Written by Adam Rapp
Directed by Jimmy Fay
Starring Lauren Farrell
Featuring Charlie Hughes
Co-Producers Lauren & Rebeccah Farrell
*The Edge Of Our Bodies, previously preformed at Studio X, Philadelphia, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, is one to watch out for.
‘Anything can be a woman: a flower, an animal, an inkwell.’
- J.P. Sartre on Jean Genet’s The Maids
What we see is a young girl in surrounded by furniture – cabinets, rugs, chairs, a mirror, and a radio. She begins to read from a notebook, telling us she is on her way to from New England to New York, departing her prep school to visit her boyfriend Michael.
Bernadette reads aloud of her own story though it occurs in the present tense as lived and impacting events. In removing the protagonist from her own narrative, the activity of story-telling is also removed from the straightforward matter of relaying past occurrences. This lived interaction between a narrator, text and recipient audience is one of several references throughout the play to writer Jean Genet. For Genet, writing was a self-sustaining activity, a means of explication and engagement not only with the reader/viewer, but with himself. For Sartre,
He is telling himself stories in order to please himself. 1
As Bernadette reads her own story to us, she indicates the extent of her own alienation, a compulsion to look outside of herself in order to clarify events. On the train to New York, she tells us things about herself: her boyfriend, Michael, is somewhat older, and fits certain criteria involving intellectual prowess and sexual competence. Their relationship is quite literally a place she must travel to, somewhere that provides a different mode of existence to her prep school, which we come to know through her description of its enclosed female community and the density of the friendships contained therein.
This en-masse burgeoning femininity held captive resonates with the bleak solitude of Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and, more recently, The Moth Diaries (2012), where puberty and its various manifestations are undergone at a communal level. These cordoned off institutions always have a ring of fatality, and Bernadette likewise seems fuelled toward some unpleasant realisation. Our anticipation of this is much aided by the fact of her pregnancy, her main impetus in travelling to see Michael.
Alienation
While on the train, Bernadette finds herself the object of an several unwanted gazes, and she wills herself to disappear. This splitting of the self from the body as a self-protective manoeuvre, literally obscuring oneself from sight, is something Bernadette believes she has previously achieved. When confronted with lecherous eyes, her only defence is to tug at her own ontological status and attempt to negate herself, and this option of existing in terms other than those dictated by the body is a notion that comes to colour the play’s duration, as well as Farrell’s performance.The need to slip away from the immediacy of the given moment is subsequently consistently present, and is relayed to us primarily through Bernadette’s initial reliance on the notebook and also us, the audience, regardless of whether or not we exist as a projection of her clarifying impulses.
Just saw ‘The Edge of our Bodies’ in @smockalley. Amazingly intense and compelling show on until April 6th, well worth seeing!
— 10 Days in Dublin (@10DaysinDublin) April 1, 2013
Alienation operating at this degree within the self was a condition Genet saw as integral to his creative identity and artistic process. With Bernadette we see it undergone at a pubescent level by way of the attention she is forced to pay her own body. Michael’s father, who Bernadette encounters as she searches for Michael in New York, references the play’s title by similarly describing the existential effects he’s experienced as a result of his cancer. His consideration of his illness has brought him the edge of his own body, pressing him against the perimeter of his senses where things begin to slip.
The unhinged sensation of being removed from your own flesh brought about for Genet an intense awareness of one’s bodily processes, and in The Edge of Our Bodies the body is largely represented in terms of the processes it instigates as well as those which happen to it: pregnancy, abortion, cancer, ejaculation are not peripheral subject-matter, but function in a localising way within the story. They are all presented as having the same base function, which is essentially to impact upon and alter the body.
It is also during her conversation with Michael’s father that Bernadette recites dialogue from Genet’s play The Maids, soon to be produced at her prep school and which she plans to audition for. The Maids, based on the true crime scandal of the Papin Sisters, two maids who murdered their mistress in 1933, is in many ways a brutal exegesis on the construction of the notion of ‘femininity’, something that wields much intpretive power as we see Bernadette conform to and break with the expectations laid before her. As to which character she’ll audition for, Bernadette does not yet know – Claire and Solange, who have
‘no other function than to be the other, to be for the other – herself-as-other’ 2
or Madame, decked out in feminine artifice, and doomed to the fate of eventual victim?
Surviving Femininity
The Edge of Our Bodies plays also on many of the questions posed so famously in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper (the 6,000 word short story adapted for theatre), whose protagonist was locked away in a country manor so that she might ‘get well’ again, the cause of her illness being the strain of activities unsuited to her gender – namely, writing. Yellow Wallpaper
..recounts in the first person the experiences of a woman who is evidently suffering from postpartum psychosis. Her husband, a censorious and paternalistic physician, is treating her according to methods by which S. Weir Mitchell, a famous “nerve specialist,” treated Gilman herself for a similar problem. 3
In each, the small space of a room is the infrastructure of the protagonist’s inner state: the yellow wallpaper becomes a sight at which to marvel, becoming increasingly ominous and alive, as the furniture surrounding Bernadette morphs in accordance to narrative and memory. With Yellow Wallpaper, the female struggle for subjectivity is essentially a descent into madness: at each turn there is an opposing force citing the merits of feminine passivity and motherhood. In her refuting of these roles, and continuing to write and exercise her creative force, Gilman’s semi-autobiographical heroine does not ‘get well’, and we leave her on all fours, scurrying around in the dark.
..with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies.. I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. [4. The Yellow Wallpaper, pages 15-16]
Bernadette is much altered by the time the play ends, but – regardless of whether her sanity has been compromised – she is in control of her own body. What means of self-preservation has she then appealed to, that she no longer participates at her body’s boundaries but operates from its centre? What has she overcome that Gilman’s protagonist fell prey to in 1892?
Bernadette has refuted the template of girlhood cusping into maturity, claiming her own body as well as those around her: she has an abortion in secret so that she may stay in school, she meets a man in a bar and participates in his orgasm without touching him. This is at a great remove from her recalled encounters with Michael, who in thinking he has formed his own means of contraception, dictated the means of interaction between their two bodies – means which led to Bernadette’s pregnancy. Thus, from the beginning a claiming of her own body has necessitated a removal of Michael – a character who we do not ‘see’ throughout the play’s duration. 
Bernadette has acted with pragmatism to disengage with various hindrances (pregnancy, Michael’s lack of commitment, her mother’s depression) and acts on her desires, performing in Genet’s The Maids. This last point provides a more literal reading. We have seen her quote from The Maids throughout, seemingly at random, but by the end we know she has been cast as Claire, and when she exits the stage she seems still poised between herself and this role.
She did not play Madame, who must die, but her maid who forgoes the hoax of femininity.
The psychological effects of young girls held within educational institutions, with only one another to filter and field every possible emotion is, as already mentioned, detailed in such films as Picnic At Hanging Rock and The Moth Diaries. When behaviour is subsumed within such a generalising corpus the deviations against it take on the form of rebellion and disaster: The Moth Diaries falls in with the use of the supernatural as an elongated metaphor for female puberty, Picnic At Hanging Rock if read literally shows that young girls may actually vanish, i.e. have their identities obscured, as though their as yet unformed personalities are tested too harshly by the boarding school environment.
How then will Bernadette operate once her she permanently leaves her prep school? While those around her waiver and mostly crumble, Bernadette slowly comes to marry her actions with their effects, but in what environment has she learned to exercise this control? Coming to its close with a description of her long winter walks around the school’s grounds, The Edge Of Our Bodies seems to suggest that the concessions she’s made ultimately position her somewhere both isolated and cold
Derealisation
But by virtue of being false, the woman acquires a poetic density. Shorn of its texture and purified, femininity becomes a heraldic sign, a cipher. As long as it was natural, the feminine blazon remained embedded in woman. Spiritualised, it comes a category of the imagination, a device for generating reveries. 4
In terms of one play underpinning another, The Maids in its critique of womanhood’s societal construction gives a sharp silhouette to what is essentially a coming-of-age story. The Maids’ allusion to a degree of unreality as inherent to femininity is played out toward the play’s end, when the janitor (Charlie Hughes) appears on stage. With a sudden extraneous presence, Bernadette is rendered an actor of her own out emotions over which she has little control, and while the janitor tidies and ultimately removes the small constructed environment, he dismantles the narrative and stage within a stage we have seen steadily built around her; the furniture laden with their associations of Michael’s bedroom, the bar, the hotel room, her family home.
Going to see the very talented Lauren Farrell in ‘The Edge of our Bodies’ tonight. I wish more plays had trailers: http://t.co/5ErAaZWTok
— Emily Carson (@escarson) April 1, 2013
Genet’s original intention for The Maids was that young men play the roles of Claire and Solange, demonstrating how ‘anything can be a woman’, so convoluted with cultural conditioning are its associations, how regimented its form. To fully adhere with the notion of a woman is after all to forego and accept a multitude, opposing impulses toward subjectivity and independence. In light of this, The Edge of Our Bodies perhaps suggests that the least likely of all things to become a woman is, in fact, a pubescent girl.
Farrell’s performance is marked by the consistency of her appeal and the sheer breadth of material she relays; time, place and an array of characters that Bernadette adapts to, retaining throughout an ardent quality of address rendering the audience complicit, while also exposing that often presumed and feared element of the teenage girl’s psyche: that she knows a great deal more than she is letting on.
It is thus tempting to read Bernadette as a girl acting older than her years, a precocious pubescent determined to be treated as an adult, who after prolonged observation can repeat the terminology of divorce and sex. She has, however, partaken deeply of the world, and in continually evoking and emphasizing diverse aspects of herself in accordance to her surroundings, she demonstrates a versatility that is the truer face of the young girl adolescent; the ability to prove coquettish, sympathetic, learned, youthful, mature, and to switch between these states with fluid ease.
The remaining question then, as Bernadette exits from view, seemingly comforted by the wintry landscape, is has she emerged unscathed, or has much in fact been taken from her?
Her personal version of femininity that we see develop is without any trace of the coy or coquettish; it is virile and self-assured. And yet, there is a suspended threat permeating the final scene: the regal, languid nature of her departure from the stage has an undiscerning resonance. We still don’t what exactly has she learned that permits her to progress rather than fall prey to the static aspirations laid before her – her mother’s advice, for example, that
..a good ass will add years to your marriage.
Perhaps she is not so different from Gilman’s suffering author, perhaps some inner facet was leaned upon too heavily, but the resulting madness has proved a proficient means of coping with the enforced cultural affliction of femininity masquerading as biological fact, rather than an ailment to cure. Or, is it not that she has accepted unto herself the prescription of the feminine, but has learned that though it is impossible to be a woman as so ordained, it is something entirely easy to imitate? Is she frighteningly, cunningly prepared to adopt this role of artifice indefinitely?
