PROVOCATIVE PERFORMANCEFinal Essay – 5-7 pages: Due Friday, December 18, 2015

For your final essay, you may choose one of these options (or propose your own):

Question 1

Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, to some extent, lampoons “Body Awareness Week” on a college campus. What do the feminist artists we read and viewed want us to be “aware” of regarding women’s bodies? In Top Girls, Pope Joan explains why she didn’t know she was pregnant: “But Nijo, I wasn’t used to having a woman’s body.” Near the end of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, L’il Bit, recalling her earliest driving lesson with Uncle Peck, says: “That was the last day I lived in my body.” And in Ruined, war is fought through women’s bodies. Various performance art pieces we viewed dealt with bodies—naked, “cross-dressed”--- or talked about the subject. Further, the theatre is a particularly effective art form for exploring these issues because it is so explicitly “embodied.”

Selecting your own thesis around the topic of “bodies,” write an essay that considers women’s bodies as both a “subject” and “site(s)” for theatrical representations and/or resistance, using two or three of the plays we have read or performances we have viewed (but not one on which you have already written). Your topic may be related to that of your presentation, but should expand significantly on what you discussed in class.

Question 2

Is there another topic you’d like to take up? Just as I pose the question about bodies, above, you might look at feminist stagings of other topics or depictions, such as:

Race, Class, Ethnicity, Gender, Motherhood, Men, Servants, Sexuality, “Sisterhood”; etc.

There are many common themes we have encountered, but these have been handled very different ways by different playwrights. You might pick a topic of your own interest (run it by me first).

Question 3

Across the plays we have read and viewed this semester, artists have alternatively selected strategies such as shock, sentiment, and humor to persuade audiences to new perspectives. Describe such moments, their purposes, and impact, considering the way(s) these strategies seem to be used and to what effect. [This is an open question, leaving you lots of room to make your own argument.]

Question 4

Not only have we encountered a range of topics, we have also encountered a variety of styles: adaptation, realism, performance art, satire, comedy.... You might choose to compare and contrast how two completely different types of play or piece approach similar topics, and make an argument for which is effective.

NOTE: The strongest essays will be specific, citing page numbers of plays (or moments from videos); I would also like for you to engage with at least one critic we have read (or another you find on your own, possibly from your presentation preparation). Attached for your review is a list of works we have encountered throughout the semester.

PROVOCATIVE PERFORMANCE Dr. Rosemary MalagueTHAR 279.401, ENGL 356.401, BFS 521 Annenberg CenterFall 2015 rmalague@sas.upenn.edu______________________________________________________________________________

Plays:A Doll’s House by Henrik IbsenTop Girls by Caryl ChurchillCloud 9 by Caryl ChurchillLove of the Nightingale by Timberlake WertenbakerLear’s Daughters (ensemble-created)Desdemona: a play about a handkerchief by Paula VogelBelle Reprieve by Split Britches and Bloo Lips (with Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire)The Children’s HourHow I Learned to Drive by Paula VogelRuined by Lynn NottageIn the next room, or the vibrator play by Sarah RuhlIntimate Apparel by Lynn NottageBody Awareness by Annie BakerFabulation, or the Reeducation of Undine by Lynn NotttageRapture, Blister, Burn by Gina Gionfriddo

Presentations (including in-class presentation as well as at-home viewing/reading):The “NEA Four” (Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller)Fun Home Lisa KronDeb Margolin“Hello Sadness” and Mary TuomanenAnna Deavere SmithEve Ensler and The Vagina MonologuesPaula Vogel“For Colored Women and Urban Bush Girls” (cleverly decided by the two Burkes!)Women and Comedy

Live Viewing:A Doll’s HouseThe Children’s HourUrban Bush Womenfor Colored Girls...

Home Viewing:Belle Reprieve Menopausal Gentleman by/with Peggy Shaw(as well as some clips sent by classmates)

Articles:Jill Dolan, excerpts from The Feminist Spectator as CriticSue-Ellen Case, excerpts from Feminism and TheatreElin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist CriticismSharon Friedman, “Revisioning the Woman’s Part: Paula Vogel’s Desdemona”Gay Cima, “Strategies for Subverting the Canon”Rosemary Malague, “Theatrical Realism as Feminist Intervention”