Adrienne Truscott and Feidlim Cannon’s two-hander Masterclass delivers a parody of the broad-shouldered genius of the American stage, in the form of the character Adrienne Truscott (he/him), as played by performer Adrienne Truscott (she/her). The piece plays with the ways genius and gender have been entwined in popular imagination, and embodied in the mythos of the artist as a great white man; in this case, a playwright and director with the power to script and stage encounters on others’ bodies and in their voices.
Ursula Le Guin was not only not a man, she was for so many years an old woman – which, she argued, is the worst kind of man one can be. “I am a man,” she states in the opening gambit of her 1992 performance piece “Introducing Myself”:
When I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.
This satirical, cisgender taxonomy, a world of “only men,” still relies on a binary of “manly” and “not manly,” rather than “man” or “not man” – Le Guin is not exempt from measuring herself against the rigid standards of the form, as an old woman. “We have been told that there is only one kind of people and they are men. And I think it is very important that we all believe that. It certainly is important to the men.”
Her declaration, in this brief performance piece, engages obliquely with the ways her writing had been overlooked or underrated at points in her career, in relation to both gender and genre – she largely wrote “genre” novels, a euphemism for science fiction and fantasy, which have regularly been considered to be on the outskirts of literature proper. “Introducing Myself” was written 30 years into her professional writing career, and almost 25 years after publishing The Left Hand of Darkness, widely recognized as one of the great texts in science fiction (and also, controversially, written with a “generic he” used for a planet without binary gender). She focuses on her shortcomings as a stereotypical man, and in doing so outlines an archetype of that genre and its expectations.
People are supposed to be lean and taut, because that’s how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that’s how a lot of men start out and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established, and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I’m really lousy at being people, because I’m not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut. And then, people are supposed to be tough. Tough is good. But I’ve never been tough. I’m sort of soft and actually sort of tender. Like a good steak.
She turns to Ernest Hemingway as an example of an archetypal man (not coincidentally, also an archetypal American genius), someone who’s better at manning than she is. Hemingway is a recognizable and muscular straw man, and a popular one, and he has been for coming up on 100 years. Gertrude Stein talked shit about him, delightfully, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (another two-hander). He got some measure of revenge years later in For Whom the Bell Tolls – although “a rose is a rose is an onion” is a pretty weak example of l’esprit de l’escalier considering the time he’d had to workshop it – and then again decades later in A Moveable Feast. He didn’t like Stein’s air of self-declared genius, her disinterest in the “lean and taut” ideal he embodied. Le Guin’s final confession of her failure in manliness is in relation to Hemingway, which puts her finally in the position of having to invent the category of “old women” and relinquish further attempts to comport herself in Hemingway’s mold.
What it comes down to, I guess, is that I am just not manly. Like Ernest Hemingway was manly. The beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences. […] I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax.
And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.
The impossibility of sustaining the kind of genius at play in these mythic figures comes at the cost of syntax, and the structural integrity of the imagined script, which Truscott deviates from in Masterclass – pulling off her wig, her mustache, her pants – in order to get at the heart of the collaboration she and Cannon are portraying. The show becomes a long sentence. In the back half of the performance, the character of the performer Adrienne Truscott as played by the performer Adrienne Truscott, and the character of the performer Feidlim Cannon as played by the performer Feidlim Cannon, stage a fight for onstage supremacy, imagining in the logic of a wild west showdown that any stage is not big enough for the both of them. Of course, this logic itself restages the myth of scarcity that genius is predicated upon. Their lingering refusal to exit the stage drags this showdown into hyperbolic clarity.
In Masterclass, genius is a two-hander, at best; and arguably even better with more hands. Truscott and Feidlim have four hands between them – not to mention all the additional bodily capacity offstage, backstage, that goes into making collaborative artforms like theatre and live performance possible. Who’s clapping in a two-hander? The audience, too, can’t be discounted. In Masterclass, the audience has to call it quits before the performers do. Truscott and Cannon will outlast us – “a long sentence, a life sentence.” There’s no hero onstage, just a lot of messy questions, a willingness to wait and see what happens.
J de Leon is Director of Engagement at NYU Skirball.