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“That's Not Acting”: Feminist Mimesis in the Solo Performances of Ruth Draper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2021
Extract
It is difficult to exaggerate the level of critical praise that American solo performer Ruth Draper received during her long career, which stretched from 1920 until her death in 1956. As one critic notes: “Very few people have ever talked very coherently about Ruth Draper. There are no standards by which to gauge her. The magic she conveys is as inexplicable as air or light or love.” Indeed, after reading the myriad panegyrics that collected during her career, words like “magic,” “genius,” “powerful,” and “consummate” begin to lose their meaning. Her critics were so adoring that by 1956, one admitted, “London has long ago worn its most extravagant adjectives, clichés, and superlatives to tatters in its attempt to cope with her achievement.”
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- Copyright © The authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.
References
Notes
1 William Hawkins, “Ruth Draper and Her Immortal Company,” New York World, 26 January 1954, Ruth Draper Clippings File, Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL.
2 Quoted in Zabel, Morton Dauwen, “Ruth Draper: A Memoir,” in Draper, Ruth, The Art of Ruth Draper: Her Drama and Characters (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 1–124Google Scholar, at 122.
3 Shaw quoted in Zabel, 113.
4 Studs Terkel, “When Ruth Draper Was Onstage, the World Was There,” New York Times, 26 November 2000, ProQuest.
5 DiPrima, Jay, “Remembering Ruth Draper,” New England Theatre Journal 27 (2016): 63–88Google Scholar, at 77, 68.
6 Quoted in Draper, Ruth, The Letters of Ruth Draper, 1920–1956: Self-Portrait of a Great Actress, ed. Warren, Dorothy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 15Google Scholar.
7 Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), 124. Jill Dolan also comments on the friction between realism and feminism, explaining that an interrogation of realism as a form was “[o]ne of feminist performance theory's first moves.” Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 64.
8 Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., xvi.
10 For some of these reconsiderations of realism, see Dolan, Jill, “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal 60.3 (2008): 433–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; New Canadian Realisms, ed. Roberta Barker and Kim Solga (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2012); J. Ellen Gainor, “Rethinking Feminism, Stanislavsky, and Performance,” Theatre Topics 12.2 (2002): 163–75; Dorothy Chansky, “Usable Performance Feminism for Our Time: Reconsidering Betty Friedan,” Theatre Journal 60.3 (2008): 341–64.
11 Roberta Barker and Kim Solga, “Introduction: Reclaiming Canadian Realisms,” in Barker and Solga, 1–15, at 1, 6.
12 Gainor, 168.
13 Ibid., 172.
14 Canning, Charlotte, “Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography,” Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 227–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 228.
15 Warren, Dorothy, The World of Ruth Draper: A Portrait of an Actress (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 32Google Scholar.
16 Draper quoted in Zabel, 34.
17 Scott, A. C., Mei Lan-fang: The Life and Times of a Peking Actor (1959; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1971), 111Google Scholar.
18 For instance, a Variety headline from 9 May 1933 reads “Juliet Back on Stage to Do a Ruth Draper.” As the notice goes on to explain, doing a “Ruth Draper” meant touring as a solo performer: “Juliet, standard vaude single of some years ago . . . is planning a road-show concert tour on her own, a la Ruth Draper.”
19 James Patterson, “Ruth Draper: In Original Character Sketches,” Billboard, 5 March 1921, 19, ProQuest.
20 In her 21 May 1926 letter to her friend Harriet Marple, Draper mentions that she has just read My Life in Art by Stanislavsky and gives the following review: “not interestingly written, but many interesting ideas that line up with some I've had, and a great story of well spent effort that makes me feel ashamed of my effortless success!” Letters of Ruth Draper, 77. Although Draper finds some resonance with Stanislavsky's ideas, her comments emphasize the separation she always felt between her own idiosyncratic one-woman theatre and the rest of the theatre world. As part of that separation, she eschewed any concerted study of acting techniques or methods outside her own approach to developing characters and monologues.
21 Ruth Draper to Harriet Marple, 13 September 1920, in ibid., 26.
22 John Chapman, “Ruth and Paul Draper Do Two Solos at Bijou,” Daily News, 28 December 1954, Ruth Draper Clippings File, Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL.
23 Notably, female critic Wilella Waldorf did not show similar restraint in highlighting the fact that Draper was a woman alone onstage or in praising the autonomy and creative control Draper enjoyed as a solo performer: “Dramatist, acting company and stage director all rolled into one, Miss Draper, all by herself, is one of the best shows in town.” Wilella Waldorf, “Ruth Draper Returns,” New York Evening Post, 27 December 1929.
24 Hope-Wallace, quoted in Warren, 118.
25 Brooks Atkinson, “Ruth Draper Returns for Limited Engagement,” New York Times, 27 December 1938, ProQuest.
26 Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: the Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 76.
27 Glenn, 95, 87.
28 Zabel, 109.
29 Ibid.
30 “Ruth Draper, Plural, Comes to Town,” New York Herald Tribune, 19 January 1936, ProQuest.
31 Michael Feingold, “Beauty Is Ruth,” Village Voice 47.1 (8 January 2002), 55.
32 Draper quoted in Zabel, 99.
33 Anna Deavere Smith, “Introduction” to Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), xxiii–xlii, at xxvi.
34 Ibid., xxvii.
35 Ibid., xxviii.
36 Ruth Draper to Harriet Marple, 20 September 1920, in Letters of Ruth Draper, 27.
37 Ruth Draper to Martha Draper, 12 October 1920, in ibid., 29.
38 Warren, 93.
39 Ruth Draper, “A Cocktail Party,” in Art of Ruth Draper, 302–6, at 303.
40 Draper quoted in Zabel, 92.
41 Diamond, 5.
42 Ibid., 4.
43 Ibid., 5. See also Case, 124.
44 Diamond, 5.
45 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books), 29.
46 “Ruth Draper, Plural, Comes to Town.”
47 The Herald Tribune article (ibid.) goes on to explain that “Miss Draper never had worn a hat in this particular sketch, although one was logical, but she never had been able to find one which she considered just right. Then one day in Edinburgh she saw a hat in a shop which simply shouted that ‘Mrs Grimmer would be perfect in that hat.’ That is the one she now wears.”
48 Draper to Marple, 20 October 1922, in Letters of Ruth Draper, 49.
49 Terkel, “When Ruth Draper Was on Stage.”
50 Mildred Adams, “The One-Woman Theatre Casts a Spell,” New York Times, 18 December 1932, ProQuest.
51 According to Warren, in Letters of Ruth Draper, xix.
52 Draper, “Three Generations in a Court of Domestic Relations,” in Art of Ruth Draper, 167–74, at 169, 170.
53 Ibid., 173, 171.
54 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 68, 67.
55 Ibid., 68, 70.
56 Ibid., 70.
57 Ibid., 67.
58 Ruth Draper, “The Actress,” in Art of Ruth Draper, 321–7.
59 Diamond, 52.
60 Ibid., 54, 52.
61 “Ruth Draper Creates Illusion of Thickly Populated Stage,” Washington Post, 2 May 1937, ProQuest.
62 Ibid.
63 Brooks Atkinson, “One Exciting Hour: ‘Three Women and Mr. Clifford’ in Which Draper Increases the Scope of the Monologue,” New York Times, 4 January 1931, ProQuest.
64 Ibid.
65 Diamond, 54; emphasis hers.
66 Ibid.
67 Draper, “Three Women and Mr. Clifford,” in Art of Ruth Draper, 350–69, at 368. Subsequent page citations for this three-part monologue are given parenthetically in the text.
68 Tomlin quoted in Frances Gray, Women and Laughter (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 172; emphasis mine.
69 Jeff Sorensen's biography of Tomlin explains that “Lily never saw Draper, but when she was working at The Unstabled, ‘A man told me I reminded him of her, and I went to the library and listened to her records.’” Jeff Sorensen, Lily Tomlin: Woman of a Thousand Faces (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 29.