Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre

• Published in: Theatre history studies 2017, Vol.36, p.330-333
• Main Author: Maresh, Karin
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; American culture; Chansky, Dorothy; Cultural identity; Drama; Families & family life; Food; Hansberry, Lorraine (1930-1965); Housework; Middle class; Minority & ethnic groups; Reading; Theater; Women
• ISSN: 0733-2033
• DOI: 10.1353/ths.2017.0032

In their introduction to Food and Theatre on the World Stage (2015), part of the Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series, Dorothy Chansky and coeditor Ann Folino White note that the late-twentieth-century growth in food studies demonstrates that food and the labor used to produce and consume it are enmeshed with cultural identity; for example, the time and energy spent rolling pasta and sautéing garlic are as integral to the traditional Italian American Sunday dinner as are the oral and physical interactions between family members creating and consuming the meal.[...]when Lulu Bett escapes, through marriage, the drudgery of laboring for her extended family, as depicted in the first two acts of the play, she in reality trades one life of domestic labor for another, since any Midwestern housewife of the 1920s would necessarily have lived "out her post-triumph days in a world of housekeeping" (58).In ending her examination with a reading of Sara Ruhl's The Clean House (2005), Chansky demonstrates how our implacable stance on "waged labor as the only legitimate means of achieving" (225) any amount of income, status, and respect continues to the present.[...]in Ruhl's play, the all-female cast, in a stylistically nonrealistic setting, contends with their assumptions about the action or refusal of domestic labor, as well as caregiving, and leaves the reader with questions rather than answers regarding how to ameliorate the conflict between domestic labor and capitalism's disregard for unpaid labor.