Playing House: Staging Experiments About Women in Domestic Space

Abstract

When Nora leaves the house, she exits upstage, out of the box set and into a world not depicted in the theatre.[...]Ibsen not only sheds light on the repression of women in his culture, but also on the repression of the female subject in the theatre and within the style of realism in which he is writing.[...]after staging these plays together in the house, I believe that Fefu can be best understood when considered dialogically with Hedda Gabler-Fefu's most profound features a direct extension of Ibsen's realist dramaturgy.Fuchs concludes that as a result, "at the level of text, dramaturgy, and reception, the play is embodied. . Since the actors and I now shared the same 'house,' their bodies became real bodies instead of the stand-ins for the imagined bodies of the characters that most audiences make of actors" (89).Significant to the paradigm of practice-based research, this space can only be fully discerned through experience-occupation of the physical act of performance as either audience member or actor.Because our performance of Fefu in a real house with nonactors was situated between the real and the fictitious on multiple levels, liminal space was richly occupied in the project.