China Doll Play Analysis

As a white, homosexual, upper class, female spectator, I am an oppressor in my whiteness and class but am oppressed through my “alternative” sexuality and through my gender. Addressing and recognizing my own personal identity as oppressor but also the oppressed helps me to examine these four plays, China Doll, Sex Kitty, Snake Oil Show, and Spell #7 in terms of representation of identity through performance. I am analyzing how these women playwrights configure identity for themselves and the audience by observing the similarities in form and content within these texts. A shared theme in these works is to move away from and/or deconstruct a universal, ideal spectator’s lens through personal experiences. Each of these works tend to avoid

Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City uses personal experience from Native performers in order to re-appropriate popular stereotypes about Native people, attempting to make apparent the colonial assumptions and underlying images. Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City is introduced by Princess Pissy Willow herself a stereotype, and she says “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City. Now for our Grand Entry, I would like to introduce to you these three genuine Indian Princesses.” (7 Mayo).This opening itself challenges of authenticity as a myth in the Western gaze about Indians.The princesses enact deliberately re-appropriated identities such as they talking back. As the actors prance about the stage, deliberately mocking the tricks of the Wild West Show, they call themselves by the ridiculously invented names for their princess incarnations, and their parody intensifies the deconstruction of the image. The four performers, who play over fifteen parts all together, inhabit the body of the stereotype of Native American Indians, revealing and deconstructing the representation of "authenticity" by the colonizing power. Hortensia Colorado, Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel, who in their performance

The ludacris minstrel-show parody shocks the audience with an all too familiar racism once labeled comedy. A black face mask hanging from the ceiling of the theater literally dictates the scene of spell # 7. The minstrel mask, a sign of white domination draws the audience to look at the mask and unmask the face underneath the mask. The face underneath the mask of blackface is already white, in the sense that minstrelsy is a white male tradition, a white disgrace, a white issue. The characters of spell # 7 are Black American men as well as women, where they examine the impact of racist, sexist and economic oppression on their lives, through personal