A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre
Abstract
Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.
It’s tough to recall another recent moment in the national zeitgeist when women’s public expressions of anger were so widely recognized by the mainstream US media as a legitimate part of the sociopolitical landscape. This is not to say that those affective responses have always been validated or heeded, but in the long history of women’s rage, from angry suffragettes to second-wave feminists, its prolonged public consideration only seems to happen a few times each century, like a rare comet consumed by its own blaze. In the early months of 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s democratic debate performances and failed presidential candidacy led news columnists across the political spectrum to opine about the legitimacy of her unbridled fury (as well as the fury of her devastated supporters).1 By October, then vice presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris was making headlines for just the opposite – successfully “channeling her anger” during her debate with US Vice President Mike Pence (Mitchell) – and actively subverting the racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman,” which had been deployed against her since before her nomination (Mitchell; Clifton). These political performances, as well as the Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, and the women-led Black Lives Matter uprising, have revived questions about who is allowed to publicly express anger in our culture and who isn’t. Meanwhile, conventional retailers have already begun figuring out how to capitalize on the women’s anger trend with the release of new fashion lines, art journals, and cookbooks.2 Many of the trend’s consumer artefacts display intersecting tensions linking anger to gender, class, race, and age in ways that highlight deeply rooted systemic inequities. For example, a T-shirt on sale at the shopping mall outpost Hot Topic that reads “ANGRY & YOUNG & POOR” is advertised on the store’s website with the caption, “You’re angry because you’re poor. You’re poor because you’re young. You’re young because … life?” (“Angry & Young & Poor”). Meanwhile, Tangerine Jones, the community baker, founder of the RageBaking Instagram account, and longstanding top hit of the popular #RageBaking hashtag, has asked why she, as a Black woman, was never invited to contribute to the best-selling volume Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices (2020), edited by two white women executives at the Food Network and NPR, who knew about her influential social media presence but didn’t cite her in their book.3 From big-box stores to the controversy over the origins of the rage baking trend, fury-themed consumer goods have become all the rage, as have discussions about who gets the credit for igniting the movements.
The theatre and performance world is no different. In the last two years before the pandemic, I sat in the audience, jaw clenched and claw fisted, caught between my own delight and outrage as female characters took sledgehammers to watermelons, tossed carved Thanksgiving turkey like party confetti, tantrumed on carpets covered with salad, and hemorrhaged blood and organs on several linoleum floors (see Figure 1). I was struck by the way angry women’s bodies and food seemed to be repeatedly and ridiculously linked in their explosive wreckage around domestic sites. And just as in the political and commercial examples mentioned above, these expressions of rage also seemed to be intricately tied to questions of race, class, age, and privilege. The attention paid both to identity politics and intersectionality marked these new productions as distinct from the vaunted feminist food-filled performances by revolutionaries like Carolee Schneemann and Karen Finley and playwrights like Tina Howe. Instead, in female-authored shows like Alice Birch’s Revolt. She said. Revolt again., Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad, and Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land, angry women were going nuts and bananas and everything else on stage in ways I hadn’t quite seen before.4 Female playwrights were clearly cooking up what could be called a New Feminist Absurd.
As it turns out, what I observed in the theatre was fascinatingly consistent with the concurrent tidal wave of mass-market best-sellers on female rage. For example, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad posits that our current “cascade of wrath” (xvii) channels a particular brand of “freakish” (xvi) 1970s’ second-wave protest that came from political invisibility. Traister describes how
[a] desperate rage at being manhandled, ignored, sidelined, and not taken seriously was driving this group of revolutionaries […] to behave outlandishly. Their frustration at the seeming impossibility of their project was being disgorged, superseding common sense about decorum and polite discourse. They would do anything to get people to really hear how livid they were. (xvi, emphasis in original)
As she reflects on the bizarre costumes and peculiar tactics of twentieth-century women’s liberation, Traister observes similarities with women’s activism today. In her descriptions of 1970s protestors in crocodile masks and feminist folk singers in Mickey Mouse ears, it isn’t hard to recognize connections to the last four years of knitted pink pussy hats and the silent storming of state buildings by droves of hooded women in crimson Atwoodian handmaid cloaks. Then and now, as the saying goes, well-behaved women rarely make history.
The more of these analyses I read, and the more crazed and combustive shows I attended, the more I have been reminded of the ways that ritual theorists understand festival traditions as harnessing the power of quotidian things that, as folklorist Roger Abrahams has proposed, may be “condensed and then exploded” (qtd. in Siskind 51). Like the birthday balloon, bursting Christmas crackers and near-bursting chimneys and stockings, the popped champagne bottle, the wrapped present, the piñata, and the stuffed turkey, these plays’ explosive moments replicate the ludic holiday wholeness that gets broken wide open, “allow[ing] everyone to share the now-freed energies and resources” (Abrahams qtd. in Siskind 51). These plays seemed to be morbidly celebrating the detonation of the feminist political project. Each new horrifying headline and seemingly pointless protest added to the circus of fruitlessness. Like Eugène Ionesco’s notion of the “tragic farce,” the alternating moods in these new plays similarly move from “heaviness and the proliferation of matter” into disjointedly comic “lightness and evanescence” (qtd. in Esslin 163). Ionesco understood this affective shift through the framework of excess, a product of solemn truths “fermented, […] expanded, and overflowed. [Clichés and truisms] which had once made sense had now become empty and fossilized […] disintegrated into wild caricature and parody” (138). Food metaphors and combustive chemical reactions operate here to describe desperately ridiculous scenes wherein logic and language both fail. If “the hope of changing the world” through reason and discourse was, in fact, as “utterly vain and absurd” as resorting to violence, then it made sense to Ionesco to use the stage as a true place of daring and experimentation (168). Futility becomes its own form of freedom: as he implores, “let’s include the circus in the theatre!” (168).
Could this absurdist approach help to explain these new plays’ festive moments of oscillation between rage and glee when characters enact domestic outbursts on stage? Might we better understand these plays by considering them as part of a distinct group or a movement? If so, how has this emerging theatrical movement worked to first anticipate and later reflect the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 presidential election? And how do these physical blow-ups represent, negate, or erase emotional and political eruptions-in-waiting? Are they a feminist rallying cry, or a death rattle, or something else entirely?
Performances of ludic feminist futility appear in recent productions by diverse women playwrights including Callaghan, Spiegel, Sibblies Drury, and Birch, as well as Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, and Bekah Brunstetter, among others. Often confining their characters within the frameworks of domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, dining rooms, tucked away corners of supermarket aisles or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights use joyful celebrations of failure and futility to portray the lives and labour of their female characters. Cycling between rage and mirthful delirium like two rapidly alternating currents, the electricity in the plays is generated by the female characters’ repeated experiences of thwarted action and impotence. The close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) later in this essay serves as a touchstone for understanding the New Feminist Absurd as a developing theatrical movement – one that runs parallel to the developing sociopolitical climate of our time.
It is significant that despite these playwrights’ racial diversity, many of their most laughable and ridiculous characters are white. Both the archetypal white matriarchs and white ingénues staged in these productions remind audiences of the challenges of representing contemporary feminism without also representing its whiteness and white supremacy. As a movement that has become synonymous with its nearly two-hundred-year exclusion of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) women, American feminism still struggles with its own absurd history of negating and invisibilizing its constituents of colour while frequently co-opting or occluding the work of BIPOC feminists and erasing them from its major narratives. Thus, like affective capsules, these productions are spectacular absurdist homages to an era embodied by the twinned rage and futility on parade at the first Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. A perfect example of contemporary feminism’s intersectional fractures, the march and its organizers have been frequently criticized for failing to include and represent women of colour. As Brittney Cooper writes in Eloquent Rage, “Watching white women take to the streets to protest an election outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an exercise in white-lady tears […]. White girls usually cry white-lady tears after they have done something hella racist and then been called out by the offended party for doing so” (172–74). Hungering for the multiracial and intersectional feminist projects promised by the Women’s March and #MeToo, but struggling to choke down how half the US population of white women could have voted for Trump, Cooper snarls with the same wry ferocity as the playwrights in this article: “I eat white-lady tears for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” (174). It follows, then, that this study of hungry and unruly lady bodies cannot just be another tribute to Western literature’s great binders full of hysterical women; rather, it is crucial to bring whiteness studies and feminist studies into the service of critically reconsidering the value of staging plays about anger, futility, and failure in an absurd time.
The Past and the Future of the New Feminist Absurd
Martin Esslin’s 1961 treatise, The Theatre of the Absurd, established the enduring paradigm for the field of mostly European playwrights like Genet, Ionesco, Beckett, and Adamov, whose devastating comedies used flattened characters and cyclical language patterns to play with social mores and question the rigid norms of post-war life. Although absurdism has been studied largely as the domain of existentialist white, male playwrights occupied with mid-century middle-class emasculation and the looming awareness that life might be more cruel and meaningless than most Western moral and religious structures let on, contemporary feminist playwrights are creatively transgressing the boundaries of this form by deploying an uncanny brand of shared feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. Esslin, for example, defines absurdism’s ethos by quoting Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus: “A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger” (Esslin 23). Similarly, the female playwrights in this study also attempt to “diagnose the human situation in a world of shattered beliefs” (23). However, they do so in the context of what has been lost – by women in particular – in the twenty-first century, things like the promise of collective feminist solidarity, the dream of “having it all” or at least some form of work-life balance, hope for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and freedom from gender-based discrimination, harassment, and assault: a very different canon of losses than those that Esslin investigated in the shadow of World War II.
Still, these two versions of the absurd both contend with loss and despair in ways that lead to the same joyfully freeing result. The ludic festive response to feminism’s rage-inducing failures in these plays shares some affective genealogy with the transcendent mysticism and exhilaration of Esslin’s playwrights, whose loss of religion led to the “disintegration of facile solutions and the disappearance of cherished illusions” about life’s purpose and meaning. Esslin writes that once illusions are given up, “we have to readjust ourselves to the new situation and face reality itself. And because the illusions we suffered from made it more difficult for us to deal with reality, their loss will ultimately be felt as exhilarating. In the words of Democritus that Beckett is fond of quoting, ‘Nothing is more real than Nothing’” (426). For the feminist playwrights in this article, the shattering losses of recent years seem to lead to the same exhilarating emptiness as the writers in Esslin’s foundational study.
Undoubtedly, though, this iteration of plays breaks with Esslin’s model in distinctly feminist ways. Unlike traditional absurdism, it consistently centres not just women’s lives (which would already be quite distinct from the absurdist tradition) but their rage at the political and social injustices that have shaped their lives – and also seem to overdetermine their futures. This affective valence contrasts sharply with traditional absurdism, which tends to be more concerned with representing apathy, anxiety, and existential alienation as responses to the inexplicable brutality and rage of the World War II era that lies outside the plays’ narratives. Some scholars of absurdism have even gestured toward the essentialist notion that the genre’s “linear objective thinking about grandly stated ideas” makes it “particularly ‘male’” as opposed to “plays that portray much more personal situations” that tend to invoke emotional responses (Bennett 119). In eschewing absurdism’s traditional attachments to conventional gender norms, the New Feminist Absurd creatively recuperates the stereotype of the hysterical woman as a tool for dismantling mainstream culture’s unending project to control women’s bodies and self-expression. Building on the wealth of feminist writing on hysteria’s patriarchal mythos, this article identifies a growing set of plays that concretize and canonize aspects of hysteria’s individualized and ephemeral precarity.5 These new works imagine volatile worlds built around unruly female protagonists swinging from litotes to hyperbole, dieting to devouring, and laughing to revolting. Sometimes masquerading as merely trendy or trivial, improvisational, or unfinished, their non-linear and formally disruptive, anti-structural nature makes these plays potentially resistant both to categorization and to serious academic study. Yet, asserting their collective significance is a feminist act, even if my category of “A New Feminist Absurd?” ironically poses the question of its own legitimacy.
Moreover, these plays differ from other feminist and absurdist theatrical forms because of how they consider women’s anger from an intersectional standpoint. Their treatment of women’s racialized performances of rage is neither laudatory nor condemning, though they frequently mock their own failures and blind spots, ruptures and privileges. Rebecca Traister explains that unlike the second-wave movement, women’s anger today is also a response to “the kinds of privileges and incentives certain women – white women – have been offered in exchange for shutting off or turning down their anger, and about the price other women – nonwhite and especially black women – have paid, always having had reasons to be angry and having rarely been offered reprieve or reward for the act of suppressing it” (xxii, emphasis in original). Thus, it is through irony and self-deprecation that these plays demand our urgent recognition of this fraught new everyday praxis while hopelessly damning the invisibility and futility that both incite and perpetuate it.
Moreover, the New Feminist Absurd’s apparent US-centrism, both in terms of its playwrights and its particular brand of intersectional feminist crises and concerns, marks it as distinct from Esslin’s Eurocentric Theatre of the Absurd. As theatre scholar Natka Bianchini explains,
many scholars have wrestled with the imprecise fit between absurdist perspectives and American social ideals. Esslin himself suggested that since the American homeland did not experience the devastation of the Second World War, Americans were ill-suited to embrace the bleak existentialism at the heart of European absurdism (Esslin 311). […] On the contrary, America experienced a period of intense economic growth and prosperity in the postwar years. Coupled with our deeply entrenched, mythic ideals of opportunity, freedom, prosperity, and the American Dream, it is easy to understand the difficulty of tying American writers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Albee, to the existentialist philosophy of postwar Europe. (“Edward Albee” 105)
By contrast, this twenty-first-century approach to absurdism expresses a “bleak existentialism” rooted in the late capitalist outcomes of all that old mid-century economic growth and prosperity. Though the United States may have been late to the party of post-war disillusionment and despair, these new plays seem to reflect a more contemporary crashing down of American neoliberal and feminist “mythic ideals.”
Still, it is significant that in their focus on futility, the plays do exhibit key features of traditional absurdism, but with an updated twist. In keeping with these updates, Michael Y. Bennett introduces his 2015 study of absurdism with the claim that despite its lack of stable and unifying traits, one consistent feature of absurdism that has endured since the sixties is its spirit of revolt (2): revolt against theatrical tradition, revolt against categorization, and even revolt against the very label of absurdism by most of the playwrights to whom it has been assigned.6 The plays considered here echo these motifs of shattered illusions and revolt (see Figure 2). But, at the same time, they also embody some of the features that theatre scholars Paul K. Bryant-Jackson, Celeste Derksen, and Elaine Aston have identified by applying various feminist lenses to the study of Adrienne Kennedy, Margaret Hollingsworth, and Caryl Churchill, respectively.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Caryl Churchill, with her dramatic oeuvre and its spirit of absurdist revolt, has influenced a generation of playwrights who employ features of the absurd to make feminist arguments on the stage. Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Washburn, and many of the most prolific absurdist-leaning female playwrights working today credit Churchill with influencing their approach to framing political history and its contemporary legacies (see Anderson; Thompson). That influence is certainly present in the New Feminist Absurd. As Churchill once said, “one of the things the Women’s Movement has done is to show the way the traps work” (qtd. in Aston, Caryl Churchill 17), and Elaine Aston suggests that Churchill’s absurdist plays changed contemporary theatre by revealing the same thing. The traps (and trappings) of a slew of sociocultural norms (related to gender, sexuality, class, race, age, the body, and domestic and professional labour) are staged in these contemporary plays as spring-loaded vises always threatening to clamp down on female characters. Thus, while Elaine Aston’s recent (2015) attention to Churchill’s animality and her consideration of the human condition within an ecofeminist context doesn’t easily cohere with this study’s plays, her argument about Churchill’s influence does. She writes, “[Churchill’s] critiques of gender […] helped to shape and to define the growing body of feminist writing, in theory, criticism and practice, which constitutes the field now recognized as feminist theatre studies” (Caryl Churchill 19).
For Paul K. Bryant-Jackson, the elements of grotesque and burlesque in Adrienne Kennedy’s plays are the key features that connect her work to absurdism and help to “frame political questions within a subjective, poetic ‘inner’ universe” of individual struggle (53). Discussing Kennedy’s violently surreal “caricature and the grotesque” (51) in Funnyhouse of a Negro, Bryant-Jackson asserts that her work was embraced by Edward Albee and adhered to his definition of a playwright as “someone who lets his guts out on the stage” (52). Certainly, the bizarre food fights and gory dismemberments in plays by Sibblies Drury, Callaghan, Birch, and Spiegel conform quite literally to this description, yet they lack the attention to myth and history that Bryant-Jackson sees as an existential force in Kennedy’s absurdism.
By contrast, Derksen argues that British-Canadian playwright Margaret Hollingsworth’s exemplary works of feminist absurdism bring a more overtly political subjectivity into an absurdist framework that was initially conceived as apolitical. Derksen makes a strong case for the possibility of merging feminism’s social standpoint with Esslin’s later view that subversive political allegory might be effectively hidden by the universal guise of absurdist writing. This approach renders absurdism a suitable genre for feminist critiques of patriarchal “controlling structures” including gender, heterosexuality, and capitalism (Derksen 212–13). By the end of her analysis, however, Derksen views the feminist absurd as useful to “create consciousness of [patriarchal] structures and elicit an appreciation of oppositional possibilities” (226), which seems distinctly more hopeful than the darkly satirical and sometimes nihilistic plays of the New Feminist Absurd I am identifying. Whereas Derksen sees Hollingsworth’s The House That Jack Built (1988) as suggesting that “the potential for women’s resistance and resilience […] continues to exist in subversive expressions” (226–27), the audience is rarely left with such promise in today’s feminist absurdist works.
Ultimately, unlike each of these single-playwright studies that often imagine new hybrid forms of eco-absurdism or transcendentalist absurdism as a lens for understanding individual works, the range of female playwrights in this article constitute their own emerging twenty-first-century movement in American (and, arguably, British) theatre. By bridging a close reading of Callaghan’s play with the cultural and political affect work of Lauren Berlant and recent studies of feminist anger by Brittney Cooper, Soraya Chemaly, and Rebecca Traister, this article explores the sometimes nascent, sometimes flailing praxes of protest that characters ludically enact through their invisible and affective labour in and around the home. Using live performance to transform historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of raucous resistance, inquiry, and revolt – all with questionable degrees of success – these performances of absurd discomfort and futility force audiences to confront many familiar, normalized forms of glaringly failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality and activism.
Making Sense of Madness: A Rubric for Women’s Contemporary Rage On Stage
Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) is a useful text for illustrating the foundational elements of a New Feminist Absurd. Though there have been more recent examples, including the other plays mentioned above, Callaghan’s work, with its tight yet episodic focus on one extended feminist trope, made it easy to start identifying key features of the New Feminist Absurd when I first began this research. In undergraduate classes where I started teaching these plays, I also noticed that for students who considered themselves digital natives, but largely newcomers to theatre, their fluency in online forms of cultural and political critique made Callaghan’s meme-inspired comedy a good jumping-off point for understanding a rubric that updates Martin Esslin’s time-honoured taxonomy of absurdist theatre. Though the play’s original pre-election premiere before 2016 means that it predates many of the other plays in this study, when I viewed it at Shotgun Players in Berkeley, California, in 2018, it still came across as highly emblematic of the types of absurd feminist productions I had been witnessing at other local venues.
First performed at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2015, Callaghan’s play is based on a 2011 internet “sub-meme of the stock photography cliché meme” on the women’s website The Hairpin (Callaghan, Original script 1). As Vivian Patraka once wrote about the forms of mass culture (such as radio, television, and comic strips) instrumentalized in Joan Schenkar’s plays, Callaghan’s use of internet memes and advertising as cultural tropes similarly helps to make the familiar strange by “menac[ing] our received conceptions” of popular images and “extend[ing] them into visual figuration on stage” (25). The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis explains the meme’s potency by asking, “What’s so funny about salad? Nothing, really. And that’s why the stock photography trope – you may have seen it in advertisements or illustrating health stories online – is so absurd. Picture an ecstatic woman with glowing skin, salad bowl in hand, fork perfectly poised, leaning forward and laughing” (emphasis added). Centring on the interwoven lives of three voracious salad-eating women – Tori, in her twenties, Meredith, in her thirties, and Sandy, in her fifties – the play examines the trials of contemporary dating, work, motherhood, and activism in an eerily familiar hyper-capitalist, sexist, image-obsessed, other-worldly world (see Figure 3). As an award-winning co-founder of the feminist theatre group The Kilroys, Callaghan crafts her punchy comedy with wry precision. The play’s crispness (yes, like a salad) makes it both accessible to students and a good source to draw out examples of five thematic elements that recast Esslin’s famed old criteria for a New Feminist Absurd.
Criterion One for the New Feminist Absurd: characters are drawn to commodified fantasies of inclusive mass intimacy and wellness. This first principle comes from one of Lauren Berlant’s central conceits in The Female Complaint wherein she argues that the notion of an intimate, familiar, and nurturing public sphere pedalled by mass-market women’s culture promises female-identified consumers that they “already have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief even when it is mediated by commodities, even when it is written by strangers who might not be women” and even when its material is not true empirically but “marked as fantasy and expressed in extreme genres tending to hyperbole and grandiosity” (ix). Extending from Esslin’s foundational claim that absurdist characters are often “out of harmony,” alienated, or out of sync with the world in which they live (23), the characters in these plays often experience their lives as lonely and devoid of intimacy and purpose, though they yearn for the untenable feelings of human connection, affirmation, and wellness that commercialism sells them. This marketing tactic is staged in various iterations in twenty-first-century plays and performances by women, from the evangelical salesmanship parodied in Young Jean Lee’s Church (2007) to the self-help web series in Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise (2019). Similarly, Berlant insists that the message that “‘you are not alone (in your struggles, desires, pleasures)’: […] is something we know but never tire of hearing confirmed, because aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collectively, structurally unprivileged” (ix).
We see this message parodied, mocked, and then reified in Callaghan’s first act of Women Laughing Alone with Salad. The stage directions from her original production script of Women Laughing Alone with Salad’s fourth scene give us a glimpse of Meredith, Guy, and Tori waking up after a night of romantic triangulations and disconnections at the dance club:
IN THE BACKGROUND—billboard. Photo of a WOMAN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD with the slogan “Handleman’s Lite Dressing. For the YOU in You.” Salad dressing logo.GUY is passed out on the couch. He snores. Beat. THEN – A large bowl of salad trails down from the sky.MEREDITH enters. Catches the bowl. Dances the DANCE OF THE SEVEN LETTUCES. Romaine. Frisée. Iceberg. Arugula. Butter. Oak leaf. Baby spinach. She tosses the salad. She bests the salad. Owns it. Foils it. Salad won’t win, no ma’am. When she is finished, she bows and exits.TORI enters picks up the bowl of salad MEREDITH left. Stares at GUY sleeping.
tori:
You drank a lot last night. You’re never this hung over. It’s weird.
She eats the salad. She stares. Finishes eating. Goes off-stage. Sound of retching, vomiting from off. Water running. TORI emerges, brushing her teeth loudly.
guy:
Shhhh …
tori:
Sorry.
She exits to spit. Returns. Curls up onto the floor on the blanket. Grabs a magazine. On the back is an advertisement for Branson Community College (BCC), showing a WOMAN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD. Slogan: “Education = Liberation.”(14–15, emphasis in original)
Here, salad is imbued with a tremendous multivalent power to make or break the women’s desires for wellness and connection. It is presented first as the key to accessing self-affirmation in the billboard advertisement for salad dressing; then as a source of stiff competition when Meredith “bests the salad” through her dance; then as a thing to consume and reject when Tori eats and purges the salad; and finally, in the community college magazine ad, as evidence of the supposed liberation that comes from self-denial. For women like Tori, the salad is the Kool-Aid that she can’t help but drink. She is the market’s target demographic. Woolly Mammoth warns its audiences that the meme that launched the play’s development
was created over many years in cubicles, in water cooler conversations, in small meetings, in big meetings, and in grand unveilings to clients. It’s the child of marketing firms and brand consultants. It’s the pride and joy of neoliberal capitalism and post-millennial relations of production. It’s the spawn of an ideology that reinforces systemic inequality on a macro scale, and a vicious cycle of distorted desire, shame and self-loathing on a micro scale. (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company)
Likewise, journalist Olivia Petter reports on the wellness industry’s efforts to capitalize on fear. Even though most people probably know that the fast-growing women’s sector isn’t selling anything that can really make you feel better, understanding the ploy’s mechanics doesn’t always guard us against its clutches. It’s a powerful phenomenon of what Jen Gunter calls “selling patriarchy but wrapping it up and calling it feminism” (qtd. in Petter).
Criterion Two of the New Feminist Absurd: perceived precarity and white performances of vulnerability. Like Esslin’s claim that absurd characters often express vulnerability and anxiety about who or where they are, as revealed through their disconnection from their pasts, their identities, and their geographic locations, characters in this new iteration of absurdism experience a particular brand of existential, political, and economic precarity and disorientation. A recent study of whiteness and country music by Amanda Nell Edgar and Holly Willson Holladay reminds readers of the idea that precarity discourses have increased in circulation as employment patterns have changed for the middle class, with temporary and contract work becoming more prevalent. They explain that as discussions of the economically imperiled American worker and the crumbling middle class grow more ubiquitous, the nuances and stratifications of economic injustice inflected by race, gender, neighbourhood, region, disability, and inherited wealth tend to get lost:
[T]he visible consequences of precarity have been systematically redistributed. Groups with access to structural support have increasingly been portrayed as particularly vulnerable, despite the relative stability offered by generational economic advantages and the privileges of able-bodied white masculinity. This performed precarity of white men and women was a touchstone of Trump’s presidential campaign, a move that brought attention to real economic struggle in places like the Rust Belt but that inaccurately cast that struggle, and the consequences of capitalism in general, as predominantly white and male. (Edgar and Holladay 124)
This performance of precarity is evidenced by the only male character in Callaghan’s play, Guy, who makes his entrance as he leaves the following voicemail message:
I told myself I wasn’t gonna leave a message ’cause you never listen to them anyway … but here I am. So.I got your text. And here’s my answer. No. […] I’m not your employee. I’m the wet fleshy blob you expelled from your vagina 29 years ago, and I don’t appreciate being manipulated. I have a life. A job. I mean both kind of suck right now, but they’re still mine.Also dinner this week sounds great. Looking forward to it.Also. I can’t hang up. […] Because I’m dead inside. (Original script 2)
Just like Callaghan’s own vaguely self-annihilating claim that “[t]his play is going to disappear in like, a day, because it’s based on an Internet meme. It’s built to vanish” (Judkis), Guy is always torn between asserting his own agency and bemoaning his own precarity. In his opening monologue, Guy’s mother and her vagina are sources of both his expulsion and enmeshed manipulation, rendering him abandoned and smothered at once. This push-and-pull theme of impossible corporeal vulnerability is further dramatized throughout the play as Guy’s mother, Sandy, struggles in several scenes to keep her detached uterus and “stump-hands” intact and in place, even as she “dissolve[s] like a cube of sugar into the warm, milky tea of motherhood” (Callaghan, Acting ed. 39). As Esslin writes of Beckett’s legless Nagg and Nell from Endgame (1957), Sandy’s literal bodily disappearances and falling apart suggests that these are “not characters but the embodiments of basic human attitudes, rather like the personified virtues and vices in medieval mystery plays or Spanish autos sacramentales. And what passes in these plays are not events with a definite beginning and a definite end, but types of situation that will forever repeat themselves” (Esslin 76, emphasis in original). Thus, Sandy and Guy’s internalized precarity discourses begin to take on the quality of a worldview or a whole way of being, as Edgar and Holladay discuss.
Sandy is the matronly “Upper East Side grand dame” of the play, and her precarity is literalized through her compliance in her own gradual dismemberment (Callaghan, Acting ed. 5). Though her age, class, and race cement her economic stability, her body renders her vulnerable when “something wet, fleshy, blob-like, and glistening with blood drops from between her legs and lands on the floor with a splat” while she buys an anti-aging hand treatment in Act One (10). Later, in Act Two, we learn that the fleshy blob was her uterus, which keeps persistently falling out, and the hand treatment “to take years off your hands” involves five days of soaking in a bucket with creatures that “eat all the dead skin off your hands and then some” (33):
guy:
But … your fingers …
sandy:
What about them?
guy:
Where are they?
sandy:
They ate them, honey. I wasn’t using them anyway. I never cook anymore, I’ve forgotten how to drive, I use voice-recognition on my phone … honestly they were a distraction more than anything.
guy:
Mom, that’s idiotic.
sandy:
No more idiotic than the hundred other things I’ve done to my body to keep it fresh and vigorous. (33–34)
Tired of going to protests and “making yourself ugly and unappealing while at the same time demanding respect” (39), Sandy decides she is “better off sitting” and trying to (literally and figuratively) hold herself together (34). Benefitting from the types of privilege she accrues by “shutting off or turning down [her] anger,” as Rebecca Traister (xxii) explains above, Sandy’s wealth and whiteness allow her to opt out of some types of precarity while her age and gender leave her contending with others.
Contemporary political texts like Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) also take up these racialized performances of precarity.7 From Hochschild’s “deep stories” of white indignance and betrayal (135–40) to DiAngelo’s “white women’s tears,” (131) Callaghan’s characters echo some of the hyperbolic performances of white women’s distress, suffering, and victimization that are real-world impediments to intersectionality in the feminist movement. “For the newly formed collective ‘precariat,’” Lauren Berlant argues, “adaptation to a sense of precarity dramatizes the situation of the present”(qtd. in Edgar and Holladay 125). Thus, the contemporary culture around precarity is not solely tied to economics, but it is also an affective praxis. It is a product of “what it feels like to live in and respond to a looming but, for many, immaterial threat of vulnerability. Surviving this psychological dimension of class warfare encourages an active though generally ineffective orientation toward the future possibility of ‘the good life’” (125). In the world of Callaghan’s play, Sandy and Guy might both be vulnerable and powerless in the present, but in the future, there’s still the possibility that life could be made great again.
This point leads nicely into Criterion Three: the New Feminist Absurd is fixated on futurity and optimization as well as the fatalist shadow that doggedly mocks such aspirational frameworks. Whereas traditional theatre of the absurd often conveys the feeling of being ahistorical and out of time, disconnected from past and future, the New Feminist Absurd is often forward-looking, not out of a sense of optimism but rather as a mode of denying and avoiding the present. In her study of how women’s white supremacy is reflected in the workplace, Heather Laine Talley writes,
This obsession with what is coming (over and above what is) leads white women to overlook challenges that need tending in the current moment. We justify this by imagining that the future vision will magically address the problems of the current reality. Ironically, dismissing present realities in favor of a vision of the future is a surefire way to undermine the future.
Such naïve visions of a better future seem to define Callaghan’s youngest and most aspirational character, Tori. “Spring! Yay,” she enthuses in her first scene as she tries to ignore her boyfriend’s infidelity by imagining the warmer season ahead. “Pink toenails and pastel tank tops. Midnight fro-yo. Riding our bikes around the city like gangstas. Ha! Makes me feel, like, powerful? You know? Like I own something in the world? I dunno” (Callaghan, Acting ed. 21). Here, Tori’s self-soothing vision of a better, more powerful future trades on tired stereotypes circulated through the world of hip-hop culture. Actual economic and racial precarity is made over into a commodity-fetishized “gangsta” lifestyle, craveable by white middle-class youth.
This focus on self-improvement and futurity repeatedly appears in the plays mentioned above. From the competitive high school swimmers in Spiegel’s Dry Land to the corporate managers in Birch’s Revolt. She said. Revolt again., many of the young women characters in these plays act out a highly gendered, ritualized, and self-destructive form of continual self-optimization. Caryl Churchill’s corporate Top Girls seem to haunt these characters, like shoulder-padded specters from the Reagan-Thatcher era.
By contrast, in Fairview (as in Spiegel’s Dry Land), Sibblies Drury offers us an ambitious but worn-out Black female high school student who aspires to greatness but whose future is threatened by a possible pregnancy (see Figure 4). Unlike the all too real pregnancy of a white teenager in Dry Land, however, Fairview’s Keisha seems to be pregnant with racist stereotypes and clichéd tropes of imperiled Black girlhood. In a ridiculous pressure cooker of a scene, with layers of Keisha’s real and imagined family all antically dancing, reveling, and lamenting her dashed hopes and her thwarted college dreams, this reveal could be taken as an hysterical pregnancy:
beverly:
My daughter wouldn’t throw her whole future away. My daughter would go to college, get an education.
suze
(Sotto voce):
(Sotto voce):
Poor Keisha
keisha:
I’m going to college.
jimbo:
Then watchu gonna do with your baby, Keisha?
[…]
keisha:
There is No Baby.
I am going to go to college.
I just want to find myself before I go –
(Jimbo takes out a stack of bills and eviction notices.)
jimbo:
There ain’t no money for college, Keisha. (Sibblies Drury 93)
Prior to this parodic medley of racist narrative clichés, Keisha had confided in her aunt that she is always wondering what her future could be “if everyone would work as hard as I do” but laments that she needs a gap year off before starting college because, as she says, “my Soul is exhausted” (15–16). Her persistent desire for self-optimization and futurity, grounded in hard work and guileless ambition, is set apart from the rest of the play’s kaleidoscopic outlandishness when she describes her own story simply as that of “A Person Trying” (105).
Like Keisha and Tori, many of the central female characters in this grouping of plays are presented to the audience in the midst of their aspirational struggles for self-improvement. But Jia Tolentino argues in Trick Mirror (2019) that absurdism inheres in this self-perpetuating endeavour for young women: “Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity” (66). Callaghan’s young Tori reminds us of this Sisyphean project, harkening back to Esslin’s use of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus when she pivots to a different imagined future and swoons: “You know if we lived in LA we’d have an orange tree and I’d squeeze my own orange juice with like a manual press. And I’d wear flip-flops every day. Even in the rain. And do yoga, like serious yoga, like I’d get my certification. I think I could get my dad to pay for that, right?” (Original script 16, emphasis in original). Tori’s shallow ambitions drearily recall Camus’s claims about the “inauthentic” and “half-unconscious” preoccupations that dominate the human condition: “their senseless pantomime makes stupid everything around them” (Esslin 400).
Criterion Four: The New Feminist Absurd valorizes expressions of women’s anger over the importance of the anger’s sources or effects. Like the disjunction between cause and effect that Esslin notes in the plays of his study, anger in the world of these new plays is vividly performative but rarely consequential. Albee’s Mommy from The American Dream (1961) is an early antecedent to this category. For example, she regales her husband with the story of how she indignantly took action upon discovering that her department store hat was wheat coloured rather than beige: “Well, that made me angry, and so I made a scene right there; I screamed as hard as I could; I took my hat off and I threw it down on the counter, and oh, I made a terrible scene. I said, I made a terrible scene” (Albee 60). Though her senseless and ineffectual anger can barely hold her husband’s attention, her furious displays are successful in helping her achieve fleeting moments of “satisfaction.”
Similarly, Rebecca Traister’s phrase “little doll of female anger” (76, qtd. in Kipnis) is a useful term to define a contemporary brand of women’s rage present in these plays that helps to create white male “victims” despite its lack of real potency. Traister suggests that “our occasional admiration for female anger is in inverse proportion to its effects” (Kipnis). The beloved late Supreme Court Justice–turned–feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, was “‘a little doll of female anger,’ precisely because the angry opinions she wrote were constantly outvoted. Likewise, the Angry Black Woman—‘the cultural caricature of neck-snapping, side-eye-casting black female censure’—gets celebrated and fetishized because she’s so disconnected from real power” (Traister 76–77, qtd. in Kipnis). Though long denounced by Black feminists, the racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman” continues to be leveraged by conservatives. These icons and caricatures both represent female anger in the national imaginary: mainstream culture either valorizes or is terrorized by their snappy shade, their intellect, and their dissent, and yet their actual power to disrupt systems of oppression and inequality is quite limited. Laura Kipnis, paraphrasing Traister, argues that “such emblems do the work of expelling the anger that white women feel but can’t express.”
In Fairview, when white characters appear in Act Two to act out their projected fantasies about the Black family from Act One, one woman, Bets, seems to do exactly this work of using a stereotype to ventriloquize her own anger. Bets’s performance takes on the quality of minstrelsy as she becomes Grandma Frasier, the Black matriarch and placeholder for the racist “Mammy” caricature in Act Two. “As the black woman,” Bets’s non-Black character in full blown mimicry asserts, “the world tell me: shhh”:
bets:
The world tell me that I am too much.
Too loud.
Too aggressive.
Always.
Too sassy.
Always.
They fear me because I feel too much. I think too much.
But you know what?
mack:
You tell ’em, honey.
bets:
I am too much. (Sibblies Drury 91)
But in this appropriative moment of parroted excess, Bets plays at the too-muchness of the Angry Black Woman stereotype that she is clearly invested in emulating and preserving. Like the mass-market anger books, T-shirts, and accessories mentioned above, these absurdist plays use the gustatory excesses of food fights, messes, and dances to offer – at worst – fantasies and racist projections of anger or – at best – some form of emotional release. Almost none offer examples of purposeful or mobilized anger.
Yet, despite this lack of efficacy, there is, folded into this equation, a notion of women’s power – and especially women’s anger – as dangerously injurious to men. Cultural critic and novelist Kiese Laymon has argued that “part of the project of patriarchy is convincing men that they have been harmed by women and then giving them permission to act out that harm.” When that project intersects with white supremacy, it operates as a system of internal harm and destruction to white people along with everyone else. In Callaghan’s play, we see these systems at work not only in Guy’s voicemail monologue above, but also in his mother Sandy’s retirement from her own angry activist status. “Tired of screaming your throat raw about what you believe your gender deserves,” Sandy explains that she lost her friends when she gave up activism, but she gained a husband (Callaghan, Acting ed. 39–41). Moreover, Callaghan’s second act requires her cast to switch roles and, in some cases, perform their gendered expressions of anger through drag. She invites us to consider the impact of a female boss’s anger when it is played by a male actor. Likewise, the audience is able to witness the expressions of victimhood and injury by male characters played by female actors, which renders the status of that victimhood all the more parodic. Thus, as absurd and arguably racist examples of non-intersectional feminism, the characters of Bets and Sandy are both interested in temporarily playing the roles of “little doll[s] of female anger,” but even that is something that they cannot sustain beyond a few protests or a brief caricature.
Finally, before I spoil the tricks of Callaghan’s second act any further, the Fifth (and last) Criterion of the New Feminist Absurd is its explosive fracturing, fragmentation, and kaleidoscopic layers of repetition and self-referentiality. Moving beyond Esslin’s old formal claims about absurdism’s cyclical plots without climax or resolution, this new ludic iteration rejoices in the loopy, self-reflexive possibilities for shattering conventional plot structure and resisting linear narrative. One major way that this quality is achieved in the plays considered here is through the simulacra and metaphors of digital and social media. It’s worth noting how many of these contemporary plays reference (either through content or formal structure) elements of identity fracturing and solipsistic self-referentiality related to internet pop culture such as the meme, the web series, and the social media post. If these plays sometimes feel like an homage to these forms, it’s tough to parse whether they are doing the feminist work of critiquing their effects or if they’re merely reflecting that this new generation of playwrights has grown up as consumers of these cultural platforms. Kristen Wiig’s 19 December 2020 performance of ridiculous futility and erasure in the “Christmas Morning / I Got a Robe” Saturday Night Live sketch nods to the performative aspects of women’s domestic work, as well as its curated representation on social media. Her mom character labours to create the perfect photo-ready Instagram-able ideal of family holiday happiness, but her family forgets she exists and buys more gifts for the dog than for her (“Episode 898”). Jia Tolentino addresses the same links between digital culture, fractured selfhood, and feminist futility when she writes:
The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so. The internet codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer. […] There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other – and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? (89–91, emphasis in original).
In Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise, Misha, a Black female character, copes with systemic racism and white privilege by controlling their production in her own livestreamed self-help web series “Ask a Black” for white viewers seeking information on Black culture. In Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land, smartphones are at once a persistent high school distraction, a vehicle for harassment, and a resource for girls seeking vital information about their own bodies and reproductive health. And of course, in Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad, the titular meme spawns replications of itself in digital forms, pharmaceutical marketing campaigns, and print advertising until it seems to take over the world of the play. This eerie use of repetition and fragmentation extends Esslin’s claims about mid-century absurdism into a digital hall of mirrors for the twenty-first century.
Beyond the realm of the digital, it’s clear that in Callaghan’s work, as in Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Birch’s Revolt. She said. Revolt again., dismantling old orders and using their remnants for defiant play is the name of the game in terms of content and form. Sometimes this work is literalized through the grotesque and ridiculous disfiguring, dismembering, and remaking of women’s bodies onstage. Sometimes it is analogized through polite dinners, picnics, and business lunches that (d)evolve into food fights. Just like the role reversal in the final act of Women Laughing Alone with Salad, mentioned above, the final two acts of Fairview also involve crucial forms of inversion and reversal, as the play’s first act is repeated in its entirety for the play’s second act, but with the accompaniment of a voice-over critique happening in real time. Inversion also operates through the non-Black characters that play members of the Black family from Act One and, later, through the audience members who are called up to become spectacles for observation on stage.
As many of the above examples demonstrate, Women Laughing Alone with Salad is a fractured and fragmented homage to the ludicrous salad meme as its central characters not only eat salad but also expel it, dance with it, take their repose in it, and wrestle with it. By the time the curtain falls on several feats of temporal zigzagging, role swapping, and gender playing in Act Two, almost every inch of the stage has been grazed by a careening lettuce leaf or two. The only stable storytelling element that carries over consistently from Act One is the salad motif itself.
Anger and the Serious Play of Radical Imagination
Going forward, my hope is that modern drama scholars will continue to investigate the New Feminist Absurd as a burgeoning theatrical form with significance for both our students and national audiences. By no means is the taxonomy in this article meant to be exhaustive; rather, like any good feminist text, it aims to be a starting point for inquiry and collaboration, not an end. We can understand this growing collection of absurdist performances and plays as sites of protest in process, where the praxis of contemporary feminism sometimes belies the more insidious fractures and failures common to most social movement work. Still, these projects share an investment in contemporary debates about women’s affect and public citizenship that have found new life in the global uprisings for racial justice and in its endless days of pandemic futility and hopelessness in 2020–21. As we imagine what a new American theatre might be in the months and years after COVID-19, “We See You, White American Theater,”8 and the 2020 US presidential election, the New Feminist Absurd takes on an increasingly eerie and mimetic quality. Over this past year, without reliable access to schools and childcare, American women have left the workforce at four times the rate of men to stay home and do the unpaid work that a welfare state should be doing (see Yong). Now that current events seem even more accurately reflected in the food fights, ridiculous gore, and disgorged messes of the plays examined here, we have a new opportunity to disrupt and channel our own cycling experiences of rage, dismay, and ludic disbelief. As Soraya Chemaly insists, “The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination” (296).
The performance artists and playwrights under consideration here also share a feminist commitment to experimental play with form and genre as a mode of addressing deeply racialized and gendered systems of social, economic, and political marginalization. This is play for keeps. Not unlike Richard Schechner’s description of Nietzschean play, the New Feminist Absurd does the calculated work of making women’s fury look like fun and games, even though the stakes have rarely been higher. This kind of playing is “double-edged, ambiguous, moving in several directions simultaneously,” both innocently and purposefully subverting “official culture” (Schechner 89): “It constructs and destroys [and] calls new worlds into being” (Friedrich Nietzsche qtd. in Schechner 109). In their absurd callouts of whiteness and privilege, misogyny and performative feminism, they also call us in. Their excess demands our urgent attention to intersectional feminist conversations that may have been sidelined in the salad days before 2016 but aren’t waiting politely any longer.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jennifer Andrus, Suzanne Schmidt, and my fellow panelists on “Artwork/Homework: Creative Resistance and the Domestic Sphere” at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Association Conference and “‘F’ Word Backlash: Repetition and Beyond in Feminist Performance” at the 2020 American Society for Theatre Research Conference, whose richly insightful feedback helped me shape early drafts of this project. My appreciation also goes to the reviewers and editors at Modern Drama whose suggestions made this article stronger, as well as the Provost’s Office at Saint Mary’s College of California, whose Faculty Research Grant helped to support this work. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my Beforetimes theatre companions Daniel Baselj, Justin Bradshaw, and Kristen Beck; my perceptive students, whose observations helped me deepen my understanding of these shows; and of course to the theatre companies, past and present, whose productions inspired this research and continue to fuel my yearning for a time when we can all safely return to the shared space of the theatre: Los Angeles’s Piso Mojado; Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, Shotgun Players, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater.
Footnotes
1.
See Smarsh, Tensley, and Plank for several recent analyses that approach the same topic from different vantage points.
2.
Clothing examples range from the Decked Out Duds line at Walmart and the Anger line at Hot Topic to the more upscale trends described by Aimee Levitt in “Protest Fashion Is All the Rage.” Anger management coloring books for women also run the gamut from Calm Your Tits: Coloring Book for Women (2020), billed as a “rage-coloring book JUST for burnt-out moms who need to vent,” to Target’s Release Your Anger: An Adult Coloring Book with 40 Swear Words to Color and Relax (2019).
3.
See Jones’s article “The Privilege of Rage” on the origins of rage baking and the co-opting of that term by authors Katherine Alford and Kathy Gunst of Rage Baking; see also Rao.
4.
Local productions of the shows referenced here were all staged by Crowded Fire Theater, Shotgun Players, and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2018, but this trend is certainly not limited to Northern California. Productions like Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (2018), The Pussy Grabber Plays (2019), Erin Markey’s Boner Killer (2017) and Singlet (2018), and many more share in this queasy commitment to absurdist stagings of women’s rage.
5.
Although they don’t use absurdism as a lens for inquiry, several groundbreaking studies from the late 1980s and 1990s by Sue Ellen Case, Jill Dolan, and others offer feminist and materialist examinations that touch on hysteria, futility, anger, food, and bodily violence in women’s theatre and performance. These texts remain essential to the field today and serve as a critical foundation for this project. See, for example, the essays and scholars featured in Hart, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Three newer collections continue this trend, some through traditional essays and others via interviews with playwrights and performance groups: see Canning; Stephenson and Langridge; and Farfan and Ferris.
6.
For details on both Samuel Beckett’s and Edward Albee’s rejections of the absurdist label, see Bianchini, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America (74–75); and Bianchini, “Edward Albee” (105).
7.
Though DiAngelo’s book has come under considerable criticism recently, her understanding of fragility may still be a useful tool for articulating some of the impediments to authentic anti-racist work.
8.
See “We See You, White American Theater” for the statement issued on 8 June 2020: https://www.weseeyouwat.com/statement.
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Published In
Modern Drama
Volume 65 • Number 1 • Spring 2022
Pages: 24 - 51
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© University of Toronto.
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Published in print: Spring 2022
Published online: 8 March 2022
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