Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, eds. Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice

Abstract

SHERRILL GRACE AND JERRY WASSERMAN, eds. Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006; 352 pp. Theatre and AutoBiography is itself a work of autobiography. In the creation of this collection, editors Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman have selected and reshaped the events of the past into a new narrative, which bears both the inescapable marks of this construction and the pervasive traces of the original experience. The genesis of this was an exploratory workshop in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in February of 2004, bringing together an invited group of academics, practitioners of all stripes, and drama publishers for intense days of debate, meals, wine, coffee, and discussion, and to witness the kind of ephemeral, magic moments that can only happen with theatre (11). The book then is a collection of post-memories [that tries] to trace and recreate that event for our readers (11). So, not only do the essays, interviews, and photographs assembled here arise from that original meeting as proceedings, but they also productively talk back to it, frequently describing particular moments and actively exploring the ways that those encounters then shaped the understanding of the writers. Taken together, the shared intent of the workshop and subsequent published is to describe and debate key issues arising out of the overlap of drama and biography/autobiography both in performance and in print. The diverse voices assembled here explore the frontiers of a large territory delineated by these paired fields, encompassing a range of auto/biographical subjects including historical figures, fictional characters, and most fruitfully, producing autobiography in a self-reflexive mode, the contributing auto/biographers themselves. Grace and Wasserman's is an important addition to the literature in this burgeoning field, carving out fresh territory in at least two ways. First, although this is not featured in the title, nor highlighted in the introduction, the has a distinctly Canadian focus, featuring Canadian scholars and practitioners and mostly (but not exclusively) dealing with Canadian subject matter. The only other comparable Canadian entry into this field is Julie Rak's edited Auto/Biography in Canada (2005), which incidentally omits discussion of dramatic literature or theatre. As evidenced by the title, Rak explicitly positions the book as Canadian and self-consciously asks, why do a national collection? (11). While Theatre and AutoBiography eschews overt identification as a national collection, it implicitly offers the same answers that Rak does. One, there is now a large body of dramatic work to write about, work that is rich in quantity but also in quality as many major playwrights have produced work with an auto/biographical orientation. And two, the key principle, regarding the performative nature of identity is central to drama as to other literary forms. This is where discourses of auto/biography that are closely connected to the promise of authenticity are, in fact, connected to the idea of nation as a fiction about origins (Rak 11). By bringing together both scholarly and performed work pertaining to these selfgenerating narratives, the book documents the mosaic of stories that constitute Canadian iden-tity-in-themaking. As Grace notes in her introduction, the last three decades have witnessed the rise of autobiography and biography. These genres have a long history, but it is only recently that they have become so ubiquitous. One reason for this is that we live in a culture of me or I at a time when access to this cultural production is easy (13). Digital technology linked to the internet facilitates as never before both creation and publication of autobiographical works. The title of the popular video sharing site really says it all about the autobiographical attitude of this application: YouTube. …