Posted by eugene williams on April 20, 192003 at 12:30:06:
CASA
Denise Stoklos’ play is generally about breaking boundaries of social conditioning and locating a space of discourse regarding the legitimacy of subjectivity. This breadth of interpretation is accommodated in her expansive definition of the two characters and her allowance for the central role to be played by a man, with textual adjustments.
The piece is, however, written primarily to be played by a woman entrapped in symbolically formal garb of a man, with austere hairstyle and in a restrictive domesticated environment. The world of the refrigerator, stove, bed and dining table can be read as the conventional boundaries placed on woman. Using the definitions of Julia Kristeva, the central drama can be argued in terms of the ‘semiotics’ of the body and a metalanguage seeking to subvert the unities of the ‘symbolic’ male regulated social process of history and knowledge production.
We shall call symbolic the logical and syntactic functioning of language and everything, which, in translinguistic practices is assimilated to the system of language proper. The term semiotic on the other hand, will be used to mean: in the first place, what can be hypothetically posited as preceding the imposition of language…and unity of a signifying practice, the semiotic register is the practice…(222-3)
The symbolic is constructed by Stoklas as the paternal syntactical logic of behavior language, space and objects, which the central female character disavows and which is symbolically governed by the male Stage Manager whose ‘white house’ signifies the pervasive Eurocentric male white power. The central character breaks syntactical linearity and instead ‘thinks out loud’ in a kind of stream of consciousness monologue that travels back and forth across boundaries of history memory and the immediacy of the theatrical event. Fragments of the evolution of man, tools and language collide with seemingly unrelated quotidian activity in a desperate quest to reject the imposed social codes and find new meaning. For example, her natural impatience at the slow continuous
Pouring of orange juice to the brim of the glass and the illogical shift to Montverde’s aria; her irrational physical gyrations to harmonize subjective impulse with the signification of her conditioned environment; physical fumbles, rolling on the floor, sticking her head in the oven etc., are not treated as subsidiary idiosyncrasies but rather seeking to valorize a cognitive embodiment of awareness and communication.
The playwright is also trying to locate a liberatory space within the interactivity of this indeterminate language (body and utterance), and the regulated social code, to negotiate the dismantling of negative perceptions of history and mythology of subjectivity as well as a female centered strategy of knowledge production. Locating that space is ultimately represented as an entire clearing of the stage, a virtual removal of the objects of rational discourse, leaving only her bowl of popcorn. Here she drifts away and back to the symbolic, but to a new beginning. The corn like the Brazilian pine nut, resonates with similar signification as the ‘forbidden fruit’ of knowledge which has been negatively inscribed along with woman (Eve) in Christianity.
In Stoklos’ re-inscription it becomes the ‘core, the inside, [that] remains completely preserved…Expressing oneself as a kind of organic manure for the inner core.’ Preserving and beginning from this positively re-inscribed space of being and expression is therefore posited as a political strategy to the empowerment of woman, subjectivity and the rewriting of history. The negative image of Eve (woman) reaching for the fruit of knowledge and being banished to a history of guilt and oppression must be reversed and celebrated in the assembly of the human ‘Casa’ and gender relationships. ‘ We must reach for the fruit and not accept the fall.’
Kristeva, Julia. “Signifying Practice and Mode of Production.” in Edinburgh Review 1 (1976): 68