Gender as an Imaginary Circumstance

The Praxis of Female Actors playing Male Characters

In LaBute’s reasons to be pretty

Richard Schechner, “Casting Without Limits,” American Theatre, 12/10

• “No one raises an eyebrow about a woman prime minister, but there would still be a to-do about a woman on Broadway playing Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

• “Not playing Willie “as a woman,” but as the male character Miller wrote”.

• No change is made to the gender of the character, only to that of the actor traditionally associated with the role.

Theory and Practice

• The Semiotic Stage, Austin, Elam and Searle• Dr. David Z. Saltz’s “The Reality of Doing”• The possibility of real action on stage• The framing of imaginary circumstances as

game theory.• The framing of gender as an aspect of

imaginary circumstances.

The Semiotic Stage

• Stage action is fictional, actors only pretend to speak or engage in speech actions. John Searle

• “The stage, the area of fictional utterance, is a frame that disengages all speech acts.” Issacharoff

• Actors are not only pretending to be characters but, also only pretending to speak.

• Semiosis mistakenly collapses what the actor does, with the given circumstances under which it is performed. “The pretense is in the context, not in the action itself.” David Saltz

Imaginary Circumstances as the Rules of the Game

• “By defining the conventions of performance in this way, the actor will always have a reason to commit any action in any play”.

• “There is no insincerity here; the nature of the game is up front and understood by all”. Saltz

• The separation of real action from the aesthetics of realism and mere mimetic imitation.

Phenomenologically Speaking

“The normal man and the actor do not mistake imaginary situations for reality, they disentangle themselves from the living world and breath, speak and if need be weep with the circumstances of the imagination. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Benefits of Gender as an Imaginary Circumstance

• It makes precarious the already weak link between theatre and realism by encouraging the actor and the audience to speculate and imagine rather than to simply identify-or not-with the character.

• Actors get the chance to play roles previously off limits to them, not because of their ability but because of their sex.

And…

• “Actors and audiences alike would be more likely to see gender not as “biological destinies” but as flexible, historically conditioned performative circumstances”. R.S.

More Pragmatically Speaking

• Given the preponderance of male characters in the Western classic repertory.

• We are unable to write ourselves out of this dilemma.

• In this author’s opinion and experience:This situation is especially acute in the academy where the number and the abilities of female actors frequently exceed those of their male counterparts.

The Praxis of Female Actors Playing Male Characters

Suggested Practices

• Complete cast Agreement• Frame the play’s given circumstances as rules

of a game which generate behavior, the gender of a character is simply one of these many circumstances.

• Minimal mimesis-by and large, don’t hide anything and don’t emphasize anything.

• Allow the actors to find their own physicality

And

• Begin any physical action work early, as well as any business with furniture, costumes and props.

• Be sensitive to the “male dialogue” sometimes it really is written differently.

• Don’t ignore the female actors playing female characters.

Moving from a lower center of gravity seems to help

The End