Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (50 page)

As Sander L. Gilman and Carol Ockman have recently reminded us, in sep- arate articles, Bernhardt was widely regarded as the most notorious and sensa- tional embodiment of the contradictory meanings imputed to Jewish feminin- ity throughout the fi de siècle.
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Regarded as being in some ways a reincarnation of Rachel, the Jewish superstar tragedienne of the fi half of the nineteenth century, the two women held a uniquely charged place in misogy- nist and antisemitic discourse: tubercular and otherwise “diseased,” ruthless ma- nipulators and exploiters of male lust and gullibility, these celebrated actresses look in the lurid light of these representations astonishingly like the “fairie” prostitutes who fl through the Bowery taverns and allegedly performed “live sex acts” in the curtained booths of a Hester Street dance hall. The in- tensely mixed feelings James expressed toward Bernhardt’s persona are of a piece with his interested but essentially unhappy response to the powerful Jewish presence in his childhood neighborhood around and below East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan and his similarly “mixed” (intensely confused) relation to the publicization of erotic desire between men in the 1880s and 1890s.

Bernhardt made her American debut in New York the year after she left the Comédie. She and her company performed an entire repertory of plays in French. As we have seen, visiting European actresses like Madame Ristori had given programs in foreign languages in the United States before then. What is different about Bernhardt’s relation to her American audiences is that she immediately became a mass phenomenon; the Europhiles and con- noisseurs of acting who attended Ristori’s American performances were sup- plemented in Bernhardt’s case by tens of thousands of people who would never otherwise have attended a performance in French. One can imagine how James would have responded to the audiences who flocked to vast au- ditoriums and circus tents to see Bernhardt on her successive American tours. The majority of them could not follow whatever Bernhardt was saying

in her beautiful and extraordinarily expressive voice, but they seem to have been thrilled by the spectacle of her grandly intimate acting style, the music of her declamation, the gorgeous and fashion-setting costumes and sets. For many of them, going to see this notorious French actress may have seemed slightly transgressive and adventurous, so they might have had the unusual experience of going slumming and attending a glittering social event at the same time. A Hartford audience, handed a synopsis of
Phèdre
by inattentive ushers as they entered the theater, thought they were sitting through Racine’s masterpiece while Bernhardt was actually performing a new vehicle written for herself entitled
Froufrou
. No one complained.
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It was not only the peanut-crunching crowd that seems to have felt that something precious was being transmitted to them through Bernhardt’s per- formance, through her voice and person, even (or especially) if they did not know enough French to follow her lines or the plot of the play. On her own American (lecture) tour about forty years after the event, Gertrude Stein re- called having seen Bernhardt perform in San Francisco:

I must have been about sixteen years old when Bernhardt came to San Francisco and stayed two months. I knew a little french of course but re- ally it did not matter, it was all so foreign and her voice being so varied and it all being so french I could rest in it untroubled. And I did.

It was better than opera because it went on. It was better than the the- atre because you did not have to get acquainted. The manners and cus- toms of the french theatre created a thing in itself and it existed in and for itself as the poetical plays had that I used so much to read, there were so many characters just as there were in those plays and you did not have to know them they were so foreign, and the foreign scenery and actuali- ty replaced the poetry and the voices replaced the portraits. It was for me a very simple direct and moving pleasure.
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Typical as Stein’s decision to relax and enjoy, to go with the flow of, Bern- hardt’s performances apparently was, few playgoers could have had as much at stake as the young Stein may have had in the spectacle of Bernhardt’s being acclaimed a genius despite, or even perhaps in part because of, the incompre- hensibility of her performances to her American audiences. Stein would her- self come to constitute the limit case of how incomprehensible an artist could be and still attain major celebrity in the United States and Paris in the years after Bernhardt’s death in 1923. Fascinated with the writing and career of Henry James, Stein nonetheless did not at all share his defensive and protec- tive attitudes toward the “purity” of the English language.

The specter and spectral voice of Bernhardt also haunt at least two of the formative, crystallizing moments in the recent history of queer theater. In the early 1970s James Roy Eichelberger, a young gay actor, the son of Amish Men- nonite parents, who was paying a brief visit to New York from the regional repertory theater in Providence, Rhode Island where he was then employed, wandered into the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. There, as part of an exhibition of historical theatrical materials, a gramophone had been set up to play a wax-cylinder recording of Bernhardt performing a
tirade
from Racine’s
Phèdre
—which was, along with
La Dame aux camélias
, her greatest role. Eichelberger later recalled being electrifi by the expressive powers of Bernhardt’s voice and vocal performance: “It changed my life. I listened to it over and over. Every time it stopped I pressed the button again. . . . I fi ed it was time to go in another direction. I tried to go back to the nineteenth centu- ry, to that ‘declaiming,’ to where you take human speech . . . one step further.”
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Deciding to abandon his career in more conventional theater, Eichelberger began to perform a solo version of a script he had cut and pasted from Robert Lowell’s translation of
Phèdre
, fi back in Providence and then in New York, where he soon settled. He renamed himself “Ethyl” Eichelberger, earned a cos- metologist’s license, and began to support himself by doing hair and makeup for downtown theatrical companies. Over the next twenty years he would perform a long series of “Strong Women of History,” ranging from Medea and Jocasta and Nefertiti to Elizabeth I, Lucrezia Borgia, and Carlotta, empress of Mexico. He also appeared in a number of productions at Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous. He was for some years Ludlam’s partner and lover.

A decade before Eichelberger’s discovery, Ludlam had himself experienced a transformation from a mediocre undergraduate student of theater at Hofs- tra University to a full-blown
tragédienne
. This life-altering change he attrib- uted to having seen by chance on television a broadcast of Greta Garbo’s
Camille
, while he himself was bedridden and, owing to a passing illness, semidelirious. As soon as he was recovered, according to his own account, he began to collect photographs and recordings of great actresses in the role, in- cluding Bernhardt, who was perhaps the most celebrated of all its exponents. Within ten years or so Ludlam would himself become New York’s favorite
dame aux camélias
, playing the role hundreds of times.
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Following in the traces of the heroic and mock heroic playwrights and per- formers of the classic Yiddish theater, Ludlam was perhaps the most accom- plished and inspired
pasticheur
and
bricoleur
of the theater in our day (the Yid- dish theater spoke of pulling plays together from an implausibly various set of sources, high, low, and “out there,” as “baking” a play; the baking tended to be done rapidly at a high heat). Ludlam’s work as playwright, performer, and (as

he was sometimes called) “the last of the great Victorian actor-managers” might have often recalled, for anyone who knew of them, the practices of the divo- impresarios of Second Avenue. It manifests many ties to the Yiddish theater and its performance traditions, explicitly, as in his 1977 mock homage to Wag- ner,
Der Ring Gott Farblonjet
, or more implicitly in his general practice of cre- ating shows by “collaging” an outrageous assortment of theatrical texts and modes—Marlowe, Molière, and Ibsen colliding with “blue” burlesque-house humor, silent movie and vaudeville shtick, and the stylistic tics of film noir, Russian ballet, and late-night-TV commercials:

chester:
[Dressed in leopard skin] (
Lets out a Tarzan cry then speaks in an almost expressionless voice. He is no actor
) This is The Artificial Jungle. Bring love into your home with a cuddly pet or add a touch of the exot- ic with a home aquarium, tropical fish, a snake, lizard, or even a tarantu- la. We have everything you need to bring adventure into your living room. Or take home a cuddly hamster, rat, mouse, or gerbil. Whatever your choice we have all the accessories to turn your home into an artifi- cial jungle too. Open six days a week except Sunday. Conveniently locat- ed at 966 Rivington Street in lower Manhattan.
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Eichelberger, interviewed by Neil Bartlett around 1988, called himself “a tragedienne” working in “the American tradition”—by which he meant he considered himself a daughter of Rachel and Bernhardt, but one who had come up as a performer through a full range of the vernacular performing tra- ditions in this country: “When I was a kid I was a tapdancer, and I used to see (God this is showing my age) the travelling minstrel shows. I come out of a really grassroots performing tradition, and it is a living tradition, it’s only the academics that give us trouble.”
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“It’s vaudeville, it’s burlesque and it’s Yiddish theater,” Eichelberger goes on to say of the main components of this “living tradition” he saw himself as embodying and transmitting. Of the Yiddish theater in particular, he says:

Those actors are especially important to me, you know that down here [Eichelberger was speaking to Bartlett in the building where the Theatre of the Ridiculous was then located, near Sheridan Square, in the Village] was Yiddish Broadway, especially their tragedy, that was an important tra- dition here in the East Village, on Second Avenue. People do view me more now as comedy, well if people think of me like that then that’s fine, I’ve found that if they laugh then that gives me a chance to go on and perform. Let them laugh, it’s fine.
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Ludlam made similar remarks about playing roles like Marguerite Gautier in
Camille
: “When the audience laughed at my pain, the play seemed more trag- ic to me than when they took it seriously.”
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When Eichelberger and Ludlam make these observations they are taking up—as they often did—a matter with its own long performance tradition. The trope of the audience’s mistaking tragedy for comedy or vice versa, or of the author or actor’s willfully combining or confusing the two, is a constant in Western theories of spectatorship, authorship, and performance. At the very end of Plato’s
Symposium
, when everyone else has passed out or gone home, Socrates begins to argue “that the same man might be capable of writ- ing both comedy and tragedy—that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well.” Marx’s correction of Hegel in the opening lines of the
Eighteenth Bru- maire
(“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”) famously gave the old generic distinction/con- fusion renewed dynamism as markers of historical repetitions with a differ- ence (or with a vengeance).

Marx was not the only stagestruck nineteenth-century writer to ponder the relations between tragedy, comedy (or farce), and various histories. Charles Lamb, in his essay “My First Play,” recalls as a small boy sitting at Congreve’s comedy
The Way of the World
“as grave as a judge,” mistaking “the hysteric affectations” of Lady Wishfort for “some solemn tragic passion,” ap- parently oblivious, or at least indifferent, to the laughter of the rest of the au- dience. He remembers sitting through the “clownery and pantaloonery” of a pantomime he was taken to see during the same season with similarly fasci- nated gravity. The aged Henry James’s account of his memory of himself as a small child seeing a production of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
manifests a similar fas- cination with the possibility of discovering jollity and pathos in a single per- formance. He remembers the event as “a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed.” The most significant part of the mix- ture is for him his sense of enjoying above all “the fun, the real fun” of his and his companions’ unwillingness to discriminate between “the tragedy, the drollery, the beauty” of a crude but nevertheless powerful performance. The great pathos of the story
and
the clunky mechanical creaking of the “ice floes” over which Eliza escapes are both indispensable elements of the full effect of the experience for James.
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Like James, Ludlam and Eichelberger had been fascinated with the ef- fects of theatricality in its many modes from early childhood. Ludlam saw a Punch and Judy show at the Mineola (Long Island) Fair in 1949, when he was six years old, and set up his own puppet theater at home soon thereafter.

The following year he appeared in his first school play,
Santa in Blunderland
. Puppets, animated cartoons, comic books, Hollywood movies of the 1940s, and dressing up as a girl for Halloween were all formative of his theatrical sen- sibility, but so also was a voracious appetite for the classical dramatic litera- ture of the past four centuries. Shakespeare, Molière, Punch and Judy, Tom and Jerry, Norma Desmond, and Maria Montez: the young Ludlam chan- neled them all. “Classics seemed to be the alternative to theatre as ‘show busi- ness,’” he wrote, “although I did have a kind of show business fantasy, too.”
35
Similarly, as a child in Pekin, Illinois, in the 1950s, Eichelberger studied piano and tap dancing, composed music, formed a song-and-dance team with a friend, and, in the fifth grade, played the witch in the class play,
Hansel and Gretel
. “My mother made me a big black crepe paper dress and a big black pointed hat. She put pink yarn on it for hair.” “I’ve never recovered,” he com- mented as an adult after telling Neil Bartlett the story.
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When I saw his pro- duction of
Medea
at the S.N.A.F.U. bar in New York circa 1980, the aggres- sive versatility of his performance was nearly overwhelming: his Medea combined elements of Kabuki with old-fashioned hoofing and accordion- playing. When her rival in love attempted to reason with her, Medea bom- barded her with small but deafening charges of live explosives (cherry bombs), sending patrons seated in the front half of the performance space scurrying for cover, hands over ears.