In her award winning solo performance piece, I Claudia (2001), Kristen
Thomson dons masks to create four characters: Claudia, a preteen, her future
stepmother, her grandfather, and Drachman, the school janitor, and former
theatre director from “Bulgonia.” Drachman frames the play by presenting
I Claudia, and concluding with a fable for Claudia and each spectator:
in adversity we reach new self awareness, a transformational process integral
to our changing identities. Thomson challenges the conservative view of
autobiography as the writer’s “true” lifestory and instead performs what
she terms “emotional autobiography” which deliberately negotiates boundary
crossings between enactments of fact and fiction, representations of self
and other, facets of memory and imagination, and the performance of masked
actor and character. Inhabiting the liminal space of pre-teenhood marked
by an emotional trauma, the divorce of her parents, the eponymous protagonist
veers between confused, angry daughter and precocious, perceptive observer
in an emotional roller coaster that evokes hilarity and poignancy. The
paper examines the deployment of multiple masks to enact gender and ethnic
difference, from preteen to octogenarian. How does the performance of “emotional
autobiography” powerfully impinge on the transformation of identity?
05/27: 1400