E Is for Empathy, F Is for Fingersmith

Augusto Boal, in his Theatre of the Oppressed, takes a cynical view of dramaturgy that excites empathy. He describes that the dominate powers in a given society use empathetic theater as a means to normalize systems that reinforce their control. Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, as adapted for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Alexa Junge, demonstrates how empathetic theater can be used to assert the rights of an oppressed group in the face of belligerent social systems.

Fingersmith's impact centers on the work of Waters, Junge, Sara Bruner (who plays Sue Trinder) and Erica Sullivan (who plays Maud Lilly). Waters and Junge craft a suspenseful love journey between Sue and Maud, and Bruner and Sullivan deliver grounded performances that inspire empathy in the travails of the protagonists.

The first act is told through the point of view of Sue, a "fingersmith," or jill-of-all-crimes in Victorian England. She's hired on to a con by the Gentleman (Elijah Alexander) to defraud Maud Lilly. The Gentleman is paying court to the heiress whose inheritance is in trust until she marries. Sue is to hire on as Maud's servant to support the Gentleman's suit. Once the pair are married, they plan to dump Maud into a mad house. Her inheritance will go to the Gentleman, and he and Sue will split the take. As the women spend more and more time with each other, however, they develop a friendship that blossoms into an illicit love affair. After a cliff-hanger chapter-end at the end of Act I, Maud takes over as the point of view character. Act II likewise ends in a cliff-hanger, whetting appetites for the climactic Act III.

It's hard not to draw parallels between the drowningly homophobic milieu that Waters writes in Fingersmith with Indiana and Arkansas' attention-grabbing attempts at passing discriminatory anti-gay laws, and Oklahoma's acquiescence to gay-conversion therapy. When gay kids are being driven onto the streets by parents who are too caught up in their own prejudices to love their offspring, when American Protestant morality equates itself with discrimination on the basis of sexuality, we need stories that normalize homosexual love. Fingersmith, at least with Bruner and Sullivan in the protagonic roles, takes the audience on a journey on which we root for Sue and Maud to overcome the homophobic road-blocks thrown in their path by Waters' Victorian England. Whether or not we in the audience are lesbians, we can empathize with this love story. Since non-heterosexuals are gleefully and anachronistically oppressed in the U.S., empathy plays the opposite role in Fingersmith of how Boal describes it. Instead of normalizing systems of oppression, this dramaturgy in Fingersmith normalizes equality.

Fingersmith uses classic empathetic dramaturgy to assert the rights of our homosexual citizens. Since some of our other, more Victorian, citizens, are currently in the process of trying to take homosexual rights away, Waters' story is especially timely.