Furthermore, Barthes’ disdain for authorial passions suggest that he might as well be Carolee Schneeman’s structuralist filmmaker, discounting the performer for
the personal clutter
the persistence of feelings
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgence
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt
the primitive techniques . . . (qtd in Forte 225-226)
Instead, Barthes seeks to accord the scriptor the same status as he sees accorded to the reader “without history, biography, psychology” (225).

The problem is that when we view Barthes’ theoretical desire to elide the author within the field of staged feminist life-writing, we find that women become the collateral damage of Barthes’ de(con)structive impulses. When the theorist attempts to take away Holly Hughes’ “history, biography, psychology” he seeks to elide precisely what has been denied her as a woman throughout time. While Barthes’ desire to kill off the author does nothing to disrupt the status of men’s contributions to history, women’s contributions to history are by no means well established in the popular imaginations, and much of what is established comes through what we know from women writers and their texts. To elide the historical body of the author; which in this case is the speaking body of the woman who experiences the very narrative that she sets down to write, is to prevent women from writing themselves back into history.

Ultimately, then, the dialectic created by staged feminist life writing serves as a means to asserting the relevance of the material historical body to the body of the performer. In doing so, we must acknowledge both the relationship of the historical woman’s body to the image we see on stage, thereby reasserting her place in history and revalidating her experience, which the notion of the dead author and the author-function invalidates as merely so much textuality.

In the case of Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted, acknowledging such a dialectic permits us to understand Hughes narrative through the authority of her experience. This understanding therefore encourages the audience to join Hughes in her critique of the Supreme Court and its institutionalized white male anxiety, and to understand the urgency of this critique by acknowledging its grounding in the real, a grounding that the elision of the author does not permit. It is Hughes’ performing body—the same body that was made into spectacle by the NEA Four controversy, that verifies the experience of her performed narrative, and therefore underwrites the authority of her life performance.

In the case of biography plays, such a congruent connection between the historical subject, the playwright, and the performer is not necessary to establish the political connection, say, between the Restoration actresses of Playhouse Creatures and the contemporary actresses who play them, although to understand what is being reclaimed in this play, we must first understand how those disparate bodies function dialectically across history. And in plays like Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies, being able to read the objectifying gaze of the biographer/ playwright through the body of the desiring character of Severine forces us to understand the dialectic as one the exceeds simply the historical body and the performing body to include the author in its representational function.

And in the case of staged oral history, to understand this relationship and to acknowledge the identity of the author is to interrogate the relationship of Eve Ensler’s white middle class body to the diverse bodies of her interview subjects. If we heed Barthes, we ignore the disempowerment of those voices that Ensler’s process of writing and performing the play necessarily involves, and we similarly ignore the large degree to which Anna Deavere Smith attempts to invest those diverse voices with the empowerment she identifies as missing from the violent events that prompt her performances.

This study, in seeking to put forward the feminist theatrical practice of playing at lives through autobiographical performance, biography plays and staged oral histories, also puts forward a few more mundane methodological assertions: that narrative study, despite the disciplinary turf battles that it inevitably invokes, can be usefully applied alongside performance theory in illuminating theatrical, literary and real-life performances of gender; that life-writing and life-performances be read and viewed through lenses that consider both their fictional aspects alongside the truth-value that they assert; that the dialectic between the historical body the authorial body and the performing body be scrupulously interrogated as a means of understanding how authorship functions, how women construct and assert their identities and political power, how transgressive performances can be reclaimed and disseminated, and how community can be propagated through single or multiple performing bodies.

With so much going on with what may initially may seem to be a tiny field, it is difficult not to return to the narrative that began the study, in which we looked at a boom in staged life writing in a fairly random location at a moment in history when feminism was being asked to reconsider its continued relevance. That staged feminist life writing finds itself so central to theatrical practice in a city in which power is wielded unapologetically suggests that its political intent and impact go beyond the discreet audiences who filter into the theatre night after night, and that instead, extends across communities, across pages, and across history.