Dramaturgies of home in on- and off- stage spaces
Jeanmarie Higgins
Home and theatre share a discourse. In a work that engages the interplay of domestic space and psychoanalysis, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that the seeming permanence of our childhood homes—the structure of walls, rooms, windows, and other enclosures—provides a staging space to imagine what lies beyond them. “Lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past" (15), these childhood homes continue to exist for us as a place we visit in dreams, a fixed/dream space where the lucky among us can relive memories of security: “Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images” (6), Bachelard says. Like a home, a theatre space is “something closed” that retains lived images; both are stages that allow events to unfold in time, as rich, symbolic worlds are built.
And in theatre, these symbolic worlds are built whether home is actually depicted—the “room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly” of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—or whether home is produced solely in an audience’s mind’s eye, like Blanche DuBois’s Belle Reve in A Streetcar Named Desire, the “great big place with white columns” that we never see. In drama, home is not always a safe place, whether onstage or offstage. In the final moments of Sophocles’s Electra, Orestes prepares to kill his stepfather by ushering him offstage/indoors as Aegisthus asks “Why take me into the house, if this deed is just?...Is this dwelling doomed to see all the sufferings of us descendants of Pelops?” In many Greek dramas, the house’s threshold is the (unseen) domestic feature that points to the horrible things that happen at home: Aegisthus stands on the threshold, Oedipus enters the house, Clytemnestra leads her husband to his final bath. And the walls absorb what happens next.
Several writers included in this special issue of Etudes, “Dramaturgies of home in on- and off- stage spaces,” cite phenomenologist Bachelard and philosopher Martin Heidegger precisely because these thinkers bring the private, domestic sphere to the forefront, elevating the very idea of home to an existential and spatial fact. Between earth and sky, asserts Heidegger, we dwell. At the same time, our authors’ collective citation of these writers historicize them, constituting a de facto critique. Traditional critiques of Bachelard focus on reading the historical moment of the 1950s in his work. Heidegger and Bachelard’s works can be seen as mid-century celebrations of the plenty that comes after war, a war that chillingly reinforced the need for the safety of domestic spaces, both individual and national. As interior design theorist Joe Moran writes, “Bachelard’s discussion of the house shows that the poetics of space are always unavoidably linked to a politics, . . . The key question, then, is how the nebulous entities of memory, desire and the imagination intersect with the material culture of houses, a process that is crucially connected to history and economics.”
Others criticize the use of domesticity as an affect rather than as a site of economic and social relations replete with power structures. In her critique of Witold Rybczynski’s and others’ use of Dutch painting as evidence of emergent feelings of domesticity in seventeenth-century Holland, Heidi de Mare tells us that discourses of home and domesticity were layered into the criticism of art, literature, and architecture after the fact. “In the seventeenth century, the house is primarily an external matter. It is concerned with material possessions, how to use them and how to represent them. The house is seen as a fine building, stocked with furniture.” Simply put, varied critiques of these foundational theories of the domestic proceed from a single idea: not all dwellers have equal say in how they dwell. Despite this, our authors here go beyond materialist critique to show how reimagining the very idea of “the domestic” engages central questions in theatre and performances studies. Provocations that repeat: How do notions of theatrical time-space affect feminist dramatugies that have potentially liberatory effects? How do our personal experiences of home affect our artistic practices in the present? How does showing the intimate, private sphere – in both onstage and offstage spaces – move theatrical domestic space theory beyond discourses of realisms?
In this last point, these authors join a robust, ongoing discussion. In recent years, scholarship about the relationship of domestic spaces to theatre and performance histories have opened vibrant conversations about how race, class, gender, and nationalisms affect playwriting, scenic practices, and theatre labor practices. Nicolas Grene’s Home on the Stage, Dorothy Chansky’s Kitchen Sink Realisms, and Fred Miller Robinson’s Rooms in Dramatic Realism in particular inspire this special issue of Etudes, as a response to these conveners' conversations about domestic space and dramatic realism that, in turn, generate new questions for emerging theatre and performance scholars and practitioners. Grene’s book logically begins with Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House to explore domestic settings and ideas of home in modern realist drama. Chansky’s book places a sweeping twentieth-century women’s cultural history within an equally wide re-evaluation of realisms to point to audiences’ personal experiences of productions of realist dramas within their particular social and economic circumstances. Like Kitchen Sink Realisms, Robinson’s pithy Rooms spotlights the tension between interior and exterior that inspires this issue’s analytic, that is, that onstage and offstage domestic spaces produced by scenic and theoretical mise-en-scènes throughout historical periods, dramatic texts, theoretical lenses, performance and performative practices, and personal artistic practice, make heretofore ignored bodies, social relations, histories, and historiographies visible.
The authors and scenic designers of this issue build on this conversation-in-progress as they offer provocations of their own, embracing the questions these scholars pose while posing new questions that frame domestic space in unexpected ways: As feminist imaginary. As nostalgic space. As craft practice. So varied is the praxis these scholars explore that the “Essays” section of the issue is organized chronologically by subject, providing ballast for this collection of thoughts’ wide-ranging, sometimes whimsical changes of direction.
In “Simultaneity in the Plays of Menander,” Mitchell Brown examines the fourth-century BCE playwright’s use of time, matching “the length of an offstage event with its onstage reporting.” Through a close reading of two characters in two plays, Brown argues that Menander’s use of simultaneity makes the creation of complex, active female characters possible.
In “You Can Never Go Home Again: Nostalgia, the Uncanny, and Staging Home on the Front Lines,” Victoria Scrimer connects soldiers’ “estrangement” from home to the “Alienation” associated with twentieth century theories of theatre making, especially those of Bertolt Brecht. Building on Freud's uncanny, the feeling of fear caused by experiencing a moment as simultaneously homelike and foreign, Scrimer examines the unheimlich domestic spaces of two dramas, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836/1913) and Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside (1947). Here Scrimer explodes a commonly held binary of (nostalgic, regressive) modernism “versus” an (innovative, progressive) Epic theatre.
Scenic designer and design scholar Wes Pearce takes a fresh look at the dramaturgy and legacy of a noted Canadian playwright through the lens of domestic space in “(Im)possible Spaces in the Plays of Sharon Pollock.” Charting Pollock’s body of work from 1972 through 2017, Pearce identifies the writer as a feminist artist, a label she has resisted but that scholars of her work have enthusiastically embraced. Here, Pearce contributes his knowledge of stage space and design to “end the silence” about how Pollock’s domestic mise-en-scènes contribute to her oeuvre’s feminist argument, going beyond character and plot to show how design can conspire with other stage languages to build a a politics of the domestic.
Thea Fitz-James positions needlework as performance practice (and the home as performance space) in “Women's Work: Queer Phenomenology and Performing Domesticity,” giving the reader a shortened focal length from which to observe performance artist Eliza Bennett’s piece, “A Woman’s Work is Never Done.” The author draws on Sarah Ahmed and other queer theorists to frame the activity of embroidery within discourses of feminist historiography. “Combining a historical look at embroidery with the close reading of Bennett’s intervention,” Fitz-James “explores how craft and the female body come to disrupt concepts of the domestic sphere.” Positioning the background of embroidery and the embroidery as background, Fitz-James notes that Bennett “reclaims the act of penetration by piercing her own hand . . . this self-inflicted, sadomasochistic piercing allowing Bennett to wield the power of the penetrative phallic object, reveal the damage it does, and simultaneously make her body art/work.”
Finally, L. Archer Porter expands our notion of performance space even farther. “Screening Intimaesthetics: The Paradoxically Private-Public Dancing Body on New Media’s Domestic Stage,” draws on of-the-moment and mid-century theory to round out our discussion of domestic space with provocations to consider what constitutes a performance space at all. YouTube? An Instagram account? Likewise, Porter seems to ask, what constitutes a domestic space? Someone’s home? Or someone’s careful curation of home? Porter reminds us that virtual spaces make use of the domestic in making meaning, and that we relegate these “performances” to mere celebrations of everyday life at our peril.
And so we begin and end this essay section with similar sets of questions and answers. What Brown imagines as a shift in the manipulation of onstage and offstage time in the fourth century BCE, Porter answers with questions that interrogate how performers might think of performance places in virtual spaces. No writer in this issue takes the idea of performance time or space for granted; rather, they carefully define each of the historically charged moments they’re working in as possessing its own emergent chronotope.
In our new “Notes from the Field” section, we host three theatre artists/artist groups as they give voice to the effects of home on their design, directing, and applied theatre practices. Sabrina Hykes-Davis and John Paul Staszel reflect on a university production of four late-nineteenth-century Symbolist plays as a dialogue between designer and director, examining how they embraced and also thoughtfully departed from both historical and contemporary staging practices in order to reveal and contest Symbolist notions of domestic space. Director Wes Drummond grapples with offstage domestic space in musical theatre, specifically through his 2019 production of Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s 1997 Violet, whose plot describes a constant journey away from home. Drummond’s team’s resourceful solution of a set built from various arrangements of suitcases signifies travel as they also produce Violet’s childhood home in offstage space. Finally, in “Lessons in Homemaking: Devising Theatre with Women and Men in Transitional Housing,” applied theatre practitioners Chelsea Hanawalt, Esther Triggs-Camacho, and Nicole Kontolefa relate their personal notions of home to their playmaking work.
Deepening the conversation about home and theatre praxis is Michael Schweikardt’s edited section, “Designing the Domestic: a photo essay.” Here, scenic designer and theatre scholar Schweikardt collects the fruits of a call for papers that asks scenic designers to share two images of their own designs – one that depicts an onstage domestic space, and one that produces an offstage domestic space in the minds of audiences. The thirteen essays contextualizing these photos, authored by the individual designers, may be the most exciting answer to Etudes’s mission to publish scholarship in a variety of forms. At the same time, it provides a model for theatre practitioners who wish to share their scholarship with a wider readership. What is an exploration of scenic space without the voices of scenic designers?
Rounding out the issue is Phillip Zapkin’s review of the 2019 Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere, edited by Emily Klein, Jennifer Scott-Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, which he describes as “considering multiple ways in which houses and homes/homelands/home towns are performed or performative,” adding that “the collection illustrates just how tense and contested relationships between home and theatre can be.” It is exciting to realize that collections such as these, in addition to such essays as the ones included in this special issue will continue to explore new territory in the field of domestic space and performance.
-JH
And in theatre, these symbolic worlds are built whether home is actually depicted—the “room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly” of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—or whether home is produced solely in an audience’s mind’s eye, like Blanche DuBois’s Belle Reve in A Streetcar Named Desire, the “great big place with white columns” that we never see. In drama, home is not always a safe place, whether onstage or offstage. In the final moments of Sophocles’s Electra, Orestes prepares to kill his stepfather by ushering him offstage/indoors as Aegisthus asks “Why take me into the house, if this deed is just?...Is this dwelling doomed to see all the sufferings of us descendants of Pelops?” In many Greek dramas, the house’s threshold is the (unseen) domestic feature that points to the horrible things that happen at home: Aegisthus stands on the threshold, Oedipus enters the house, Clytemnestra leads her husband to his final bath. And the walls absorb what happens next.
Several writers included in this special issue of Etudes, “Dramaturgies of home in on- and off- stage spaces,” cite phenomenologist Bachelard and philosopher Martin Heidegger precisely because these thinkers bring the private, domestic sphere to the forefront, elevating the very idea of home to an existential and spatial fact. Between earth and sky, asserts Heidegger, we dwell. At the same time, our authors’ collective citation of these writers historicize them, constituting a de facto critique. Traditional critiques of Bachelard focus on reading the historical moment of the 1950s in his work. Heidegger and Bachelard’s works can be seen as mid-century celebrations of the plenty that comes after war, a war that chillingly reinforced the need for the safety of domestic spaces, both individual and national. As interior design theorist Joe Moran writes, “Bachelard’s discussion of the house shows that the poetics of space are always unavoidably linked to a politics, . . . The key question, then, is how the nebulous entities of memory, desire and the imagination intersect with the material culture of houses, a process that is crucially connected to history and economics.”
Others criticize the use of domesticity as an affect rather than as a site of economic and social relations replete with power structures. In her critique of Witold Rybczynski’s and others’ use of Dutch painting as evidence of emergent feelings of domesticity in seventeenth-century Holland, Heidi de Mare tells us that discourses of home and domesticity were layered into the criticism of art, literature, and architecture after the fact. “In the seventeenth century, the house is primarily an external matter. It is concerned with material possessions, how to use them and how to represent them. The house is seen as a fine building, stocked with furniture.” Simply put, varied critiques of these foundational theories of the domestic proceed from a single idea: not all dwellers have equal say in how they dwell. Despite this, our authors here go beyond materialist critique to show how reimagining the very idea of “the domestic” engages central questions in theatre and performances studies. Provocations that repeat: How do notions of theatrical time-space affect feminist dramatugies that have potentially liberatory effects? How do our personal experiences of home affect our artistic practices in the present? How does showing the intimate, private sphere – in both onstage and offstage spaces – move theatrical domestic space theory beyond discourses of realisms?
In this last point, these authors join a robust, ongoing discussion. In recent years, scholarship about the relationship of domestic spaces to theatre and performance histories have opened vibrant conversations about how race, class, gender, and nationalisms affect playwriting, scenic practices, and theatre labor practices. Nicolas Grene’s Home on the Stage, Dorothy Chansky’s Kitchen Sink Realisms, and Fred Miller Robinson’s Rooms in Dramatic Realism in particular inspire this special issue of Etudes, as a response to these conveners' conversations about domestic space and dramatic realism that, in turn, generate new questions for emerging theatre and performance scholars and practitioners. Grene’s book logically begins with Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House to explore domestic settings and ideas of home in modern realist drama. Chansky’s book places a sweeping twentieth-century women’s cultural history within an equally wide re-evaluation of realisms to point to audiences’ personal experiences of productions of realist dramas within their particular social and economic circumstances. Like Kitchen Sink Realisms, Robinson’s pithy Rooms spotlights the tension between interior and exterior that inspires this issue’s analytic, that is, that onstage and offstage domestic spaces produced by scenic and theoretical mise-en-scènes throughout historical periods, dramatic texts, theoretical lenses, performance and performative practices, and personal artistic practice, make heretofore ignored bodies, social relations, histories, and historiographies visible.
The authors and scenic designers of this issue build on this conversation-in-progress as they offer provocations of their own, embracing the questions these scholars pose while posing new questions that frame domestic space in unexpected ways: As feminist imaginary. As nostalgic space. As craft practice. So varied is the praxis these scholars explore that the “Essays” section of the issue is organized chronologically by subject, providing ballast for this collection of thoughts’ wide-ranging, sometimes whimsical changes of direction.
In “Simultaneity in the Plays of Menander,” Mitchell Brown examines the fourth-century BCE playwright’s use of time, matching “the length of an offstage event with its onstage reporting.” Through a close reading of two characters in two plays, Brown argues that Menander’s use of simultaneity makes the creation of complex, active female characters possible.
In “You Can Never Go Home Again: Nostalgia, the Uncanny, and Staging Home on the Front Lines,” Victoria Scrimer connects soldiers’ “estrangement” from home to the “Alienation” associated with twentieth century theories of theatre making, especially those of Bertolt Brecht. Building on Freud's uncanny, the feeling of fear caused by experiencing a moment as simultaneously homelike and foreign, Scrimer examines the unheimlich domestic spaces of two dramas, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836/1913) and Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside (1947). Here Scrimer explodes a commonly held binary of (nostalgic, regressive) modernism “versus” an (innovative, progressive) Epic theatre.
Scenic designer and design scholar Wes Pearce takes a fresh look at the dramaturgy and legacy of a noted Canadian playwright through the lens of domestic space in “(Im)possible Spaces in the Plays of Sharon Pollock.” Charting Pollock’s body of work from 1972 through 2017, Pearce identifies the writer as a feminist artist, a label she has resisted but that scholars of her work have enthusiastically embraced. Here, Pearce contributes his knowledge of stage space and design to “end the silence” about how Pollock’s domestic mise-en-scènes contribute to her oeuvre’s feminist argument, going beyond character and plot to show how design can conspire with other stage languages to build a a politics of the domestic.
Thea Fitz-James positions needlework as performance practice (and the home as performance space) in “Women's Work: Queer Phenomenology and Performing Domesticity,” giving the reader a shortened focal length from which to observe performance artist Eliza Bennett’s piece, “A Woman’s Work is Never Done.” The author draws on Sarah Ahmed and other queer theorists to frame the activity of embroidery within discourses of feminist historiography. “Combining a historical look at embroidery with the close reading of Bennett’s intervention,” Fitz-James “explores how craft and the female body come to disrupt concepts of the domestic sphere.” Positioning the background of embroidery and the embroidery as background, Fitz-James notes that Bennett “reclaims the act of penetration by piercing her own hand . . . this self-inflicted, sadomasochistic piercing allowing Bennett to wield the power of the penetrative phallic object, reveal the damage it does, and simultaneously make her body art/work.”
Finally, L. Archer Porter expands our notion of performance space even farther. “Screening Intimaesthetics: The Paradoxically Private-Public Dancing Body on New Media’s Domestic Stage,” draws on of-the-moment and mid-century theory to round out our discussion of domestic space with provocations to consider what constitutes a performance space at all. YouTube? An Instagram account? Likewise, Porter seems to ask, what constitutes a domestic space? Someone’s home? Or someone’s careful curation of home? Porter reminds us that virtual spaces make use of the domestic in making meaning, and that we relegate these “performances” to mere celebrations of everyday life at our peril.
And so we begin and end this essay section with similar sets of questions and answers. What Brown imagines as a shift in the manipulation of onstage and offstage time in the fourth century BCE, Porter answers with questions that interrogate how performers might think of performance places in virtual spaces. No writer in this issue takes the idea of performance time or space for granted; rather, they carefully define each of the historically charged moments they’re working in as possessing its own emergent chronotope.
In our new “Notes from the Field” section, we host three theatre artists/artist groups as they give voice to the effects of home on their design, directing, and applied theatre practices. Sabrina Hykes-Davis and John Paul Staszel reflect on a university production of four late-nineteenth-century Symbolist plays as a dialogue between designer and director, examining how they embraced and also thoughtfully departed from both historical and contemporary staging practices in order to reveal and contest Symbolist notions of domestic space. Director Wes Drummond grapples with offstage domestic space in musical theatre, specifically through his 2019 production of Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s 1997 Violet, whose plot describes a constant journey away from home. Drummond’s team’s resourceful solution of a set built from various arrangements of suitcases signifies travel as they also produce Violet’s childhood home in offstage space. Finally, in “Lessons in Homemaking: Devising Theatre with Women and Men in Transitional Housing,” applied theatre practitioners Chelsea Hanawalt, Esther Triggs-Camacho, and Nicole Kontolefa relate their personal notions of home to their playmaking work.
Deepening the conversation about home and theatre praxis is Michael Schweikardt’s edited section, “Designing the Domestic: a photo essay.” Here, scenic designer and theatre scholar Schweikardt collects the fruits of a call for papers that asks scenic designers to share two images of their own designs – one that depicts an onstage domestic space, and one that produces an offstage domestic space in the minds of audiences. The thirteen essays contextualizing these photos, authored by the individual designers, may be the most exciting answer to Etudes’s mission to publish scholarship in a variety of forms. At the same time, it provides a model for theatre practitioners who wish to share their scholarship with a wider readership. What is an exploration of scenic space without the voices of scenic designers?
Rounding out the issue is Phillip Zapkin’s review of the 2019 Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere, edited by Emily Klein, Jennifer Scott-Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, which he describes as “considering multiple ways in which houses and homes/homelands/home towns are performed or performative,” adding that “the collection illustrates just how tense and contested relationships between home and theatre can be.” It is exciting to realize that collections such as these, in addition to such essays as the ones included in this special issue will continue to explore new territory in the field of domestic space and performance.
-JH
Bachelard, Gaston. Trans. Marie Jolas. The Poetics of Space: the classic look at how we experience intimate places. Boston: Beacon P, 1994.
Chansky, Dorothy. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. U of Iowa P, 2015.
Mare, Heidi de. “Domesticity in Dispute: a reconsideration of sources.” In At Home: an anthropology of domestic space. Edited by Irene Cieraad. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999.
Grene, Nicholas. Home on the Stage: Domestic Spaces in Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.
Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings. Trans. David Farrell. London: Routledge, 1999.
Moran, Joe. “Houses, Habit, And Memory.” In Our House: the representation of domestic space in modern culture. Ed. Gerry Smith and Jo Croft: 27-42. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Robinson, Fred M. Rooms in Dramatic Realism. London: Routledge, 2015.
Sophocles. Elektra. Perseus Digital Library: ll. 1501-1506. www.perseus.tufts.edu
