This article takes up recent theories of French political theorist Jacques Rancière to reassess the radical nature of Adrienne Kennedy's address to both viewing and reading audiences of her work. According to Rancière, the political promise of art rests in both its unpredictable effects on an always active spectator and its ability to reorder the sensible world, the partitioning of which determines and polices what can and cannot be said, seen, heard, and understood. I argue that Kennedy's radical contribution is located not only in her racially charged subject matter and technical innovations but in the model of spectatorship she presents to her audiences and invites them to take up – a model that breaks down boundaries between watching and acting (reading and writing) in ways that hold liberating promise for her characters, and by extension, the audience as well. Kennedy's audience address is one that does not, in Rancière's words, “anticipate its effects” but rather invites consideration and complicity from a community of equally “emancipated spectators” made all the more aware of their own identity positions in the reception of her work.
By the time I saw a production of Norman's play 'night, Mother, it was a highly acclaimed Broadway success that had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like most of the audience, I knew the play ended with a suicide. But being armed against an indulgently emotional response did not prevent me from having one. What I experienced as almost overwhelmingly painful, however, was viewed with utter indifference by the otherwise sensitive men in my company. The post-production discussion re-affirmed what I found to be a surprising difference between men's and women's responses to this play. Most of the discussion was among female viewers, who found the play intensely disturbing, realistic, and utterly riveting. Only a few men attended and fewer spoke at that session; several had left the performance early. It appeared that for most of them the play seemed too limited in focus, too predictable in effect to capture their interest completely. A subsequent survey of reviews revealed a similar disparity of reaction, although not entirely along lines of gender. John Simon and Frank Rich applauded Norman's ability to weave a shattering existential experience out of the most homely of materials. But Stanley Kauffman and Richard Gilman envied the "rapture" of others, finding Norman's play blatantly contrived on the one hand and utterly boring on the other. Gilman, in particular, captures the predominant male attitude I witnessed with this comment: "When the shot sounded, I wasn't startled, dismayed, or much moved; it was all 'sort of' sad, 'sort of' lugubrious."
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