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Embodied Absence and Theatrical Disbersement

Both Adrienne Kennedy’s A Lesson in Dead Language (c1962) and Susan-Lori Parks’s Venus (c1990) situate the figure of the girl and her bodily representation squarely within the realm of performance that engages its own theatricality. These spaces of performance–the primary school classroom and the freak sideshow that later becomes the courtroom and medical laboratory–are of bodily excess: Kennedy’s Pupils wear dresses that become more and more saturated with blood and Parks’s The Venus, whom we repeatedly are told in the Overture “iz dead” and “there wont b inny show tonite,” remains at the center of a spectacle that gazes upon and ultimately consumes her. Both plays also posit a character that controls and gives information intermittently (and here I am referencing The Great White Dog a/k/a the school teacher in A Lesson and The Negro Resurrectionist in Venus). In the most simplified reading, these plays suggest that Western society positions black girls within the space of bodily excess; a space to which they must either submit or challenge. In the most simplified reading, girls are subject to the consequences of what it means to be black and female and will become either victims or survivors as they transition from childhood to adulthood. Yet Kennedy and Parks’s plays demand a much more nuanced reading that moves beyond the notion of “girl” as a space to be traversed. Such a reading might ask how does dismemberment position the figure of the girl as a site of embodied absence? Such a reading might also acknowledge that bodily excess presented within a performance that represents its own theatricality is always already about bodily vacancy, about bodily estrangement, or about bodily deterioration. This notion of embodiment is less concerned with a unified identity and more with a gap or a disturbance, a relationship between disparate parts. Moreover, this notion of embodiment is one marked by temporal estrangement or temporal rupture illuminated by the failure of voice/language to signify corporeality. If we think about Kennedy and Parks’s plays in these terms, we can read the figure of the girl as a performance that haunts the body or a performance that echoes the body; a performance I call embodied absence–simultaneously there and not there, simultaneously present and absent–that embraces the very paradox it suggests.