Early+Dramaturgy

AUGUST 2011 This play is a Hysteria Machine Acting is cultivated hysteria — jouissance Violet and Catherine fight over control of the narrative JULY 2011 Freud: Dora "Listening is an Act of Love" Tell a story that makes more sense:

Unconscious rearragement or omission within the chronology – inability to narrativize the chronology of the illness

Getting rid of the illness is about patching up the story.

Not getting to the truth, but to the story.

Violet’s view of the world is as a violent place kept under glass. I don’t want you to put this story together —“Cut this story out of her brain” It’s not the way the story should go — she and Sebantian are natural predators and should be. This was an unnatural.

Sebastian is martyred — Catharine tells a story in which gay sex is punished — absolved her of complicity, allowing her to distance herself from her own perversions — not successful though — she can’t get away from her own sexual perversions

The beaches are an escape — Sebastian escaping Catharine’s fate — he’s escaped interpretation, deosn’t have to find the “correct term” for things (see quote from Williams editorial)

Desire for repetition and consistnacy — desire of meaning Respition loses coherence Repeat compulsively Suddenly Last Summer — it’s gone on forever but because of the trauma it’s always in the present.

“American Naturalism” — lab experiment — all about what escapes that experiment/science Realism — Strasburg criticized for being narcissistic

Takes repition that is what the theatre is — for Strasburg it’s about welding your own experience to the circumstances. SLS is dealing with the implications of turning it into psychic repetition, which include the desocialization of sex

Death drive — takes sex out of a progressive narrative

The weird moment before psychoanalysis: Charcot - Strasberg Femminist Byproduct The Case of Becky Hypnosis is good vs. bad Plot device of truth serum 1925 All Dressed Up

Medicine replacing religion — Deus ex Clinica

The Witching Hour

Feminism/Queerness

Structure of the play: One woman and then the other Role of the doctor Role nature/setting Power Esquisite place vs referece to dirty foreign places - gone to seed

America is a place where we control sex/psyches vs out there — Cold War Natural vs. Cultivated It’s a gardening play No means yes play is making an argument that deviant sex is natural — cultivating it is civilized/bad

No a play about gay sex as a perversion, but it is a play about gay sex as natural — repression of it is a perversion. Aligning her deviant desires with homosexuality. Homosexuality is like a female perversion, which is already a trope.