Content area
Full Text
Keywords: feminism, postcolonialism, utopia
In the fall of 2018, I directed a rather resistant workshop production of Sam Collier's Daisy Violet the Bitch Beast King for the Ground and Field Theatre Festival (GFTF) in Davis, California. Daisy Violet dances on the razor's edge between feminist utopia and dystopia, zinging rapidly back and forth from comedy to horror to family psychodrama. As a director, I sought to find the balance of these disparate elements in this startlingly violent play. I wanted to use both horror and comedy to achieve what Jill Dolan calls "the soaring sense of hope, possibility, and desire that imbues utopian performatives."20 I needed to frame these chaotic moments in a way that would not only allow the audience the joy of experiencing them in the moment but also invite later, deeper reflection. The result was an example of what a feminist future onstage could be.
In the opening scene of Daisy Violet, sisters Henrietta and Josephine decide to conjure up a sister on whom they can blame everything. Much to their surprise, their spell works, and they name their golem-sister Daisy Violet. As Josephine and Henrietta attempt to navigate in a world where grown-ups are continually telling them what little girls should be, Daisy Violet feels free to indulge in her appetites and her angers, eating checkerboards, cats, and eventually the grown-ups who are attempting to gender-police her and her sisters. When the sisters grow up they must deal both with the aftermath of their violent childhood and with the patriarchal structures under which they and Daisy Violet still live.
One of the first frames I needed to find to balance the horror and the comedy was the perfect actor for Daisy Violet, but the casting added another, unexpected element to the framing with which I would need to reckon. GFTF functions both as a new works festival and as a concentrated conservatory experience for students at UC Davis. From...