux lectures, je désire démontrer que, tant du point de vue de la dramaturgie que de l'efficacité politique, il est important que la réalité dite << essentielle >> soit considérée dans un cadre << anti-essentielle >>, c'est-d-dire comme une fiction nécessaire mais dont le statut demeure provisoire.
In the opening scene of Judith Thompson's most recent stage play, Lion in the Streets, 2 '[t]he ghost of ISOBEL, a deranged and very ragged looking nineyear-old Portuguese girl, runs around and around a large circle, to music, terrified of a remembered pursuer, in fact, the man who killed her in this playground seventeen years before the action of the play.... She is terrified.3 She says:
Doan be scare. Doan be scare. [turns to audience] Doan be scare of this pickshur! This pickshur is niiiice, nice! I looove this pickshur, this pickshur is mine!gesturing behind her] Is my house, is my street, is my park, is my people! You know me, youknow me very hard! I live next house to you, with my brother and sisters, Maria, Luig, Carla and Romeo we play, we play with your girl, your boy, you know me, you know me very hard. But ... when did tha be? Tha not be now! Tha not be today! I think tha be very long years ago I think I be old. I think I be very old. Ismy house but is not my house is my street but is not my street my people is gone I am lost. I am lost. I AM LOOOOOOOOOST! (15)
One of the things I find interesting about this passage-and, for that matter, the rest of Lion in the Streets and much of Thompson's other work-is the way that it may be seen to combine a powerful level of realism with equally powerful deconstructions of reality. Isobel may seem 'real' because she exhibits characteristics which, in traditional psychological realism, might indicate she was a unified subject-a real person with a real problem. She tells us she has a home, a family, and is afraid she is lost. And the idiosyncrasies of her naturalistic speech seem to corroborate her reality, suggesting further that she is young, perhaps speaks English as a second language, and is frightened. Read as a unified realist text, and the play may be seen to invite this kind of reading, Isobel appears to be a little girl in a classic state of psychic fragmentation which she and the audience will presumably move from through the course of the play to a state of unity and resolution.
But as much as Isobel may seem real and may seem to confirm our preconceptions of reality, her reality may likewise be seen as problematic. For instance, she describes her home, what frames her reality, as a 'pickshur'specifically a representation, not a reality. Moreover, she undermines the truth of her own description of herself and her 'life' when she claims she is very old although she seems young, and she contradicts her own story-her own construction of reality-with comments like, 'Is my house but is not my house. . . .' Later in the play, Isobel realizes that long ago she was kidnapped and murdered. 'I am gone,' she observes, 'I am no more!' (36). Realistically, these lines suggest that Isobel 'went missing' and is now dead. In a poststructuralist sense however, these lines suggest Isobel is missing-she is absence, not realistic presence.
As a critic concerned with issues of cultural heterogeneity, the reason this combination of the apparently real and the real problematized interests me is because it seems to allow for the mimetic depiction of contemporary social realities-realities, say, of age, gender, class, and race-at the same time as it deconstructs our ideas of reality, problematizing the objectivity with which we may think we perceive what seems 'obvious,' and positing reality not as essential, homogeneous, and therefore static, but as provisional, heterogeneous, and changeable. Informing a reading of gender issues, this combination might allow us to recognize gender as, in one respect, 'true,' and, in another respect, socially constructed. Acknowledging gender as true, we may recognize it as a common condition for oppression and confront and challenge that oppression. We may also allow for gender identification as a form of empowerment. Reading gender as socially constructed, on the other hand, we may perceive it as an ideologically loaded fiction, in Julia Kristeva's terms a 'slogan,' a myth of a static idea in a world which might more constructively be considered ever changing.4
These two positions--one seemingly affirming an essential reality and the other apparently deconstructing that reality-might both benefit a project of recognizing and communicating cultural difference, but they might also appear inherently to negate one another. However, I think they may be seen as compatible if we consider a concept of an essential reality as perhaps necessary but only ever provisional, in other words, as a fiction of an essential reality.5 I would like to suggest that Thompson's Lion in the Streets constructs necessary but provisional fictions of reality. This allows that some concept of a static or essential reality may be helpful to a project of cultural emancipation, but also that such a concept should be considered provisional, and in that sense fictional, so that reality may furthermore be seen as not intractable but open to change.
To begin, I would like to look at how Thompson's Lion in the Streets may be read as a linear, unified realistic text, and how such a reading may, first, serve a project of recognizing cultural heterogeneity and, second, impede that project. In serving that project, Lion in the Streets mimetically depicts a recognizable current Canadian society, specifically that of a semi-gentrified neighbourhood in urban Toronto. The play 'shows,' and evokes audience empathy for, a vast gamut of oppressed subjectivities differentiated by, among other things, age, race, class, sexuality, gender, religion, occupation, and ability. With twenty-nine characters, including a young girl of ethnic minority, a woman with cystic fibrosis, and a gay male Maritimer, the play presents a cultural spectrum broad enough to be the envy of any Canadian federal government advertising office. And importantly, the play evokes empathy for these diverse subjectivities. Thematically, Lion in the Streets acts as an exhortation to recognize the sources of one's oppression and to rise up and challenge them, a worthy theme for any oppressed subjectivity. But a realist reading may also impede a project of effecting cultural change because it may be inherently conservative, seeming to confirm a world we think we already know, reifying the truth of the oppressions we identify, and comfortably closing off any will to change stimulated in the audience in the course of the play by providing the catharsis of resolution.
To demonstrate how Lion in the Streets may be read as a unified realist text and how this may serve the recognition of cultural heterogeneity, I would like to turn first to characterization, attempting to identify character as unified by realistic psychological motivations and objectives.6 The play has been described by Thompson herself as a relay play and by Globe and Mail critic Robert Cushman as a daisy chain play.7 Structurally, this means one character from the play's first scene appears in the otherwise apparently unrelated second scene, from which another character appears in a similarly unrelated third scene, and so on, until we accumulate twenty-nine characters and roughly thirteen main scenes. Thus, the play may be seen to resist unity, particularly unified characterization. But through the length of the play, Isobel is present, appearing in her ghostliness on the fringes of every scene, sometimes commenting, sometimes remaining silent, but providing throughout recognizable character objectives which are reflected or even reverberated by numerous other characters in their individual scenes. In act I, Isobel's objective is to find her home, and in act II, this alters slightly, becoming the need to find her killer, whom she refers to as the 'lion.' In both acts Isobel seeks resolution or, in Thompson's etymology, escape from the 'abyss.' 8 And it is in identifying each character's 'abyss' or 'lack' that we may further identify some of the ways and reasons people or groups are oppressed in the current social formation.
For instance, we may say Isobel's age and gender are part of what renders her vulnerable to the suffering she experiences-abduction, probable rape, and murder. Another scene presents a character named Scarlett who hascerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair. Her 'abyss' is boredom, partly the result of patronizing social attitudes and assumptions which construct the disabled as predominantly unable to participate in 'normal' activities like, for instance, sex. Scarlett's objective might thus be read as the need to escape from her boredom by challenging social attitudes which diminish the interests and abilities of the disabled and reconstructing herself as someone who can, as she puts it, 'git it ONNN'(46). Other scenes show a woman whose abyss is the fear of her impending death from bone cancer and whose proverbial 'home' or resolution is the possibility of 'd[ying] good' (35), and a day care worker whose abyss is the snobbish insults she suffers from the parents and whose objective is to confront and challenge their classist assumptions with a comment like Scarlett's spoken to her interviewer, 'You think you're bettern me, dontcha?' (46). Repeatedly throughout Lion in the Streets apparently real characters are presented in situations which mimetically portray some of the diverse possibilities of oppression in a heterogeneous urban Canada.
The play's structure may likewise be read as unified, providing a through line from disorder to resolution and catharsis. As a quest narrative, Isobel searches for her home and her killer and other characters search for their respective homes or resolutions. And as a revenge tragedy--or perhaps more specifically a revenge comedy because Isobel ultimately forgives her killer-Isobel and the other characters seek to triumph over their oppressors and oppressions. Again these through lines suggest 'real' conditions of oppression and 'real' responses to that oppression, responses which include self-recognition (especially as this relates to recognizing the sources of one's oppression) and confessing or giving forgiveness, methods of achieving catharsis or, again in Thompson's words, 'grace,' which she describes as happening 'through penitence.... Through seeing who you are and changing things.'9
Imagery may also act as a unified signifier of meaning in Lion in the Streets, serving to help make sense of or comprehend the play's unified meaning. Typically for a play by Thompson, the strongest image pattern is Christian, predominantly Roman Catholic. Images of angels and saints and private heavens and hells abound.10 Through the course of the play Isobel acts as a Dantesque guide through inferno and purgatory to heaven-a pattern reflected in actors' vertical movement up and down the set of the premiere production directed by Thompson at Toronto's Harbourfront in June, 1990. And Isobel's final monologue, which invokes her own apotheosis or at least her ascension, makes repeated reference to her breath, another strongly loaded Christian signifier. The play's title itself comes from Proverbs 26:13, the whole of which, in conjunction with verse 14 reads,
The sluggard says, 'There is a lion in the road! There is a lion in the streets!'
As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard on his bed.11
The passage implies that for fear of oppression, evil, or Thompson's abyss, some people retreat, refusing to challenge their oppressions. Thus the title, along with the play's other Christian imagery, may act implicitly as an exhortation to the play's characters and audience to search out and confront the sources of oppression in their 'lives.' In interview, Thompson has said that all of her plays 'show how we hang onto what brings magic to our lives,' adding that 'Lion [in the Streets], which ends with an ascension, is about the power of Isobel's spirit-the power to confront evil and walk away with something even though life may be forfeit.'12 The play's Christian imagery may be seen to bolster this theme of self-recognition and self-challenge, what Thompson has referred to elsewhere as 'finding that Force in yourself and using it.'13
A second strong image pattern in Lion in the Streets is that of pictures which characters repeatedly refer to or imaginatively construct in order to contain and stabilize what might otherwise be threatening situations and experiences. Isobel, for example, refers to her home as a 'pickshur,' thereby rendering her desire attainable because it is now somehow 'concrete.' Joanne, dying of bone cancer, imaginatively interpolates herself into a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia drowning beautifully in a stream, thereby capturing and controlling a death which she otherwise fears (34-35). Again, if we read this picture imagery as signifying unified meaning-and its repeated occurrence in similar patterns may suggest this approach-we may see it also as supporting the emancipatory theme I have identified since it suggests an active recognition and construction of what one wants.
Finally, language in Lion in the Streets may often act as a realistic indication of unified meaning. Presenting so many characters so quickly, Thompson often uses 'textural' detail provided in language as much as or even more than the information provided literally through language to establish the psychological realism of her characters and to identify their various 'lions.' In a meeting with her charges' yuppie parents, a day care worker named Rhonda attempts to assimilate by speaking the type of language sported by the parents. But when her practice of occasionally giving the children sugar comes under the direct attack of one parent as the first step in what will then become the children's inexorable plummet to cocaine addiction, Rhonda speaks in her own defense in language which gradually alters from her best yuppie-friendly to include numerous ellipses, the occasional grammatically 'incorrect' space holder, the expression 'I seen' for 'I have seen,' and the word 'youse' for the second person plural (29-31). Thus, Rhonda's language acts realistically to assert what she perceives as her class difference, which she further perceives as a reason for her persecution. 14
Altogether I think it is possible and indeed worthwhile to construct a unified realist reading of Thompson's Lion in the Streets. Such a reading allows for the construction of unified subjects or representatives of certain subjectivities, mimetically depicting a vast range of personal characteristics for which individuals may suffer social persecution or oppression in a heterogeneous urban Canadian community. Read as a unified realist text, Lion in the Streets is a profound modem parable on the value of recognizing and overcoming some of the conditions which act as grounds for oppression in our current society.
What this type of reading may also do, however, is naturalize our constructions of reality or truth, making them seem essential, transcendental, or at least somehow static and in that sense intractable. Recognizing the I real'-real people marked by their 'human nature,' real problems, and real situations-we reify that reality, potentially enforcing its hegemony. Thus, although a realistic reading of Lion in the Streets may generate an interpretation of the text as promoting change, such a reading may also inhibit change by enforcing a linear-in other words deterministic-world view. A unified realistic reading may thus counteract or undermine its own theme of progress and change because such a reading requires and therefore reifies a recognition of the status quo.
Which is why I think it is worthwhile to frame this realistic reading, and an idea of an essential reality in general, as a necessary but provisional fiction, a myth of stasis, an indication not a prescription of some of the potential conditions of contemporary society. Such a reading would show that what appears real might be considered more constructively as a fiction or a discursive construction of an essential reality. This perception of reality would allow for the possibility of change-as alternative 'realities' may be seen to be constructed equally easily-and would also stimulate a recognition of reality not as essential and homogeneous, but plural and heterogeneous. The social problems identified in a realistic reading of the play could thus be seen as not intractable, but open to change. Furthermore, a reading that does not carry the objective of unifying and universalizing meaning and closing off conflict and change with a neatly arrived at resolution may instead allow to flourish a plurality of meanings and a will to change. Thus, a thematics promoting change need not be restrained by a reading practice of containment.
To problematize a unified realistic reading of Lion in the Streets, this second type of reading which I am identifying might attempt to show how the play presents itself and the reality to which it seems to refer as discursively produced texts. Characterization might thus be read not as unified and basedin a single objective, but rather as fragmented and based in often conflicting and changing objectives. Feminist theatre critic Elin Diamond calls this, refusing the romanticism of identity,' where a concept of unified identity is seen as hegemonic, acting to conserve the status quo.15 According to this type of reading, characters in Lion in the Streets may be seen as split subjects who construct and adopt, often self-consciously, fictions of subjective unity that will help them to 'comprehend' and confront their constantly changing and often threatening situations.
I have already looked at how Rhonda, the day care worker, switches languages in order to find and adopt a subject position which is, as Richard Paul Knowles has written, 'useful and meaningful in a particular context.' 16 Other characters self-fashion in other ways, attempting to contain themselves and those around them by constructing and adopting a dominant narrative, picture, or fiction selected from an implied range of potential realities. When a character named Bill is attempting to leave his wife Susan for another woman, he refers to Susan as a 'cartoon mum' (22), finely constructing what is for him a pejorative image and rejecting it in favour of an image of a woman he does want, his lover Lily, whom he likewise constructs as his 'sweet whore.' 17 Susan, in her turn, attempts to prove she too can be libidinous and constructs herself as a temptress, painting a verbal portrait of a scene where she once danced for Bill. When this image is similarly rejected by Bill, Susan reverts to a characterization of herself as a care giver, nursing Bill through an illness she also imaginatively constructs. The exaggerated unity or obvious construction of conflicting interpretations of reality in this scene and others suggests that these 'pictures' are not 'complete' representations of characters' realities but are adopted as 'slogans' which help characters to make sense of or contain only provisionally the 'lion' of a chaotic or threatening experience.
In another scene Scarlett, who is by all appearances severely disabled and confined to her wheelchair, claims she has a lover with whom she can dance. 'I can MOVE when my boy comes,' she explains, having risen from her wheelchair. 'I am movin, I know I am, I am turnin and swishin and holdin,' and she and a character referred to in the stage directions as 'MAN' 'dance romantically around the set' (47). Apparently mutually exclusive narratives of Scarlett's disability and ability make equal claim to truthfulness or reality. Thus, the desirability and indeed functionalism of a static concept of reality is allowed and even encouraged while the exclusivity of any dominant reality is severely problematized. And this goes for the audience as much as the characters. The audience partakes in these various realities without necessarily knowing which reality has a stronger truth claim. Thus the audience may recognize that in constructing a dominant narrative it does so actively and only ever provisionally. Realistic and unified character objectives and narrative through lines may be read but are perhaps best seen as provisional, allowing for the coexistence of diverse and sometimes mutually exclusive realities.
In terms of plot and structure, Lion in the Streets' rather unorthodox relay pattern may also be seen to disrupt a traditional realist reading of plot as linear and unified, usually following a single protagonist's 'journey.' In reference to writing Lion in the Streets Thompson has said, 'I thought, I just can't bear some giant narrative, somebody taking this immense journey.' 18 The resulting fragmented text, with its rapid cutting from scene to not necessarily related scene, may disrupt narrative linearity and thus narrative predictability, further interrupting audience expectations and identification. Through constant interruption the audience may come to perceive its sense of identification and resolution in any given scene as always merely provisional, a possibility which further suggests all perceptions of identity should be considered provisional.
Disrupted narrative flow in Lion in the Streets may also interrupt audience expectations, problematizing a traditional realist reading of reality as predictable and in that sense intractable. Thompson has also been quoted as saying that in writing Lion in the Streets, 'I just couldn't cope with the idea of a huge body of narrative. . . . I started to find that kind of narrative tedious, because your expectations are usually fulfilled.'19 Disrupting audience expectations allows for the expansion of potential realities. For instance, if we consider the play to have a through line offered by Isobel and her apparent objective of revenge, we may expect the play to end with that revenge enacted, with Isobel killing her killer. Instead, the play ends with Isobel forgiving her killer, the very unexpectedness of which may challenge the predictability of 'human nature' and reality. This unexpected conclusion implies an act of will on the part of Isobel to forgo a tragic conclusion and instead to construct a narrative ending which is more like a comedy. Isobel's achievement or construction of grace requires not only an act of will on her part, however, but also on the part of the audience. In her last lines, Isobel switches the focus from the play to the audience, making the direct address, 'I take my life. I want you all to take your life. I want you all to have your life' (63). Isobel may provide a through line for the play, but she does not provide a closed discourse. The audience is invited to close the discourse with a happy ending, but the act of constructing this narrative ending is foregrounded, allowing for the benefit of a static reality-a 'happy ending'-but also emphasizing that this reality is fictional or constructed.
Imagery in Lion in the Streets may also be seen as a potential destabilizer of meaning as much as a unifier as it is more commonly read. In scenes like the one where Scarlett describes herself as a living hell and threatens, quite literally, to swallow her interviewer Christine (48-49), the play's imagerymay be so overt or blunt as to call attention to itself and to its role as a unifier of meaning, effectively alienating the audience from a passive acceptance of the imagery as unified and unifying. Foregrounded like this, the play's imagery may be seen to invite the audience to acknowledge the tools it uses to construct meaning and to perceive such constructions as single possibilities chosen from a range of potential meanings. Reading imagery as a unified indicator of meaning may thus be seen as helpful and constructive, but also potentially reductive, as choosing one paradigm of meaning may implicitly disallow other options. The play's picture imagery, if we read it as metarepresentational, may act particularly strongly to interrogate the potential of any representational apparatus-like a play-to portray unified truth. Characters may adopt 'pictures' or images as subject positions but the possibility of ever achieving such stasis is nevertheless problematized throughout the play with comments like Rhonda's to Joanne, 'You can't become a picture, do you know what I mean? I mean you can't ... BE. . . a picture, okay?' (32).
Finally, language in Lion in the Streets may be seen to foreground its own textuality, further problematizing the play's realism. Thompson's naturalistic language, with its acute details connoting class, age, and psychology, often segues into a sort of 'magic realism' in which the details of the realist language are exploded and its writerliness is foregrounded. In one scene, Isobel's mother is telling her neighbour how she was folding laundry, 'I fold. I fold clothes one pile for Antony, one pile for me, one for Maria, Romeo, ISOBEL and Luig, my hands fold the clothes. . . .' And her narrative gradually carries her into the body of her husband, standing on a subway platform where he will fall to his death:
. . . I am his head, circles and circles like red birds flying around and around I am his throat, tight, cannot breathe enough air in my body the floor the floor move, and sink in, rise up rise like a wall like a killin wave turn turn me in circles with teeth in circles and under and over I fall! . . . I fall on the silver track nobody move I hearing the sound. The sound of the rats in the tunnel their breath like a basement these dark rats running running towards me I am stone I am earth cannot scream cannot move the rats tramp ... trample my body flat-ten and every bone splinter like ...(27)20
The switch to this sort of magic realism here and elsewhere in the play may draw attention to the textuality of language, emphasizing that even when, as in naturalistic speech, language appears 'natural,' it is always constructed.
Thus through analyses of character, plot and structure, imagery and language, 21 we may read Lion in the Streets as non-unified, foregrounding its own construction and, therefore, its own manipulation of 'reality.' Characters are shown to construct, adopt, and adapt their own realities, and the audience's complicity in constructing the fiction of the play's realistic through line and theme is foregrounded through the unorthodox exaggeration of the tools of imagery and structure which an audience may often use unconsciously to order a play's unified meaning or reality. What we often perceive as reality is revealed to be constructed, and what is potentially liberating about this is that 'reality' need no longer be seen as essential or transcendental but subject to change. Recognizing the imposition of unity, we allow for the possibility of plurality, alterity, and heterogeneity. The different oppressed subjectivities we identified in our unified realist reading need not be totally deconstructed and disallowed by this second reading, but may be contextualized as historically and culturally contingent fictions, not transcendental realities. Similarly, the thematic movement from oppression through self-recognition to liberation identified in our first reading need not be read as universal and timeless but historically and culturally contingent. After all, a timeless thernatics of liberation requires and therefore ensures a timelessness of oppression.
The 'realities' which we read in our unified realist reading may thus be seen as necessary but only provisional. As Thompson has said in interview, 'I really think that in many areas it is possible to turn our sense of being victims around.'22 We may recognize 'our sense of being victims,' our identities, as fictions but, nevertheless, we may also occasionally construct them as real to help us in certain oppressive situations.23 We may take both the essentialist or realist reading and the poststructuralist reading because both are helpful to a project of cultural emancipation. And I mean to suggest this as a potential reading strategy not just for this play.
As Isobel says, 'This pickshur is niiiice.' We know it is a picture, a fiction, but we still like it, need it, and invoke it however it may help us. This is a politics of the provisional, allowing Isobel and her audience to save their respective 'neighbourhoods,' if not the world.
NOTES
CONSTRUCTING FICTIONS OF AN ESSENTIAL REALITY OR "THIS PICKSHUR IS NIIIICE': JUDITH THOMPSON'S LION IN THE STREETS
JENNIFER HARVIE
1 This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Association for Canadian Theatre
Research/Association de la recherche théâtrale au Canada at the University of Prince Edward
Island on 29 May 1992. Both versions are
based on research done at the University of Guelph in 1991 for my Master's
thesis,'Problematizing "Truth": The Stage Plays of Judith Thompson.' My MA thesis supervisors
were Ric Knowles and Ann Wilson and to them I would like once again to extend my thanks
Return to article
2 Lion in the Streets was first produced by the Tarragon Theatre for the duMaurier World Stage
Festival, Toronto ,in June 1990, with Thompson directing. The stage script was developed from
Thompson's earlier radio play, A Big White Light
Return to article
3 JUDITH THOMPSON Lion in the Streets (Toronto: Coach House Press 1992) p 15. All
further references to this script will appear parenthetically in the text
Return to article
4 JULIA KRISTEVA 'Woman Can Never Be Defined' Trans MARELYN A AUGUST New
French Feminisms ed ELAINE MARKS and ISABELLE DE COURTIVRON (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press 1980) Trans of 'La femme, ce n'est jamais ça' Tel quel
(Autumn 1974)
Return to article
5 My ideas on this approach are informed primarily by my understanding of feminist standpoint
theory. Briefly stated, according to some versions of this theory, a practice of deconstructing
identity is considered valuable because it may, for instance, dismantle patriarchal inscriptions of
femininity. But standpoint theory also encourages the adoption of the fictional position 'woman'
in order to safe-guard against a rampant deconstruction which might reduce all differences to
an absolute Difference, erecting a new universality and once again 'silencing' the gender specific
interests of feminism. Feminist standpoint theory rejects both the supposed 'view from nowhere'
of humanism and the idealistic 'dream of being everywhere' of poststructuralism, and adopts
instead a cautious 'view from somewhere.' For a more elaborate discussion of this idea, please
see SUSAN BORDO 'Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism' in
Feminism/Postmodernism ed LINDA J NICHOLSON (New York and London: Routledge
1990) pp 133-156
Return to article
6 Throughout this unified realist reading, the reader will recognize the indebtedness of my
terminology-'motivation,' 'objective,' 'through line,'-to Stanislavskian acting technique. While
my intention here is to delineate a reading strategy that seeks a 'unified' character's 'through
line' to a 'super objective,' a corresponding ('Method') acting strategy would have many of the
same emphases and effects
Return to article
7 ROBERT CUSHMAN 'Exploring a Limitless Domain of Human Misery' Globe and Mail 4 June 1990 p C8
Return to article
8 JUDITH THOMPSON Interview in JUDITH RUDIKOFF and RITA MUCH Fair Play
(Toronto: Simon and Pierre 1990) p 95
Return to article
9 THOMPSON in RUDAKOFF and MUCH p 103
Return to article
10 Consider, for instance, halo imagery in Maria's description of her dying husband (27) and in Father
Hayes' narration of the child David 'dancing on the water' (40, my italics)
Return to article
11The Oxford Annotated Bible ed HERBERT G MAY and BRUCE M METZGER (New York: Oxford
University Press 1962) p 798
Return to article
12 JON KAPLAN 'Mini-fest Probes Thompson's Unsettling Visions' Now (8 November 1990) p 55
Return to article
13 JUDITH THOMPSON 'An Interview with Judith Thompson' by ELEANOR WACHTEL Brick 41
(Summer 199 1) p 41
Return to article
14 THOMPSON discusses this scene in interview with WACHTEL, p 37
Return to article
15 ELIN DIAMOND 'Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in Churchill,
Benmussa, Duras' Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre ed SUE-ELLEN
CASE (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990) pp 92-105
Return to article
16 RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES 'The Achievement of Grace' Brick 41 (Summer 1991) p 36. This
article on Thompson's dramaturgy provides the basis for 'The Fractured Subject of Judith Thompson,'
KNOWLES' shorter introduction to the published version of Lion in the Streets
Return to article
17 Bill does not call Lily his 'sweet whore' in the play's published version, but in an unpublished
typescript of the text used in the Tarragon Theatre production directed by Thompson in November
1990, p 9
Return to article
18 JUDITH THOMPSON 'A Conversation with Judith Thompson' by CYNTHIA ZIMMERMAN
Canadian Drama/L'art dramatique canadien 16,2 (1990) p 188
Return to article
19 KNOWLES p 34
Return to article
20 It is important to note that it is not 'really' Maria who speaks these lines but the neighbour's husband,
George, impersonating Maria. This layered and self-conscious role-playing may serve again to de-naturalize the play's realism and to emphasize unified subjectivity as something which is constructed
and adopted rather than unified and true
Return to article
21 Both my reading strategies have emphasized aproaches to the play as a written text. For performance
and production, similar strategies could be employed to examine the unity and potential disunity of
direction, acting style(s), and set, costume, lighting, and music design
Return to article
22 ZIMMERMAN p 192
Return to article
23 It may be argued that the freedom to construct different realities is not itself an absolute, but is
available rather in varying degrees to different groups or individuals. Access to emancipation through
self-construction must thus be seen as a function of privilege. I think this is a valid and important
criticism of the ,standpoint theory' approach, but I would also like to suggest that while it indicates
limits to the usefulness or applicability of this theory, it does not entirely deny this theory's value. I also
think this criticism is worth considering in reference to Lion in the Streets. One might ask, to what
extent does Lion in the Streets provide feasible or constructive encouragement to oppressed
subjectivities, and to what extent does it romanticize, and therefore continue to oppress, objectify, or
appropriate for uses of a prvileged group's fantasy, various oppressed subjectivities? In interview with
THOMSON, ZIMMERMAN suggests that some characters' constructions of liberation in Lion in the
Streets are unlikely. Part of THOMPSON's reply is, '. . . it is mysterious' (ZIMMERMAN p 192). To
what extent does this reply mystify Thompson's interest, as a relatively privileged member of society,
in generating texts which portray but may not facilitate the emancipation of oppressed individuals, and
to what extent does it, in its very ambiguity, capture her commitment to unlikely and, for that very
reason, powerful challenges to oppression?
Return to article