PLAYING SOLITAIRE: SPECTATORSHIP AND REPRESENTATION IN CANADIAN WOMEN'S MONODRAMA

PATRICIA BADIR

This article analyses the performer/spectator dynamic present in the text and performance of some Canadian one-woman plays, and considers the re-positioning of the female as subject and the possible construction of an ideal female spectator. The article looks at both English- and French-language monologues in an attempt to understand the effects of cultural difference on performer/spectator relationships, focusing on Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit, Marie Savard's Bien A moi, Sharon Pollack's Getting it Straight, Pamela Boyd's Inside Out, Beverly Simon's Preparing, and Janet Feindel's A Particular Class of Women.

Cet article examine la dynamique acteur/spectateur qu'offrent tant le texte que la représentation de certains monodrames canadiens à une femme seule, étudiant aussi la remise en scène de la femme comme sujet en même temps que la définition possible d'une femme-spectratice idéale. Dans sa tentative de comprendre les effets d'une différence culturelle sur de tels rapports entre acteur et spectateur, l'auteure analyse quelques monologues québécois et canadiens-anglais, en l'occurrence: Les Vaches de nuit de Jovette Marchessault, Bien à moi de Marie Savard, Getting it Straight de Sharon Pollack, Inside Out de Pamela Boyd, Preparing de Beverly Simon, et A Particular Class of Women de Janet Feindel.

In her contribution to La Nef des sorcières, Nicole Brossard states: 'Au fond, une femme qui parle seule est toujours une femme qui s'attend à quelque chose de nouveau.'¹ Expressed in these terms, the private and intimate nature of the monodrama becomes comparable to the solitary yet political. acts of journal writing and diary keeping which are forms of personal expression seeking to explore female experiences left out of history, literature and art. I have found that like these prose genres, women's monodramas tend to be autobiographical and intimately connected to the individual bodies that have conceived them as well as to the temporal and spatial context out of which they have grown. The language of the texts is oral and spontaneous, showing remarkable similarity to the entries of diaries. The dramaturgical structures display heavy reliance upon memory as the speakers move freely and frequently imperceptibly between the past and the present. Plots are primarily oriented around the personal process of 'getting it straight' with dramatic conflict arising out of a sense of oppositional discourses, as the speaker's story runs perpendicular to that of history, of patriarchy or of the dominant culture.² Christl Verduyn explains that because their experience has always been publicly documented by members of the 'dominant sex' (if documented at all), women have frequently turned to private and autobiographical forms of writing such as the journal, the memoir, the letter and the monodrama in order to re-inscribe the subjective 'I.' Verduyn argues that by replacing the written 'she' with the first person singular 'I,' the woman writer accedes to the rank of subject. She leaves behind the status of object suggested by the third person singular as inscribed in historical and literary canons.³

Monodrama, however, unlike prose forms of personal expression, is conceived with performance in mind. The presence of viewing spectators in the context of a live performance introduces a different set of both aesthetic and political questions as the issue of the representation of the private 'I' is brought to the forefront. 'In an important sense,' says Keir Elam, 'it is the spectator who "initiates" the theatrical communication process through a series of actions at once practical and symbolic, of which the first is the simple act of buying a ticket.' Elam elaborates that the audience, by its very presence, 'constitutes the one invariable condition of the performance.... It is with the spectator, in brief, that theatrical communication begins and ends.'⁴ The monodrama is a private and intimate endeavour, yet it stands as theatre for public consumption by an observer who, in most cases, has paid for the opportunity to view. The speaker's subjectivity is found to be dependent upon the participation of spectators in an act of semiotic interpretation. The 'I' becomes contingent upon a wide range of cultural values and ideological beliefs all of which form, to borrow Susan Bennett's terminology appropriated from reception theory, the spectator's 'horizon of expectations.' 'The spectator comes to the theatre as a member of an already-constituted interpretive community,' argues Bennett, suggesting that the hypotheses which constitute an audience's reading of a particular performance are influenced by and measured against a complex network of extra-performance material.⁵ Sue-Ellen Case also notes that the importance of the author's intent gives way to the composition of the audience in determining the meaning of the theatrical event.⁶ In other words, it is the 'norms' of a culture that assign meaning to the performance. 'For a feminist,' says Case, 'this means that the dominant notions of gender, class and race compose the meaning of the text of a play, the stage pictures of its production and the audience reception of its meaning.'⁷ While all this can be said of readership and of the act of reading published diaries or personal correspondence, both Bennett and Case are profoundly aware of the fact that they are concerned with a three-dimensional medium operative on visual and aural senses. In Case's analysis, within the frame of theatrical representation, the female performer is transformed into a kind of cultural courtesan, her physical body standing as a sight for the fulfilment of her spectators' desires. 'The conventions of the stage produce a meaning for the sign "woman," which is based upon their cultural associations with the female gender.'⁸ Case refers her readers to feminist film theory for elaboration on the problems of three-dimensional representation and the concept of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey describes the process:

The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.⁹

Jill Dolan's feminist analysis of spectatorship suggests that the vast majority of texts occupying a place in the dramatic canon are finally intelligible to an 'ideal spectator.' Through the conventions of the stage, the performer's address works to construct an 'amorphous, anonymous mass' of spectators carved in the likeness of patriarchal culture. Ultimately all material properties of the theatre are manipulated so that the performance is intelligible to the white, middle class, heterosexual male, leaving the performer objectified by his gaze.¹⁰

As the locus of semiotic interpretation, the woman on stage is always already determined and the 'I' she defiantly speaks, thrown into question. When a woman playwright chooses monodrama as her medium, it is against these conditions of spectatorship and representation that she must contend. I have selected for study the following examples of women's monodrama because they demonstrate an awareness of these conditions, yet are not weakened by them. I will be arguing in the following pages that Beverley Simons, Pamela Boyd, Janet Feindel, the members of the La Nef des sorcières collective, Jovette Marchessault, Marie Savard, and Sharon Pollock have all chosen the monodrama as a vehicle for the expression of a woman's voice, precisely because it aptly inscribes the 'I' while recognising that that very act is always already beyond her control.

The conscious theatricality with which Beverley Simons has crafted her monodrama Preparing hints at an awareness of the complications implicit in 'playing solitaire.' The piece depicts the speaker engaged in the act of 'preparing' her body for various occasions which are made culturally integral to a woman's experience. The space from which she speaks is established as a private, 'off stage' dressing room equipped for the process of adorning make-up, costumes and wigs in preparation for the 'stage roles' of daughter, wife, mother and grandmother. The speaker's ritualized dressing of her body becomes an analysis of how women find themselves participating in a life cycle of preparation for a drama that is not their own. 'I'm always having to get ready for something,' Jeannie says, 'As far back as I can remember.'¹¹ Despite her growing sexual awareness, her managerial skills and her stated determination that she will shape her experience herself ('No rituals, no history. I spring, fully developed, out of my own forehead'), ¹² it is suggested that the speaker's 'value' is dependent upon her ability to perform up to her .audience's' expectations. Her desire is always framed and contained:

Just once, I wish I could step outside of time where just once I could prepare myself, without being rushed for ...nothin, or ... maybe something ... important ... when I find out what that is.¹³

Simons' understanding of the potential impact of meta-theatrical techniques comes into play as Jeannie's 'lookers' become directly associated with the live spectators of the performance. Jeannie recognizes her audience and performs for it. She is overtly theatrical and makes the spectators feel like spectators. As she dons masks and costumes through various stages of her life, the spectator is reminded of how important 'being looked at' actually is:

How shall I make myself appear? What role shall I play today? ... What face shall I put on? ... ¹⁴

The speaker is overtly aware of the power her public has in the determination of her worth. With this awareness, she similarly condemns all of her spectators as guilty. The collective 'you' that she prepares for is defined as hostile and antagonistic from the first lines of the play where she cries 'Fuck 'em all.'¹⁵ The spectator is recognized as crucial to the cycle of deception and role-playing because it is his or her gaze which sanctions and approves the appearance of the performer. Even though the character is ostensibly alone on the stage, her preparation is played for an audience that has commanded the performance. There is no private space where she remains un-looked-at; in which she is subject alone. As if to question the possibility of subjectivity itself, Jeannie is presented as an actor who, like the actor who represents her, is always already determined by the frame she stands in. 'I can't ... make it ... stop, you see,' Jeannie utters, 'That's what's so ... unreasonable.' Later she remarks: 'Maybe they won't notice it's a mask floating over a void.' ¹⁶ Recognizing that traditional theatre is bound to certain representational models, Simons draws attention to the complicity of the spectator which prevents the visioning of the female subject.

In order to disengage both speaker and spectator from a cycle that perpetuates the objectification of the female body, it is possible to propose a revisioning of the traditional patriarchal spectator critiqued by Dolan. In the place of the white, male, heterosexual viewer, the genderless confidant and friend is positioned. If the spectator is conceived as one who listens and participates in a supportive, non-gendered position, then the tendency to objectify or collectivize either party as 'other' is, in theory, reduced. The relationship of confidentiality excludes the undressing stare of the male gaze and replaces it with a sense of community and sharing. The speaker is revealed in the simultaneous process of uncovering and exposing herself to individuals whose presence and participation become integral to her discovery. She is established as 'very real' as she speaks of her own life and acknowledges the presence and reactions of the audience as supportive. The conventions of the theatrical frame appear to disappear and are replaced by 'real life.' This effect is enhanced when the author of the piece performs as the speaker, removing the 'actor' from her role as mediator between audience and playwright. The 'F of the speaker and that of the author appear to conflate; the playwright performs autobiography. However, the degree to which theory and practise correspond remains a contentious issue. While this kind of performer/spectator dynamic seems to be favoured in the Canadian women's monodrama,¹⁷ I would argue that monodrama written and performed by the same woman frequently bears a conscious awareness that the speaker is no more 'real' than the guest on a television talk show who continues to be, despite her 'true story' status, framed by the lens of the camera and by the horizon of expectations of her viewers.

Pamela Boyd's monodrama Inside Out constructs a woman attempting to manage family, marriage and career whilst juggling answering machines, dinner for four, bottles, diapers and a typewriter. The final act of the piece finds Ellen on the verge of nervous collapse, her monologue seeping into disjointed hysteria:

But I do try. I try to keep myself up, show off my attributes, write the odd screenplay. I've written one recently, against great odds, great odds. It's about hope and faith. Bringing up children in this day and age should be enough, you say. Should be fulfillment. Should be fulfillment. Perhaps I'm a freak. Perhaps we're all freaks. We're all freaks. We're all freaks. We're all freaks. Bringing babies to life doomed to imminent death. Doomed to imminent death. Imminent death. It's animal nature. We're all animals. We're animals. We're animals. Just animals.When faced with extinction propagate in a frenzy. A frenzy. A frenzy. A frenzy. A frenzy. When faced with starvation, eat its young. Eat its young. Eat its young. Eat its young.¹⁸

Ellen's tirade is broken by her child's off stage cry at which point she lapses into further delirium and picks up an imaginary baby which she lifts to her face. She then reaches for a pillow which she holds to the baby as if to suffocate it. The stage directions to the printed text indicate that she realizes what her hands are doing, withdraws them, and raises her head to the audience and utters a silent scream.¹⁹ Recognizing the onset of madness, Ellen reaches out. The fourth wall is penetrated and the spectator is exposed and invited into Ellen's space. At this moment the boundary that distinguishes 'play' from 'real life' is approached, and an intimate connection is established between the spectator and the performer. Theoretically, the spectator becomes a responsible confidant, positioned not to 'determine' the speaker but instead to acknowledge and respond to her as a real, live subject. When Boyd played Ellen herself, real life and theatre might have been further entwined as the distinctions between author and character were reduced.²⁰ The problem is, however, that Ellen is not Pamela Boyd. As a character in a play and on a stage, Boyd's body is a text for audience interpretation-she is framed by their expectations and the conditions of the representation. The legacy of motherhood stands dutifully behind her. Boyd, seemingly aware of the impossibility of representing an unmediated 'reality,' makes use of highly theatrical conventions to underscore her speaker's monologue. The set is made of cardboard cut-outs painted in demented, fantastic colours with a large stopped clock on the wall indicative of how time, in this 'mother's world,' has come to stand still. Also, Ellen's child is represented by a large stuffed puppet that Boyd obviously manipulates mechanically. The spectator is therefore receiving an interesting mixture of messages. At once he/she is constructed as an intimate confidant-as a participant in Boyd's/Ellen's coming to terms with her life and herself, while at the same time his/her status as 'one who expects her to perform as a proper mother should' is underscored as he/she is faced with what is not real life but obvious simulacra. Boyd, like Simons, makes use of theatrical devices in order to consciously subvert her own insights. The speaker reaches out to her audience in order to break down the conventions which contain her and fix her meaning as wife and mother alone; however, ultimately these conditions are highlighted. To her spectators, she remains a representation of motherhood framed by the lured walls of the doll's house they have confined her to.

Janet Feindel's A Particular Class of Women, provides a second example of the interplay that necessarily goes on between the subjectivity of the author/speaker and the nature of theatrical representation. The brash tone and daring confidentiality derived from the personal experience of the author invite the spectator into the glitzy space of the strip-tease nightclub. Sitting in the dressing room with a succession of speakers, played by Feindel herself, the spectator witnesses pre-show preparations. Personal and intimate questions are directed to the spectator in a comfortable and off-hand manner, challenging him/her to understand the community of the strip from an insider's perspective:

Luv: Sometimes I prefer a chick. You compare the difference between a man and a woman in bed. A woman knows what to do. She knows what feels good on herself. Anyone in this room ever sucked puss? ²¹

Initially, Feindel's body does not exist in a state of 'to-be-looked-at-ness.' It stands as an expression of the integrity, intelligence and independence of sex trade workers. At the beginning of Act One, the spectator is introduced to Lil who is describing her experiences with ease and comfort while dancing around her kitchen in a bath robe making cookies. ²² However, in order to explore the ambivalence of the strip economy, Feindel uses the theatrical devices to remind the spectator that each woman's worth is somehow related to audience estimation. Consider the following stage direction:

LIL takes off apron in kitchen area, then moves to the costume rack, and removes dressing gown and wig, to begin change into MARKY, whose hair is in pigtails. MARKY puts on a sparkly jacketover her leotard-type outfit underdressed under LIL's dressing gown. As this change is occurring, the disco ball light goes on and turns, and the spotlight does figure eights around the stage. Circus music plays and the MC's voice comes in as soon as LIL begins the change.²³

Initially constructed as a friend or confidant, the spectator is moved from the privacy of the kitchen to the strip where he is redefined as specifically male. The MC's invocation of 'Girls! Girls! Girls! Yousa! Yousa! Yousa! '²⁴ indicates that the spectator's role is to function as the consumer of the commodity on sale within the economy of the strip. As Marky, Feindel dances on a table.²⁵ As Petal Rose, she teases the audience with her stockings.²⁶ As Georgia Scott she removes her shorts and her top, changes her bra and then reveals her pubic hair cut in the shape of a heart.²⁷ The spectator, rendered an active participant in the representation, discovers that the value of the characters is subject to his/her evaluation. As a performer, Feindel becomes an object of lust, fetishized for her potential to satisfy the sexual desires of the spectator, her paying client. Co-existing with Feindel's desire to pay tribute to the women she worked with on the strip, is the realization that the signifiers of her representation are bound by the limitations of sexist interpretation.

Barbara Freedman argues that 'to theatricalize one must deconstruct, insert a difference in a term which splits it, mimics it, then displaces or usurps it. "A woman writing like a woman writing like a woman" is never the same woman.'²⁸ Simons, Boyd and Feindel each develop speakers who remain overtly conscious of the fact that they are 'looked upon'-a fact which displaces, confuses and challenges the gaze of the spectator. But is it politically expedient to replay Catch 22 representations of women which always seem to re-enclose a fragmented subjectivity in a structure of sexist oppression? Jill Dolan intervenes in the post-structuralist assumption that the 'I'is always bound by representation by arguing that desire, far from being a 'fixed, male-owned commodity,' can be 'exchanged, with a much different meaning, between women.'²⁹ Experiments such as La Nef des sorcières Jovette Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit attempt precisely such a project. The spectators constructed by these plays are exclusively female and respond to an aesthetic that does not seek, at any point, to objectify or commodify the represented women. The monologues of La Nef-a collection of one-woman pieces to be performed in succession-individually mark out and address women who stand outside of the speakers' private spaces. The speaker of Odette Gagnon's 'La Fille' piece calls out women's names and reaches out to make contact:

J'ense aux filles, j'pense à: la femme d'en avant ... celle qui a des enfants, la fille d'à côté, celle qui est pas mariée ... la femme d'en bas ... celle qu'on dit qu'a travaille pas . . . la fille d'en haut qui tape des lettres dans un bureau ... la femme d'en arriére qui est bonne couturiére ... qui aurait bien aimé dev'nir infirmiére .... ³⁰

She goes on to list more women who, like herself, are isolated in their own spaces and who are uncovering their own monologues. As her thoughts go out to other women, the walls existing between speaker and female spectator disintegrate and contact is made.³¹ Similarly, Marie-Claire Blais' 'Marcelle' initiates the female spectator to lesbian desire. In the subsequent 'Marcelle II,' Pol Pelletier trades in the accusatory 'vous' for the more communal 'nous,' thereby inviting the female spectator into her lesbian space: 'Nous formons à nous toutes une société secréte.'³² Nicole Brossard's 'Ecrivain' concludes the performance by speaking of a political pact amongst women:³³ . . . je ne veux plus faire cela toute seule. Je nous veux. Faire craquer, grincer, grincher l'histoire.³⁴

These women, isolated in their monologues, either consciously or unconsciously transcend the restrictions of their spaces and make contact with thefemale spectator. Though each woman remains in her room, her story escapes through the walls and is given a public hearing. Yvonne Mathews-Klein and Ann Pearson, spectators of the performance, gave this account:

The terrible isolation in which each speaker stands and, indeed, in which each appears to rejoice, is disturbing. Yet, each time I saw the play, the connections were made nevertheless, between the actors and every woman in the audience who seemed to hear herself speaking out loud for the first time.³⁵

The dynamic is even stronger in Marchessault's Les Vaches de nuit, which audaciously dares to imagine a community of women flourishing outside the restrictions of 'l'ordre des castrants.' The representation, which presents a young cow in the process of explaining her nocturnal liberation into a uniquely female space, is developed around a particularly female aesthetic closely associated with the imagining of difference through memory and within the female body. The delightful association of the heretofore derogatory cow with the female body indicates that the piece is not concerned with providing an in for everybody:

Beauté! Le grand fleuve de lait, la terre de l'enfance où mères et filles sont enfin réunies. Beauté! Beauté! Canaux de lait fleuris de nénuphars. Ivressée lactée, fluidité blanche, liquide astral, le fruit des entrailles de nos méres se répand dans le temps frais du ciel.³⁶

Women alone are invited to participate in the celebration:

Entre les dames comeilles et les mammiares, à chaque fois c'est la fête, la joie des retrouvailles, tous les embrassements possibles du corps et de la mémoire .³⁷

As the speaker describes female animals gathering around their mothers, so female spectators gathered around Pol Pelletier at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde on the evening of 5 March 1979, on the occasion of International Women's Day.³⁸ Together female speaker and spectators attempt to transform the theatre into a common space for their mutual subjectivity. Women, in Marchessault's words, 'ne peu[venlt qu'apprendre A se rappeler, chacune A son tour.' ³⁹ A communion is created and celebrated.

Though effectively surmounting problems of representation with exclusive female spectatorship, La Nef and Les Vaches are no longer monodramas. The isolation of private monologue has been gleefufly abandoned in favour of a political dialogue between women. The recognition of the female spectator, and her inclusion into the process of the drama, effectively establish a situation where the term monodrama no longer applies. It is the 'we' and not the 'I' that becomes the subject of the representation. Without devaluing the importance of the communities created and celebrated in these two plays, I return inevitably to my initial query. Can there be monologue for women?Should there be? Is there a public space where the first person singular is tolerated in the hope of finding something new? Do the pitfalls of representation and the desperate need for the establishment of a feminist community render the monologue both practically and politically problematic?

Marie Savard and Sharon Pollock address these questions by circumventing traditional theatrical representation and indulging in what is more closely allied with performance art. The only listener actually recognized by Savard, in her piece Bien à moi, is the speaker, La Marquise. The piece, about one woman's creative act of self-discovery, is implicitly linked with the solitary/private act of masturbation. It is clear that the speaker engages in acts of auto-eroticism at specific points in the play:

Il est vrai que je viens. Je viens du fond de ma jeunesse .....sainte!..... Il est vraie que je vis. Je jouis. Je n'ai plus à me le cacher, à me refuser A moi pour mieux me réfugier derrière l'immense subterfuge de ma pudeur et de mon savoir vivre.⁴⁰

Under such conditions, the spectator is outside of the speaker's private space yet given special access. Unlike in A Particular Class of Women where the performance text arouses the voyeur/spectator's consumerist gaze, here the focus is internal and rests upon la Marquise's self-exploration. The speaker is active, as opposed to acted upon. By positing the speaker's desire as the subject and form of the representation, the piece, in theory, subverts any possibility of an objectifying gaze. Again, theoretically, there is no opportunity to satisfy any desire other than la Marquise's for all other view points (in a very political reversal of fortune) are left silent and unrepresented. This kind of deliberate exclusion of the objectifying gaze of the spectator, for the purposes of 'playing solitaire' was not well met by the critics. Reviews of Bien à moi reduced La Marquise's delightful self-indulgence to evidence of a nervous condition. The character was written off as inarticulate, 'décousu, farfelu et souvent absolument abeffant.'⁴¹ While a reviewer's opinion is not necessarily representative of all spectators' experiences, it does stand as the testimony of one, proving the inability of a performance text to fully release the representation from sexist stereotyping. While a specific look may be inscribed by a performance text, the possibility of aberrant receptions by individuals or the collective is always a potential reality.⁴²

Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight, about a schizophrenic who finds herself beneath the bleachers of a rodeo once the crowd has all gone home, has suffered much of the same criticism. The content of this recent monodrama consists primarily of the speaker's (Eme) grappling with the images of a postmodem world in an attempt to 'get it all straight.' Naturally, the structure is violently fragmented leaving the spectator with thoroughly disjointed images of personal and social break down:

I dream, I dream ... I lie on my back in a field full of yellow mustard at midnight ... I look deep into time for the nearest stars are tens of thousands ofyears closer than the stars that are distant and far, time being space, being time, my room, is square, one second by one second when I run screaming, rushing, hit the wall, pressing in-small, seven seconds by seven, square measured walk, drift ... in a dream . . . slow . . . space stretches ... like vowels, rooom ... groows, I see ... the milky way holding back the night so that fragments of darkness are unable to fall, crushing me, and the mustard, and a very small egg that I, hold, in my hand, it, could crush, you too, like an egg ... they say ... I say, nothing ... I whisper, I am not certain if I dream it or ... if it dreams me .... ⁴³

Like Bien à moi, Getting it Straight makes no attempt to define a place for the male gaze; neither does it recognize the spectator as a confidant or friend; instead complete self-indulgence dictates content and form. Like Bien à moi, Eme's digressions were panned by the critics as a contrived exercise succeeding only in venting the playwright's personal despair:

As with many writers, Pollock has apparently arrived at a moment when the unending news of famine, atrocity, war and ever more degrading consumerism is simply too much. She doubts the point of being a writer, of trying to create sanity. But instead of enduring the crisis quietly, she has made the mistake of foisting her chaos onto a mad character. She is in short, using Eme as an excuse for 80 minutes of free association. ⁴⁴

Manfred Pfister says that 'in the real world . . . talking alone for too long is generally thought to be a pathological deviation from the norm and those who are not pathologically disturbed generally restrict their thinking aloud to brief exclamations.'⁴⁵ In theatre, Pfister continues, the familiar conventions of the soliloquy and the monologue re-establish speaking alone and aloud as normative forms of self-expression. But la Marquise and Eme, like real life 'deviants,' can be diagnosed as pathologically disturbed. Their discourse is not necessarily sanctioned and their subjectivity re-centred within established theatrical conventions. Ultimately the signifier of the woman's body does not exclude from the range of signifieds: hysteria, madness and deviant sexuality.

It is my contention that the act of 'playing solitaire' sets into motion the very subversion of the 'I' that it wishes to articulate; however, I do not conclude that monodrama and theatre in general are inaccessible to feminist concerns. Freedman argues that the paradox of avant-garde theatre is that in seeking to stage a moment outside of representation, one cannot evade the gaze of the spectator that constitutes that representation. She notes: 'Theatre has always suggested a funhouse of mirrors we never escape, a precession of simulacra which remind us we can never reach a body outside of representation.'⁴⁶ The women's monodrama, in its very struggle to surmount the pitfalls of representation, is a documentation of the struggle to control one's look:

Theatre calls the spectatorial gaze into play by exhibiting a purloined gaze, a gaze that announces that it has always been presented to our eyes; is designed only to be taken up by them.... Theatre's masks announce that the 'I' is always already another; its characters assure us of their displacement, announcing, 'I am already taken,' as in 'this seat is taken'. . . .⁴⁷

Theatre, the monodrama in particular, is the appropriate medium for the dislodgement of the spectatorial gaze and the re-dressing of representation. When she speaks in the first person singular, the solo speaker understands that 'I' is always already beyond her control. It is that reality that she documents. From there, direct experience of the monodrama feeds back to revise the spectator's horizon of expectations and to challenge the very conventions and meanings that that 'I' represents. In the words of Nicole Brossard and France Théoret: 'l'isolement provisoire et stratégique du monologue permet à la fois de ne pas tout égaliser et de ne pas tout réduire.'⁴⁸

NOTES

PLAYING SOLITAIRE: SPECTATORSHIP AND REPRESENTATION IN CANADIAN WOMEN'S MONODRAMA

PATRICIA BADIR

1 NICOLE BROSSARD 'L'Ecrivain' La nef des sorcières by Brossard et al (Montrdal: Quinze 1976) p 74
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2 Each of these structural claims merits further individual exploration. I have treated them all to some extent in my MA thesis at the University of Alberta (1991)
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3 CHRISTI, VERDUYN 'Ecrire le moi au féminin' Journal of Canadian Studies vol 20 no 2(Summer 1985) 27
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4 KEIR ELAM The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (New York & London: Methuen 1989) pp 95-97
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5 SUSAN BENNETT Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge 1990) pp 52-54, 149
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6 SUE-ELLEN CASE Feminism and Theatre (London: MacMillan 1988) p 116
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7 CASE p 117
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8 CASE p 118
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9 LAURA MULVEY 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Screen vol 16 no 3 (1975) 62
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10 JILL DOLAN The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press 1988) p 1
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11 BEVERLEY SIMONS Preparing (Vancouver: Talon Books 1975) p 26
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12 SIMONS p 29
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13 SIMONS p 27
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14 SIMONS p 33
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15 SIMONS p 26
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16 SIMONS pp 31-32
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17 JOAN MACLEOD'S Jewel, WENDY LILL's The Occupation of Heather Rose or LOUISETTE DUSSAULT's Moman are a few examples, other than the ones discussed here, of pieces which develop particular moments in which the speakers, performed by the playwrights themselves, make direct contact with the spectators
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18 PAMELA BOYD 'Inside Out' NeWest Plays by Women eds DIANE BESSAI and DON KERR (Edmonton: NeWest Press 1987) p 134
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19 BOYD p 135
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20 I am here referring to the Tarragon Extra Space production of the play in Toronto in March 1986
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21 JANET FEINDEL A Particular Class of Women (Vancouver: Lazarus Publication 1989) p 30
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22 FEINDEL p 15
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23 FEINDEL p 17
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24 FEINDEL p 18
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25 FEINDEL p 18
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26 FEINDEL p 27
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27 FEINDEL p 50
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28 BARBARA FREEDMAN 'Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, T'heatre' Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre ed SUE-ELLEN CASE (London & Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press 1990) p 75
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29 DOLAN p 80
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30 NICOLE BROSSARD et al La nef des sorcières (Montreal: Quinze 1976) pp 49-50
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31 It should be noted that 'Actrice,' 'La Fille' and 'Marcelle II' were all performed by the women who wrote them. The particular dynamic of 'self-performance' noted in FEINDEL's and BOYD's plays is also applicable here
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32 BROSSARD et al p 70
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33 BROSSARD et al p 74
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34 BROSSARD et al p 75
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35 YVONNE MATHEWS-KLEIN and ANN PEARSON 'A Stage of Seven Women' Branching Out vol 3 (Sept-Oct 1974) p 19
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36 JOVETTE MARCHESSAULT Les vaches de nuit (Montreal: Editions de la pleine lune 1980) p 87
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37 MARCHESSAULT p 91
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38 Both JEAN ROYER ('Le théâtre au féminin de la fête' Le Devoir 7 mars 1979 p 6) and ANDREE LEBEL ('Un spectacle beau par sa simplicité' La Presse 6 mars 1979 p 67)document that the audience was made up mostly of women
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39 MARCHESSAULT p 92
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40 MARIE SAVARD Bien à moi (Montreal: Editions de la pleine lune 1979) p 40
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41 MARTIAL DASSYLVA La Presse 19 fév 1970 p 27
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42 BENNETT p 164
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43 SHARON POLLOCK Getting It Straight (unpublished ms 1989) p 8. 1 would like to thank Ms POLLOCK for making this manuscript available to me
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44 RAY CONLOGUE The Globe and Mail 12 Jan 1990 p C7
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45 MANFRED PFISTER The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ Press 1988)pp 131-32
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46 FREEDMAN p 72
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47 FREEDMAN p 74
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48 NICOLE BROSSARD and FRANCE THEORET Préface' La nef des sorcières (Montreal: Quinze 1976 p.13)
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