Quèbècoise virtuoso Marie Brassard’s newest show, The Invisible continues to investigate the questions raised by Jimmy and Peepshow: Questions which are at the forefront of international avant-garde theatre and performance. The interface between the live body of the performer and machinery and apparatus that deliver the spectacle, the role of the audience in the process of meaning-making and the status of character and narrative in contemporary performance are all at issue in this play.
The work of Brassard productively mines the tension between text/narrative and the post-dramatic performance paradigms, as she transforms her body and voice to reveal the hidden and marginal spaces of the human psyche. For years, she notes in an interview, she fought her own adherence to the spoken word, believing theatre should be purely physical. She then realised that talking itself is a physical act. When you embody a story, she notes, and perform it, the body organizes itself. “There is a subtle choreography that is being staged without you even knowing about it." This interface between the story and the teller, between the creator and the created is at the heart of The Invisible.
There are some stunning moments of pure stage technique where a simple piece of mylar and the play of lights upon it tease the audience’s assumptions about what is in front of their eyes. Brassard’s collaborations with Alexander MacSweeny and Mikko Hynninin allow her to push the limits of the actor’s body and vocal range. As a microphone moves around the stage under its own power we might ask ourselves whether seeing is believing or whether it is the other way around. These moments of technical prowess, along with Brassard and MacSweeney’s particular use of voice technology combine for an otherworldly effect that leads us back to the play’s thematic exploration of the supernatural.
Another dimension of Brassard’s new play is its meditation on the art of acting and character development. We often speak of the actor’s skill and ability in bringing characters to life for us, but less often do we ponder the way that embodying and channelling these characters impacts the actor. Whether an actor uses the Stanislavski technique, Strasberg’s adapted “method,” or any of the ever-proliferating physical approaches to actor training, there is still an imprint that playing any character will leave on him or her and this is the terrain that Brassard wants to investigate.
Her latest in a series of one person ( but notably multi-character) performances has Brassard channelling spirits. One of the most interesting emanations she brings forth is the ongoing and complex literary/gender performance hoax that is J.T. Leroy. Leroy was supposedly the author and protagonist of Sarah: A book based on the life of a young boy who was raised as a girl and forced to turned tricks at truck stops with his drug addicted mother. He was supposedly born in 1980 in West Virginia into a life of homelessness, drug addiction and prostitution from which he emerged after the publication of his first novel. It turns out, however, that none of this was true. Leroy was recently revealed to be the nom de plume of Laura Albert, an American woman writer who also gave birth to the persona of Leroy by asking her sister in law Savannah Knoop to play J.T. Leroy at readings and public events. Then, as Brassard tells us, the play began to spill over into real life. Savannah played J.T. Leroy who became a cult figure and instant celebrity, a hero to trans-gendered people and began moving in the circles of celebrated filmmaker Gus Van Sant, Winona Ryder, and Dennis Hopper. Leroy even had a brief affair “in character” with actress Asia Argento.
Although the reaction has been mixed by those who befriended, worked with and even became romantically entangled with this fictional, yet embodied being, Laura Albert doesn’t see Leroy as a hoax, but rather as a veil or a meditation on the power of celebrity and society’s fascination with “real” tragedy and our hunger to peer voyeuristically into one another’s tragic and sordid pasts. John Strausbaugh, former New York Press editor, has compared Albert’s creation to the combination of pseudonym and real life role playing engaged in by French Writer Georges Sand and this is likely one of the points of inspiration for Brassard’s invocation of J.T. Leroy.
Despite the fact that J.T. Leroy was exposed as a hoax and the author Laura Albert convicted of fraud by a Manhattan Jury in 2007, J.T. this character who no longer exists continues to compile an impressive resume and is listed as a contributing writer on a film shot in Amsterdam in 2008 and slated for release in 2009. Savannah Knoop has, in fact, written her own book, GirlBoyGirl which explores the experience of being the public face of J.T. Leroy. Not only was she the public face of another’s literary productions, she was a woman playing a man who was supposedly raised as a girl; a complicated experience with gender to say the least. Knoop notes in an interview that her experience playing J.T. Leroy has been the inspiration for a line of designer unisex clothing called Tinc. Knoop sees her work as a form of wearable art that uses fashion as a vehicle to examine identity and gender.
In a recent interview the real life woman who played the character of J.T. Leroy at readings, parties and public engagements still speaks about being possessed by him. So where is J.T. Leroy now? As Brassard points out he continues to exist, in limbo perhaps; in fragmented and refracted forms. This is a fascinating case that asks questions about identity and performance, not only in terms of spiritual emanations, but also in the very concrete sense. What is identity? How is it formed? Who owns it? What are the limits of the law when it comes to regulating such heady matters? In defiance of the very concrete demands of economic profit and the law, J.T. Leroy lives. Despite the fact that he has been declared non-existent he is out there, refusing to exist simply inside one body. He is out there, making clothes and selling them. He is writing movies and books. He is onstage with or inside Marie Brassard each night as she performs The Invisible.
This play invokes some most powerful and timeless questions about identity and gender that are the stock in trade of the theatre since men playing women staged a sex strike upon the men to end the Peloponnesian war in Lysistrata. Or since a male actor playing Viola disguised as a man wooed Olivia in Twelfth Night.
Dr. Natalie Meisner,
Department of English, Mount Royal College
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