Illness Narratives and Audience Engagement in Linda Park Fuller's A Clean Breast of It and Susan Miller's My Left Breast

Illness narratives are a genre where an illness and its effect on the patient's life are told as an autobiographical or biographical account. Rarely is a patient's story 'just a story,' but is rather the conscious and unconscious representation and performance of complex personal motives and dominant meta-narrative influences. This paper tackles two autobiographical solo performances of breast cancer survivors, Linda Park-Fuller's A Clean Breast of It (1993), and Susan Miller's My Left Breast (1998), as examples of illness narratives. The study focuses on how autobiographical illness narratives contain therapeutic potential for their authors, making room for the restoration of identities and subjectivities undermined by the experience of illness. The two dramatists use autobiographical solo performance to ensure that their voices are heard by removing others from the stage entirely. In each of these plays, the protagonist breaks the fourth wall that traditionally separates the performer from the audience both physically and verbally and addresses the audience directly, making them active participants in the piece. The performers demonstrate a perpetual desire to connect with the audience to tell her own story rather than allow supporting characters to perform a mediated recreation. The need to tell their stories in their own words is the motivating force all the way through. The two one-woman, one-act plays emphasize that testimony functions as a politicized performative of truth. The study investigates how these performances witness to radical reshaping of identity through the transference of trauma into conveyable life narrative. Rather than simple successful stories of individual cure and recovery, these complex expressions of traumatic experience reveal patterns of cultural oppression that keep the ill female body isolated and silenced. These plays chronicle cultural, social and political tendencies around cancer, thus sharing a claim for making the most painful experiences enjoyable to the audience. The two pieces are approached with two main issues in mind: on the one hand, intentionality, personal involvement, feminist commitment and on the other hand, the process of reception - audience involvement, outcome expectations, and effectiveness.