Jan 2, 2010

Blood Relations | Feminism and Metadrama Role-Playing in Blood Relations

Stone-Blackburn discusses Pollock's play from a feminist perspective. She also explores how the play fits into the category of metadrama—works that, in the critic's words, "examine the conventions... of dramatic representation itself."

In her introduction to a new collection of feminist essays on contemporary women's theatre, Lynda Hart reminds us of Marilyn Frye's analogy between women and stagehands. In the foreground of our collective world view, Frye observes, is "Phallocratic Reality," constructed by men and presented as objective reality The analogue is dramatic realism, which depends on sustaining the onstage illusion of reality. In both cases, attention is not to stray to the background. Women's experience in the one instance and offstage reality in the other are kept in the dark, while men's experience and...