Leaking Bodies and Fractured Texts: Representing the Female Body at the Omaha Magic Theatre

Abstract

The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.