to feminist concerns.

Both Marsha Norman in Getting Out and Wendy Kesselman in My Sister in This House demonstrate the potential power of formal realism when appropriated for feminist purposes.¹² Both plays depend on formal realism and the picture-frame stage for their structure, using linearity and realistic detail to suggest the oppression of their female characters. Yet both plays combine this basic realism with experimental techniques (such as a divided protagonist, scenes presented out of sequence, and pantomime) to express the thwarted interior lives of the women they depict.¹³ By using an imaginative combination of realistic and experimental techniques, these playwrights portray women's condition of being locked into limited social roles and powerfully explore the consequences—both personal and social—of that confinement.

Marsha Norman's Getting Out depicts the twenty-four hours following Arlene Holsclaw's release from a state prison. Although Arlene is legally free as the play begins, she is still surrounded by systems of enclosure. The set, which is divided into two parts, makes this point clear. The central performing area represents a cheap apartment, with conventional (if tawdry) accoutrements—bed, chair, sink, etc.—and the usual imaginary fourth wall. Around this realistic set, however, Norman erects yet another playing area, a catwalk of stairs and prison cells that completely surrounds the apartment. This playing area is both literal and metaphorical: it is used to enact remembered scenes from Arlene's prison days, but it also visually illustrates the restrictions placed on Arlene in the world outside the prison. By constructing a prison-like, interior proscenium arch to parallel the exterior arch of the stage, Norman has visualized in a theatrical context Arlene's continuing imprisonment in limited and limiting social roles.

The metaphor of theatre as prison is extended in the opening speeches. Each of the two Acts begins with prison announcements, broadcast throughout the theatre by an unseen prison official. Because the house lights remain up during these announcements, the audience is included among the prisoners who listen and must comply with the instructions. We cannot sit comfortably in the darkness, watching as outsiders, but must share the prisoners' degrading lack of privacy and individuality.¹⁴

The content of the announcements suggests the many subtle ways that Arlene and her fellow inmates are restricted, even beyond the physical confinement represented by the boxed-in set. First the announcer lists a series of prohibitions: no library hours, no walking on the lawn, no using the picnic tables. Prison excludes freedom of choice. The announcer next reports that the prison exercise instructor, Mrs. Fischer, has given birth to a daughter. Her comment that Mrs. Fischer “thanks you for your cards and wants all her girls to know she had an eight-pound baby girl” reflects the prevailing paternalistic attitude towards the inmates, who are here equated linguistically with an infant. Then, after announcing three times that Frances Mills has a visitor, the broadcaster corrects herself: it is Frankie Hill, not Frances Mills, who has a visitor. This slip of the tongue reveals the loss of personal identity that accompanies the prisoners' loss of freedom.

Arlene's life outside the prison (at least, on this first day) remains uncomfortably like the life inside suggested by these announcements. When she wants to remove the burglar-proof bars that line her apartment window, she is told that “The landlord owns the building. You gotta do what he says or he'll throw you out …” (p. 9). When Carl, her former pimp, arrives to entice her back to work for him, he scoffs at her plan to work at a legitimate job and spend her free time playing cards and watching television; “Sounds just like the dayroom in the fucking joint,” he remarks (p. 55). And when her neighbor Ruby, also a former prisoner, explains that life as a dishwasher is at least life outside a prison, Arlene retorts:

Outside? Honey, I'll either be in this apartment or inside some kitchen sweatin over the sink. Outside's where you get to do what you want, not where you gotta do some shit job jus so's you can eat worse than you did in prison.

(p. 59)

It is no wonder that Arlene feels as trapped outside a prison as she did inside one: her apartment and her limited opportunities represent continued imprisonment, reflected visually in Norman's doubled proscenium arch.¹⁵

The chronological plot, familiar characters, and conventional dialogue of Arlene's day of release—all devices of traditional stage realism—also underscore her ongoing confinement. Each visitor to her apartment reminds Arlene of her history of oppression and of the present restrictions to her behavior. Benny, a former prison guard who has driven Arlene home, attempts to rape her, thereby recapitulating both her father's sexual abuse and the degrading voyeurism of the prison guards, who installed a two-way mirror in the inmates' shower. Carl, who accurately assesses Arlene's inability to earn a decent wage legally (“You come with me and you'll have money,” he tells her. “You stay here, you won't have shit” [p. 55]) recalls the economic powerlessness that first drove Arlene to crime. Her mother, appearing ostensibly to help Arlene get settled in her apartment, refuses to invite her home for Sunday dinner. Her explanation—“I still got two kids at home. Don't want no bad example” (p. 23)—illustrates clearly Arlene's rejection by her family and by traditional society at large. Just as the set emphasizes Arlene's continuing confinement, so the linear chain of the day's events suggests that her options are limited and that she will be forever imprisoned by others' expectations of her.

Within this realistic set and chronological plot, however, Norman has experimented with dramatic form in order to show Arlene's interior reality and the emotional effects of her lifetime of imprisonments. Most obvious is her creation of a separate, younger Arlene—the wild, incorrigible “Arlie”—who, as John Simon puts it, “rampages” through the prison scenes, in Arlene's memory, and on stage for the audience.¹⁶ At the simplest level, Arlie represents Arlene's past. Although Arlie's words and actions are relegated to the prison “surround” or are ignored by the characters who cannot see her in the apartment, she and Arlene both face the same sources of oppression, often suggested in parallel scenes of sexual, economic, or familial exploitation.

Arlie is more than an innovative expository device, however. Since she is played by a separate actor who often occupies the stage in conjunction with the actor playing Arlene, Arlie represents a split in Arlene, a fragmentation of personality that is the result of her oppression—what Rosemary Curb might call “a mirroring of multiple selves in imprisoning cells.”¹⁷ Arlie may well “rampage” in Arlene's memory, but Arlene has had to develop a socially acceptable demeanor to escape at least literal incarceration. Arlie's presence on stage illustrates the repercussions for oppressed women of living in a double society, partly inherited from a patriarchal tradition and partly of their own making. By experimenting with this divided protagonist, Norman dramatizes something expressed in feminist criticism:

For women, then, existing in the dominant system of meanings and values that structure society and culture may be a painful, or amusing, double dance, clicking in, clicking out—the divided consciousness.¹⁸

Moreover, the achronology of the play, that Arlie's appearances necessarily introduce, mirrors Arlene's memory rather than an externally verifiable sequence of events, moving Arlene to the subject position of the play. She becomes the producer of symbolic expression rather than the mere cultural construct that the play's realistic elements and the other characters demand she be.¹⁹ As a result of Arlie's “clicking in,” we understand the past events and external forces that drove Arlene to crime; we see the psychological effects of abuse, restricted opportunities, and imprisonment embodied in Arlene's double consciousness; and we share in Arlene's past and present struggle to maintain some of Arlie's courage while developing a mature, autonomous identity.

By the end of the play Arlene does emerge as a mature character. She is no longer divided; Arlie, who sat center stage in the opening scene of the play, has been banished to the prison catwalk of Arlene's memory, even though the play ends with Arlene (now center stage herself) reminiscing about her younger avatar. Arlene is finally able to accept the conditions of her life and control them when possible, as we see when she firmly rejects both Bennie and Carl. What has brought about this change in Arlene? Getting Out abounds in images of entrapment and offers no real chance for escape. Where has Arlene gathered her new strength?

The answer to this question is twofold. First, Arlene has seen the value of autonomy. Although she recognizes that she will not have extra money, fine friends, or the companionship of her family (even her son has been taken from her), she discovers that, on the “outside,” “when you make your two nickels, you can keep both of em” (p. 59). Second, she learns the importance of female bonding. Despite her initial rejection of her neighbor Ruby's overtures, Arlene comes to value the companionship and sympathy of a woman who, like her, has lived a lifetime of varied imprisonments, and who will not exploit or demean her as every other character in the play attempts to do. As the play ends, Arlene accepts Ruby's supportive friendship. With Ruby's help, Arlene resolves to exercise those few options open to her and make the most of her meager economic opportunities.

It is true, as Keyssar has pointed out, that a realistically constructed play can offer no solution or alternative to class- and gender-based hierarchies. Getting Out illustrates, however, that a flexible realism can depict the values encoded and disseminated by a patriarchal culture, assess the consequences of oppression by powerful cultural agents, and simultaneously support the alternative values—such as autonomy and female community—that feminism espouses.

Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House also uses an innovative combination of formal realism and experimental techniques to depict the harmful restricting of women's lives. In this play, based on the same true story that inspired Jean Genet's The Maids, the central characters are not literally imprisoned (as was Arlene Holsclaw), but the forces that entrap them are just as potent and even more pervasive, and the consequences—for them as well as for their society—are even more disastrous.

The central characters are sisters, Christine and Lea Lutton, who work as servants in the home of Madame Danzard and her daughter Isabelle. The four women could live together in harmony, and Kesselman uses a number of parallel scenes to establish the correspondences of taste, habit, and experience between them. Despite their similarities, however, the two sets of women inhabit different parts of the house, and the class distinction thereby preserved (and illustrated in the set) permanently segregates them. Like the set of Getting Out, that of My Sister in This House is a realistic representation of a divided world. One half of the stage depicts the elegant sitting/dining room of the Danzards; the other half, the kitchen where the Luttons work. Separating the two worlds is a staircase leading up to the tiny, unheated bedroom that Christine and Lea share. While their catwalk cell may not have the bars that Arlene's did, Christine and Lea are nonetheless imprisoned within its confines.

The basic plot, too, shares the fundamental realism of Getting Out. It comprises a linear sequence of causal events that lead inexorably to conflict between the two sets of characters, climax in the Luttons' murdering the Danzards, and resolution in Christine's death sentence and Lea's term in prison, where, metaphorically at least, she has always been.

Within this realistic set and plot movement Kesselman, like Norman, has experimented widely. In contrast to Norman's innovative techniques, however, which primarily illustrate the psychological effects of prisons and traps on Arlene, Kesselman's theatrical devices and deviations from realism reiterate the restrictions of gender and class under which the Lutton sisters suffer, and predict their ultimate inability to escape confinement. For although Christine and Lea, like Arlene and Ruby, create a shared life (in their lesbian relationship) and devise moments of autonomy (such as wearing an inappropriate pink sweater while working or having their picture taken by an expensive photographer), their day of release will never come.

Kesselman uses a number of visual symbols to suggest the Luttons' hopeless condition and to predict their inevitable rebellion. The pink sweater mentioned above, the lacy undergarments Christine sews for Lea, and Madame Danzard's white glove (used to detect undusted spots) are obvious examples. The most potent of these significant props, however, is the blanket that the Luttons' mother crocheted for the infant Lea. Maman, like Arlene's mother, is implicated in her daughters' oppression: she confined Christine in a dreaded local convent when she was a young child, despite the girl's repeated attempts to escape; she denied Christine her wish, years later, to remain at the convent and become a nun; and she put both girls to work as domestics as soon as they could earn money for her. At the beginning of the play, Maman's crocheted blanket functions as a security blanket for Lea, who is homesick, and as a source of resentment for Christine, who has never forgiven Maman for undermining all her personal choices and taking all her hard-earned money. After they break off relations with Maman, however, the sisters unravel the blanket, symbolically unravelling their ties to their evidently greedy and manipulative mother. Nonetheless, escape is still impossible. As the stage directions reveal:

As the blanket unravels faster and faster, they run around the room. They are constricted by the confines of the narrow room. They wind the wool around the bed, under the sink. They wind it around each other.

(p. 26)

Christine and Lea may feel that they have escaped their mother's domination, but the room in which she has placed them and the wool from her blanket keep them just as tightly locked in place as Maman herself ever did.

The most interesting of Kesselman's theatrical innovations is her extensive use of silence. Locked within the separate halves of the divided world they inhabit, the Luttons and Danzards never speak to each other until the final, climactic scene, the confrontation that leads to rage and murder. Their conversations remain strictly intrafamilial, alternating or even overlapping from within their separate realms. During the few scenes in which members of both families are on stage together (and not on opposite sides of the staircase), the Luttons always remain silent. Some scenes are therefore enacted entirely in pantomime, as Lea is silently ordered to pick up the seed pearls dropped by Isabelle, or Madame's dusty white glove speaks eloquently to the Luttons of their tiny domestic failures.

These scenes of total silence illustrate dramatically the inability of the two families to communicate with each other. The characters never know of the similarities among themselves (although Isabelle and Lea, both younger and less rigid than Madame and Christine, do silently share chocolates and hairbrushing, perhaps imagining the possibility of friendship). But the Danzards and the Luttons are in different social positions and do not, after all, share the same condition of voicelessness, as Kesselman dramatizes powerfully in scene 13. In this scene Madame and Isabelle direct Christine in altering Isabelle's dress without ever speaking to either servant. Although Christine continues to make the required adjustments throughout the scene, “Never, during any point in the scene, is a word addressed to Christine or Lea” (p. 47). In fact, Madame Danzard refers to the silent Christine as “she,” even in her presence, asserting firmly that the dress will be ready on Friday because “She hardly has anything to do” (p. 47). Despite Madame's repeated criticism of Christine's skillful alterations, the Lutton sisters must remain silent under her instructions, waiting until they are alone together to complain of Madame's increasing injustice. Their inability to speak in Madame's presence signifies their powerlessness in a world inexorably divided, and their frustration with their condition predicts the violence that will erupt when the women finally confront each other. For voiceless women imprisoned by an unjust society, antisocial actions become inevitable.

That the ability to speak is equated with power in this play is made quite clear by the two scenes enacted in front of the proscenium arch, outside the Danzards' prison-house: scene 9, in which the Luttons have their picture taken by a photographer, and scene 16, in which they are sentenced for the murders of the Danzards. Although they are outside the divided house in these scenes, the Luttons are still controlled by powerful social forces, represented by the disembodied male voices of the photographer, the medical examiner, and the judge. Although these male characters are never seen, their very voices restrict, define, and finally determine the fates of Christine and Lea.

This power of speech to define and control is only hinted at by the photographer, to whom the sisters, dressed alike, seem to be identical twins, as lacking in individuality as the inmates of the prison where Arlene was incarcerated (and, in fact, the male voice-overs in this play function similarly to the voice-over prison announcements with which Getting Out begins). By the end of the play the sisters, like Arlene, are literally imprisoned, and although the judge orders them to explain the murders, to speak in their own defense, the Luttons have learned well that to speak is futile in a world where their voices will never be heard. Christine's final speech is a cry to see her sister—a request which is, of course, denied. The play ends with the sisters standing “as if framed in a photograph,” that is, pictured as society has mandated they appear: silent.

Kesselman, however, has shown us another view of the Lutton sisters. By dramatizing the inescapable condition of servitude and oppression under which Christine and Lea suffered, Kesselman engages our sympathy for them, making their eventual murder of the Danzards even more appalling. The voice of the medical examiner describes the scene of the crime in “a flat, anonymous voice”:

… a single eye was found, intact, complete with the optic nerve. The eye had been torn out without the aid of an instrument. … On the ground were fragments of bone and teeth. … The walls and doors were covered with splashes of blood reaching a height of seven feet.

(p. 64)

With her innovative combination of realism and experimentation, Kesselman has dramatized the conditions that impelled these murders, making audible throughout the play “that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”²⁰

Getting Out and My Sister in This House both demonstrate that a modified realism can be an appropriate and powerful vehicle for staging feminist issues. While traditional theatre still depends to a lamentable extent on male-dominated hierarchical structures for production and funding, the proscenium stage offers playwrights built-in opportunities for dramatizing the traditional systems of enclosure that restrict women. Michelene Wandor, defending the realism of her own feminist plays, has explained that “artistic movements which seek to represent the experiences of oppressed groups reach initially for a realistic and immediately recognizable clarity.”²¹ Perhaps this appropriation of the devices of realism will turn out to be only a small step in the history of feminist drama, but it is a step that should not be overlooked or undervalued. Depicting what is can help create what should be.

In fact, the variety of available theatrical forms is one of the strengths of the contemporary theatre, and feminists can and should take advantage of this variety. Eve Merriam recognized this fact when she described the generation of women playwrights that emerged with her in the 1960s and 70s; she said, “First you had to write an Arthur Miller play, then you had to write an absurd play. Now there is a new freedom—you can write empathetic women characters.”²² To deny women playwrights this freedom, to insist that their plays cannot be considered feminist unless they adhere to a particular ideological stance within feminism or that they take shape in a certain prescribed dramatic form, is to practice essentialism in its most insidious guise; such criticism only locks feminist playwrights into a new set of restrictions when our goal should be to empower them.

Feminist writers and scholars must, of course, continue to study, develop, and encourage their own separate tradition, in theatre as in all else. But an undeviating separatism of dramatic forms can only mean that fewer feminist concerns will be dramatised, fewer audiences will be reached, and feminist playwrights, like the women they often depict, may be left unheard, speaking softly to themselves at the margins of our culture.

Notes

1. Patti P. Gillespie, “Feminist Theatre: A Rhetorical Phenomenon,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64 (1978) 284-289: 284.

2. Women in American Theatre, ed. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York, 1981), pp. 343-45.

3. Megan Terry, interview with Dinah L. Leavitt, in Women in American Theatre, p. 288.

4. Karen Malpede, quoted in Elizabeth J. Natalle, Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion (Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 41.

5. Janet Brown, Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis (Metuchen, NJ, 1979), p. 1.

6. Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (New York, 1985). Rosemary Curb shares Keyssar's view that when recognition scenes exist in feminist plays they are qualitatively different from those in traditional, man-centered plays. She says: “Recognition in woman-conscious drama does not unmask a personal flaw for which the individual character must make social restitution through personal suffering. Rather the necrophilia of patriarchy is unmasked.” See Rosemary K. Curb, “Re/cognition, Re/presentation, Re/creation in Woman-Conscious Drama: The Seer, The Seen, The Scene, The Obscene,” Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), 302-316: 308.

7. Honor Moore, “Woman Alone, Women Together,” in Women in American Theatre, p. 185. Moore herself defines feminist drama more broadly than most students of feminist theatre troupes.

8. See, for example, Phyllis Mael, “A Rainbow of Voices,” in Women in American Theatre, pp. 320-24; Karen Malpede, “Introduction” to Women in Theatre: Compassion and Hope (New York, 1983); Sylvia Virginia Horning Zastrow, “The Structure of Selected Plays By American Women Playwrights: 1920-1970,” unpublished dissertation, Northwestern University, 1975.

9. See Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York, 1985), pp. 261-265; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” in The New Feminist Criticism, pp. 271-91, and her Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington, 1985), esp. p. 33; and Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Gender, Values, and Lessing's Cats,” in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington, 1987), pp. 110-123.

10. For a helpful recent attempt to define a woman's dramatic tradition, see Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York, 1988), esp. Chapters 1 and 2.

11. See especially her Chapter 7, “Success and Its Limits.”

12. Marsha Norman, Getting Out (New York, 1978); Wendy Kesselman, My Sister in This House (New York, 1982). References to the plays will be cited in the text by page number.

13. In this way, they combine the two varieties of “woman-centered drama” that Rosemary Curb calls “Re/cognition” and “Re/presentation.”

14. On this point I obviously disagree with Keyssar, who sees Norman's play as voyeuristic; see her Chapter 7.

    See also Timothy Murray, “Patriarchal Panopticism, or The Seduction of a Bad Joke: Getting Out in Theory,” Theatre Journal, 35 (1983), 376-88. Murray discusses in some detail the ways that the play encourages audience complicity with Arlie's behavior and values.

15. Timothy Murray also discusses the implications of the prison for the theatricality of the play, concluding that “getting out” is not much different from “being in.”

16. John Simon, Review of Getting Out, “Theater Chronicle: Kopit, Norman, and Shepard,” Hudson Review, 32 (1979) 77-88: 84.

17. Curb, 308. Curb's comment does not explicitly refer to Norman's play but to one version of what she calls “woman-centered drama.”

18. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” in New Feminist Criticism, p. 285.

19. This discussion of feminist dramatic semiotics is indebted to Case, pp. 115-22.

20. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York, 1977), p. 135.

21. Michelene Wandor, “Introduction” to Strike While the Iron Is Hot (London, 1980), p. 11.

22. Eve Merriam, quoted in The New Women's Theatre, ed. Honor Moore (New York, 1977), pp. xxix-xxx.