Contemporary American Playwrights - Emily Mann

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Emily Mann
Emily Mann is the author of plays which engage history through
offering testimonies to the nature and crushing power of that history.
Largely through the words of those who observed and suffered, she seeks
to stage the reality of our century, alive to the ambiguity of the exercise
and yet necessarily submitting to it. Hers is an uneasy art. She stares into
the heart of darkness, aware that the light she seeks to shine there may
falsify the profundity of that darkness and that the mere act of presen-
tation may diminish the enormity of what she seeks to encompass. The
result is an art whose own methodology is as fraught with moral com-
plexities as the world which that methodology is designed to capture.
In Granada Television’s documentary account of the Second World
War, The World at War, a woman recounts the death of her family in a
concentration camp. She sits on a chair and speaks directly into the
camera. Her words are uninflected, her face expressionless. The film’s
director has done nothing but asked her to sit and testify. She could be a
bystander recounting events she has happened upon. The effect is dev-
astating. Much the same could be said of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,
designed to record the details of the Holocaust. In an earlier television
series, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Bronowski goes to the camp
in which his family died. He wears the suit of a television presenter.
There comes a moment when he walks into the mud and stands in the
water at the edge of the camp, apparently careless of the fact that the
water covers his shoes and the lower part of his trousers. He bends down
and as he rises remarks that the mud he has gathered in his hands could
contain the ashes of those he loved. The film’s director chooses at this
moment to present the scene in ultra slow motion, the water and mud
appearing to float down like the ashes of the dead those years before.
The artifice destroys the emotional impact. Suddenly truth is shielded
by art. What was designed to amplify the stark facts of genocide trans-

fers them from the realm of fact to that of aesthetics and the audience’s
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response becomes ambiguous. Facts and art coexist uneasily, while truth
may be something quite apart.
Emily Mann, writer and director, is aware of this and yet, working in
the theatre, has to exist on this very borderline between fact and art. She
is drawn to allow those she interviews to speak their own truth and yet
necessarily shapes their words. She creates a new context for the testi-
monies she stages, thereby changing the nature of those testimonies.
Private conversation becomes public event, confidences are breached,
and even though they are so with the sanction of those who offered them
there is a subtle shift in pressure, moral no less than social.
By presenting, as she does, edited, shaped, transformed transcripts in
a theatrical environment not merely is she removing them from the
context in which her subjects lived, moved and had their being, a context,
in other words, in which meaning sank roots deep into a familiar soil, she
is relocating them in a theatre which has its own dynamics, its own social
milieu, its own history. It is not merely that a conversation between two
or three people differs from the same conversation overheard by those
with whom the subjects might not have chosen to share their intimate
and most troubling memories, but that the theatre is a social event, a paid
entertainment with its own customary accoutrements, which include the
whole business of ticket sales, pre-theatre dinner menus, reviews.
Nobody ever reviewed the Holocaust. Suddenly the sensibility of the
witness is discussed over the fruit juice and cornflakes as though it were
the product of a playwright, anxious to please, as in part it obviously is.
And behind this lie acknowledged debts to Brecht, an awareness of theat-
rical technique and audience–performer relationships learned from
other ‘productions’, and other writers. For Mann’s works are plays
offered in production. We are not in a human rights court or at a war

trial. And if the subjectivity of the speaker is crucial to understanding, to
an emotional empathy, the writer has her own subjectivity, as does the
director, the designer and the lighting engineer.
All this is to say no more than that a category such as ‘documentary
theatre’, popular for a while in the s, is misleading. It is to say no
more than that the shaping of eye-witness accounts, personal memories
and public history into art is no simple matter, theatrically or morally.
Emily Mann’s theatre lays no claim to objective truth, in the sense of
offering a verifiable account of the Holocaust, of Vietnam or a murder
trial. But even in offering the subjective truth of the lives of those whose
experiences she draws upon, she deals in a complex world. The testimo-
nies that she derives from personal interviews concentrate on those
Emily Mann 
aspects of her subjects’ lives that she is anxious to address. The plays are
thus metonymic. Indeed the lives are rendered metonymic. In some
degree, of course, that is indeed true to their experiences, as single events
cut so deeply that they do indeed become definitional. There is, none-
theless, a degree to which the shaping hand of the playwright is present
even in the questions asked and hence in the answers elicited. She views
the world through a frame of her own devising even as those to whom
she speaks, and whose responses help to shape the play she would create,
are invited to see their lives from a single perspective. It is not simply that
the play is shaped out of a conversation. The conversation itself has a
template.
The theatrical challenge, however, is in a sense no different from that
confronting any other playwright. It is to give shape and form to the
material, to develop character through language and action, to find a
way to bridge the gap between the subjectivity of the character and the
subjectivities of the audience. Emily Mann is no mere transcriber. Why
else does she express admiration for David Mamet? She is as concerned

for the rhythms of language, for the vividness of character and for the
theatrical effectiveness of what she writes as she is for the personal truths
which may move her but for which she must discover a dramatic correl-
ative, a means of communicating to the audience. But she has a respon-
sibility, in that sense, which goes beyond that which David Mamet would
willingly accept.
Such theatre, moreover, derives part of its power precisely from what
is not said but known. Behind the personal anecdote is a public history.
Therein lies the metonymy. This is, after all, our route into the larger
history, our means of decoding the cipher of the past. Personal testi-
mony is an attempt to break through the implacable fact of an enormity
whose sheer scale, as in the case of the Holocaust, seems to resist ratio-
nal analysis, since the irrational can, by definition, never be explained.
For the writer, however, history may offer a free ride. No matter how
authentically the subject’s memories are conveyed, no matter how moti-
vated the writer may be by a desire to retrieve what is lost, to memorial-
ise those who have slipped anonymously into death, our knowledge of
the fact of the Holocaust, its enormity, its countless private pains and
collective despairs, is imported by the audience into their response to the
play. What is external to the play (though access to that externality is
opened up by what is contained within it) in part determines our reac-
tion to it. Our awareness that we are dealing with fact rather than fiction
freights our responses with pity, guilt, horror, despair which may or may
 Contemporary American playwrights
not be generated by the play in isolation. Audiences are confronted with
a double truth: this really happened and this is being simulated. People
died; an actress is pretending to be what she is not. This is fact; this is
fiction.
Suddenly Diderot’s paradox is something more than an intellectual
debate; it has moral implications as the actress decides either to be

moved by what she portrays, and thus approximate the feelings of the
person she portrays the better to convey them, or to remain detached
and find methods of appearing to be moved, not least because this per-
formance has to be replicated. For what is theatre but repetition, through
rehearsal and on to performance. In this context, however, the detach-
ments of craft may come at the price of guilt at an inauthenticity which
potentially threatens the quest for an authentic history. A work which
sanctifies truth, and testimony as a route to that truth (‘I was there. I saw
it. Believe me’), may falter in the face of artifice required to communi-
cate that truth (‘I am pretending to be the person who was there’).
It is not hard to move audiences. Yeats warned against sentimentality,
by which he meant unearned emotion. For Poe, the ideal subject was the
death of a beautiful young woman, a subject sure to stir pity and regret,
a romantic affectation that stresses the evanescence of beauty and life
alike, caught by an art which alone will not corrupt. How much more
powerful, though, death which has the status of history, death which can
indeed be represented as a slaughter of the innocents, death which can
be thought to have contaminated the century and confirmed a deep flaw
in human nature which leaves no one untouched. This electrical, emo-
tional charge is available for anyone who fictively enters the death
camps, and many a writer has attempted to surf on this wave (including
myself in a novel called Still Lives, which raises many of the issues that I
am apparently discussing with such detachment). Consider William
Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. The terrible dilemma at its centre gains a great
deal of its emotional force from the fact that such things did happen. Yet
it is difficult not to feel uneasy about this, as about an American televi-
sion series which sought to communicate the experience of the
Holocaust by turning it into soap opera, which has its own paintbox of
sentimentalities.
It is true that such reservations are liable to dissolve when the author

was there. Primo Levi spoke out of experiences so real that they eventu-
ally led him to suicide. Anne Frank recorded her daily life. We read that
life as we do because we see it ironised by the fate that awaited her, a fate
which we know and she only feared. We honour her because she told her
Emily Mann 
small truths which spoke a larger truth, thereby reminding us of what a
lost life amounts to. Surely the transference of that account to the theatre
does no violence to that principle. Well, a little. She wrote words on a
page which we then read (though her father did intervene as editor). In
the theatre we deal with a box of tricks. Writer, director, actress have at
their disposal lights, sound, décor. They may choose to employ an actor
whose own theatrical history carries with it certain assumptions which
potentially bleed into the parts he or she plays. The audience, mean-
while, is not a single reader, alone, free of social inhibitions or coercive
influences, but a collection of people subject to group dynamics and
responsive to those moral and behavioural pressures which, for example,
force an individual to his feet when the rest of the audience is intent on
offering a standing ovation. And what is it we applaud when we reward
Emily Mann’s Annulla, An Autobiography if not a performance detached
from the role reproduced and thus in some senses detached from the
horrors and triumphs dramatised? What do we praise if not what Emily
Mann has made of someone else’s story?
Why preface a consideration of the work of Emily Mann in this way?
Because these are all concerns which bear on what she has chosen to do,
which is to create a drama of testimony in which she takes us on a
journey into personal histories that in turn become the key if not to
history itself then to events which otherwise exist somewhere between
the neutrality of facts and the engagement of myth.
Emily Mann grew up at a time of social ferment. In  she attended
the University of Chicago Laboratory School and lived in the Hyde Park

area. As she has recalled, the Black Panthers were ten blocks away and
Elijah Muhammad lived three doors from her own house. The area was
integrated but within two years, following riots across the country and
the assassination of Martin Luther King, the move towards black sepa-
ratism had begun to have its effect. Meanwhile, the Tet offensive in
Vietnam intensified opposition to that war. She herself did participate
in protest marches but has expressed her own suspicion of the emotion-
alism generated by mass action. The group to which she was drawn was
less defined by political action or street demonstration than that consti-
tuted by the communalism of theatre.
Working first on props, make-up and design, she then moved to acting
and then directing, which remains a principal activity. She directed her
first play at the age of sixteen and wrote her first play at Harvard, in a
playwriting seminar with William Alfred, though she abandoned writing
 Contemporary American playwrights
in favour of directing, which she began in her sophomore year. Following
a temporary disillusionment with theatre, she moved to Minnesota,
working at the Guthrie Theatre and studying at the University of
Minnesota.
The key moment in her career, however, had come with her reading
of documentary material assembled by her father for an oral history
project, and then with a visit to Europe to study family history.
In her senior year at college she read transcripts gathered by her father
for the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project on the survi-
vors of the camps. One interview, in particular, seized her imagination
and stirred her feelings. A Czech woman, interviewed by her daughter,
talked of a recurring dream that had haunted her in the camps, a dream
of a ballerina dressed in white. This was a vision that had no correlative
in her actual life but which served in some unaccountable way to sustain
that life. At that point, Mann has explained, ‘I thought, “I have to talk

to people. I have to get it down, to have it in their own words”, because
you could hear, from the page, the cadences and rhythms of the Czech
woman, as opposed to those of her daughter who was American born.
And both of them reaching out across a language barrier, as well as an
experiential barrier. It was extraordinary.’
1
What is fascinating about
this account is that though she was moved by the simple account, with
its striking image and its human resilience, what she found equally com-
pelling was the attempt of someone to understand an alien experience,
to bridge not only a gap between the generations but a gap of experi-
ence that could be filled only with words. Beyond that, she heard in the
rhythms of speech something more than evidence of national origin.
This broken dialogue was itself a sign both of dislocation and of a need
to mend. For someone who as a writer and director would later express
a distaste for the artifice of theatre, it also had the authority of truth. It
was, anyway, an experience which inspired in her an interest in family
documentary whose first fruit was Annulla.
In the summer of  she interviewed Annulla Allen in London.
Annulla was the aunt of her college room-mate. Mann herself had, as the
play indicates (through the voice of a young woman who seems to repre-
sent the author), been intending to look for her grandmother’s house in
Poland but was persuaded instead to spend time with the woman who
became the basis for the play. She was so impressed by the resulting tran-
script that she wished toturn it intoa play. This desire, in turn, led toher
Emily Mann 
1
David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ) p. .
decision to go to Minnesota and the Guthrie. By her own account it was
seeing the actress Barbara Bryne perform there that made her feel that

the project was possible and it was Bryne’s enthusiasm on seeing the tran-
script which led tothe play. An early version, Annulla Allen: Autobiography
of a Survivor (A Monologue), directed by the author and starring Barbara
Bryne, duly opened at the Guthrie Theatre’s Guthrie ,in.Ina
revised form, Annulla, An Autobiography was staged at the Repertory
Theatre of St Louis in , directed by Timothy Near, and in New York,
at the New Theatre of Brooklyn in , with Linda Hunt as Annulla.
In a note Emily Mann indicates that ‘for the most part’ the words of
the text are those spoken to her in that summer of , ‘and my own
words told to Timothy Near over a decade later’.
2
The equivocation is
necessary, understandable, but interesting. Anyone transcribing a tape
knows full well that changes are required to make spontaneous speech
fully coherent. The process of editing, meanwhile, represents something
more than a shuffling of the deck. Annulla is thus a testimony whose
shape is determined partly by the events recalled, partly by the manner
in which its subject chose to recall them, and partly by the writer who
needs to shape them to the requirements of theatrical presentation. This
is, in short, a play and not a dramatised tape recording. By the same
token the Voice in the play is that of Emily Mann; it is also, however, a
character with a dramatic function.
Emily Mann’s own motivation, at least as later rationalised and given
to the character in the play, is personal. The truth which she seeks is to
serve a private as well as a public purpose. It is not testimony that she
seeks but information. What she is looking for is a past that has been dis-
assembled and a language in which, and with which, to address that past
and unlock its secrets:
I needed to go to someone else’s relatives in order to understand my own history
because by this time my only living relative of that generation was my grand-

mother – my mother’s mother – and she had almost no way to communicate
complex ideas. She’d lost her language. Her first languages were Polish and
Yiddish, but when she went to America she never spoke Polish again. My grand-
father spoke English at work, but at home they spoke a kind of Kitchen Yiddish
together – certainly not ‘the language of ideas’. Her children first spoke
Yiddish, but they wanted to become American, so as soon as they went to kin-
dergarten, they only spoke English. So in the end, she read a Yiddish newspaper
but spoke in broken Yiddish – half Yiddish. She had no fluent language. This isn’t
uncommon among immigrants of her generation. So I went to Annulla, who
had the language. (Testimonies,p.)
 Contemporary American playwrights
2
Emily Mann, Testimonies: Four Plays (New York, ), p. .
And so a European story becomes an American story: not the revelation
ofsuffering but the discovery of roots. The primary purpose of one
woman’s life is suddenly to throw light on the life and pre-history of
another. An act of appropriation is undertaken and justified. The dis-
continuities of one woman’s life (Mann’s grandmother), and hence of
those to whom she bequeaths those discontinuities, are to be resolved by
a woman (Annulla) who is presumed to have the key to one experience
only to reveal that she is the holder of the key to another. The disrup-
tions, discontinuities and vacancies which she suffers, however, are, argu-
ably, more profound than those afforded by expatriation while fluency
may not give access to a truth that lies outside words or outside the
capacity of words to recuperate. And that, of course, is the problem of
testimony for language can never be adequate to experiences which defy
comprehension and communication alike. The young woman of the
play goes in search of one thing, hoping to complete the gaps in her own
story, only to find herself confronted with other stories whose caesuras
are more profound and terrifying.

Ironically, on her arrival in Annulla’s Hampstead Heath flat, she finds
herself confronted by a woman who tells her that her own life ‘is in ter-
rible disorder’ (Testimonies,p.), and who has herself tried to bring shape
to her life by writing a play, called The Matriarchs, still six hours long and
in need of precisely that condensation which will confront Emily Mann.
Indeed she confesses that the pages are unnumbered and that she has
just dropped the manuscript so that it is in total disorder. Her putative
play, however, is not in itself an account of her camp experiences but is
designed to demonstrate that a global matriarchy will conquer evil,
though on this evidence it seems unlikely to bring much order to the
world. She seems less interested in the past, indeed, than in the future,
which is ironic given Emily Mann’s commitment to countering an
American disregard for history.
Gore Vidal’s references to the United States of Amnesia imply a con-
tempt for history that he finds disturbing, but perhaps this disregard says
no more than that America is an immigrant country with a vested inter-
est in leaning into a future over which it has always asserted presump-
tive rights. Denying the past, or banishing it to pre-history, is the price of
entry. Henry Ford may have been over-blunt is declaring history to be
bunk but he had the sanction of national mythology on his side. America
was a new beginning. The slate was wiped clean. When Arthur Miller
went to Italy not long after the Second World War his father was
bemused that he should wish to visit a continent they had been so glad
to leave. It was a land of oppression. The Voice in Annulla recalls her
Emily Mann 
grandmother asking the same question of her and, indeed, her journey,
and the play which it generated, constitute an engagement with the past,
and more specifically the European past, which is, indeed, at odds with
American notions of history as discarded experience. Of course a
different kind of past has always proved attractive, a past composed of a

sentimental nationalism, a myth of origins which sends American pres-
idents looking for Irish forebears and members of the Daughters of the
American Revolution for evidence that they sailed, with impeccable
social origins, aboard the Mayflower. But the history explored in Annulla
is of a different kind, while the past has more secrets than those offered
by a genealogical chart.
Emily Mann, in the guise of the Voice, explains her own attachment
to the past as in part a factor of being the daughter of an historian but
also as a product of her Jewish identity. Indeed identity, for her, is
entwined with a tradition that by definition offers a crucial link with the
past. In a play which consists of a collage of stories, she thus has her own
story to tell, in fact her own account of the Holocaust passed down from
her grandmother to her mother, a story no less terrible but in some way
now released by the stories of another.
This difference between European and American sensibilities is raised
by Annulla herself, who in describing her family life relates it to that
offered in Strindberg’s theatre, a drama whose concern with tormented
souls she believes to be at odds with American values, or at least alien to
American actors. This is the reason, she assumes, why Goethe’s Faust
finds so few interpreters in America. O’Neill once suggested that his own
failure to engage the American public had something to do with a tragic
sensibility so at odds with American values, while Arthur Miller has been
tempted by the same thought. Annulla, however, is precisely concerned
with ‘souls in torment’, as it is with survivors. It is, in that sense, a
European play as defined by Annulla herself. For if it goes back, hori-
zontally, through time it also slices downwards, vertically, into extremes
of human emotion, recalling moments when men and women were in
extremis. Annulla goes on a journey into her own past but this is paralleled
by the different journey on which the writer or, more properly, the Voice,
goes, on being led back into the heart of darkness.

Annulla, by its very structure, poses questions about the nature and
capacity of theatre to address and dramatise certain experiences and
emotions, as its central character discusses the relationship between
theatre and national identity. A play about a woman who writes a play
which she believes will have an immediate impact on people’s behaviour,
 Contemporary American playwrights
which is in turn shaped by another woman, Emily Mann, cannot help
but raise questions about theatre itself, as about women’s sensibilities.
Indeed, Annulla is, by its nature, metatheatrical. Annulla is simultane-
ously a character and an historically located person whose existence,
independent of the play, is offered as a sign of its authenticity. Yet this
‘real’ Annulla is herself a conscious creation, her identity problematic
and deliberately vague. After all, her own survival as a Jew in Nazi-occu-
pied Europe, and the survival of her husband, depended on the success
with which she performed as an actress, presenting herself as what she
was not, concealing her real identity, an identity already problematic.
For the truth is that she was also a product of that grand theatre which
is European history. Born in L’vov in Galicia, which was first Austria
then Poland and finally Russia, she spoke Polish and then German
before Ukrainian, French and Ruthenian. The family then moved from
Austria proper to Germany to Italy and then England. Along the way
she picked up a handful of further languages. Who, then, was she?
Those around her assumed she was Czech. She presented herself as
being Aryan. She inhabited, and continues to inhabit, a necessary
vagueness. Forgetful of her childhood days, raised in a country whose
identity and language changed, she drew her vagueness around her as a
protection. This woman, who once wanted to be an actress, became pre-
cisely that, necessarily concealing the pain she felt, her religion, her
motives. She flirted with a German officer to get her way, became a
coquette to protect her husband. She became a contradiction, a role

player who faced the risk of losing herself in her roles if she was not to
become merely a mosaic of them. She even chooses to forget her child-
hood because it was unpleasant. As she confesses, ‘I was really ignorant
of the horror that could befall me because I had to be’ (Testimonies,p.).
Thus, though she asks ‘how can people change if they don’t know
what happened. It is like in psychoanalysis. You must know what hap-
pened to you’ (p. ), she herself knows the advantages of oblivion, the
necessity of forgetting which must contend in her own life with the
necessity to remember. And Annulla, the play, is about the necessity of
remembering. There is, thus, an element of cruelty in the naive Voice
who urges Annulla to travel where she would rather not go, disperse the
ignorance which had once offered her a limited protection, a dubious
grace. There is, in other words, an element of cruelty in Emily Mann.
Annulla’s husband had been arrested in  on what came to be
known as Kristallnacht. He was taken to Dachau from which, remark-
ably, she managed to secure his release in good health, the Germans
Emily Mann 
having experimented on him with antibiotics, at the time little known
and therefore not to be tested on true Aryans. Her son, meanwhile, who
had been visiting Sweden, was safe but separated from her, so that she
came to the edge of insanity at this double separation. For her, however,
this is the past. What is now of importance is not this history of pain but
the play she has written, a play which she is convinced will change the
world: ‘if the women with their hearts would start thinking, we could
change everything within a year’ (p. ).
The evidence of Annulla’s own life, however, would seem to suggest
otherwise. Her relationship even with other women is fraught. She
regards that with her mother as having been destructive while her sister
Anna, who she describes as ‘gruesome’, baffles her. Her friend Lydia,
sister to Boris Pasternak, who also now lives in England, rejects her

notion of a Women’s Party. Meanwhile her own life is full of confusions
and distractions. Throughout the play she busies herself preparing a
chicken for the oven, making tea, taking telephone calls, listening to the
radio.
The idea for the Women’s Party, she explains, came to her in .All
these years later it is no more than so many thoughts gathered in an
unpublished and unproduced play. Nor is she unaware of the fate of
such utopian ideas, having lived with the consequences of such. Indeed
the play itself, apparently, offers a catalogue of such failures, failures
which extend to capitalism. Against this, however, she pitches her own
utopianism: ‘Men have strong feeling too, but they are violent. They
should not be allowed to rule. A woman’s natural instinct is loving . . . It
will be clear when I have finished my play’ (pp. –).
But the play is unfinished, her utopianism unrealised, and it begins to
seem that the fact that it is so is perhaps what keeps Annulla going, that
and even a suspicion that if utopias contain their own negation the
theatre itself is an imperfect mechanism for instituting change. She cer-
tainly speaks disparagingly of Brecht’s Artuo Ui, not only because it turns
Hitler into a gangster, an object of fun, but because Brecht had not lived
out the war in Germany but established his home in Hollywood. For
those who had remained there was nothing remotely funny about Hitler.
The implication seems to be that theatre has to carry the force of the
real, that it requires the authentication of experience, a requirement so
demanding as to rule out most committed drama. And that, of course,
raises a central question about Emily Mann’s play.
Annulla, after all, may speak out of her own knowledge and experi-
ence of war; Emily Mann does not. Annulla objects to Brecht seeing
 Contemporary American playwrights
humour in a serious subject; but Emily Mann sees humour in Annulla.
Meanwhile, Annulla’s life, perhaps, sustains its integrity more fully pre-

cisely because she has not succeeded in translating it into art, thereby
containing its variety, giving it an arbitrary shape and meaning, lifting it
from a moral into an aesthetic realm.
Nor is Annulla’s the only story to be told, for we learn that the woman
who is the Voice had sought out the Polish village where her relatives had
been humiliated and killed. The on-stage listener is thus not only an
audience to Annulla’s tale but herself the protagonist of another story.
For this is an account of someone slowly learning who she is from explor-
ing the past through those who embody it. Nor does she learn only from
Annulla. She completes the pilgrimage that took her to Europe (in
search of her family’s origins) and though she discovers that the written
records have been wholly expunged, the journey itself contains the
meaning which she seeks. When she returns, it seems, she can under-
stand something of the mother from whom she had previously felt alien-
ated:
My mother looks more beautiful and more alive than she’s ever looked. She said
such an interesting thing to me. She said, ‘I feel like I’ve finally figured out how
to live and it’s going to be over.’ And I know what she means. I remember being
with her at her mother’s funeral. And the tears just welled up in her eyes. And
she said, ‘I can’t believe it went by so fast.’ She was putting her mother into the
ground, and she remembered sitting in the kitchen and talking to her about –
you know – baking bread; five years old, remembered the smell, remembered
every single moment of it and all of a sudden fifty years had passed. Her
mother’s life was over. And she looked at me and said, ‘There’s no time.’ (p. )
She who had been drawn to her father discovers another route to truth.
She lives, after all, in her mother’s garden. Some things pass more easily
down the female side so that, ironically, perhaps Annulla’s Women’s
Party already exists, a biological and experiential history whose meaning
emerges over time, having slowly and invisibly infiltrated the mind and
sensibility. The Voice’s confession that ‘I know what she means’, re-

establishes the link she thought broken, opens up an avenue into under-
standing.
At the end of the play she lists the family names on her mother’s side
while understanding, too, that the story told to her by Annulla is a part
of her own story. As she remarks, ‘There is a wonderful fairy tale about
a young girl who loans her relatives to another young girl who doesn’t
have any’ (p. ). The link between them, however, is forged not only by
a shared history but also through language as Annulla echoes the
Emily Mann 
mother’s comments, remarking that the interview has ‘gone by so fast’.
She, however, resists the notion that ‘There’s no time’, by insisting that
‘I have so much time now . . . I write all the time. That is why I wake up
every day’ (p. ).
The question, nonetheless, remains: is Annulla anything more than the
edited transcript of a conversation which derives its power from the fact
of historical suffering and personal trauma? Do Emily Mann’s interven-
tions as ‘author’ justify seeing the work as a play? After all, should we not
require a more radical intervention by the imagination to distinguish
mere recording of experience from a ‘made’ work? The questions are
legitimate enough, though they in turn raise further questions about the
relationship between art and the material which constitutes it, between
the given and the constructed. Plot, after all, is frequently gifted to the
writer by history or the small change of daily life while the final source
for all writers is their own experience, not in the strictly autobiographi-
cal sense but to the degree that the imagined is a projection of the
known. Annulla, in an early version, announced itself as the Autobiography
of a Survivor. Its published version carries a Playwright’s Note that ‘for
the most part’ what we hear are Annulla’s own words as told to the
author, and the author’s own words recalled ten years later. But note that
this is a ‘Playwright’s’ note. The claim, then, is to at least shared author-

ship. It is difficult to resist that claim. Annulla is a character. She exists
within the limited and potentially limiting frame of the stage presenta-
tion. The mere brevity of the piece hints at an act of compression that
involves a work carefully shaped to serve a purpose beyond the simple
recording of personal experience or the elaboration of an historical
moment. The Voice, meanwhile, suggests another element, another dra-
matic construction, a related, interlocking and yet tangential story which
generates meaning from the energy which arcs between the two
accounts, accounts consciously designed to release such energy.
It has been suggested that the force of what is in effect a monologue
comes from its unmediated nature, but it is, of course, mediated, its
claim to the status of art lying precisely in that mediation. Its rhythms
are, admittedly, partly those of Annulla’s own speech but they are also
partly those shaped by Emily Mann. The juxtaposition of word and
action, or, more properly, perhaps, since the ‘real’ Annulla had, like her
dramatist counterpart, herself been engaged in preparing food during
the interview, the choice of moments in which that juxtaposition would
be underscored, is hers as is the counterpoint created by interjecting the
Voice into the unfolding story. The irony of Mann creating a play out of
 Contemporary American playwrights