Contemporary American Playwrights - Emily Mann

 Emily Mann Emily Mann is the author of plays which engage history throughoffering testimonies to the nature and crushing power of that history.Largely through the words of those

 

Emily Mann

Emily Mann is the author of plays which engage history throughoffering testimonies to the nature and crushing power of that history.Largely through the words of those who observed and suffered, she seeks

to stage the reality of our century, alive to the ambiguity of the exerciseand yet necessarily submitting to it Hers is an uneasy art She stares intothe heart of darkness, aware that the light she seeks to shine there mayfalsify the profundity of that darkness and that the mere act of presen-tation may diminish the enormity of what she seeks to encompass Theresult is an art whose own methodology is as fraught with moral com-plexities as the world which that methodology is designed to capture

In Granada Television’s documentary account of the Second World

War, The World at War, a woman recounts the death of her family in a

concentration camp She sits on a chair and speaks directly into thecamera Her words are uninflected, her face expressionless The film’sdirector has done nothing but asked her to sit and testify She could be abystander recounting events she has happened upon The effect is dev-

astating Much the same could be said of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,

designed to record the details of the Holocaust In an earlier television

series, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Bronowski goes to the camp

in which his family died He wears the suit of a television presenter.There comes a moment when he walks into the mud and stands in thewater at the edge of the camp, apparently careless of the fact that thewater covers his shoes and the lower part of his trousers He bends downand as he rises remarks that the mud he has gathered in his hands couldcontain the ashes of those he loved The film’s director chooses at thismoment to present the scene in ultra slow motion, the water and mudappearing to float down like the ashes of the dead those years before.The artifice destroys the emotional impact Suddenly truth is shielded

by art What was designed to amplify the stark facts of genocide fers them from the realm of fact to that of aesthetics and the audience’s

trans-

response becomes ambiguous Facts and art coexist uneasily, while truthmay be something quite apart.

Emily Mann, writer and director, is aware of this and yet, working inthe theatre, has to exist on this very borderline between fact and art She

is drawn to allow those she interviews to speak their own truth and yetnecessarily shapes their words She creates a new context for the testi-monies she stages, thereby changing the nature of those testimonies.Private conversation becomes public event, confidences are breached,and even though they are so with the sanction of those who offered themthere is a subtle shift in pressure, moral no less than social

By presenting, as she does, edited, shaped, transformed transcripts in

a theatrical environment not merely is she removing them from thecontext in which her subjects lived, moved and had their being, a context,

in other words, in which meaning sank roots deep into a familiar soil, she

is relocating them in a theatre which has its own dynamics, its own socialmilieu, its own history It is not merely that a conversation between two

or three people differs from the same conversation overheard by thosewith whom the subjects might not have chosen to share their intimateand most troubling memories, but that the theatre is a social event, a paidentertainment with its own customary accoutrements, which include thewhole business of ticket sales, pre-theatre dinner menus, reviews.Nobody ever reviewed the Holocaust Suddenly the sensibility of thewitness is discussed over the fruit juice and cornflakes as though it werethe product of a playwright, anxious to please, as in part it obviously is.And behind this lie acknowledged debts to Brecht, an awareness of theat-rical technique and audience–performer relationships learned fromother ‘productions’, and other writers For Mann’s works are playsoffered in production We are not in a human rights court or at a wartrial And if the subjectivity of the speaker is crucial to understanding, to

an emotional empathy, the writer has her own subjectivity, as does thedirector, the designer and the lighting engineer

All this is to say no more than that a category such as ‘documentarytheatre’, popular for a while in the s, is misleading It is to say nomore than that the shaping of eye-witness accounts, personal memoriesand public history into art is no simple matter, theatrically or morally.Emily Mann’s theatre lays no claim to objective truth, in the sense ofoffering a verifiable account of the Holocaust, of Vietnam or a murdertrial But even in offering the subjective truth of the lives of those whoseexperiences she draws upon, she deals in a complex world The testimo-nies that she derives from personal interviews concentrate on those

aspects of her subjects’ lives that she is anxious to address The plays arethus metonymic Indeed the lives are rendered metonymic In somedegree, of course, that is indeed true to their experiences, as single eventscut so deeply that they do indeed become definitional There is, none-theless, a degree to which the shaping hand of the playwright is presenteven in the questions asked and hence in the answers elicited She viewsthe world through a frame of her own devising even as those to whomshe speaks, and whose responses help to shape the play she would create,are invited to see their lives from a single perspective It is not simply thatthe play is shaped out of a conversation The conversation itself has atemplate.

The theatrical challenge, however, is in a sense no different from thatconfronting any other playwright It is to give shape and form to thematerial, to develop character through language and action, to find away to bridge the gap between the subjectivity of the character and thesubjectivities of the audience Emily Mann is no mere transcriber Whyelse does she express admiration for David Mamet? She is as concernedfor the rhythms of language, for the vividness of character and for thetheatrical effectiveness of what she writes as she is for the personal truthswhich may move her but for which she must discover a dramatic correl-ative, a means of communicating to the audience But she has a respon-sibility, in that sense, which goes beyond that which David Mamet wouldwillingly accept

Such theatre, moreover, derives part of its power precisely from what

is not said but known Behind the personal anecdote is a public history.Therein lies the metonymy This is, after all, our route into the largerhistory, our means of decoding the cipher of the past Personal testi-mony is an attempt to break through the implacable fact of an enormitywhose sheer scale, as in the case of the Holocaust, seems to resist ratio-nal analysis, since the irrational can, by definition, never be explained.For the writer, however, history may offer a free ride No matter howauthentically the subject’s memories are conveyed, no matter how moti-vated the writer may be by a desire to retrieve what is lost, to memorial-ise those who have slipped anonymously into death, our knowledge ofthe fact of the Holocaust, its enormity, its countless private pains andcollective despairs, is imported by the audience into their response to theplay What is external to the play (though access to that externality isopened up by what is contained within it) in part determines our reac-tion to it Our awareness that we are dealing with fact rather than fictionfreights our responses with pity, guilt, horror, despair which may or may

not be generated by the play in isolation Audiences are confronted with

a double truth: this really happened and this is being simulated Peopledied; an actress is pretending to be what she is not This is fact; this isfiction

Suddenly Diderot’s paradox is something more than an intellectualdebate; it has moral implications as the actress decides either to bemoved by what she portrays, and thus approximate the feelings of theperson she portrays the better to convey them, or to remain detachedand find methods of appearing to be moved, not least because this per-formance has to be replicated For what is theatre but repetition, throughrehearsal and on to performance In this context, however, the detach-ments of craft may come at the price of guilt at an inauthenticity whichpotentially threatens the quest for an authentic history A work whichsanctifies truth, and testimony as a route to that truth (‘I was there I saw

it Believe me’), may falter in the face of artifice required to cate that truth (‘I am pretending to be the person who was there’)

communi-It is not hard to move audiences Yeats warned against sentimentality,

by which he meant unearned emotion For Poe, the ideal subject was thedeath of a beautiful young woman, a subject sure to stir pity and regret,

a romantic affectation that stresses the evanescence of beauty and lifealike, caught by an art which alone will not corrupt How much morepowerful, though, death which has the status of history, death which canindeed be represented as a slaughter of the innocents, death which can

be thought to have contaminated the century and confirmed a deep flaw

in human nature which leaves no one untouched This electrical, tional charge is available for anyone who fictively enters the deathcamps, and many a writer has attempted to surf on this wave (including

emo-myself in a novel called Still Lives, which raises many of the issues that I

am apparently discussing with such detachment) Consider William

Styron’s Sophie’s Choice The terrible dilemma at its centre gains a great

deal of its emotional force from the fact that such things did happen Yet

it is difficult not to feel uneasy about this, as about an American sion series which sought to communicate the experience of theHolocaust by turning it into soap opera, which has its own paintbox ofsentimentalities

televi-It is true that such reservations are liable to dissolve when the authorwas there Primo Levi spoke out of experiences so real that they eventu-ally led him to suicide Anne Frank recorded her daily life We read thatlife as we do because we see it ironised by the fate that awaited her, a fatewhich we know and she only feared We honour her because she told her

small truths which spoke a larger truth, thereby reminding us of what alost life amounts to Surely the transference of that account to the theatredoes no violence to that principle Well, a little She wrote words on apage which we then read (though her father did intervene as editor) Inthe theatre we deal with a box of tricks Writer, director, actress have attheir disposal lights, sound, décor They may choose to employ an actorwhose own theatrical history carries with it certain assumptions whichpotentially bleed into the parts he or she plays The audience, mean-while, is not a single reader, alone, free of social inhibitions or coercive

influences, but a collection of people subject to group dynamics andresponsive to those moral and behavioural pressures which, for example,force an individual to his feet when the rest of the audience is intent on

offering a standing ovation And what is it we applaud when we reward

Emily Mann’s Annulla, An Autobiography if not a performance detached

from the role reproduced and thus in some senses detached from thehorrors and triumphs dramatised? What do we praise if not what EmilyMann has made of someone else’s story?

Why preface a consideration of the work of Emily Mann in this way?Because these are all concerns which bear on what she has chosen to do,which is to create a drama of testimony in which she takes us on ajourney into personal histories that in turn become the key if not tohistory itself then to events which otherwise exist somewhere betweenthe neutrality of facts and the engagement of myth

Emily Mann grew up at a time of social ferment In  she attendedthe University of Chicago Laboratory School and lived in the Hyde Parkarea As she has recalled, the Black Panthers were ten blocks away andElijah Muhammad lived three doors from her own house The area wasintegrated but within two years, following riots across the country andthe assassination of Martin Luther King, the move towards black sepa-ratism had begun to have its effect Meanwhile, the Tet offensive inVietnam intensified opposition to that war She herself did participate

in protest marches but has expressed her own suspicion of the alism generated by mass action The group to which she was drawn wasless defined by political action or street demonstration than that consti-tuted by the communalism of theatre

emotion-Working first on props, make-up and design, she then moved to actingand then directing, which remains a principal activity She directed herfirst play at the age of sixteen and wrote her first play at Harvard, in aplaywriting seminar with William Alfred, though she abandoned writing

in favour of directing, which she began in her sophomore year Following

a temporary disillusionment with theatre, she moved to Minnesota,working at the Guthrie Theatre and studying at the University ofMinnesota

The key moment in her career, however, had come with her reading

of documentary material assembled by her father for an oral historyproject, and then with a visit to Europe to study family history

In her senior year at college she read transcripts gathered by her fatherfor the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project on the survi-vors of the camps One interview, in particular, seized her imaginationand stirred her feelings A Czech woman, interviewed by her daughter,talked of a recurring dream that had haunted her in the camps, a dream

of a ballerina dressed in white This was a vision that had no correlative

in her actual life but which served in some unaccountable way to sustainthat life At that point, Mann has explained, ‘I thought, “I have to talk

to people I have to get it down, to have it in their own words”, becauseyou could hear, from the page, the cadences and rhythms of the Czechwoman, as opposed to those of her daughter who was American born.And both of them reaching out across a language barrier, as well as anexperiential barrier It was extraordinary.’1 What is fascinating aboutthis account is that though she was moved by the simple account, withits striking image and its human resilience, what she found equally com-pelling was the attempt of someone to understand an alien experience,

to bridge not only a gap between the generations but a gap of ence that could be filled only with words Beyond that, she heard in therhythms of speech something more than evidence of national origin.This broken dialogue was itself a sign both of dislocation and of a need

experi-to mend For someone who as a writer and direcexperi-tor would later express

a distaste for the artifice of theatre, it also had the authority of truth Itwas, anyway, an experience which inspired in her an interest in familydocumentary whose first fruit was Annulla.

In the summer of  she interviewed Annulla Allen in London.Annulla was the aunt of her college room-mate Mann herself had, as theplay indicates (through the voice of a young woman who seems to repre-sent the author), been intending to look for her grandmother’s house inPoland but was persuaded instead to spend time with the woman whobecame the basis for the play She was so impressed by the resulting tran-script that she wished toturn it intoa play This desire, in turn, led toher

1 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York,) p .

decision to go to Minnesota and the Guthrie By her own account it wasseeing the actress Barbara Bryne perform there that made her feel thatthe project was possible and it was Bryne’s enthusiasm on seeing the tran-

script which led tothe play An early version, Annulla Allen: Autobiography

of a Survivor (A Monologue), directed by the author and starring Barbara

Bryne, duly opened at the Guthrie Theatre’s Guthrie, in  In a

revised form, Annulla, An Autobiography was staged at the Repertory

Theatre of St Louis in, directed by Timothy Near, and in New York,

at the New Theatre of Brooklyn in, with Linda Hunt as Annulla

In a note Emily Mann indicates that ‘for the most part’ the words ofthe text are those spoken to her in that summer of , ‘and my ownwords told to Timothy Near over a decade later’.2The equivocation isnecessary, understandable, but interesting Anyone transcribing a tapeknows full well that changes are required to make spontaneous speechfully coherent The process of editing, meanwhile, represents somethingmore than a shuffling of the deck Annulla is thus a testimony whoseshape is determined partly by the events recalled, partly by the manner

in which its subject chose to recall them, and partly by the writer whoneeds to shape them to the requirements of theatrical presentation This

is, in short, a play and not a dramatised tape recording By the sametoken the Voice in the play is that of Emily Mann; it is also, however, acharacter with a dramatic function

Emily Mann’s own motivation, at least as later rationalised and given

to the character in the play, is personal The truth which she seeks is toserve a private as well as a public purpose It is not testimony that sheseeks but information What she is looking for is a past that has been dis-assembled and a language in which, and with which, to address that pastand unlock its secrets:

I needed to go to someone else’s relatives in order to understand my own historybecause by this time my only living relative of that generation was my grand-mother – my mother’s mother – and she had almost no way to communicatecomplex ideas She’d lost her language Her first languages were Polish andYiddish, but when she went to America she never spoke Polish again My grand-father spoke English at work, but at home they spoke a kind of Kitchen Yiddishtogether – certainly not ‘the language of ideas’ Her children first spokeYiddish, but they wanted to become American, so as soon as they went to kin-dergarten, they only spoke English So in the end, she read a Yiddish newspaper

but spoke in broken Yiddish – half Yiddish She had no fluent language This isn’t

uncommon among immigrants of her generation So I went to Annulla, who

had the language (Testimonies, p.)

2 Emily Mann, Testimonies: Four Plays (New York,), p .

And so a European story becomes an American story: not the revelation

o f suffering but the discovery of roots The primary purpose of onewoman’s life is suddenly to throw light on the life and pre-history ofanother An act of appropriation is undertaken and justified The dis-continuities of one woman’s life (Mann’s grandmother), and hence ofthose to whom she bequeaths those discontinuities, are to be resolved by

a woman (Annulla) who is presumed to have the key to one experienceonly to reveal that she is the holder of the key to another The disrup-tions, discontinuities and vacancies which she suffers, however, are, argu-ably, more profound than those afforded by expatriation while fluencymay not give access to a truth that lies outside words or outside thecapacity of words to recuperate And that, of course, is the problem oftestimony for language can never be adequate to experiences which defycomprehension and communication alike The young woman of theplay goes in search of one thing, hoping to complete the gaps in her ownstory, only to find herself confronted with other stories whose caesurasare more profound and terrifying

Ironically, on her arrival in Annulla’s Hampstead Heath flat, she findsherself confronted by a woman who tells her that her own life ‘is in ter-

rible disorder’ (Testimonies, p.), and who has herself tried to bring shape

to her life by writing a play, called The Matriarchs, still six hours long and

in need of precisely that condensation which will confront Emily Mann.Indeed she confesses that the pages are unnumbered and that she hasjust dropped the manuscript so that it is in total disorder Her putativeplay, however, is not in itself an account of her camp experiences but isdesigned to demonstrate that a global matriarchy will conquer evil,though on this evidence it seems unlikely to bring much order to theworld She seems less interested in the past, indeed, than in the future,which is ironic given Emily Mann’s commitment to countering anAmerican disregard for history

Gore Vidal’s references to the United States of Amnesia imply a tempt for history that he finds disturbing, but perhaps this disregard says

con-no more than that America is an immigrant country with a vested est in leaning into a future over which it has always asserted presump-tive rights Denying the past, or banishing it to pre-history, is the price ofentry Henry Ford may have been over-blunt is declaring history to bebunk but he had the sanction of national mythology on his side Americawas a new beginning The slate was wiped clean When Arthur Millerwent to Italy not long after the Second World War his father wasbemused that he should wish to visit a continent they had been so glad

inter-to leave It was a land of oppression The Voice in Annulla recalls her

grandmother asking the same question of her and, indeed, her journey,and the play which it generated, constitute an engagement with the past,and more specifically the European past, which is, indeed, at odds withAmerican notions of history as discarded experience Of course a

different kind of past has always proved attractive, a past composed of asentimental nationalism, a myth of origins which sends American pres-idents looking for Irish forebears and members of the Daughters of theAmerican Revolution for evidence that they sailed, with impeccable

social origins, aboard the May flower But the history explored in Annulla

is of a different kind, while the past has more secrets than those offered

by a genealogical chart

Emily Mann, in the guise of the Voice, explains her own attachment

to the past as in part a factor of being the daughter of an historian butalso as a product of her Jewish identity Indeed identity, for her, isentwined with a tradition that by definition offers a crucial link with thepast In a play which consists of a collage of stories, she thus has her ownstory to tell, in fact her own account of the Holocaust passed down fromher grandmother to her mother, a story no less terrible but in some waynow released by the stories of another

This difference between European and American sensibilities is raised

by Annulla herself, who in describing her family life relates it to that

offered in Strindberg’s theatre, a drama whose concern with tormentedsouls she believes to be at odds with American values, or at least alien to

American actors This is the reason, she assumes, why Goethe’s Faust

finds so few interpreters in America O’Neill once suggested that his ownfailure to engage the American public had something to do with a tragicsensibility so at odds with American values, while Arthur Miller has been

tempted by the same thought Annulla, however, is precisely concerned

with ‘souls in torment’, as it is with survivors It is, in that sense, aEuropean play as defined by Annulla herself For if it goes back, hori-zontally, through time it also slices downwards, vertically, into extremes

of human emotion, recalling moments when men and women were in

extremis Annulla goes on a journey into her own past but this is paralleled

by the different journey on which the writer or, more properly, the Voice,goes, on being led back into the heart of darkness

Annulla, by its very structure, poses questions about the nature and

capacity of theatre to address and dramatise certain experiences andemotions, as its central character discusses the relationship betweentheatre and national identity A play about a woman who writes a playwhich she believes will have an immediate impact on people’s behaviour,

which is in turn shaped by another woman, Emily Mann, cannot helpbut raise questions about theatre itself, as about women’s sensibilities.

Indeed, Annulla is, by its nature, metatheatrical Annulla is

simultane-ously a character and an historically located person whose existence,independent of the play, is offered as a sign of its authenticity Yet this

‘real’ Annulla is herself a conscious creation, her identity problematicand deliberately vague After all, her own survival as a Jew in Nazi-occu-pied Europe, and the survival of her husband, depended on the successwith which she performed as an actress, presenting herself as what shewas not, concealing her real identity, an identity already problematic.For the truth is that she was also a product of that grand theatre which

is European history Born in L’vov in Galicia, which was first Austriathen Poland and finally Russia, she spoke Polish and then Germanbefore Ukrainian, French and Ruthenian The family then moved fromAustria proper to Germany to Italy and then England Along the wayshe picked up a handful of further languages Who, then, was she?Those around her assumed she was Czech She presented herself asbeing Aryan She inhabited, and continues to inhabit, a necessaryvagueness Forgetful of her childhood days, raised in a country whoseidentity and language changed, she drew her vagueness around her as aprotection This woman, who once wanted to be an actress, became pre-cisely that, necessarily concealing the pain she felt, her religion, hermotives She flirted with a German officer to get her way, became acoquette to protect her husband She became a contradiction, a roleplayer who faced the risk of losing herself in her roles if she was not tobecome merely a mosaic of them She even chooses to forget her child-hood because it was unpleasant As she confesses, ‘I was really ignorant

of the horror that could befall me because I had to be’ (Testimonies, p.).Thus, though she asks ‘how can people change if they don’t knowwhat happened It is like in psychoanalysis You must know what hap-pened to you’ (p.), she herself knows the advantages of oblivion, thenecessity of forgetting which must contend in her own life with the

necessity to remember And Annulla, the play, is about the necessity of

remembering There is, thus, an element of cruelty in the naive Voicewho urges Annulla to travel where she would rather not go, disperse theignorance which had once offered her a limited protection, a dubiousgrace There is, in other words, an element of cruelty in Emily Mann.Annulla’s husband had been arrested in  on what came to beknown as Kristallnacht He was taken to Dachau from which, remark-ably, she managed to secure his release in good health, the Germans

having experimented on him with antibiotics, at the time little knownand therefore not to be tested on true Aryans Her son, meanwhile, whohad been visiting Sweden, was safe but separated from her, so that shecame to the edge of insanity at this double separation For her, however,this is the past What is now of importance is not this history of pain butthe play she has written, a play which she is convinced will change theworld: ‘if the women with their hearts would start thinking, we couldchange everything within a year’ (p.).

The evidence of Annulla’s own life, however, would seem to suggestotherwise Her relationship even with other women is fraught Sheregards that with her mother as having been destructive while her sisterAnna, who she describes as ‘gruesome’, baffles her Her friend Lydia,sister to Boris Pasternak, who also now lives in England, rejects hernotion of a Women’s Party Meanwhile her own life is full of confusionsand distractions Throughout the play she busies herself preparing achicken for the oven, making tea, taking telephone calls, listening to theradio

The idea for the Women’s Party, she explains, came to her in  Allthese years later it is no more than so many thoughts gathered in anunpublished and unproduced play Nor is she unaware of the fate ofsuch utopian ideas, having lived with the consequences of such Indeedthe play itself, apparently, offers a catalogue of such failures, failureswhich extend to capitalism Against this, however, she pitches her ownutopianism: ‘Men have strong feeling too, but they are violent They

should not be allowed to rule A woman’s natural instinct is loving It

will be clear when I have finished my play’ (pp –)

But the play is unfinished, her utopianism unrealised, and it begins toseem that the fact that it is so is perhaps what keeps Annulla going, thatand even a suspicion that if utopias contain their own negation thetheatre itself is an imperfect mechanism for instituting change She cer-

tainly speaks disparagingly of Brecht’s Artuo Ui, not only because it turns

Hitler into a gangster, an object of fun, but because Brecht had not livedout the war in Germany but established his home in Hollywood Forthose who had remained there was nothing remotely funny about Hitler.The implication seems to be that theatre has to carry the force of thereal, that it requires the authentication of experience, a requirement sodemanding as to rule out most committed drama And that, of course,raises a central question about Emily Mann’s play

Annulla, after all, may speak out of her own knowledge and ence of war; Emily Mann does not Annulla objects to Brecht seeing

humour in a serious subject; but Emily Mann sees humour in Annulla.Meanwhile, Annulla’s life, perhaps, sustains its integrity more fully pre-cisely because she has not succeeded in translating it into art, therebycontaining its variety, giving it an arbitrary shape and meaning, lifting itfrom a moral into an aesthetic realm.

Nor is Annulla’s the only story to be told, for we learn that the womanwho is the Voice had sought out the Polish village where her relatives hadbeen humiliated and killed The on-stage listener is thus not only anaudience to Annulla’s tale but herself the protagonist of another story.For this is an account of someone slowly learning who she is from explor-ing the past through those who embody it Nor does she learn only fromAnnulla She completes the pilgrimage that took her to Europe (insearch of her family’s origins) and though she discovers that the writtenrecords have been wholly expunged, the journey itself contains themeaning which she seeks When she returns, it seems, she can under-stand something of the mother from whom she had previously felt alien-ated:

My mother looks more beautiful and more alive than she’s ever looked She saidsuch an interesting thing to me She said, ‘I feel like I’ve finally figured out how

to live and it’s going to be over.’ And I know what she means I remember beingwith her at her mother’s funeral And the tears just welled up in her eyes Andshe said, ‘I can’t believe it went by so fast.’ She was putting her mother into theground, and she remembered sitting in the kitchen and talking to her about –you know – baking bread;five years old, remembered the smell, rememberedevery single moment of it and all of a sudden fifty years had passed Hermother’s life was over And she looked at me and said, ‘There’s no time.’ (p.)

She who had been drawn to her father discovers another route to truth.She lives, after all, in her mother’s garden Some things pass more easilydown the female side so that, ironically, perhaps Annulla’s Women’sParty already exists, a biological and experiential history whose meaningemerges over time, having slowly and invisibly infiltrated the mind andsensibility The Voice’s confession that ‘I know what she means’, re-establishes the link she thought broken, opens up an avenue into under-standing

At the end of the play she lists the family names on her mother’s sidewhile understanding, too, that the story told to her by Annulla is a part

of her own story As she remarks, ‘There is a wonderful fairy tale about

a young girl who loans her relatives to another young girl who doesn’thave any’ (p.) The link between them, however, is forged not only by

a shared history but also through language as Annulla echoes the

mother’s comments, remarking that the interview has ‘gone by so fast’.She, however, resists the notion that ‘There’s no time’, by insisting that

‘I have so much time now I write all the time That is why I wake upevery day’ (p.)

The question, nonetheless, remains: is Annulla anything more than the

edited transcript of a conversation which derives its power from the fact

of historical suffering and personal trauma? Do Emily Mann’s tions as ‘author’ justify seeing the work as a play? After all, should we notrequire a more radical intervention by the imagination to distinguishmere recording of experience from a ‘made’ work? The questions arelegitimate enough, though they in turn raise further questions about therelationship between art and the material which constitutes it, betweenthe given and the constructed Plot, after all, is frequently gifted to thewriter by history or the small change of daily life while the final sourcefor all writers is their own experience, not in the strictly autobiographi-cal sense but to the degree that the imagined is a projection of the

interven-known Annulla, in an early version, announced itself as the Autobiography

of a Survivor Its published version carries a Playwright’s Note that ‘for

the most part’ what we hear are Annulla’s own words as told to theauthor, and the author’s own words recalled ten years later But note thatthis is a ‘Playwright’s’ note The claim, then, is to at least shared author-ship It is difficult to resist that claim Annulla is a character She existswithin the limited and potentially limiting frame of the stage presenta-tion The mere brevity of the piece hints at an act of compression thatinvolves a work carefully shaped to serve a purpose beyond the simplerecording of personal experience or the elaboration of an historicalmoment The Voice, meanwhile, suggests another element, another dra-matic construction, a related, interlocking and yet tangential story whichgenerates meaning from the energy which arcs between the twoaccounts, accounts consciously designed to release such energy

It has been suggested that the force of what is in effect a monologuecomes from its unmediated nature, but it is, of course, mediated, itsclaim to the status of art lying precisely in that mediation Its rhythmsare, admittedly, partly those of Annulla’s own speech but they are alsopartly those shaped by Emily Mann The juxtaposition of word andaction, or, more properly, perhaps, since the ‘real’ Annulla had, like herdramatist counterpart, herself been engaged in preparing food duringthe interview, the choice of moments in which that juxtaposition would

be underscored, is hers as is the counterpoint created by interjecting theVoice into the unfolding story The irony of Mann creating a play out of

a situation in which another woman fails to create a play may be implicit

in the situation but is also heightened by her choosing to retain Annulla’sown comments about theatre

Beyond this, the question of authorship has other resonances in awork in which Annulla makes plain her survival of multiple assaults on

her identity and selfhood The mélange of identities and languages which

she had necessarily embraced had plainly threatened to fragment her, ashad her enforced and voluntary moves Her role as independent womanwas constantly at risk because of acknowledged personal and familialresponsibilities And, most profoundly, she was potentially the victim of

an historical attempt to annihilate her identity, her selfhood, her entirerace on the part of those who offered her no fate beyond extermination.The single most important fact about her, therefore, is that she emergesfrom this process as the author of her own life, not the author of the playwhich she struggles so hard to complete

The Voice, likewise, this refracted version of Emily Mann, comes tounderstand the extent to which she, too, is a survivor By recording notonly the experiences of this woman to whom she is genetically unrelatedbut also the details of her own journey backwards through the genera-tions to the point at which an attempt was made to wipe them from thepublic record, she, too, becomes an author in a double sense, writing

herself and herself writing Annulla is thus, in some senses, about the very

questions which its form appears to raise: authorship, the relationshipbetween memory and truth, the power of theatre to contain, express,record, shape experience, the degree to which the real, re-forged, re-pre-sented, still carries the force of that reality But if it presents the shock ofthe real a question still remains: how far does the aesthetic presentation

of that reality risk diminishing its impact or at least deflecting attentionfrom fact on to form?

If the scale of the intervention of the author was unclear in Annulla, the

same could hardly be said of the play which opened in October , atChicago’s Goodman Studio Theatre before moving to the AmericanPlace Theatre in New York the following year as part of the Women’s

Project Still Life is, as Emily Mann has explained, a play about violence

in America It is ‘a “documentary” because it is a distillation of

inter-views I conducted’ (Testimonies, p.) with three people in Minnesota inthe summer of  As she has said, ‘I have been obsessed with violence

in our country ever since I came of age in the s I have no answer

to the questions I raise in the play but I think the questions are worth

asking The play is a plea for examination and self-examination, anattempt at understanding our own violence and a hope that throughunderstanding we can, as one of its central figures, Nadine, remarks,

“come out on the other side”’(p.)

The play, which concerns itself with the tortured memories of aVietnam veteran, Mark, his abused wife, Cheryl, and respectful mistress,

Nadine, was born when the ‘real’ Nadine saw a performance of Annulla

and persuaded Emily Mann to meet a person who she characterised asthe gentlest man she had ever known The two accordingly met in a con-ference room at the Guthrie Theatre and, to Mann’s horror, over severalhours he spelled out details of atrocities in which he had been involved

in Vietnam At his suggestion she then met his heavily pregnant wife,only to discover that violence displayed in war had spilled over intodomestic life The gentlest man Nadine had ever known turned out to

be a man who filled his wife with terror The result was  hours ofrecordings, which, transcribed, resulted in an -page typescript Ninemonths later Mann began to shape this into a play because ‘I was feeling

an incredible responsibility to these people They’d given me their story

and it was important to tell’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p.) It may

have been their story but the fact is that Still Life is more completely a construction than Annulla.

Mann’s first problem was to find what she called ‘a theatrical voice for

each person’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p.) Beyond that, she had

to find a way of interweaving the separate accounts offered to her, aprocess which involved both a musical sense of harmony and disso-nance, point and counterpoint, crescendo and diminuendo, and an

awareness of irony, contrast and comparison In other words Still Life is,

as its title implies, a very self-conscious work of art, even while taking itssubject supposedly directly from life It is sculpted It is a collage, a bric-olage Indeed the process of construction quite literally involved scissorsand tape with the three monologues being brought into ever-closer prox-imity By degrees, the -page transcript became ninety pages, thisprocess having an effect on the language in which it was cast

Thus an early version seemed to her to lack ‘muscle’ It ‘became a way

to get information across, and the play began to seem like educationaltheater The piece seemed very leaden; it didn’t have any poetry, it didn’thave any drive or electricity or tension in it And it didn’t have the trau-matic effect’.3 Distilled, however, the monologues, ‘found their own

3Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York,

), p .

rhythm, which was, in fact, iambic pentameter I wanted to retain theactual rhythms of the way each person spoke, in real language, duringthe interviews.’ She describes this as though it were merely immanent inthe language of her subjects, stressing, like David Mamet, the iambicnature of English speech, yet at the same time she speaks of ‘the dia-

logue I’d written’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews, p.), relating her own

use of the iambic to Shakespeare’s, and it is clear that the rhythms of Still

Life are carefully worked for It is equally clear, however, that Still Life is,

for the most part, not written in iambics, any more than the British andAmericans spend their lives obligingly echoing Shakespearean metrics.Nonetheless, there is a powerful sense of the poetic in the play encour-aged, to be sure, by Mann’s decision to set the text out as verse, but alsoestablished by the shifting rhythms of speeches, by the careful shaping

of language and emotion and by images generated out of juxtapositions.Sometimes those juxtapositions were implicit in the raw material withwhich she was working She recalls, in particular, that it was Nadine andnot Mark (who had served in the jungle of Vietnam) who referred tobeing ‘in the jungle’, as though his language had bled into hers, as shehad allowed him to infiltrate her life and her values Sometimes theywere worked for as she experimented with the monologues

The relationship between the fractured monologues is complex, asthey appear to comment on each other, slowly creating meanings out oftheir interaction, out of their colliding stories Sometimes the connec-tion lies in a meaning generated out of juxtaposition, sometimes in atonal similarity or contrast, sometimes in linguistic echoes, repetitions,ambiguities

At times the last sentence delivered by one character seems to remark

on thefirst delivered by another, as though they thereby passed meaningfrom one to the other, though for much of the play they speak not to oneanother but to the presumed audience Thus, Mark indicates a projectedslide of his foot, explaining that he had taken the picture in case he losthis foot in the war, commenting that, ‘I wanted to remember what it

looked like’ (Testimonies, p.) When Cheryl begins the next speech byremarking: ‘If I thought about this too much I’d go crazy’ (p ), itappears tobe a response tohis remark, but the word ‘this’ is a freefloatingsignifier, as is the word ‘it’ in the following sentence (‘So I don’t thinkabout it much.’) Both words seem to relate to her sense of a vaguelyrecalled past, but the very weakness of the linguistic link, together withthe close proximity to Mark’s comment, makes it seem a response

In the same speech she refers to the finality of divorce – ‘it’s over’ –