Laura Levin, U of California, Berkeley
Environmental Affinities: Naturalism and the Feminine Body

In recent years, Canadian playwrights have experimented vigorously with naturalist conventions. Many of these experiments unsettle common assumptions about the intrinsic conservatism of naturalism. Judith Thompson’s plays offer some of the most striking examples of this kind of innovation. In her work, Thompson draws out unrecognized affinities between the naturalist project and that of the surrealist avant-garde. Yet, if Thompson’s plays approach the style of the surrealism, they do so most evocatively through their presentation of space. Her approach recalls the work of surrealists like Frida Kahlo and Lenora Carrington, who tried to break down perceptual and physical boundaries between self and environment, between the ego and its external objects. A similar operation is at play in naturalist dramas with the environment forcefully determining the lives of its inhabitants. Raymond Williams saw this as a key feature of high naturalism, where the setting thoroughly “soaks” into the characters’ lives. Thompson’s plays literalize this “soaked” naturalism by presenting us with characters that linguistically and visually become oversaturated in their environments. This oversaturation is produced through exorbitant references to the local or geographic particular and through the filtering of environmental substances into the body. In exploring the possibilities of “performing ground” – of making the body coextensive with its material surroundings – Thompson imagines an alternate encounter between self and world, one that is predicated less on personal distinction than on a ecological correspondence. She complicates this act of performing ground by illuminating ways in which the feminine historically has been obliterated as background.