THE WOMAN WHO KILLS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ISLE OF DOGS

by
VIOLET MARIE LOPEZ GUTIERREZ, B.F.A.

PORTFOLIO PAPER
Presented to the Faculty of
The University of Texas at Dallas
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN THE HUMANITIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

AUGUST 2015

"Society is afraid of both the feminist and the murderer, for

each of them, in her own way, tests society's established
boundaries"
Ann Jones
Isle of Dogs is a stage play of approximately seventy pages and ten scenes. The first final
draft of the play was titled Someone Wants to Cut a Hole in You, a stage play of approximately
fifty pages and eight scenes, that was told in reverse-chronological order. Isle of Dogs now
contains two additional scenes and is told in chronological order. By adding the additional scene
three, and the final scene ten, I was able to give the play a sense of closure that it didn't have
previously.
Isle of Dogs is a product of a lifetime of influences, affinities, and fascinations. This
introduction will chart the completion of Isle of Dogs through its first incarnations as simple
exercises and monologues in Thomas Riccio's class Creating Plays. This introduction will also
address principal influences, problems encountered, processes utilized, and decisions made as I
continued to workshop and present the play in Fred Curchack's class Creating Performances. I
will also attempt a critical interpretation of the themes in my own work.
Isle of Dogs is a love storyperhaps not with a happy endingbut a love story
nonetheless. Isle of Dogs is also a play about history, violence, and gender. In this love story,
Lola and Jude meet and fall in love. But due to personal shortcomings that have fatal
consequences, Lola and Jude aren't able to make their relationship work. Lola is an older woman,
considered atypical of her stereotyped gender role because she is the more aggressive of the two.
Lola pursues Jude, she is the one that likes the typically-considered-men's-territory of comics
and movies, and she is the one in the end that perpetrates violence. Jude is younger, more
passive, and atypical of his stereotyped gender role, as the lover of literature. There is also Pietro,
the waiter that stands for the old-world male point of view that regards women as passive and
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rightfully compliant. A female police officer and male nurse characters continue with the theme
of challenging gender norms and accepted perceptions.
The plot of the play is a rather straightforward "girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love"
plot with an unhappy ending. Lola and Jude meet at a cafe. At their first encounter Lola jokingly
makes it apparent that she's a recovering alcoholic. They go on a date and fall in love. As their
relationship progresses, they begin to encounter the problems that are typical of any couple. Lola
confronts difficult memories from her past and emotionally shares some of that burden with
Jude. After a year of a normally progressing relationship that happens between scenes and
offstage, by scene five Lola seems very changed. She is not only drinking again, she is also
heavily pregnant. The combination of these two characteristics turn out to be a greater problem
than either of them anticipates. Lola's past experiences along with her alcoholism inspire Lola to
brandish her own set of idiosyncrasies that Jude must contend with, including jealousy,
insecurity, and issues of trust. Jude has his share of idiosyncrasies in the relationship, but their
origins are not addressed. He is the younger of the two and so assumed to be still somewhat
malleable in his personality. Jude's main character flaw is that he is forgetful, but this
forgetfulness is particularly piercing where it comes into play with Lola's insecurities. It is Lola
who is older and more set in her ways. Her insecurities and alcoholism begin to cause problems
in the relationship, including requiring Jude to quit his job because of her anxiety regarding his
friendship with a female coworker. Jude's joblessness creates more tension, along with Lola's
unexpected pregnancy, which becomes visible in scene five. Lola becomes belligerent after a few
weeks of her abandoned sobriety, and thus Jude is convinced by a misogynistic, though
concerned, Pietro, to "scare her" back into submission. It doesn't go well. Lola, heavily pregnant
and defensive, uses the gun that Jude brings to intimidate her to kill him. She gives birth to the

child between the final two scenes and is being guarded at the hospital by a police officer who
plans to take her into custody after she wakes up.
My aesthetic vision of the play consists of several key points, including Lola's pregnant
belly and the lighting of the scenes. The actor who plays Lola should wear a prosthetic pregnant
belly that is rather large and obvious. I intend for this to achieve an effect similar to that of the
actor who plays Marge in Fargo, who's pregnancy is a constant physical intrusion into every
scene... [though] her pregnancy neither affords her special privileges, nor does it stop her from
doing anything... It is, however, always present... [as the image of a woman] holding a gun above
her swollen belly complicates gendered categories (Neroni 125).
I envision the lighting of the play as chronologically moving from natural outdoor
lighting to garish indoor lighting to inspire an anxious feeling of being trapped. It can start out
with an imitation of natural light when Lola and Jude meet in the first scene at a cafe. The cafe,
symbolic of the promise of new love, is buoyant and airy with a lot of natural light. The second
scene is set in a bistro, the lights are low, but soft, comfortable, and intimate. The lighting can
progress to less natural and more garish indoor lighting as the plot veers into more negative
territory. By the time we get to scene five, we should note a demarcated difference

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It is worth noting some of the literal progression of Isle of Dogs. Monologue 1, appendix
I, was one of the first exercises I wrote that led to this play. I wrote it about a man who thought
that he was within his rights to take what he physically wanted from a girl because he'd paid to
take her on a date. The girl cuts the man's face with a knife before escaping from his car where
he intends to rape her. The monologue is told from his perspective. My aim was to show that the
male character on the one hand was truly baffled and angered by the girl's reaction and his
subsequent loss of control of her body, yet he was also angry at his injury and resulting scar. This
anger betrayed a certain sense of responsibility that he wouldn't come face to face with. He didn't
want to, or couldn't, acknowledge that his controlling gaze did not mean he actually controlled
her, nor is her body owed to him as payment for his generosity. Monologue 5 is told from the
perspective of a woman who has disappeared and turned into a painting. From the wall she has to
watch as her husband mourns her disappearance then eventually moves on. She watches as her
husband falls in love with another woman, until she is moved into a dark room and left to gather
dust and see only darkness for all eternity.
In hindsight, I believe those monologues were expressing an unease with the controlling
male gaze that I and many women experience (Petrescu 279). They were attempting to
understand the feeling of being valued only in the sense of our physical bodies, and the way that
men, or society in general, tend to see our bodies as something they can own. There also seemed
to be communicated a sense of not having any value outside of the physical. The woman in
Monologue 1 is experiencing an attempted rape because the man believes the girl is something of
a commodity that he's paid for with dinner and a ride in his car. Her rejection of his gaze
constitutes a loss of his control, and this is what his scar symbolizes. In Monologue 5 the woman
ceases to matter once her physical form has disappeared. The longer her body is missing from the

scene, the less she matters, until she is rendered totally meaningless and relegated to the darkness
to never see or be seen again. Exploring these themes wasn't my overt intention upon writing
these monologues. At the time, they were just exercises in writing different voices. Though, in
hindsight, the themes that work between the two seem obvious. There is a sense of struggling
with what place I embody as a woman in the world dominated by the male gaze, and as an
academic in a world where often my value is judged based not on what I can offer intellectually
or artistically, but based on what physical body I bring to the discussion.
Monologue 14, appendix II, continues with the theme that women's bodies are valued
mainly for what they can give and how they can be used. It is a conversation between a patient
and a therapist in which the patient is admitting being sexually molested as a child. Thus, the
female character is again familiar with, though not fully resigned to, the way her body is viewed
as an object to be used by those around her. The patient admits being suicidal. The counselor
wants to have the patient admitted but will compromise if the patient can have someone pick her
up and vouch for her. The patient ends the monologue by saying I have no one. Both
monologues 5 and 14 are dismal presuppositions that leave the character alone in the end, with
relatively little power to change the destructive control that the male gaze holds.
Monologue 15 is told by a character named Sola, which means alone in Spanish and
indicates the feminine. This piece evolved more into a performance-art type of monologue. In the
performance, Sola looks at herself in the mirror in her underwear before the stage goes black.
She talks to no one, perhaps to herself, and asks Where did you go? We hear a baby cry and
she sings a lullaby to the baby. We hear banal everyday noises, like a radio, and the lights come
back up on Sola, who is in fetal position in a costume. She is surrounded by taxidermy animals
or any other type of object that could symbolize something that once had life and is now

inanimate. We hear a recording of a man's voice telling an anecdote that Sola refuses to listen to
by closing her hands over her ears. We see Sola changing costumes and handing these costumes
over to a faceless someone who comes to the door and gives Sola cash for her items. All the
while the room is filling up with more inanimate objects. Televisions drone on, radios play, and
more taxidermy animals begin to fill the space until all the audience can see is the clutter of the
objects and the glowing screens of the televisions. Sola is no longer visible.
Monologue 15 seemed to want to express Sola's loss of herself in the very beginning
when the stage turns dark. We hear a baby cry, which could be herself as a child, and she sings a
song to comfort her childhood sense of self that has been lost. We then see her selling her
identities, one after the other, to a faceless person who comes to the door. In exchange she is
filling up the room in an attempt to comfort and cushion herself with sounds and objects until
they eventually crowd her out. She doesn't have to think or consider herself anymore, whether or
not she was lost, where she is now, or any of her suffering.
Monologue 22 is more of an Oulipo-esque game with the equivalency of words. The
character Girl starts by repeating the words so sad. The Boy character then riffs off of her
dialogue by saying all the words that approximate to the word sad, namely, sand, sag, and dad.
They continue to riff off of each other, adding words like fuck until the conclusion is made that
blood is music and I am that I am. In effect, it is an abstract conclusion that we are all these
things just because we arethus ending with the religious phrase, I am that I am, or, I will be
what I will be, or lastly, I am because I am. There is no moral or spiritual explanation for why the
word sad is so close to the word dad, or the word sand or sag, or sol and sal, Spanish for sun and
salt. That fuck and suck, drink and think, and flood and blood are approximate words, and the

monologue is a kind of conclusion to the others that try to make sense of difficult human
emotions and circumstances. There are no answers. Everything just is.
Monologue 28 goes on to try to make sense of the complicated human experiences of
human relationships, namely, love versus sex. This theme was planted in the first monologues
about how we place value in bodies, especially women's bodies. In Monologue 29 the characters
have become ghosts from loving one another. Each has entered into the other and replicated like
a virus until there is only a ghost left behind, though the Ghost Girl character pretends to play it
cool as if this is protocol and she is not at all alarmed. In Monologue 30, Ghost Girl and Ghost
Boy continue to discuss their new realities as ghosts. The girl expresses to the boy that at least
he's brought his bags with him so he can still retain a sense of identity even as a ghost. She's
brought nothing with her so she gets to remain completely nothing. This seems to reflect back on
the initial themes planted in the original monologues. Themes of feeling that a woman's greatest
value is in her body, like a woman in a world where man owns everything, including our bodies.
Although Ghost Girl and Ghost Boy have both become ghosts through their own ignorance and
humanity, he at least gets to retain his identity, whereas she has to remain empty of meaning or
value completely, with no remnants from her past life and completely without a body

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