Archive | 2019
Making Room(s): Staging Plays About Women and Houses
Abstract
Shanahan considers architecture and staging of domestic spaces as physical manifestations of conflicts between the genders. Drawing from her experience directing plays that focus on women and houses, she identifies certain features common among them and demonstrates how the production process has allowed her to devise new, resistant modes of storytelling. Shanahan’s piece centers on the staging of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba to show that by negotiating how the borders of the fictional house in the play “fit” within the material circumstances of real performance spaces, we can discover strategies for undoing oppressive dramatic tropes and proposing new freedoms in gender expressions more broadly.