The abyss is death.… You see an abyss when you’re falling, in that dream where you’re falling and falling and there’s no bottom.
– Judith Thompson1
Canadian dramatists Ann-Marie MacDonald (1958– ) and Judith Thompson (1954–) are pioneering playwrights whose dramas are on the cutting edge of feminist and postcolonialist dramaturgy. Thompson’s first play, The Crackwalker (1980), has encompassed suffering and the conditions of lower-class life with dialogue that is groundbreaking in its authenticity. While her other plays – White Biting Dog (1984), I Am Yours (1987), and Lion in the Streets (1990) – situate Thompson as one of Canada’s leading dramatists, The Crackwalker emerges as her most representative and most produced drama. Novelist and playwright MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning, Juliet (1988) is also her most produced play. These two plays (and others) represent an anti-colonial ideology that encompasses a social and feminist form.
Goodnight Desdemona deals with an English instructor, the frumpy Constance Ledbelly, who toils away as an assistant professor at a nondescript Canadian university, trying to complete her thesis, “Romeo and Juliet and Othello: The Seeds of Corruption and Comedy.” Constance is attempting to decipher the “Gustav Manuscript,” an alleged apocryphal text supposedly the source material for Shakespeare’s two well-known plays. If she can crack the code of the manuscript she will have discovered a more nuanced (and feminist) interpretation of Desdemona and Juliet. As she writes at her office desk, the characters from these two Shakespearean plays come to life, enacting the actual text of the dramas, similarly to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The enactments serve as a split screen for her identity, a space for Constance’s imagination as opposed to the reality of her cloistered and restrictive life. Amidst her writing she takes walks with Professor Claude Night, a pompous pedant dripping with condescension, who oversees the mere “Assistant Professor” Constance:
PROFESSOR:
CONSTANCE:
PROFESSOR:
CONSTANCE:
The smarmy professor (calling her belittlingly “Connie”) announces that he is marrying the co-ed Ramona, grooming her for a higher academic position (a position Constance was supposed to occupy), and moving himself (with Ramona) to a loftier position at Oxford University. The contrast between Constance and Claude starkly amplifies Constance’s rut: unless she can see her way through her dissertation, she will remain forever at the bottom of the academic food chain. In a state of shock, she laments her condition: she could resign her post, eventually go back to her dour apartment “and watch plants die and let the cat copulate freely” (20). A Chorus emerges, telling the audience they might have witnessed a “teacher, spinster – ‘old maid,’ some would say” (22), but there is more here than meets the eye.
In Act Two, Constance plunges headlong into the world of Othello, trying desperately to inform Desdemona of her impending fate. Gradually Constance becomes Desdemona’s confidante and raisonneur, though Constance still remains doubtful:
CONSTANCE:
DESDEMONA:
CONSTANCE:
Constance forms – or rather transforms – her identity through the imaginative character of Desdemona, but more importantly to the play, she gains a foothold on her identity as someone with confidence and assurance. Lauren Porter has aptly observed that Constance’s journey from “mouse” (or mousy), as she often calls herself, to a self-confident, strong, independent woman, from child-like to adult, is owing to the fact that the Shakespearean characters who come to life in her imaginative vision “come to Constance with no preconceptions or stereotypes” of what she is like, allowing Desdemona and Juliet “to see her value.” MacDonald “manipulates the plot to make this possible, using especially the character of Desdemona to turn liabilities, as Constance’s culture would perceive them, into assets. The fact that she is a scholar, unmarried, traveling alone – even the fact that she is a vegetarian – are qualities “set in a new context and admired.”3
Constance is also Canadian, while the “Professor” is off to claim a higher perch on the academic greasy totem pole at Oxford. This raises the important point that not only is Constance exploited through the male–female power dynamic, but she also reflects a colonialism in Professor Night. Night, the snarky British academic, symbolizes an English tradition of colonization over Canada, imposing a superiority and domination not unlike other colonial situations. Ann Wilson makes this point well when she says that
Within a Canadian context MacDonald’s representation of Claude Night as a tweedy Brit is not merely innocently comic, but serves as a reminder of Canada’s history as a colony which Great Britain dominated culturally and exploited economically. The relationship between a Canadian woman and a British man sets into play a complex set of colonial relations which is further complicated by Constance’s academic focus on the tragedies of Shakespeare, whose work is represented as the apex of British cultural achievement and consequently is central to humanist studies of English literature.4
Constance’s project symbolizes her efforts to turn two victimized women in Shakespeare, Desdemona and Juliet, into active characters in much the same way as she seeks to turn her own life around from passive supporter of a man’s career (Professor Night) to her own active advancement and achievement.
In Act Two, she opens up to Desdemona, revealing how she wrote many of the academic essays for the Professor while he assumed credit. In language imitating iambic pentameter, Constance unpacks her life of toil as a sincere but hopeless academic:
It is quite dog eat dog. And scary too.
I’ve slaved for years to get my doctorate,
but in a field like mine that’s so well trod,
you run the risk of contradicting men
who’ve risen to the rank of sacred cow,
and dying on the horns of those who rule
the pasture with an iron cud […]
But, Desdemona, now that I’ve met you,
I want to stand out in that field and cry, “Bullshit!” (37)
It is in the third act where she comes into contact with the “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet. Having left Desdemona with her skirt impaled on Desdemona’s sword, she is attired only in boots, jacket, and longjohns, whereby Juliet calls her Constantine. In short, she appears as a male, though Romeo knows her as female (calling her Constance). Constance now cross-dresses and is mistaken for a boy by Juliet, who aggressively seeks her/him amorously:
JULIET:
CONSTANCE:
JULIET:
Then are thy vestal senses intact.
O let Juliet initiate
thy budding taste of woman’s dewy rose. (68)
Both Romeo and Juliet are in love with Constance/Constantine. The gender switching, romance cross-baiting, and bisexual confusion allows MacDonald to raise questions about female identity, heterosexuality, and homoeroticism. Constance is ambivalent about Juliet’s sexual enticements; she shares a story of a failed love affair with a young boy, and goes on to share her one intimate moment with another woman:
But I’m not – you know – I’m not … a lesbian. At all. That’s just rumour.
I’ve never been involved with a woman.
Unless you count the one time in grade eight
when Ginnie Radclyffe did my portrait. (78)
Notably it is under the guise of a “portrait” that Constance shares her homoeroticism. Her mirror reflection and her identity are bound up in a reflective coupling, and it is here that MacDonald subtly but specifically unearths Constance’s final revelation. As Juliet replies to Constance, “Be thou the mirror pool of my desire:/reflect my love as thou dost ape my form” (78). Constance continues with her self-effacing demeanor, calling herself an “aged crone.” But Juliet will not be denied:
More beauty in thy testament of years,
Than in the face of smooth and depthless youth. […]
O touch me with those hands that held they quill
before I learned to read and write my name.
and this with every look and touch, entwine
My poor young thread into thy richer weave. (78–9)
Constance’s simple reply of “Okay” (79) shatters comically the pseudo-iambic dialogue with a blunt and un-gnomic affirmation of her desire. “Although MacDonald considers herself a feminist,” Mark Fortier writes, “the strongest impulses in her theatre are popular and populist, and she seems to feel that labelling her work as feminist or lesbian would jeopardize the pluralist audience that she is seeking. If her work is feminist, it is feminism as part of a pluralist humanism.”5 The play is an unabashed comedy, with the full spirit of a happy ending and a romance that is unquestionably lesbian. To engage a “plural” audience does not nullify the facts of the play; the two items are not mutually exclusive.
According to Robert Nunn, who quotes from a personal conversation with Judith Thompson, her play The Crackwalker is “about ‘the abyss,’ the depths that are hidden from us, the opaque surface, the cracks in the surface that give us dizzying glimpses of the abyss.”6 Crackwalker means someone who walks the cracks of city streets, usually referring to people marginalized and forgotten. The Crackwalker consists of four characters – two couples, Sandy and Joe, and Alan and Theresa – who fight, make up, fight again, and try to work through their lives on the fringe of society. There is a fifth character, known only as the Indian Man, who is an itinerant, often speaking incoherently and living on the street. All five are on the cusp of mental illness; all talk at times directly to the audience in a kind of confessional/confidential monologue; and the dramaturgical structure is broken into short, punctuated scenes with the language of lyrical street argot.
A social worker (unseen in the play) attempts to convince Alan and Theresa to avoid having children, but Theresa eventually conceives, and Alan, in the end, strangles the baby. While the characters are ill equipped to raise children from a conventional standpoint, the play is sympathetic to their desires. Throughout the play they struggle to articulate their feelings but are blocked by their limited vocabulary and poor communication skills. They often speak of their bodily functions and fluids, their connection to the flesh being raw, vulnerable, and acute. In the Introduction to the plays by Thompson, the artistic director of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre (where many of Thompson’s plays have been performed) Urjo Kareda writes that Thompson is “overwhelmingly aware of the physical side of our biology. Her characters are not spared revelation of the intimate death of their bodies. Piss, shit, sweat, blood, saliva, vomit, tears, mucous, semen, amniotic fluid – these are as central and as inescapable a part of our beings as our heart, our mind, our soul.”7 The body politic – literally – is infused in her characterizations.
The play opens with Theresa addressing the audience, saying “Shut up, mouth, I not goin back there no more no way, I’m goin back to Sandy’s.”8 The dialogue is distinctly and immediately working class and uneducated, yet street savvy and what Ric Knowles calls a stylized “poetic naturalism.”9 There is also the implication in the opening (and at the end) that Theresa is talking to someone else, someone offstage, though it’s entirely possible it’s all in her imagination. For all the characters their emotions are just beneath the surface, bursting forth spontaneously through expletives, surly monologues, and defiance of the status quo. They are people marginalized, left in the dustbin of society, with little hope except each other, where they lash out virulently and cruelly. For Robert Nunn, Thompson’s plays concern “characters on the margins of the dominant order – the physically and mentally challenged, the mentally ill, the lumpenproletariat, the working class, racial and sexual minorities,” together constituting “an intricate system in which the borders between social groups is metaphorically expressed in terms of physic borders and margins, and vice versa, while both borders are located in the liminal space of the theatre.”10 Yet Thompson’s lack of sentimentality eschews any syrupy affection for the five characters; still, they evoke empathy because their desires are visceral and organic. Theresa, for instance, tries to explain why she is incompetent for child-rearing, because in the past she failed to properly care for her cousin’s baby:
Nothin it wasn’t my fault just one Friday night I was sniffin, eh, so I took off down to the plaza and I leave the baby up the room, eh, I thought I was comin right back, and I met this guy and he buyin me drinks and that then I never knew what happened and I woke up and I asked somebody where I was and I was in Ottawa. (35)
Alan is appalled not at Theresa’s behavior, but at the man who left her in Ottawa.
There is in the play a rift, or disconnect, between characters that is bound up in the failures of language. Theresa’s groping dialogue, as well as the others trying to make sense of their worlds, amplifies their inarticulateness; they confront language as an orality of anxiety; and theirs is a cauldron of alienation. Thompson’s characters “say almost everything they are thinking and feeling whether they understand themselves or not (usually they do not),” Diane Bessai writes, yielding “disarming monologues of direct address [that] compel the audience’s interest in their identities as people, not as case-histories, and leads to an understanding of their confusions and capricious violations of ‘normal’ social prohibitions.”11 Language itself is foregrounded in the play, amplifying characters lacking the capacity or training in the proper (bourgeois) use of language as a tool for meaning-making. In his philosophical study of language and meaning, Ludwig Wittgenstein calls into question the assumptions of language as a conduit for linguistic clarity. He asks, “what about the language which describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand? How do we use words to stand for my sensations?” We might have words to describe private sensations (“pain,” for example), but he adds “suppose I didn’t have any natural expression for the sensation, but only had the sensation?”12 For Thompson’s characters are adrift in sensations while devoid of bourgeois social skills; they speak impulsively even as their words fail to communicate their sensations. Alan, for instance, tries to tell Sandy that he will quit smoking. She calls him “nuts,” but he defends himself:
(Grabs her back into the room). I am not nuts. I am not nuts you understand? I just decided now I’m gonna quite smoking that’s all. I got a flash in my head of my old man tryin to take his breath tryin to find the fuckin air and not getting it fuckin all hunched over so’s he wouldn’t crown to death his his his feet all puffed all that shit all that shit comin out of his mouth and they wouldn’t even clean it cause they said he couldn’t get nothing cause he was gonna die so he had all this shit coming out of his mouth and and I know he didn’t lie cause he was clean – all the time he was washin – and then when he’s dyin they don’t give a shit about his goddamn mouth with all the fuck comin out of it and they got a goddamn vacuum cleaner goin – … (43)
The woozy and ungrammatical syntax, the repetition of words, and the lurching back and forth in his memory is indicative of Thompson’s characters: their inarticulateness is woven into their characterizations such that the lyricism of their linguistic rhythms highlights the lumpenproletarian distinctiveness. Thompson is skilled in capturing a “rap” music pitch, her ear attuned to the thumping rhythm of an urgent frustration in her dialogue.
Thompson’s drama tests the boundaries of dramatic acceptability, with the slaughter of the baby in the play’s penultimate scene meant to be harrowing and disturbing. Theresa is trying to apply medicine to the baby but Alan resists her attempts because he mistrusts doctors: his father died in the hands of incompetent physicians. For a brief moment their escalating violence subsides as Alan tries to seduce Theresa. Theresa balks; she hasn’t yet picked up her IUD and is afraid of having another child:
THERESA:
ALAN:
The violence awakens the baby. In his efforts to prevent the baby from crying, he “squeezes the baby’s neck till it dies” (65). The vicious cruelty is unflinching; the vitriolic actions unforgiving; and the showing of the murder of a baby is similar to the violence of Edward Bond’s Saved. Thompson is unsparing in her depiction of characters devoid of feelings; in the very next scene Alan is with his friend Joe, rooting on his favorite team in a hockey game while the dead baby, lying in a bag, is carted around by Theresa, who half-knowingly realizes the baby has expired.
Thompson’s play might arguably be a succession of violent acts if not for the penultimate scene, where Sandy “demonstrates a willingness not to pass judgment” on the child’s parents, George Toles remarks,13 and instead defends the parents at the funeral of the baby (named Danny) against the gossiping of Bonnie Cain (a character who does not appear in the play). “I’ll tell ya who else I stood up for at that service,” Sandy says directly to the audience; “Al [Alan], and he done it. Oh yeah, I still consider him a friend. No matter what he done, nobody can say what happened in that room” (70–1). The monologue is built on a kind of offhand intimacy, a sense of Sandy talking to the audience as if she were sitting beside them, speaking randomly about the funeral (the past), the present (her feelings), and the future: “I worry about Trese [Theresa] but she’ll be okay, you know? She’ll – she’ll go back to the Lido, start blowin off old queers again for five bucks.” Abruptly, she shifts gears and refers to the funeral and the baby’s casket: “It’s still open it won’t never close.… They had them flowers round Danny’s neck so’s to hide the strangle but I seen it. The flowers never hid it they just made ya look harder, ya know? They just made ya look harder” (71).
The point of the play, as in Good Night Desdemona, is for audiences to peer beneath the surface, to look harder at those condemned to marginal lives. “It’s not so much that I’m drawn to the dark side,” Judith Thompson says, “as that I’m interested in the invisible side of human beings. I think that’s what theatre should do, is show us what is invisible and covered up with piles of everydayness and everyday life.”14 In the final scene Theresa enters from a small struggle offstage, saying: ‘Stupid old bastard don’t go foolin with me you don’t even know who I look like even. You don’t even know who I lookin like” (71). The implications here are both the audience (who fail to understand the characters because they don’t look hard enough), and the sense of camaraderie with the audience, as if Theresa extracted herself from someone offstage and commiserates with the spectators about the offstage (mysterious, unseen) bully. The violence is mitigated to some degree by the sense that these two female characters are redeemed by their will to survive: the former, Sandy, finding her way into forgiveness and understanding, and the latter, Theresa, continually living a life trying to avoid the persecution of men, are struggling to make sense in their senseless, spontaneously brutal world run by men.
While worlds apart in their milieu (one play is a comedy, the other a penetrating look at the underbelly of poverty), Thompson and MacDonald find solace in female characters who survive cleverly and ingeniously. Thompson’s vision of a violent society surrounding her characters would especially usher in a far more violent era in the 1990s, exemplified by the next and last two dramatists examined here.