I sent a note to TurboMD titled "End of the semester reckoning...." I hope this answers some questions and allays some fears. In the realm of policework, I can report that we have received the following peer reviews for Essay 2:
Bolin & Gill |
Michel & Sekiya |
The play is Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches (1991). We may have some video clips. The question is: what's postmodern about this play? You might want to think about the "split screen" scenes, and whether or not they resemble those moments in Pillow Talk when the screen splits and we listen to and watch, sort of, the phone conversations. [Should I ask if any of you actually have seen Pillow Talk?!]
Felicia is going to take us through a number of scenes from Belle Reprieve, a "collaborative theatre" work, written by ["put together by"] Bette Bourne, Paul Shaw, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Published editions of this play, as well as other Split Britches productions, do not always indicate specific songs but instead specify that songs "in the style of _______ [the name of the song in a particular production] be used." Substitutions in the production your are seeing are:
The other scenes we'll see are the "Bite me, bite me, suck on me" scene between Stanley and Mitch (p. 996) and the "Breakdown" scene (p. 1001).
Extensive notes follow.
Lois Weaver, a founding member of Split Britches Company, comments,
[The name Split Britches] was taken from my two great Aunts and one Great-Great Aunt who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and they wore these under-garments that were called "split-britches" and this was something that would enable them to pee while they were standing up in the fields and we thought this was the funniest thing we had ever heard and we also thought -- well -- what a great image, really, in terms of, you know, taking power over your life and also that whole idea of humor -- that you could split your britches laughing.Belle Reprieve is a work originally conceived and performed in 1991 by British drag company Bloolips (Bette Bourne and Paul Shaw -- aka "Precious Pearl") and Split Britches Company (Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver), a feminist lesbian performance group. A take-off on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Belle Reprieve is a cross-gender send-up of the Elia Kazan film. Alisa Solomon sees that the play as
a four-part invention on themes the script evokes for these avatars of homo, pomo performance: the influence of heterosexual imagery on gay and lesbian eroticism; the mythological power of cinematic icons; the appeal of butch-femme and macho-sissy role-playing in lesbian and gay subcultures; the whole messy meaning of gender itself.Belle Reprieve encompasses gay and lesbian sexuality and performs the gender constructs of masculinity and femininity. The play embodies a clearly articulated critique of realism and puts its theory into practice. Brechtian performance is heightened in this play -- costume changes and costume layering are intricate, songs and vaudeville routines are used to break any narrative flow, and the multileveled characters play themselves playing a performer who is playing the role of a character from Streetcar in the play Belle Reprieve. Alisa Solomon suggests that "The production [Belle Reprieve], Brechtian in style if not in structure, makes the categories of male and female strange; through performance it puts them -- embodies them -- in the quotation marks so common to contemporary theory."
The combination of gay and lesbian representation provides an interesting twist to the gender confusion in the play, as all the heterosexual couplings can also be read as homosexual. Blanche and Mitch are at once a straight and a gay couple, depending on how they are perceived at different points during the play. Blanche and Stella are sisters with incestuous lesbian tendencies, but can also be seen as a man in drag and a woman. Stella and Stanley are "married" and offer a picture of heterosexuality while also securing an alternate vision of their relationship as butch-femme lesbians. Mitch's infatuation with Stanley illustrates Mitch's lust for a lesbian butch while also confirming his preference for men, even though his stage relationship with Blanche shifts in and out of Mitch's perception of Blanche-as-drag-queen and Blanche as a woman. Although these pairings might seem confusing -- and they are confusing -- that is part of the point. Gender is fluid and changeable in Belle Reprieve and not, for some, such a far cry from the original characterizations in Streetcar. Peggy Shaw believes that all the characters in Williams' script are already gay: "Look at all the lesbian love scenes in the film between Blanche and Stella. When Stanley interrupts them, they're always head to head, like they're about to kiss. And Stanley! He walks like Mae West, hates women, and loves other men. He's obviously a faggot."
Hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity are obvious in the portrayal of Blanche and Stanley, but the roles of Mitch and Stella also play with gender in a multi-layered fashion. Stanley and Blanche offer the most blatant impersonations of masculinity and femininity, while the less exaggerated masculinity and femininity of Mitch and Stella is also revealed to be provisional. The role of Mitch, as played by Precious Pearl, is a pivotal role in the play, but is also the most ambiguous. Mitch portrays Mitch from Streetcar, Precious Pearl playing the role of Mitch in Belle Reprieve, and the character also serves the function of narrator -- a sort-of Stage Manager from Our Town. For Precious Pearl, playing straight Mitch is more of a stretch personally and performatively than his usual whiteface, glitter, and "fancy frocks" required of a Bloolips extravaganza. Precious Pearl says, "For men to be silly creatures is one step forward. It is very liberating."
A queer Brechtian distancing is at work in Belle Reprieve. Split Britches Company consciously affords distance between what a character says and what a character does. In a purely post-modern fashion, Weaver attempts to work away from text-based acting, even though plays are most often text-based. She states that
Your tendency is to want to illustrate the language and what I've been working with is to create a distance between the language and the acting so there's a lot of things that go along between that. We've been working a lot with gender and with butch-femme [in] workshops. You can take a line that's a femme line but you can do it in a butch manner or with a butch action or . . . in language; what you say isn't nearly as important as how you do it. And it's that distance, that tension, between language and action that I find really interesting and, you know, a willingness to not have to explain the language is really important. . . . your body can create an impulse and then the language rides on top of it. . . . it's the opposition, always looking for the opposition.Within all of the gender explosions that manifest themselves in Belle Reprieve, the characters of Mitch and Stella supply a more obscure critiqueon and that distance between the action and the text. Belle Reprieve critiques realism both in style and content. The play is extremely non-linear and non-realistic and the content of the play critiques realism as part of its message. Lois Weaver explains that "Realism works against us as women and as gays and lesbians. In a realistic play, chances are the woman gets raped. We couldn't reconcile ourselves to that. And we couldn't pursue the idea of a drag queen going insane." Belle Reprieve presents a post-modern performance by questioning the validity of not only what is represented, but how it is represented. The characters institutionalized by Williams' play are placed within "quotations marks" in Belle Reprieve, an act altering not only the perception of who these characters are, but if they are at all. The play manages, as critic Alisa Solomon observes, "to examine what can happen when the borderlines of gender as transgressed toward power instead of away from it, toward a critique of gender roles instead of toward a parody of them." Calling the constructs of masculinity and femininity into question is one of the ways Belle Reprieve calls for the reorganization of gender so that personal, political, and social power can be re-evaluated and re-defined. Alisa Solomon suggests that
Belle Reprieve points in exciting new directions not only because, by self-consciously using drag that crosses both toward and away from power, it puts masculinity as well as femininity into critical relief. More than that, it envisions the rejection of the power structure itself, obliterating domination through the playful disruption of its most confining expressions.The characters of Mitch, Stella, Blanche, and Stanley, played consciously as character types by the performers, "makes strange" the gendered realities society at large takes for granted. Bette Bourne insists that "We kick over the stereotypes by using stereotypes."
Many queer critics believe that there are two kinds of gay theatre: assimilationist and subversive. I think it is safe to say that Belle Reprieve falls under the subversive category! Are there any aspects of Modernism in Belle Reprieve? When you get to it, think about how Belle -- its feminism and attempts at queer representation -- are different or similar to Angels in America.