| The dissertation investigates the representation of ritual, blood sacrifice in three American plays: Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1977), August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), and Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play (1994). All three plays develop scenes of ritualized, blood sacrifice to represent theatrical performance metaphorically. By configuring these scenes as plays-within-the-plays, each work creates a self-reflexive relationship between the representations of blood sacrifice and the play itself, in order to draw critical attention to the processes and purposes of theatrical performance. Through this theatrical self-reflexivity, the scenes of blood sacrifice serve as models of performance though which the works theoretically address relationships between theatrical production and the creation of historical, communal and individual identity. The introductory chapter develops a framework to examine the structural and thematic function of ritual, blood sacrifice in these plays. It argues that each play uses blood sacrifice as a theatrical, identity-producing machine. The following chapters investigate each play individually, and explain the details of how the playwrights imagine the construction of identity. The chapter on Zoot Suit examines how Valdez, by representing the main character as the metonymic equivalent of a Chicano nation, represents individual and communal identity as homologous entities, and subsequently imagines the Chicana/o cultural collective as a type of homogeneous, communal, individual. The chapter on Joe Turner looks at how Wilson similarly constructs a national, African American collective in terms of a bounded, continuous entity, but represents the interior of that culture as heterogeneous and historically dynamic. The chapter on The America Play examines how Parks constructs identity as a type of performance, always being created in the present. Parks' more fluid construction of identity, as well as her ironic play on patriarchy and historicity, implicitly critiques the cultural-nationalist conceptions of identity found in Wilson's and Valdez's plays. The study concludes that, while all three playwrights look to the theater as a place to shape history and identity, Parks looks at this process more critically, and ultimately imagines a more comprehensive social transformation through her work, than either Wilson or Valdez. |
