The interpretation of difference: Staging identity in the United States (1986--1992)

The works I study do theatrically what a dominant strand of critical discourse does theoretically during the volatile late 1980s and early 90s. A period marked by massive cyber- and bio-technological development, the breakdown of Communism, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and post-structuralist philosophies of the inseparability of reality from representation, there is a striving for fluid ways to map emerging experiences of difference that make traditional positions seem inadequate. There is an intensification, evident in the texts I address, of a sense that identity is inextricably entwined in interpretative mechanisms.;Each of the three sections is comparative: Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz with Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror ; Ping Chong's Kind Ness and Nosferatu with Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play; George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum with Mimi Goese's Tin Foil Sandwich, Bombardment and See More Evil.;Section One, "From Brooklyn to Baltimore: The Theatrical Textualization of Difference," focusses on the mediation of identity in theatre. Though they respond to specific crises---Vogel to the loss of her brother and to perceptions of AIDS-related illness, Smith to ethnic clashes in Crown Heights---conflicts between identity positions such as Black and Jewish, gay and straight, are folded, in both Fires in the Mirror and The Baltimore Waltz, into an overarching tension between an individual's consciousness and the manipulation of consciousness by theatrical mechanisms. Vogel and Smith depict interpretation in process, from the sub-conscious to conscious expression, to social statement.;Section Two, "Envisioning Assimilation," argues that the ways individuals absorb information in the form of signs is integral to the way they themselves are absorbed into society. I compare the similarly elliptical narratives constructed by Chong and Parks, in which the epic and the intimate are swirled together, a seemingly mundane moment suddenly acquiring historical significance.;Section Three depicts individuals entrapped within "Interpretative Regimes"---theatres, museums, laboratories, circuses---which restrict the development of new permutations and possibilities for the formation of identity. The Colored Museum, and the three Goese pieces, enact interpretations of identity that undermine systemic demarcation.