Performance, identity, and immigration law: a theatre of undocumentedness

Abstract

Immigration issues carry multiple opportunities and problems that manifest differently for a number of groups, creating tension, inspiring passion, and thus rendering these issues politically difficult. As people move across borders into the United States, legal frameworks divide individuals into reductive categories of documented immigrants and undocumented non-citizens. In his first book, Gad Guterman, Head of the Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy Program at the Conservatory Theatre of Arts at Webster University, provides a detailed discursive analysis of theatrical works to illustrate how legal language defines the identity of those dealing with situations of undocumentedness. Guterman has spent nearly 20 years writing, directing and teaching theatre, focusing on relationships between theater and the law. The object of analysis in this book is a "theater of undocumentedness," a theatre movement with many historical antecedents that has been circulating through small playhouses in border cities, Chicago and New York City since 2006. He addresses a number of the more well-known pieces by Josefina López, Culture Clash, Arthur Miller and Michael John Gárces, among others that he considers to fit into the theatre of undocumentedness. In order to analyze these theatrical depictions of "border scenarios," Guterman focuses on plays depicting the tenuous nature of immigrant status in the United States, both from an individual and collective perspective. While Guterman addresses plays that describe terrible instances of injustice, oppression, and violence towards those with undocumented status, he points out that most of the plays he reviews focus mainly on the powerful and hopeful stories of immigrants who "overcome" their illegal status in order to live as a "normal" juridical subjects in the U.S. legal system. For example, he relates the plot of Real Women have Curves, a 1987 play by Josefina López, about a group of women in a textile factory in East Los Angeles told by Ana, the teenaged protagonist. Ana is a documented citizen, but her family and the community she interacts with are not. The story, Guterman maintains, is intended to access notions of class and gendered wage labor, along with the way women must carefully craft their identities in order to evade the ever-watchful gaze of immigration police and those that might report them to the immigration police. At the same time, he claims that the plot breaks with reductive stereotypes associated with undocumented laborers by portraying nuanced characters in complex situations. Despite Ana's struggles with a low-wage job, family, and body issues that are particularly harsh for women of color, her confidence and resolve are compelling. Guterman argues that one of the more memorable scenes takes place when Ana strips to her underwear in the sweltering