Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues

by Michael Peterson

Mass media images of the male are central to popular culture. This book analyzes a genre known as "performance art monologues" as presented by white heterosexual men. Its focus is stand-up comedians and stage and screen artists, including Spald-ing Gray, Eric Bogosian, Josh Kornbluth, Rob Becker, Andrew Dice Clay, Wallace Shawn, and Danny Hoch, whose acts portray and investigate power, politics, privilege, and community. Solo work has become the dominant form in performance art, and stand-up comedy has returned to the front row of popular culture. While apparently free of many traditional theatrical trappings, the monologue amplifies the power that performers wield over their audiences. The chief examples examined here are Gray and Bogosian. Gray's minimalist autobiographical storytelling is quite different from Bogosian's impersonation of dozens of fictional characters in a single show. Their performances (and the books, recordings, and feature films that re-market them) have marked these two as the leading practitioners of their own subgenres of monologic performance art. This fascinating examination connects performance studies with the monologue traditions in theatre history, with such contemporary cultural activities as the men's movement, and with the current interest in queer theory and gender studies. Acknowledging the complex politics of all performance, whether avant-garde or popular, this first book-length critique of heterosexuality, masculinity, and whiteness in solo performance asserts that straight white male monologues create an illusion of community rather than engaging with the politics of identity as a social fact. Michael Peterson is a professor in the department of theatre and dance at Millikin University.

222 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1997

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Reviews

[Jeff Wax · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Straight White Male, Michael Peterson, whose formative political and academic experiences were framed by feminist theory and the feminist movement, demonstrates in his careful investigation the function of identity in the making of meaning through an intriguing study of the performances by white heterosexual males as represented by professional monologists to include Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Danny Hoch, Wallace Shawn, Rob Becker, Denis Leary, Andrew Dice Clay, and Josh Kornbluth. Theseare artists who mine their most private selves for public revelation and whose work depict and interrogate such issues as power, politics, privilege, and community. A collective of men who not only produce their own works but write and perform them too, whose words are infused with turn-of-the-century realism and righteousness, and who demand that their audiences look inward while watching them on stage. Peterson expresses intrigue in the art of the performance monologue produced by white heterosexual men because these individuals represent (to him) “the intersection of a form that insists and depends on the forceful, charismatic power of the performer’s presence with performers whose social identities are highly empowered in contemporary Western culture” (16).

In Peterson’s opening remarks, he acclaims the form of solo performance for three distinct reasons. The first are the ways that it maintains an equivocal position between high art and popular culture. Secondly, owing to the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence that the work contributes to how identities – of authors, performers, and spectators – influence both the authentic and the appurtenant implications of performance. Lastly that the terms used to define identity like “white,” “male,” and “heterosexual,” “while problematic if treated as essential, ahistorical, unchangeable formations, are important objects of study” (ix) given the fact that significant power is vested in them with such frequency. Consequently, Peterson believes that this form of performance offers a mosaic of unbounded landscape “in which to contest and contend with these identities” (ix). Its essence privileges “reality” over “fictionality” and its contrast with dramatic art is that “it is much more likely that the author is present onstage in the body of the performer” (12). The reader will find the recurring theme of ‘aura of authorship’ emphasized throughout Peterson’s writing.

Neatly compartmentalized into six specific and succinct areas Peterson’s study begins by preparing the reader through defining the genre of ‘performance art monologues’, setting forth a number of theories which the author relies on, and prefaces the essential contentions relating to identity and how it is politicized in performance. Today the single voice has become fundamental to theatrical performance and as an ‘apparatus’ he suggests “the degree to which monologue has been naturalized as a condition of performance becomes clear in what is thought of as a relatively novel form” (4). This form of naturalization is akin to many hegemonic cultural traditions in which the singularity of artistic expression is emphasized. Furthermore as Peterson notes the “monologue always contains, however sublimated or repressed, the question “Why are you listening?” (5) which, taken in the context it is intended elevates the “white man” to a “social sign”, “he-who-speaks” then becomes a prevalent trope of the form. Peterson argues that the monologue, as fabricated by white men, “is a highly concentrated, rarefied cultural production that depends on and participates in the construction of contemporary white male identity” (6). In this sense he further evidences that a “crisis of identity” (distinguished by hierarchy and representation) are the “important conditions under which these monologues are spoken” (6). In discussing the genre of the ‘performance art monologue’, Peterson argues that it is an idiosyncratic “way of speaking” (13) and a “relatively stable type of utterance” which is currently recognized as a “loose genre”. What makes this a form of performance art is they way that these monologues are informal and discursively constructed. Later in his study, Peterson will delineate distinctions between Gray and Bogosian separating the works produced by the two performers into subgenres. He explains how Gray combines a combination of soliloquy and aside into his performances whereas Bogosian is noted for the use of the “monopolylogue” which he defines as “a theatrical entertainment in which one performer plays several parts or characters” (14). He goes on to explain that Bogosian and others who rely on the ‘monopolylogue” will frequently direct their performances as “imaginary characters (that is, unacted characters conventionally imagined by performer and audience), and sometimes spoken to the audience as if they were a character or characters” (14).

In the second section of the text, Peterson proffers a broadening overview of performance art. He situates it within the realm of today and examines its similarities as well as its differences to other analogous forms of coexistent performative to include solo drama, stand-up comedy, Western poetic tradition and other radical typologies, e.g., dada cabaret, futurist performance, ‘concerts’ of bizarre acts, etc. His motivation in this chapter is to put forward the circumstances that determine meaning in preparation for the critical discussions he propounds later in his text. He does not posit that his study of performance texts will uncover anything highly exceptional yet he points out that “performance art is still a contested term” (21) and his aim is to define it in such a way as to account for both its critical value (as a term) and the potential value in its lack of precision. He explains that meaningful difference can be derived in the “material circumstances of production and the cultural uses to which these forms are put” (22). Within this section Peterson attempts to present evidence that supports a ‘provisional definition’ of the genre (and its two subgenres, autobiographical confession and multiple character impersonation), moreover to strengthen the provisionality. In so doing, Peterson microscopically focuses on the theatrical tradition of solo drama, the exemplification of dramatic monologue poetry as a form of high culture and the use of spoken poetry in performance (discussing the use of irony through the process of dramatic interpretation) explaining that when a poem is read it becomes an “act of art”. He draws a comparison between the reading of poetry and the performance art monologue by illustrating that “the spectator is encouraged to locate the author-function within the body of the speaker” (30). In effect this raises the stakes of responsibility “when the work performed is additionally presumed to have autobiographical reference” (30) and in these instances the spectacle of performance by the artist offers itself as the art object” (31) with the performance “thriving on the anxiety of this responsibility”. In addition, Peterson introduces the reader to role of stand-up comedy as it is typically situated within popular culture and borrows from Stephanie Koziski’s “The Stand-up Comedian as Anthropologist” who considers stand-up as a ‘cultural force that makes “covert culture visible” (33). In his summary of the monologue culture Peterson, referring to Brecht, acknowledges how performance art advances the intertwined relationship that takes into account the simultaneity of the performer and the spectator. This is a significant force at play throughout his discourse as are the ways in which the perception of authenticity and privileged meaning are discerned and how audience reception is evaluated in view of the confrontational circumstances, which are frequently and at times flagrantly exercised by many of the performers central to this study.

In the third chapter of his investigation, Peterson profiles the unparagoned career of Spalding Gray whom he refers to as “the first of two central examples” (vii). He opines that Gray is “arguably the most famous monologist in the United States”. The author focuses on the significance of the artist’s work interrogating the ways in which Gray’s “career-long autobiographical project” alters every occurrence situated within his performance into a component, which uniquely defines his career. In this section, Peterson draws from Peggy Phelan who both celebrates the role of “autobiography in performance art” (48) yet who also suggests that, “at times it seems to imply an escape from representation”. This is an issue that Peterson addresses in raising the questions of who controls representation, and who represents whom. He examines these concerns further as he looks for some of the potential consequences of playing the real and uses Spalding Gray as an example of someone who not only is performance art, but who is a performer that has defined the performance art form of the autobiographical narrative as a “new understanding of the self through performance” (49). Peterson, in profiling Gray talks about the performers presence explaining that his “topic is invariably himself” (54). He is an anomaly for his layered persona, which positions him as someone “who sees himself seeing himself” and which “is a vital part of Gray’s remarkable performative charm and charisma” (54). Correspondingly, what makes Gray so effective is his strong “sense of presence, both material and temporal” (55), his skills or introspection and his abilities to witness the present rather than to represent the past. Throughout this chapter, Peterson pays tribute to Gray as a novelist, as someone whose “superior wit making fun of the hapless mortals he encounters” (71) is epic and for achieving the status of “an institution”. He equates the artists’ perpetuity of journey towards clearness of thought using the “monologue as a white voyage of self-discovery (in the midst of) the mysterious culture of the other” (75). From a sociopoliticized perspective Peterson expresses the opinion that Gray’s performance aligns the personal with the hegemonic and that it is viewed as apolitical “or even reactionary in its functioning” (77), a form which for many represents a “highly commodified form of art performance”. That to witness a performance of Spalding Gray is a cathartic event, which unifies the performer with the spectator. At the same time this allows Gray the opportunity of “accepting his personal history of privilege and accepting his position of authority – complete with the empowering tools of a system” (77) akin to the ‘manor born’ instead of the option of “pursuing an avant-garde political agenda”.

Peterson’s fourth section examines the body of works (most commonly the straight white male characters) of Eric Bogosian, a solo performer and shaman whose artistry is not autobiographical but who aims scorching social commentary at the contemporary urban and suburban scene revealing the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy, and rage of America. A hyperaggressive standup comic noted for his seductive element of self-revelation and the ways in which he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension us and the people we try not to see – and not to be – every day. In this chapter, Peterson’s primary focus centers upon a discussion of Bogosian’s interpretations and representations of American social structure and how his solos work off the attitudes that drive him; his open meditation on the conflicts of his life from his inimitable point of view. Thematically Peterson argues on two fronts that Bogosian “brings a repressed or othered social element challengingly close to his (presumably privileged) audience. Secondly, that the artist provokes political readings of his performances and that the confrontational nature of his work is fashioned around his need to overcome the “passivity typical of the form” (83). His thesis in this section is that Bogosian’s content “cannot escape the trap built of concentrated identity privilege and the monologic form” (83). He examines Bogosian’s career in which he began as a ‘downtown artist’ in 1975 in New York. He proceeds to take the reader through the next twenty five years of his multiple character impersonations, which continue to operate upon the successful Brechtian device of “estranging the everyday” (85) and are ironically structured to “imply a distance or distinction between the author/performer and the character” (89). Peterson comprehensive look at Eric Bogosian is unparalleled concentrating on the ways that the performer has successfully used a “high (visual) arts aesthetic of mass media appropriation to create the illusions of his characters and how each speak with coherent ideologies each of which are fragments of “familiar discourses” (86) to all of us.

Chapter five is a veracious inquiry into the practices of six monologists in juxtaposition to the work of Gray and Bogosian converging upon “an even more explicit focus” (119) on the issues of ‘identity politics’ in straight white male performance. He brings to the fore a fascinating criticism of the “deviant” norm of the “straight” theater form and how straight white male solo performers “tend self-assuredly to demonstrate the self-reassuring stratagems of make heterosexuality
In this section, Peterson returns to his discussion on stand-up comedy, approaching works that cannot really be called performance art under even the broadest definition. He explains how performers like Andrew Dice Clay, Rob Becker, and Dennis Leary are not performance artists but that their comedy is similar in many ways to the works produced by the more artistic solo performers. He uses a number of examples to define what he calls “concept comedy” which he characterizes as often lighthearted and frequently self-indulgent, autoerotic, misogynist and quite often “masturbatory” (120). Peterson also details, “How in performance monologues whiteness and white self-knowledge frequently depend on interaction with the racial other” (75).

In the last section of Peterson’s tome, “The Universal, The Essential, The Particular, The Political”, he discusses Danny Hoch’s production Some People distinguishing the characteristic devices which he sees Hoch “using to avoid many of the pitfalls other soloists encounter” (viii). At the conclusion of this discourse, Peterson offers his polemic relative to the “cultural conditions” which delimit contemporary solo performance. In this regard, the author asserts that the performers in his study all operate within the aesthetics of what he coins “bourgeois avant-gardism, which in these monologues tends to operate hand in hand with identity essentialism to perpetuate traditionally conceived straight white manhood” (viii). Peterson goes on to argue that the ‘straight white male’ monologist cobbles an illusory body politic of characters who are veritably based on the opposition of the diachronic meaning of that identity. Peterson is optimistic that this identity will eventually rupture yet he steadfastly suggests that monologue performance “seems almost inevitably to conserve and reiterate it” (viii).

In Michael Peterson’s epilogue, he raises several questions. The first is whether his study allows the reader an ability to see consistently the reality of the power of the white straight male and concurrently “its highly arbitrary and artificial constructedness”, (188) which he feels is very difficult to keep within ones focus. From his point of view, he has met with intermittent success simultaneously recognizing the irony of his own project namely “writing a monograph about monologue” (188). Secondly Peterson posits his argument that a “straight white male bourgeois avant-garde cannot admit the reality of identity into the space of the performance” (189) and given this presumption suggests that this means, “It cannot offer real performance art under his provisional formal definition”. Consequently, he asks if this means that straight white male performance art is impossible and concludes that it is an achievable objective but one that for him is “very hard to imagine” (189) because of the difficulty he has in envisioning performance independent of “bourgeois” and “avant-garde”. Nevertheless Peterson ends his book optimistically and idealistically of the belief that “straight white male performance art is possible when the notion of ‘the straight white male’ is divested from the esoteric nature of the “representations that bring class into existence” (189).

This text is potentially useful to those theatre practitioners, educators, students, and historians interested in performance, contemporary culture, feminism and the men’s movement, -- dense, yet rich in resources. Peterson includes an outstanding cache of further sources worth consideration by those interested in learning more about the dynamically evolving genre of monologic performance art. Straight White Male is an invaluable resource to heighten awareness of existing knowledge and perceptions. The breadth of the material covered in this book is commendable, intellectually stimulating, and practically useful and certainly sets the groundwork for more expansive scholarship to follow.