A FRIEND TIPPED me to this after learning of my abiding fascination with Joan. It's a one-performer play, a monologue by Joan in two acts (maybe an hour playing time?) in which she recounts her career from the beyond the grave.
Gage gives us a deliberately anachronistic Joan who makes her points with references to baseball and the Wizard of Oz and who from the outset relates the events of her life with a squarely feminist stance. By the end, she even sounds a bit like a lesbian separatist: "I realized that the closest I had ever come to any real sense of spirituality was alone with my voices, in nature, or in the company of other women." Sacrificing herself to save a tottering male monarch and strengthen belief in a patriarchal God was a mistake, she now thinks--she would have done better to stay at home in Domrémy with her best friend and occasional bed-partner, Hauviette.
The play is from 1988, and in relation to more contemporary thinking it might seem to be relying too much on essentialist conceptions of gender and reinforcing the gender binary. Joan's cross-dressing, in this play, is purely a practical matter of ease of movement and discouraging rape, not a matter of chosen identity. Joan as TERF? Gage dials down the visionary aspect as well.
Debatable interpretative points aside, though, Gage knows her history and has conjured up yet one more dramatically convincing Joan.
No comments:
Post a Comment