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A HORSE'S HUSBAND: DAVID GREENSPAN'S QUEER TEMPORALITIES AND THE POLITICS OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
Extract
Near the end of his solo piece The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion, prominent playwright and performer David Greenspan presents a pair of scenes in which he investigates, from a queer perspective, the question of time in the theatre. In the spirit of The Myopia's own temporally disruptive mechanics, I will describe the second scene first: an Orator and his Doppelganger, who “bears a striking resemblance to the actress Carol Channing,” have a conversation in which they explain to the audience that the overlong fourth act, in whose stead they appear, has been cut from the play. The Doppelganger, who is particularly concerned with keeping good time (and whose “striking resemblance” to Channing is camped in performance as an uncostumed Greenspan does an uncanny vocal impersonation of the actress), looks impatiently at her wrist—as if at a watch—and says that audiences will put up with “telling” in the theatre, as distinct from “showing,” only if the telling is “not too long. People—who of course apprehend words by either reading or listening—might be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by reading but might not be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by listening. Even if they're simultaneously seeing.” Here the Doppelganger, like the Orator, speaks in rhythms explicitly modeled on those of Gertrude Stein, whose essay “Plays” is invoked earlier in the scene. Likewise concerned with the pacing of showing and telling and the phenomenology of audience responses to that pacing, Stein complains famously in “Plays” of theatre's “syncopated time,” its inability to produce an identity between “the emotional time of the play” and spectators' “emotional time as audience.” Stein's own plays do not exactly solve the problem of syncopated time but rather attempt to circumvent the problem altogether by rejecting the theatrical apparatus that, in her view, produces syncopation—that is, “by blurring beyond recognition the distinctions among dialogue, didascalia, and other diegetic language that seems to belong to the province of neither dialogue nor didascalia.”
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References
Endnotes
1. David Greenspan, “The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion” (unpublished manuscript, 2003), 45. An earlier version of this piece was published in Theater 29.2 (1999): 61–9 and is available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theater/v029/29.2greenspan.html, accessed 2 February 2011.
2. Ibid., 49.
3. Stein, Gertrude, “Plays,” in Stein, Last Operas and Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, xxix.
4. Salvato, Nick, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 103.
5. Greenspan, “Myopia,” 46.
6. Ibid., 43.
7. Ibid., 43–4.
8. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., online version, s.v. “superposition,” www.oed.com:80/Entry/194465, accessed 29 December 2010 (and since migrated to www.oed.com/view/Entry/194465).
9. Giannetti, Laura and Ruggiero, Guido, Introduction: Playing the Renaissance,” in Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, trans. and ed. Giannetti, Laura and Ruggiero, Guido (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, xxi. Subsequent citations from this book, including passages from Pietro Aretino, Il marescalco (The Master of the Horse), ibid., 117–204, are given parenthetically in the text.
10. Tulchin, Allan A., “Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement,” Journal of Modern History 79.3 (2007): 613–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 616.
11. Eskridge, William N. Jr., “A History of Same-Sex Marriage,” Virginia Law Review 79.7 (1993): 1419–1513CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1470.
12. Muñoz, José Esteban, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 353–67Google Scholar, at 353. Reprinted in Muñoz, , Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 83–96Google Scholar.
13. Ibid.
14. Boellstorff, Tom, “When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2–3 (2007): 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 234.
15. Ibid.; emphasis added.
16. Clarke, Eric O., Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 46.
17. Mark Greif, “On Repressive Sentimentalism,” n+1, 6 October 2009, http://nplusonemag.com/repressive-sentimentalism.
18. Boellstorff notes that even as he “explore[s] the possibility of a queer theory that does not foreclose the support of what [he] provisionally term[s] same-sex marriage,” he wants that carefully modified support to remain “aligned with scholars like [Michael] Warner and [Lisa] Duggan in terms of an attention to how marriage has been deployed in the service of normalization, in linked symbolic and political economic registers”; Boellstorff, 228. See also Warner, Michael, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Duggan, Lisa, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
19. Boellstorff, 228.
20. Ibid., 231.
21. Ibid., 234.
22. See, for instance, Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Freeman, Elizabeth, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31.4 (2000): 727–44Google Scholar; and Halberstam, Judith, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
23. Boellstorff, 229–30.
24. Ibid., 238–9. Boellstorff is quoting Clifford, James, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 539–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 540.
25. Ibid., 241.
26. Ibid.
27. See, for instance, Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Saddik, Annette J., The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [Cranbury, NJ: AUP], 1999)Google Scholar.
28. David Greenspan, “A Horse's Ass” (unpublished manuscript, 2009), 3. Subsequent page citations are given in the text.
29. Greenspan, David, Son of an Engineer (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 11. Subsequent page citations are given in the text. [The play is also available online at http://ustheater.blogspot.com/2010/12/david-greenspan-son-of-engineer.html, accessed 2 February 2011.]
30. David Greenspan, “The Earth Is Destroyed by Missiles,” in Greenspan, Son of an Engineer, 5–7, at 5 (and also in the online version cited).
31. Ibid., 6–7.
32. See Greenspan, David, She Stoops to Comedy (New York: First Look Press, 2007)Google Scholar. The play, full of the temporal instabilities and metatheatricality characteristic of Greenspan's other recent work, features the briefly rocky but ultimately enduring and loving relationship between actresses Alexandra Page and Alison Rose. As their friend Kay Fein says in the dialogue that foregrounds most explicitly the dignity of their long-term commitment, which she likens to a marriage, “The point is—despite their problems … they have stayed together—now I realize that's complicated … but it's not been all bad—and they do struggle—hell, they've stayed together longer than most of the straight couples we know” (50).
33. Greenspan, “Myopia,” 13. Subsequent page citations are given in the text.
34. Sellar, Tom, “Near and Far: David Greenspan's Dramatic Vision,” Theater 29.2 (1999): 57–9Google Scholar, at 57.
35. Ibid.
36. Charles Isherwood, “A Fantastical Epic Seen through Gertrude Stein's Rose-Colored Glasses,” New York Times, 12 January 2010; online at http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/theater/reviews/12myopia.html, accessed 2 February 2011.
37. Greenspan, “Horse's Ass,” 18.