Performativity

BRAD KRUMHOLZ, THEATRE DOCTOR
Posted 7/25/18

Just about everyone knows the famous quotation from Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage,” even if they don’t necessarily know it’s from “As You Like It,” …

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Performativity

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Just about everyone knows the famous quotation from Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage,” even if they don’t necessarily know it’s from “As You Like It,” written in 1599. The next line, “And all the men and women merely players,” is perhaps a little less widely known, and the rest of Jaques’ speech to Duke senior is virtually unknown in common culture.

While Jaques identifies both men and women as players on the world stage, his extended metaphor includes only men in the “leading roles;” the only woman mentioned is “his mistress.” This seems somehow fitting, given the fact that all actors on the London stage during Shakespeare’s time were men. The female “skirts” roles were played by the younger men and older boys of the company.

It’s interesting to keep this in mind when thinking about the actor playing Rosalind in “As You Like It,” a “female” character who “impersonates” a male character. One can only imagine watching such a play in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, as a young man plays a woman who plays a man. This “gender play” is common in Shakespeare.

It’s also interesting to note that at almost exactly the same time, in Japan, a female “temple dancer” named Okuni was in the process of developing a new form of theatre, called Kabuki. After numerous scandals surrounding the impropriety of having female performers onstage, the government eventually legislated it into an all-male theatrical form, giving birth to the well-regarded female “Onnagata” roles, played by specially trained male performers.

At the heart of this age-old proscription against women appearing onstage is a profoundly anti-theatrical stance, namely that playing roles other than “who you really are” is the devil’s work. This is the central reason that the Puritans in England banned all theatre for almost 20 years, from 1642 to 1660. Before that, when theatre was allowed, it was only permitted for men to act, or in the language common at the time, to impersonate.

Men also had the ability to take on a number of other roles in public life, in the form of jobs, pastimes, etc. The woman’s role in both public and private life had much less room for variation and movement. It stands to reason, then, that the male law-makers would disallow women from experimenting with role-play onstage. If a woman were permitted to taste the freedom of becoming something other than what she was “supposed to be,” one can only imagine how fast women would succumb to the slippery slope of sin. Or so the thinking goes.

This “dangerous” aspect of theatre, its ability to bring into being realities alternate to the one in which we currently live, is perhaps one of the main reasons theatre makers persist in their art. You don’t like the world you live in? Create a different one and bring it to life onstage! You don’t like the constraints placed upon you as a woman in society? Create a role that embodies the characteristics you’d like to see in women today!

What Shakespeare said may be true, that all the world is a stage, but it might be more useful for us at this moment in history to see the stage as a world in its own right. Theatre stages worlds and characters and possibilities for living that the world itself does not allow.

At least not yet.

[Brad Krumholz is co-founder and artistic director, North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL Theatre). NACL is producing a three-day weekend micro-festival titled “Kaleidoscoping” from July 26 through 28, which will address art and its social relevance.]

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