Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence: Staging the Role of Theatre 303085101X, 9783030851019

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
About the Cover Image
Contents
1 Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre
Preface
Plays Aren’t Real
Scope of Study
Contemporary Metadrama
Problems of Staging Violence
Re/animation
Simplification
Appropriation and Mis/identification
Violence, Theatricality, Representation
Metatheatricality and Violence
Metatheatricality Foregrounds the Creative Decision-Making Process
Metatheatricality Emphasizes the Structural Causes of Violence
Metatheatricality Deauthorizes Representational Privilege
Metatheatricality Reminds Us That Spectatorship Is Never Neutral
Book Structure
Lastly…
References
2 Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works
Introduction
“Shut-In, but Hearing the Gunshots”
“Bombs Are Falling from the Sky. What Else Do You Need to Know?”
Staging Performative Violence
Conclusion
References
3 “Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present…
Introduction
“Doing Anything Other Than What’s Real”: Illuminating Historical Injustice
“Where Are All the Africans?”: Exposing Theatrical Bias
Something…
Conclusion
References
4 The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle
Introduction
Theatrical Witness and Authorship
The Unhappy Performativity of Goodness in Rwanda
Staring Down Genocide: “A Wonderful Feeling”
Thistle: “All This I Saw”
Conclusion
References
5 Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author
Introduction
The Author: Enraging the Spectator
Dramaturging “Insufferable” Female Rage: Hickson’s Metatheatrical Counterfeit
The Writer: An Outline
A “Pure Shout of Rage”
Conclusion: Changing the Subject Position
References
6 Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
Introduction
Audience
Staging the Power of the Spectator
Fairview
Conclusion
References
7 Conclusion
Beyond the Death of Theatre
Bringing It Home… Racists Anonymous
Last Words
References
References
Index

Citation preview

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence Staging the Role of Theatre

Emma Willis

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence “Close to the end of her book, Emma Willis shares with readers the hope that she has been able, not only to fulfil the book’s aim of analysing the relationship between violence and theatre, but also to “broaden insights into the contemporary challenges facing theatrical practice.” With Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence: Staging the Role of Theatre, she certainly achieves this. Willis has written a profound volume that tackles the key issues often hinted at but not always fully investigated in theatre scholarship. Empathy and its limits, the role of metatheatricality, questions of solidarity, trauma and suffering are all given detailed consideration. Each topic and idea is explored through detailed engagement with playwrights, their works and the voices of critics and scholars. This is a breathtaking book that will make an excellent contribution to disciplinary conversations.” —Professor Helena Grehan, Murdoch University, Australia “This is a very timely and important text that offers detailed and thoughtprovoking commentary on theatre’s capacity to ethically stage and efficaciously critique structural, psychological and physical violence. The text focusses on key play texts that employ metatheatrical techniques to address a variety of issues related to representations of violence and its reception. The analysis reveals dramaturgical practices and conditions that work as an effective form of critical action as well as those that inadvertently reinstate the power structures and objectifying practices at play in acts of violence. This is a rich, deeply considered and useful investigation that not only examines theatrical representations of violence but theatre’s own implication in the objectifying nature of violence. Its insights will be of use to scholars, students and practitioners.” —Dr. Suzanne Little, University of Otago, New Zealand

Emma Willis

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence Staging the Role of Theatre

Emma Willis University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-030-85101-9 ISBN 978-3-030-85102-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: body/fight/time. Dir Malia Johnston and Emma Willis. 2011. Pictured: Francis Christeller and Lucy-Margaux Marinkovich. Photographer: Philip Merry, Axolotl Photography. Image courtesy of Movement of the Human This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my father, Michael Willis, with much love and gratitude To my dear Jared and Zoe for all the love and support

Acknowledgements

This project has taken me some years to finally complete and I am so very grateful for those who have supported me along the way. I would first like to thank the Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland for their funding support of this research project. I have tested out the ideas in this book at various conferences and in publications and in particular I would like to thank: Andrew Quick and Richard Rushton for their feedback on an essay on metatheatricality I published in the issue of Performance Research, “On Theatricality”; the editors of Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, who published an early essay on Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present; and Ric Knowles while he was editor at Theatre Journal for an article I wrote on the work of Erik Ehn, which was formative for the development of this project. I would also like to thank the American Theatre and Drama Studies Association for including me on an M.L.A. panel where I was able to speak about the relationship between metatheatricality and violence, Suzanne Little and the Performance of the Real Research Theme for including me in their conference, “The Performance and Performativity of Violence,” which allowed me to develop the ideas contained in this book, and Peter O’Connor for the invitation to share my research at the International Applied Theatre symposium, “Performance of Hope.” Thanks to Erik Ehn and Catherine Filloux for speaking with me about their work, and to Bailey Willliams and Guillermo Calderón for sharing the unpublished script of Kiss. Many thanks to

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Malia Johnston for permission to use the cover image, and to photographer Philip Merry of Axolotl Photography and Francis Christeller and Lucy-Margaux Marinkovich, who are pictured. I am also grateful for the generous feedback of my colleague Lisa Samuels as I was in the last stages of finishing the project. With gratitude and thanks to the team at Palgrave, in particular Eileen and Supraja, and to the peer reviewers who gave feedback on the draft material. Warm gratitude to Irene Corbett for her assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. Thanks to my patient friends and especially my friends of SGINZ for always listening and encouraging me, and gratitude to Daisaku Ikeda for the continuing guidance. Lastly, thank you always to my family, in particular Michele, Claire and Eleanor, Jared and my darling Zoe.

About the Cover Image

The cover image is taken from a production called body/fight/time, which was staged in Auckland and Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. I worked on the production as a dramaturge along with choreographer, Malia Johnston. Pictured are dancers Lucy-Margaux Marinkovich and Francis Christeller. The image is taken by Philip Merry of Axolotl Photography. I have collaborated with Malia for a number of years and this piece followed our earlier work, Dark Tourists, which I discussed in my previous monograph, Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others. Although I don’t discuss it in this book, my work with Malia has been an essential part of my scholarly journey, with the theme of violence and representation a constant across a number of works we have made together. This particular image comes from a scene in body/fight/time called “Over My Dead Body,” which featured a parade of dancers carrying seemingly lifeless others over their backs as projected theatrical red curtains opened and closed behind them. A fuller discussion of the representation of violence in my work with Malia may be found in a 2015 article I published in Testimony Between History and Memory (see final reference list).

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Contents

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Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre Preface Plays Aren’t Real Scope of Study Contemporary Metadrama Problems of Staging Violence Metatheatricality and Violence Book Structure Lastly… References

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Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works Introduction “Shut-In, but Hearing the Gunshots” “Bombs Are Falling from the Sky. What Else Do You Need to Know?” Staging Performative Violence Conclusion References

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CONTENTS

“Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… Introduction “Doing Anything Other Than What’s Real”: Illuminating Historical Injustice “Where Are All the Africans?”: Exposing Theatrical Bias Something… Conclusion References

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The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle Introduction Theatrical Witness and Authorship The Unhappy Performativity of Goodness in Rwanda Staring Down Genocide: “A Wonderful Feeling” Thistle: “All This I Saw” Conclusion References

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Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author Introduction The Author: Enraging the Spectator Dramaturging “Insufferable” Female Rage: Hickson’s Metatheatrical Counterfeit The Writer: An Outline A “Pure Shout of Rage” Conclusion: Changing the Subject Position References

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Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview Introduction Staging the Power of the Spectator Fairview

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CONTENTS

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Conclusion References

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Conclusion Beyond the Death of Theatre Bringing It Home… Racists Anonymous Last Words References

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References

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre

Preface This monograph is motivated in part by doubt—my own—about the role of dramatic theatre in responding to real-world violence. Is it enough to “live inside ideas” as Rebecca Solnit suggests (2019), or, as documentarian Oliva Rousset argues, is it the case that “if all we are left with is the capacity to be moved, or to know and share the information, it’s no longer enough” (Rousset and Grehan 2020)? As a scholar of theatre—someone who lives inside ideas—I have found myself drawn to plays that wrestle with this question of artistic agency, and this book is an account of my reflections on those texts. In his fictional imagining of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s speech upon leaving office in 2012, Guillermo Calderón writes of her experience of torture, “this is like something to write a tragedy about. But playwrights aren’t up to a story like this” (2013, 118). The same doubt runs through the dramatists’ works that I survey: is theatre “up to a story like this”? Or, as Catherine Cole asks in her reflection on a dramatic “mis-performance” of Indigenous history staged at her university, “what can a mere piece of theatre actually do” (2015, 130)? Is it capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and inter-personal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society? In each of the plays I discuss, these questions are addressed through dramaturgies that put theatre itself on stage. Their authors turn the spotlight, as it were, not just on the capacity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_1

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of the artform to effectively represent and critique violence, but also on the role that theatre and theatricality might play in enactments of violence itself. There is a moment in Joanne Tompkins’s Theatre’s Heterotopias that touches on this anxiety about theatre’s responsiveness to the realities of global violence. Early in the book, Tompkins describes how she was so affected by a performance of Suitcase, a site-specific performance about the arrival in the UK in 1938 of hundreds of children whose parents hoped to save them from Germany’s political violence, that she was moved to a gesture of direct action: “the profound effects of the act of faith and compassion from 1938 prompted me in 2008 to donate to children’s charities in several war zones around the world, an attempt to address the injustices of 1938” (2014, 65). This small detail in Tompkins’s writing has stayed with me for the sense in which it too expresses the feeling that “the capacity to be moved” isn’t enough, and that theatre that aims at this end isn’t enough. Tomkins addresses this tension elsewhere in her monograph, writing that “heterotopic theatre may not in itself directly create political change (theatre almost never has that capacity), but it is possible that a performance might affect audiences significantly by demonstrating how change for the social good (however incremental) might take place off the stage” (2014, 29). Her argument has echoes of Solnit’s, particularly when the latter writes of the consequences of “subtle” transformations: “They remake the world, and they do so mostly by the accretion of small gestures and statements and the embracing of new visions of what can be and should be” (2019). Yet, there is a clear sense of unease in Tomkins’s writing about the status of theatre, which gives voice to the anxiety that often underlies theatre scholarship that aims to recuperate and claim for the political and ethical potential of the artform. I count myself amongst these anxious scholars and this project is a wrestling with that very anxiety. I hazard that Calderón is not entirely disingenuous when in his imagining of the First Russian Revolution, Neva, the character of Masha remarks: “The theatre is shit. Actors are shit. I imagine a revolution. The world will end and we will never be free. Why waste time doing this? How can you stand up onstage knowing that out on the streets, in the world, people are dying?” (2016, 67). This monograph does not propose as grand a task as setting forth the potentiate political role of dramatic texts that deal with violence, nor does it attempt to alleviate the anxiety that I pointing to, but it does seek to understand why theatre-makers so commonly turn

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to self-reflexivity when dealing with the demands of staging violence. While such a focus may seem narrow, the extremity of violence gets to the core of theatrical anxiety, which is that it may in fact cause harm. As Jonas Barish has argued, theatre-makers themselves are not excluded from histories of anti-theatrical bias, and indeed he points to metatheatrical works such as Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience to describe playwrights who “assault the theatre” (1981, 458), an attitudinal quality that Nicholas Ridout describes elsewhere as theatrical “queasiness” (2006, 3). Through reading alongside a series of dramatists who put this very same queasiness on stage, I ask what their plays tell us, from the point of view of theatre artists themselves, about both our doubts and our dreams of the role of theatre in the contemporary world.

Plays Aren’t Real “Plays aren’t real. The soldier’s boot — that’s real” (Ruhl 2010, 65). So declares a foot soldier in Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play. It is 1934 in Oberammergau, Bavaria. The soldier has forsaken his role as Pontius Pilate in the town’s well-known passion play to take up arms. His lover, Eric, who plays the role of Christ, wants to come with him, declaring that he is “tired of crucifixions” (65). The soldier suggests that Eric is better suited to the stage than to war, to the unreality of dramatic mimesis than to the violent reality of the world. In this simple exchange, violence trumps theatre by laying claim to the real, and by relegating theatre to its margins. By returning again and again to that crucial scene of violence in Western history, Christ’s crucifixion, Ruhl’s metadramatic trilogy— which takes place across Northern England in 1575, Bavaria in 1934, and South Dakota from 1969—puts theatre centre-stage. This staging of staging practice not only explores how violence underpins dominant cultural narratives, but also examines the very nature of the relationship between theatricality and violence. In their introduction to Violence Performed, Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon write that rather than being diametrically opposed, the material and the discursive—violence and its representation—are much more intricately “interlaced” (2009, 5, 6) Lucy Nevitt makes a similar point when she writes in Theatre & Violence that “[s] imulated violence, in which the violence and its physical effects are illusory and no bodily harm is done, is connected with reality in so many ways that it quickly becomes impossible to assign it a

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simple definition of ‘not real’” (2013, 2). When Queen Elizabeth arrives in the village at the end of Part One of Ruhl’s trilogy, for example, she declares: “If any man or woman in England is seen with a painted face, assuming the person of a holy figure on stage, I will have them beheaded. Immediately” (Ruhl 2010, 53). Plays may not be real, but they produce real effects. It is precisely this interrelation of real-world and theatrical violence and the use by theatre-makers of self-reflexivity to interrogate both the limits of theatrical representation and the theatricality of violence that is the task of this research. In its theatrical self-consciousness, Passion Play provides a helpful exemplar through which to introduce some of the monograph’s key concerns, both in its illustration of the intertwined ontologies of real-world and staged violence and for the sense in which it is both a love letter to theatre and a deep indictment of the art form’s implication in histories of violence; it simultaneously celebrates theatre as a space of resistance and transformation and shows how theatre itself may function as an instrument of power and control. The “interlacing” of the real and the theatrical in Passion Play is mostly explicitly expressed through Ruhl’s characterization of her actors. Indeed, what elevates the play above mere parody or farce (for it is often very funny in its illustrations of theatrical amateurism) is the continuous “bleed” between the worlds of the actors and their characters and the degree to which the actors struggle to escape the weight of their roles. Such internal ontological conflict is set up very early in Part One, after the actress playing the Virgin Mary becomes pregnant to the actor playing Pontius. When he implores her to run away with him, the following exchange ensues: Mary 1. I want to keep my part. Pontius. Curse the part, Mary! Curse the part! It’s a tiddling, priddling, little turd of a play. Plays aren’t real. Your knee on my chest, Mary, that’s real. Marry me! Mary 1. Ever since I was little I’ve wanted to play the Virgin Mary. (2010, 40–1)

Pontius suggests the theatrical experience isn’t real, implying that it is violence or force—“your knee on my chest”—that constitutes the “real” real. Nonetheless, Mary, fights to preserve both her part in the play and

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her status as a “real” virgin, later informing the priest: “There’s been a miracle, Father, I wanted to tell you first. God has impregnated me that I can better play the Virgin Mary” (2010, 43). In due course, the village rejects Mary’s miracle, accusing her of sexual impropriety. Part One ends when Mary’s drowned body is carried onto stage. Pontius laments her death, then stabs himself in the heart. In each part of the trilogy, the mimetic violence of the passion play cannot be separated from the real acts of violence that mark the communities in which it is staged. The device of the actors’ preparation of the passion play, therefore, becomes a means for Ruhl to mark out the distance between socially scripted demands and the unscripted desires that come from life as lived; rough and improvisatory—as impassioned. Similarly, in the plays discussed throughout this monograph, the staging of acting itself serves as means of recognizing the performativity of our negotiations of subjectivity and power. Throughout the trilogy, Ruhl emphasizes the stage as a space of performative iterativity, not just by the staging of rehearsal practices but also through the repetition of the essential pretext in each of the three plays. Through time and space, the characters keep returning to a staging that, despite its place in history as a narrative of transfiguration, ultimately becomes one of loss, alienation, despair. What the characters yearn for cannot be fulfilled within the confines of the play, yet to live completely outside of the play is virtually impossible as the play is so deeply embedded in the communities in which it is staged and so intrinsic to the identities of those who live there. In Part Three, Mary (mother of Jesus), criticizes the inadequacy of the new actor playing the role of Jesus: “No! It wasn’t better! You’re still acting ! My father — he never acted — he just told the story. There was no — effort. There was no — acting” (121). Across the three plays, we see cycles of repetition where confusion of the real and unreal is played out over and over again, a dramatic strategy that yields questions not just about the theatricality of the so-called real, but also challenges theatre’s role in the enactment and repetition of structures of power and control, what Leslie A. Wade calls theatrical instantiations of “ownership and domination” (2009, 16). Ruhl’s explicitly metadramatic premise enables her to examine the relationship between subjectivity, community and violence through a kind of forensic investigation of the “stage management” of those relations. As it is represented in the trilogy, theatre serves as a kind of panoptical form of social control where the dynamic of surveillance that constitutes the symbiotic acts of performing and watching shapes real-word action.

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Part Two, set in pre-WWII Southern Germany, ends with Eric who, subsequent to the scene cited at the beginning of this section, has been conscripted into the German army and is shown wearing a Nazi uniform and Violet, a young Jewish girl. Eric urges Violet, whose life is in danger, to come away with him. She resists and encourages him to do the same: “Wait. Right now — it’s not like being in a play — no one’s watching — you could do something different.” Eric replies: “They watch all the time” (Ruhl 2010, 98). The scene ends with a physical struggle that sees Eric push Violet into the light of an oncoming train. The world of the play is depicted as an unending performance of looping repetitions seemingly capable of absorbing everything and everyone—even the man charged with performing Christ—into its violent matrices. Part Three of the trilogy ends when, in the middle of a performance of the Passion in Spearfish, North Dakota, an event at which Ronald Reagan is a special guest, the protagonist, P, a Vietnam veteran suffering PTSD playing the part of Pontius, stops the play. He turns directly to the audience proper (not the fictional audience) and implores: This big stage. This stage of history, This little block of wood. Separates you from your most terrible fantasies — It’s important, this piece of wood, this stage, between you and I it—(152)

P’s unheard plea seems to channel the voice of the author as she gives poetic expression to the ontological complexity of the stage. It is both large and small, encompassing everything and nothing. It separates and connects us. It bears forth terrible fantasies that serve as acts of substitution for our own violent desires, and at the same time is a potentiate space of refuge and resistance. In the midst of his plea to the audience, P is interrupted by Reagan who, in a moment when incipient dementia seems to reveal itself, begins calling a baseball game: “Batter swings — and it’s a long fly ball to left field…” As the audience “goes wild,” P cries out—“Stop the play!” This time he captures the attention of both Reagan and the imaginary crowd. Reagan addresses him: “I never did serve in the military, but I feel as though I did. I made training films for soldiers during the war. It was one of the happiest times in my life.” They salute each other. Reagan continues, “What’s the matter son? Don’t cha have a part in the play” (152)? P replies that he doesn’t. At

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this moment, the collapse between the boundaries of the real and the theatrical is complete—Reagan never served in the war but playing the part of a soldier was enough to make him feel that he did. Moreover, Reagan identifies P as someone with no part to play despite the fact that he is on stage in the midst of dramatic action when this outburst takes place. The world of “terrible fantasies” is no longer able to be held at bay; the separation of “you and I” is no longer able to be held at bay. The section ends when P declares his love for Mary Magdalene, pulls out a gun and points it at himself. The action seems a retort to the claim of a foot soldier: “Plays aren’t real. The soldier’s boot — that’s real.” P’s anticipated suicide signals the ultimate “real” on stage. This is not the end of the play, however. Ruhl provides an epilogue, narrated by P. It begins: You might think, at the very end, that I’d kill my brother. Kill myself. Kill my ex-wife. Big love triangle, bang, bang, an American Passion Play. But that’s not how the story ends. I sat in my seat, and whispered: Mary, stop the play, and an old woman next to me said: shh. I left the theatre that day. (153)

The bold imagery that ended the third section is revealed as a kind of hallucinatory projection and the reality that takes its place muted and docile: “Every month I take a bus to a different city. I sleep outside. That way I can hear the wind” (153). P is exiled not just from the theatre but from the world itself, left to the wind that blows between. Shh. Ruhl’s interweaving of metatheatricality and violence raises all kinds of questions not simply to do with how we depict violence on stage, but, more profoundly, to do with where the affectivity of theatrical violence comes from, and, equally, where it goes to once the actor exits the stage. The trilogy reveals the sense in which theatre is itself a form of power and therefore not able to be fully separated from violence. At the same time, the heightened realism of the writing suggests theatre as a space of resistance, a space that might contain and express that which violence seeks to destroy. What I similarly identify in the works explored in this book is a cleaving apart of theatrical promise—our utopian fantasies of what theatre might be capable of—and theatre’s implication in structures of violence. The use of metatheatricality in reply to violence reveals the implication and “interlacing” of theatricality and power and the plays I discuss are scored through with their authors’ self-aware problematization

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of the social and political role of theatre. At the same, despite this anxiety, the plays themselves illustrate how dramaturgy may function not just as a mechanism for storytelling but also as a structural model for change.

Scope of Study So far, I have indicated the broad scope of the monograph—self-reflexive dramatic responses to violence—and have explained the significance of the topic—that it reflects a wider set of anxieties about theatre’s capacity to respond to real-world concerns. Before looking more closely at the relationship between metatheatricality and violence, I want to critically locate the project and to explain its parameters. In its orientation, the monograph intersects with research in the areas of theatre and ethics, violence and performance, spectatorship and audience, memory, witnessing, trauma and theatre and human rights, key areas of scholarship in the broad field of theatre and performance studies since the early 2000s. Formative as well as more recent texts include Helena Grehan’s Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009), Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon’s Violence Performed (2009), Nicholas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics (2009) and Scenes from Bourgeois Life (2020), Lucy Nevitt’s Theatre & Violence (2013), Paul Rae’s Theatre & Human Rights (2009), Luckhurst and Morin’s Theatre and Human Rights after 1945 (2015), Lisa Fitzpatrick’s Rape on the Contemporary Stage (2018), and Miriam Haughton’s Staging Trauma (2018), all of which are referred to in this study. The project also builds on my previous monograph, Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others, which examined how theatricality is deployed to animate histories of violence in both plays and at tourism sites and looked at the conditions required for this to be ethically generative (Willis 2014b). Whereas in that study I drew on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to frame the ethical enquiry (as a number of the authors above have done), here I am more interested in the critical commentary that dramatists themselves provide on the theatrical form. That is, while certain theorists recur between the chapters I do not privilege a particular theoretical paradigm. Similarly, while ethics is a concern for the monograph it is not its sole focus. Rather, it is the notion of dramaturgy as a form of critical action that guides the analysis of the case studies. Accordingly, the exemplars for the monograph are dramatic texts. A good deal of scholarship in the areas cited above has been concerned with

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non-text based experimental performance. As Mireia Aragay explains, because studies of theatre and ethics have tended to locate the ethicality of a given performance in the affective encounter between performance and spectators, “formal innovation or experimentation [has] become the cornerstone for the spectator’s ethical engagement,” and accordingly “many recent explorations of contemporary theatre and ethics have tended to privilege the most experimental kinds of performances” (2014, 6). While experimental writers—Tim Crouch, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Suzan-Lori Parks, for example—have received significant attention, on the whole playwriting and dramatic texts have been subject to less analysis in the broad fields named above than other types of performance. Scholarship such as Sarah Grochala’s The Contemporary Political Play, which applies Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity” to argue for a paradigm of “liquid dramaturgy,” Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte’s Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre (2014), and Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c and Stuart Young’s Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy (2017) have begun to apply more scrutiny to the political and ethical dimensions of dramatic texts and this study can be located as a contribution to this ongoing research. Already in this Introduction I have used the term “dramatic theatre” to describe the key case studies. I wish to clarify that “dramatic” is deployed in a broad sense; it does not, for example, position itself in relation to the postdramatic—and indeed a number of the plays I discuss could be described as postdramatic texts. Rather, the term clarifies that the nature of theatrical self-reflexivity under examination—written plays; certainly, the self-reflexive quality of contemporary performance in general is a topic that far exceeds the parameters of this project. Applied theatre and documentary theatre practices are also not within the scope of this study though from time to time I refer to some of the literature from those fields where relevant. Carol Martin’s observation, for example, that “theatre of the real” “blurs,” as she puts it, the boundaries between real world and stage is helpful in this context (2013, 4), pointing as it does to the interrelation of the material and discursive that Anderson and Menon discuss. The particular “role” of theatre that I am interested in, therefore, begins with the work of the dramatist. As I have said, given the emphasis in the broad field of theatre and ethics on non-text based performance, I hope to contribute to this discussion through a focussed study of playwriting.

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As noted earlier, the monograph grew out of my observation of the recurrent use of metatheatrical devices by theatre-makers such as Ruhl as they grappled with the relationship between real-world and staged violence and the responsibilities that issue from each. This relationship is the basis for the contemporary texts I have selected, which include: Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss (2016), Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (hereafter We Are Proud to Present ) (2012), and Fairview (2018), Michael Redhill’s Goodness (2005) and the subsequent documentary made about the play’s tour to Rwanda, Goodness in Rwanda (2014), Erik Ehn’s Thistle (2012), Tim Crouch’s The Author (2009), Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018), and Ontroerend Goed’s Audience (2011). The plays selected are not an exhaustive list of texts that use metatheatrical devices to represent violence on stage (and from time to time I will refer to other plays in brief), but provide a sufficiently broad crosssection for me to discuss a range of issues related to violence, including racism and gender-based violence, as well as to consider the effects of different metadramatic emphases. It is important to point out that the plays I discuss in this monograph are not straightforward documentary accounts of violence but neither are they purely symbolic and imaginal enactments. Rather, they show artists grappling with the responsibilities of bearing artistic witness to real violence. In some cases, this violence is grounded in identifiable subject matter: the German colonial genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples (We Are Proud to Present ), the massacre of the village of El Mozote in El Salvador (Thistle), Syrian civil war (Kiss ). In other cases, specific violence is alluded to—the Yugoslav Wars in Goodness and The Author, for example. Some texts ground their dramaturgy in forms of violence experienced by the author—Drury’s Fairview, Hickson’s The Writer. A number of the texts I discuss I have been fortunate to see performed—We Are Proud to Present, Thistle, Audience—and this has very much informed my analysis. Plans to see Fairview and The Writer were derailed by Covid and in the case of plays I have not seen I rely on critical reviews to give a sense of the plays in performance. As a collection of texts, the plays may be characterized as “slippery” in the sense meant by Kristie Fleckenstein; texts that “that keep us positioned on the edges that blur” (2003, 105). Elsewhere Grochala has characterized such slipperiness, noted above, as “liquid dramaturgy,” a dramaturgical expression of modernity whereby “the individualized

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social subject lives in a perpetual state of indeterminacy plagued by existential anxiety” (2017, 17). Both notions point to the manner in which the texts under discussion let the uncertainties and unknowability of their subject matter unsettle their structural form. As Haughton writes of contemporary performance that deals with trauma, such works are “navigating contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repetition, problematic confusion of Self and Other, ethical murkiness and a general milieu of vulnerability and disorientation” (2018, 4). Haughton’s term “murkiness” is useful here for the plays often blur the usual distinctions between theatrical roles—writer, actor, spectator and so on. Tim Crouch’s The Author, for example, features a character called Tim Crouch who is an avatar for the real-world Crouch but also a decidedly fictional creation. As such, the liquidity or slipperiness of the plays means that boundaries between selves and others—the “you and I” that Ruhl points to—are, as Erik Ehn suggests, “drifted” (2012, 8). As a response to the sensitivity of traumatic subject matter, this metatheatrical drift enables authors to expose their own vulnerability, hesitancy and uncertainty, and to both claim responsibility for their writing and at the same time disclaim the possibility of ever fulfilling that responsibility completely. Although the plays discussed are similarly complex in their use of metatheatrical devices, they span a range of dramaturgies and poetics. Such aesthetic diversity has informed my selection and provides a sense of the multi-faceted applications of metadramatic strategies in response to violent subject matter. Some plays straightforwardly interrogate the politics underlying the theatrical enterprise, plays-within-plays, for example, which show actors struggling to make it real, to make it matter, to make it good. These texts vividly illustrate the problems that theatre encounters when it seeks to depict real instances of violence and suffering. The actors in Drury’s We Are Proud to Present, for example, cannot agree on how to deal with the archival absence of Indigenous voices from their staging of colonial genocide. Other texts are concerned with a broader sense of mutable subjectivity and with the various cross-contaminating currents of “reality” that flow between stage and world. Erik Ehn’s Thistle, for example, dramatizes his notion of drifted subjectivity by overlaying the roles of witness, listener and actor. Part of what distinguishes the critical aim of each play is the target of their critique. Some use metatheatricality to scrutinize what it means to come to violence from the position of outsider. In Kiss, for example, a fictional cast of young American actors is depicted as completely “in the dark,” as it were, about the reality of

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life in Syria, which underlies the play they are attempting to perform. Documentary Goodness in Rwanda starkly illustrates the struggle of a North American cast to understand the Rwandan context in which they are performing Redhill’s drama. Other plays use metatheatricality as a tool to challenge dominant theatrical and political paradigms. Both of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s texts deconstruct the theatrical medium in order to expose the racist ideologies that underpin many of its values and conventions. Ella Hickson’s The Writer similarly challenges sexism within the theatre profession, positing it as a form of violence that diminishes the standing of women as subjects. Clarifying the subject position of the real-life and dramatized writers, actors and spectators depicted in the plays in relation to the violence that they critique is therefore a crucial part of my analysis as it effects both how metatheatricality is deployed and the outcomes it achieves. The kind of self-scrutiny/self-violence that Wade describes when he asks, for example, “How can theatre […] realize an approach that turns violence from the Other to the self, bringing an interrogation and challenge to the assumptions and complacency of the author/creators?” (2009, 16) means something very different when an artist of colour interrogates the ways in which white supremacist ideology informs theatrical practices than it does when a play such as Tim Crouch’s The Author ends with “the death of the author” (2011, 203). In plays like Drury’s, metatheatricality resists violence by way of a structural critique that illuminates the oppression of hegemonic power structures rather than by reflecting on the moral or ethical “compromise” of those who occupy a position of privilege within such structures. That is, the kind of self-directed practitioner “violence” that Wade suggests doesn’t fully account for hierarchies of subjectivity within the broad field of theatrical practice, “field” here meant in a Bourdieusian sense. When drawing on notions of the “Other” in performative theory as Wade does (and as I am myself have done), it is crucial to remember that such an other is far from neutral. Indeed, while Emmanuel Levinas (whose work informs Wade) has been crucial to the field of theatre and ethics, Fred Moten rightly draws attention in The Universal Machine to what he calls Levinas’ “unintended racism” (2018, 11), and his work’s grounding in “the nexus of Europe/Man/The Bible/The Greeks” (p. 10) which is framed, Moten suggests, as not just “available to the whole world […] they are the whole world” (p. 11). Thus, the effectiveness of metatheatrical critique in the plays discussed is

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significantly determined by their attentiveness to the specific conditions within which their own act of theatrical representation is located. Lastly, to work through the metatheatrical dimensions of the plays’ dramaturgies, the book is organized around the three practices of acting, writing and spectatorship. I begin with plays that represent actors for the way in which they illustrate the processes of constructing representation and the biases and ideologies that inform this. I then move to depictions of writers, which allows me to think in more detail about the role of the artist as defacto witness and to consider the authorial act as a kind of listening practice. In lastly examining dramatizations of the audience, I ask how such staging directs our attention to violence embedded within the very mechanism of theatre itself. In addition to these three key lenses there is also an underlying temporal narrative to the monograph in that the political consciousness of a dramatist like Michael Redhill writing at the turn of the millennium is quite different from that of Drury or Hickson writing much more recently and in response to significant social and political movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. These later texts are crucial examples for the monograph because they demand, as Moten does of Levinas and others, that scholarship in the areas of theatre and ethics, trauma, memory and so on, takes account of some of the unchallenged assumptions that underlie its key points of reference.

Contemporary Metadrama In order to answer the question of why the turn to self-reflexivity by theatre-makers in response to violence more substantively, some further context is required. While the task of explaining the full breadth and depth of contemporary theatre’s self-reflexive tendency exceeds the scope of this project, in this section I want to outline some of the particular features of metatheatricality as it arises in the twenty-first century practices. While metadramatic devices have a long history—Hamlet’ s play-within-a-play, “The Mousetrap,” for example — the term “metatheatre” was only introduced into the dramatic lexicon in 1963 by Lionel Abel, who suggested that metatheatricality arises in performance because of the “inherent theatricality” of life to which it responds. He argued for metatheatre as a specific genre of theatre constituted of “theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized” (1963, 133). Abel recognized that such works have a distinctive relationship not just to theatre as a practice, but to the broader concept of theatricality, particularly where it is

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mobilized to express the contingencies of human experience; that is, Abel suggested that life is itself characterized by a theatrical dimension and that metatheatricality simply reflects this. Writing not long after Abel, Elizabeth Burns added to this insight when she argued that: “The theatrical quality of life, taken for granted by nearly everyone, seems to be experienced most concretely by those who feel themselves on the margin of events either because they have adopted the role of spectator or because, though present, they have not yet been offered a part or have not learnt it sufficiently well to enable them to join the actors” (1972, 11). Drawing from Burns, I suggest that it is the ability to perceive the theatricality of life that enables one to operate in a metatheatrical register. This is of key importance for the monograph for it indicates that metatheatricality may be most effective as a political tool when it is deployed by those on the margins of power for they are most capable of seeing the theatrical dimensions of how such power is expressed precisely because it often excludes them, simultaneously rendering them spectators to its effects and making them objects of a panoptical spectatorial disciplinary gaze. Drury’s Fairview, in this sense, shows that if life is in any sense theatrical, then such theatricality is mediated and determined by specific cultural and historical conditions. David Mason has more recently suggested that metatheatricality, rather than being a genre or subcategory of performance, is in fact what defines theatre, writing that “theatre, when we encounter it, provides experience and also the reminder that we experience, and, in this, theatre is the very model of human consciousness” (2013, 217). For Mason, despite our suspension of disbelief, we never really forget that we are seeing a performance—we never “see Thebes” (217). Richard Hornby, like Mason, submits that metatheatricality stages the process of perception itself, thus inducing in the audience a “dislocation of perception,” that results in them “seeing double” (1986, 32); we see both Thebes and its staging. Hornby’s 1986 monograph, Drama, Metadrama and Perception, is one of the most comprehensive studies of metatheatrical devices. In it, he proposes a taxonomy of metadramatic function: (1) the ceremony within the play, (2) literary and real-life reference, (3) role playing within the role, (4) the play-within-a-play, (5) self-reference. Ultimately, each of these iterations serves the broader purpose of, as noted above, staging the process of perception. In their focus on perception, both Mason and Hornby, like Burns, affirm the idea that metatheatricality is foremost a way of reflecting on ourselves as “role-playing” subjects whose individual

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agency is shaped and constrained by both the scripts we are given and the roles into which we are cast. While W. B. Worthen has suggested that Hornby’s project falls short in terms of fully unpacking “the specific relations between drama, metadrama and the process of cultural representation” (1987, 261) (a project that I hope that this monograph will advance), his work remains pertinent for me in its analysis of the significance of historical context to applications of the form. For example, Hornby writes that the most obvious examples of metadrama, plays-within-plays, tend to occur when people are most cynical about their given reality: When the prevalent view is that the world is in some way illusory or false, then the play within the play becomes a metaphor for life itself. The fact that the inner play is an obvious illusion (since we see other characters watching it), reminds us that the play we are watching is also an illusion, despite its vividness and excitement; by extension, the world in which we live, which also seems to be so vivid, is in the end a sham. (1986, 45)

What distinguishes contemporary suspicion that “the world around us is a hoax” from earlier eras, Hornby suggests, is “the additional element of breakdown between the layers of the plays within plays […] This is an expression of the extreme cynicism of our time […] Today people often feel that there is nothing framing our illusory lives at all” (47). While Hornby was writing in the 1980s and responding to the postmodern avant-garde of the time, his identification of a correlation between hoax culture and a self-reflexive tendency in theatre is particularly apposite today, a period of political upheaval characterized by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and conspiracy theories. Seen from this perspective, the re-emergence of the metatheatrical form in the present—particularly works that emphasize actors and acting—would seem in accord with Hornby’s proposition. Indeed, part of what characterizes the use of metatheatrical devices by the performances discussed in this book from earlier examples is their awareness and manipulation of the “reality aesthetic”; that is, their understanding of the real as both genre and form of cultural currency. When the real becomes a genre, and when we concurrently accept the unreality of what is given to us as the “real” and suspend our disbelief (reality television being a prime example), then artistic self-reflexivity needs to take account of this spectatorial paradox; that is, self-reflexivity

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needs to be brought to bear on the very use of self-reflexivity. Accordingly, metatheatricality in the twenty-first century theatre no longer comprises a simple interplay of inner and outer forms but is much more structurally complex. In her work on the use of metatheatricality in contemporary Canadian plays, Jenn Stephenson illustrates how this bears out dramaturgically. Comparing a series of self-reflexive history plays with earlier but similarly “meta” works, Stephenson suggests that whereas earlier metadramatic plays set up fairly straightforward distinctions between the framed historical narratives and the deconstructive inner drama, newer metadramatic plays are much more “messy” (2010, 261). Rather than deconstructing grand narratives, the millennial dramas she examines foreground the relationship between personal and historical, staging intimate “microhistories” which explore how history is able to be felt and experienced through its retelling (254–5). This quality, which encompasses equal measures of irony and sincerity, is especially evident in the dramatizations of playwrights I discuss where it is the very act of self-reflection (self “violence” as Wade characterizes it) that becomes central to the metadramatic representation. One of the effects of the deployment of such ambivalent self-reflexivity is that it emphasizes the contingency and indeed instability of the theatrical event. As Dan Rebellato writes, such works “intensify the ambiguity and complexity of the aesthetic experience and refuse the tidy objectness of fictional realism” (2013, 27). Karel Vanhaesebrouck describes such a deconstructive approach to aesthetic experience as a form of “organized doubt,” echoing Hornby when he suggests that it ultimately invites the spectator to “reconsider the contingent nature of [their] reality” (2016, 64). Indeed, Vanhaesebrouck suggests that the contemporary turn to metatheatricality reflects a dominant artistic and spectatorial paradigm of “medial self-awareness,” “a coded game with the limits of representation, a game in which the spectator is willingly implied in order to unveil the mechanisms of the game” (2016, 53). Like Hans-Thies Lehmann who has argued that “the theatre shares with the other arts of (post)modernity the tendency for self-reflexivity and self-thematization” (2006, 17), Vanhaesebrouck puts the metatheatrical impulse—“experimentation with representation” (2016, 61)—at the centre of both contemporary artistic practice and spectatorial experience. What is especially interesting about Vanhaesebrouck’s analysis is his suggestion that medial self-awareness is characterized by “a tension or co-existence of two seemingly contradictory phenomena: immersion

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and metatheatricality” (50). In Vanhaesebrouck’s paradoxical interlinking of metatheatricality on the one hand, and techniques of affective immersion on the other, spectators are variously shocked, jarred, moved by what they see, yet at the same time asked to question the conditions of their act of seeing—to participate in “organized doubt.” Such a strategy in the theatrical arena, as Rebellato remarks, “destabilizes the experience of the play in performance,” necessarily directing spectators to reflect on the conditions that shape their own acts of perception (2013, 27). The inherent “doubleness” of metatheatricality is therefore multiplied in contemporary contexts by both medial self-awareness and scepticism of the “real.” In contemporary drama, metatheatricality operates not simply as a form of Brechtian criticality, but also deeply engages with the affective dimensions of living in an era where subjectivity itself has a precarious relationship to the real. The plays discussed show us the “obvious illusions” that present as the real, but do not propose than an authentic real might be conveyed through a simple act of deconstructive unmasking. Rather, contemporary metadrama shows the indivisibility of life onstage and off, suggesting that a radical reorientation of the very conditions of theatricality is required in order to begin the process of reshaping—or re-rehearsing—the real.

Problems of Staging Violence I just have outlined some of the contextual factors that impact upon contemporary metatheatrical dramaturgies. In this section, I wish to focus on the relationship between metatheatricality and violence. First, I need to explain what is meant by both violence and trauma in the context of this monograph. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as: “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (2014, 2). Many of the plays discussed deal with violence that falls under this broad definition—instances of genocide, for example. My framing of what constitutes violence is broader than the WHO definition, however, and takes into account its psychological, ideological, and, as Anderson and Menon write, “embodied” aspects (2009, 4). Moreover, I attend to the belated effects of violence, the manner in which it spills forth from the time and space of its first occurrence. Because the plays discussed do not directly show the violence to

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which they refer, the fact that the consequences of violence are belatedly embodied in the performer materially expresses what René Girard calls the “contagious” nature of “mimetic” violence (1977, 28). Violence is not limited to simply conflict that occurs between individuals or groups, but encompasses the ongoing psychic damage of such conflict in the wider community, its resonances, affects and the ways in which, “[T]he interlacing physical, psychic, and social effects of violence performed extend forward into a political structure in which the promise of power is answerable to, and fully dependent upon, an ongoing relationship of coercion” (Anderson and Menon 2009, 5). Within this broad structural understanding of violence, I draw on Kelly Oliver’s work on the relationship between subjectivity and violence as a critical touchstone. Oliver writes: “To see oneself as a subject and to see other people as the other or objects not only alienates one from those around [them] but also enables the dehumanization inherent in oppression and domination” (Oliver 2004, 182). Following from Oliver, my approach is to understand violence as that which objectifies—or desubjectifies. My reason for holding onto “the subject” in a book about deconstructive representation is that the subject remains at the centre of human rights discourse. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as Paul Rae writes in Theatre and Human Rights, “affirms the indivisibility, inalienability and inviolability of certain rights for all human beings,”— or otherwise put, all human subjects (2009, 10). Further, as Catherine Cole points out in her analysis of representations of genocide, at its centre are “bodies that became objects, and humans who did not count as humans” (2015, 129). In the theatrical context, reading violence as that which undermines subjectivity is a useful framework in that the medium itself, particularly in dramatic contexts, relies upon the notion of identification, itself a form of objectification, either by employing or resisting this mechanism. Thus, the challenge of finding forms of representation that resist objectification is a significant challenge for theatre and indeed is, as I will argue, one of the principle reasons that theatremakers draw upon self-reflexive devices in representing violence for this at least acknowledges the very precarity of what they are attempting to do. Indeed, part of what motivates the care taken by theatre artists in their self-reflexive deconstructions of theatrical violence is the desire to avoid re-traumatization that might occur through more straightforward representational strategies.

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The concept of trauma as explored by theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub, and Judith Herman has informed both theatrical practice and a good deal of contemporary scholarship related to the intersecting topics of theatre, ethics, spectatorship and violence (see, for example, the work of Christina Wald (2007), Patrick Duggan (2012), Milija Gluhovic (2013), Suzanne Little (2015, 2017), Miriam Haughton (2018)). In her introduction to Staging Trauma, Haughton writes of the care required when mobilizing psychological concepts such as trauma within theatre and performance studies: When distinctions are not called upon to mitigate these conditions, the blurred landscape of the contemporary “trauma culture” looms threateningly, whereby the potential for misplaced victimhood is apparent, specific historical traumas become generalized, and traumatic experience is rendered as symbolic capital, personally and socially. (2018, 11)

Because of the distancing and criticality the plays discussed achieve by way of metatheatrical devices, I do not approach them as examples of “working through” trauma in the way that Haughton does. Nonetheless, self-reflexivity does not exempt these plays from the problems she identifies—for example, generalizing specific instances of trauma—and this is something that I am attentive to in my analysis. If trauma, as Herman suggests, is an “affliction of the powerless” (2015, 33), then there is an important relationship between violence as that which disempowers through fracturing subjectivity, and the powerlessness of the subject caught in a cycle of traumatic reiteration of violence. Thus, when trauma is referred to in this monograph it is in relationship to how theatre approaches dramatic subjectivity. In what follows, therefore, I want to unpack the nature of how the ethical demand to preserve the subjectivity of those othered by violence impacts upon theatrical practices. I suggest three main challenges for theatre-makers: re/animation—giving (second) life to violence, simplification—eschewing the complex causalities of violence, and appropriation and mis/identification—a form of delegitimization of the sanctity of individual experience that is an act of violence in and of itself. Overarching these challenges are two factors: firstly, the uneasy relationship between theatricality and violence in the first place in the sense that violence draws upon theatrical effects in order to deploy power and, secondly, that it can be argued that violence itself is in fact intrinsic to the process of representation.

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Re/animation What does it mean to embody before an audience violent ideology and actions? What is the status of such violence and in what instances can it be justified? While in Theatre & Violence Nevitt on the whole defends theatrical depictions of violence for their ability to promote contemplation on the part of the audience, she nonetheless points out that “performed violence has the potential to overpower the context in which it is shown” (2013, 10). Such overpowering may bear out in a number of ways. In the first instance, in staging either histories of violence or fictional iterations of real-world violence, there is always the potential, as just noted, to re-traumatize (re-objectify) victims. The field of verbatim theatre has been particularly attentive to this issue. Stuart Young, for example, writes that faith in the ethical efficacy of the documentary process may be “misplaced,” writing of the “scope for damage” in the theatrical retelling of the real people’s stories (2017, 26). Carol Martin also acknowledges the tension between the theatrical and the real when she writes that: “[p]erformance of the real can collapse the boundaries between the real and the fictional in ways that create confusion and disruption” (2013, 10). In applied theatre practices, this is also a concern, particularly when victims are suffering from post-traumatic stress. Ananda Breed, for example, in her discussion of theatre as a tool for reconciliation in Rwanda writes that she “witnessed several ‘genocide plays’ in which members of the audience were traumatized,” and relates a specific example where “during one scene in which bodies are carried above the shoulders, a woman started to approach the stage asking, ‘Where are you taking them, down the Nyabarongo river?’ A child started screaming and was carried away by a first aid worker” (2008, 45). More broadly, as Anderson and Menon write: [R]epresentations of violence are not innocently mimetic, and risk extending and perpetuating the very trauma they aim to expose […] representations of violence are both descriptive and performative: not merely involved in staging and framing specific acts of violence, but also of producing the context in which violence is rationalized and excused as a symptom of inter-cultural encounter.” (2009, 6)

Such analysis recognizes the complex real-world effects produced when theatrical affectivity gives life to traumatic experience.

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Secondly, by showing violence in ways that are affectively destabilizing (shocking) for spectators, a given production’s intention of drawing attention to both the causes and consequences of violence may be undermined. As just noted, Nevitt writes that “theatre permits us to contemplate violence,” both “actual and potential” (2013, 6). However, when the distance between spectator and performance is radically foreshortened, such contemplative possibility may be negated. Bryoni Trezise offers a powerful reflection on this in her account of attending a performance of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s performance, Tragedia Endogonia Br. #04 Bruxelles, a work that features an extended and intensely visceral beating scene. For some spectators, the painfulness of watching the beating was too much to bear and they walked out of the performance. For Trezise, however, the experience was one of “affective listening” or “startling” where she became aware of her own “sensorial subjectivity,” herself hearing and feeling herself feeling (2014, 154–5). The mixed responses she describes illustrate the precarity of staging violence as a means of critiquing it, and the potential for such a strategy to direct attention away from the subject of violence—the subject who is wholly objectified by violence—and onto the affective experience of the onlooker. Thirdly, there is great sensitivity around whether or not it is responsible and appropriate to give perpetrators of violence public presence through representing them on stage. For example, in 2012, a year after Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of 77 people in Sweden, Danish theatremakers staged a metatheatrical monodrama, Manifesto 2083, about an actor/writer attempting to create a play based on Breivik’s manifesto (titled “Manifesto 2083”). The play shows the protagonist attempting to understand Breivik’s mindset as a way of comprehending how such catastrophic violence could have come about. This criticality falls apart, however, as the play depicts the protagonist slowly transform into Breivik by way of the process of rehearsing and performing his writing; that is, the play moves from self-reflexive criticality to a more conventional form of dramatic mimesis. When the performance was staged it attracted a good deal of controversy, with local press accusing the company of providing a platform for Breivik’s ideology (Copenhagen Post 2012). When performed in Aotearoa New Zealand, one reviewer published a review that simply refused to review the production, explaining that they did not want to give cultural space to Breivik’s views or actions (Hawkes and McConnell 2017). Theatre must consider its responsibilities to victims and the wider public as well as reflect on its power as a public

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medium and the limits and constraints to be observed when exercising this power. Simplification Trauma is by its nature non-linear and unresolved. How then does one represent the complex causalities of violence and its felt effects without recourse to over-simplification? In many of the plays discussed, writers and actors are shown as getting the story wrong, as failing to understand the true significance of what took place. In Calderón’s Kiss, for example, the company of American actors presenting the Syrian play that they found on the internet fails to grasp its central metaphor where the “kiss” that the plot revolves around in fact denotes rape. In Redhill’s Goodness, the playwright protagonist is continually chastised by his historical interlocuter, Althea: “What are you to me? Where were you with your notebook when we needed a witness? Bathing in milk and writing checks for charity, that’s where you were” (2005, 99). Through Althea, Redhill draws our attention to the partiality of the playwright’s account and indeed his own queasiness in engaging with the full scope of violence at hand: “It felt like the darkness of that little room was seeping into me. Whatever was inside of her, I didn’t want it in this book, infecting my own thoughts. Infecting me” (2005, 72). Thus simplification is not simply a matter of assimilating complex narratives to an apprehensible “plot,” but also assimilating them to what we ourselves can bear. In the introduction to his collection of plays about genocide, Soulographie, Erik Ehn acknowledges the particular challenges of theatrical representations of violence: “how to speak to it while being a witnessby-proxy, how to perpetuate reflections without retraumatizing victims or endorsing antipathetical divides” (2012, 5). The core principle of what he calls effective “speech for trauma” is the mobilization of complexity in dramatic language (6). He writes: Disasters of violence can be so overwhelming to behold, much less undergo, that they risk totalizing the subject. Disastrous violence can turn a person to a thing, for both the perpetrator and the victim. By “broken language” I mean a language that eludes reduction to a secure, firm (ultimately misleading) clarity by sustaining a central changeability through parable, metaphor, and the tossed wooden shoe of interruptive imagery. Inelegance, properly deployed, has an analytic utility. (Ehn 2021, 77)

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Ehn’s play Thistle, which I discuss in Chapter 3, is one such example of a complex formulation of dramatic language, which balances the voice of the victim of violence with that of the outsider who seeks to understand that violence. This balancing reflects Ehn’s own concept of “subjective drift,” which is a core feature of his “broken language.” Such driftedness—which does not enact a reversal of the subject-other relation that Levinas calls for but rather a messier collapse of the distinctions between “you” and “I”—necessarily complicates dramaturgy. As Ehn has remarked of Drury’s metatheatricality in We Are Proud to Present: “it is like a Venn diagram in motion. These worlds are rotating around each other, influencing each other, so it’s going to have to remain complicated” (Drury and Ehn 2012). In many ways, the metatheatrical approaches to violence taken by the plays discussed in this monograph acknowledge the need for complicated dramaturgy that foregrounds the problem of theatrical objectification. Appropriation and Mis/identification The capacity to variously absorb, deflect and transform the experiences of others by way of theatrical objectification is central to the politics of appropriation in metatheatrical responses to violence. As Wade writes: “[I]f we view normative representation as a kind of appropriation, then traditional stage representation may enact a violence upon otherness by ‘fitting’ the Other to the theatrical frame. The staging process may thus enact a dynamic of violence” (Wade 2009, 16). Metatheatrical depictions of violence therefore unfold a series of questions: Who may tell the story of another? Who is included and excluded from the act of storytelling? If victims are represented, what are their rights in relation to their own representation? To what extent is it possible for the actor or writer to fully understand the nature of the traumatic violent experience that they are attempting to represent? We Are Proud to Present powerfully confronts the limits of the empathic impulse that underlies the very premise of dramatic identification. You can’t take no walk in somebody else’s shoes and know anything. […] Now, you can borrow someone else’s shoes, and you can walk as long as you want, they ain’t your shoes. You can go ahead and steal somebody else’s shoes and guess what? They ain’t your shoes. (Drury 2012, 101)

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This problematization is significant in that it challenges the limits of theatrical identification, asking us to critically interrogate what Marianne Van Kerkhoven calls “dramaturgies of perceiving,” which she suggests alternate between, “‘looking at something’ and ‘walking in something’” (2009, 11) . The imagination is a powerful empathic vehicle and yet it can also lead us to believe that we understand what we do not, and that we speak for those who have not consented to our representation of them. As Anderson and Menon write: “Despite the potential for empathy facilitated by [visual images] […] it is the experience of suffering that is most considerably lost when images of violence inundate the visual realm, acting as surrogates for productive transnational discourse” (2009, 4–5). Indeed, many of the plays to be discussed grapple with the inadequacy of what Carole-Anne Upton and Catherine Cole respectively call “honourable intentions” (2012, 3) and “good intentions” (2015, 130). The notion of “empathy” is therefore crucial to this discussion and needs to be carefully defined. In her discussion of the Me Too movement, Michelle Rodino-Colocino makes a distinction between what she calls passive and transformative empathy, which is a helpful starting point. Passive empathy, she writes “is the feeling of being in another’s shoes without the risk of actually doing so” (2018, 96). Christine Sylvester puts this in a theatrical context when she writes: Audiences can feel close to such troubling actions yet safely removed from them, too. In contrast to characters that may perish, we live; but we feel maudlin, fragile. The more intense the dramaturgies of tragedy the more the fullness of fear, pleasure, entertainment, and sorrow. Schadenfreude plus empathy plus issues of ethics: Good show! (Sylvester 2003)

Transformative empathy, in contrast, is “that feeling of sharing an experience, of being in one’s same shoes” (Rodino-Colocino 2018, 97). In the context of Me Too, the potential for transformative empathy stems from the framework it provides victims to share experiences—me too, me-aswell. In most theatrical situations, empathy generated is passive in that it relies precisely on empathic identification. Some modes of participatory or experimental theatre may create the conditions for a more heightened sense of shared experience between participants, and thus one might argue in these instances that the potential for transformative empathy is enhanced. Certainly, applied theatre practices, particularly those that are community-based and made by and for clearly defined communities are

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most properly transformative in the sense denoted by Rodino-Colocino. But this still leaves us with the problem of how to represent the violence suffered by others without appropriating such experiences and thereby objectifying its victims. Ronald J. Pelias’s specifically theatrical framework for understanding the conditions necessary for empathy to be deployed in a “transformative” capacity helps to tease this out further. In his typology of actorly empathy, Pelias describes three different modes of empathic connection that an actor might have with their character: empathy as “imperialist venture” (1991, 143), empathy as “passionate embrace” (144), and empathy as “dialogic embodiment” (147). In describing empathy as imperialist venture, Pelias writes that it “allows theatre artists to possess others, to name, to claim ownership” (143). The clear problem of this approach is the projection of one’s own experiences onto another as a way of understanding that other. Pelias argues that this approach in effect “silences” the other by bringing them “under their [the actor’s] yoke” (144); or, as Wade writes, of “fitting the Other” to the theatrical frame. Empathy as “passionate embrace” veers in the other direction by encouraging actors to “adopt the perspectives of others, to see through their eyes, to open themselves to the unique, individual ways people have of making sense of the world” (145). This position attempts to give primacy to the other and positions the actor as a “learner” who is guided by that other. Pelias questions, however, whether “passionate embrace” negates or sacrifices the actor themselves. His preferred articulation of empathy is what he calls “dialogic embodiment,” where the actor adopts the position of witness, a stance characterized by a doubleness where the actor both embodies their character and at the same time retains the critical distance that enables them to “present to the community [the other] for consideration” (1991, 151). Pelias typifies this stance as a “speaking with,” which may be compared to Wade’s model of performing violence which envisions “‘being with’ or ‘alongside’ the Other in a manner that highlights a reciprocity and obligation incumbent on the self” (2009, 16). In its innate doubleness, metatheatricality is particularly suited to a paradigm of what Lisa Samuels calls creative and critical “withness,” “attention that does not seek to be somewhere other than in relation” (2021, 60). Such “speaking with” may be thought of in broad terms. In her explanation of what she calls “dialogic empathy” in the theatre, Lindsay B. Cummings remarks that:

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Dialogic empathy does not “arrive” at understanding, but rather consists of a constant and open-ended engagement, responding and reacting to the other as actors respond to fellow actors and audience, audience members respond to actors, and stage managers and other crew respond to subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) shifts in pace and performance both on stage and in the house. (2016, 6)

Significant in Cummings’ framing of theatrical empathy is her broadening of its scope of application. Empathy is not solely tied to a process of dramatic or theatrical identification, but also understood as manifest in the processes and relationships that constitute the theatrical event in its totality. Such a widened horizon is also an aim of this book. Whereas, as Mireia Aragay points out, the moment of theatrical reception—the exchange between performer and spectator—is usually framed as the prime site of ethics in performance (2014, 2), it is perhaps in the relationships between theatrical creators, and in the relationship between creators and their subjects, that the most significant empathetic if not ethical exchanges might be said to take place. Certainly, many of the plays considered in this volume pursue this very point, examining and staging the political and ethical implications of the creative choices and processes of both actors and writers and the impact of these choices on spectators. Violence, Theatricality, Representation As I suggested in my discussion of Ruhl’s Passion Play, the relationship between theatre and violence is not simply one of representation; theatricality is itself implicated in how power is deployed. As Paul Rae remarks, “theatre [has been] queasily inherent in some of the most iconic and widely publicized human rights violations of recent years” (2009, 2). In Chapter 2, I will draw on Salwa Ismail’s analysis of the theatrical and performative character of the Syrian government’s exercise of power to illustrate this point. She writes: Performances of violence generate ways of thinking, feeling and relating to the world. Thus, the performativity of violence is materialised through its formative powers. At the same time, performativity derives meanings from the work consummated and from the narrative structure of performances, that is, from the emplotment of violent acts. As performances are imbricated in processes of subjectivation, their enactments and formative powers

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extend beyond their immediate outcome to the interpretive horizons they shape and to the manner in which they are lived and recalled. (2018, 160)

The main objective of performative violence, she writes, is to “generate indeterminacy and incite bewilderment,” thereby fundamentally destabilizing the dividing line between what is real and what is fiction (188). Such strategies mean that even in the face of massacre, “it is possible that the citizen-spectators would find themselves to be uncertain as to whether the staged slaughter ever took place at all” (178). While I will explain Ismail’s work in more detail later, her deployment of the language of theatre and performance is useful to reference here. Working from the perspective of politics, Ismail’s understanding of the real-world effects of theatrical and performative expressions of violence is highly perceptive, revealing the ways in which theatricality in fact produces the real. As Anderson and Menon write, cited earlier, “representations of violence are both descriptive and performative: not merely involved in staging and framing specific acts of violence, but also of producing the context in which violence is rationalized and excused as a symptom of inter-cultural encounter” (2009, 6). The “formative” nature of the relationship between theatricality and violence that Ismail describes and that Anderson and Menon point to reflects not only the sense in which theatricality is available to be used in service of violence, but also the fact that violence is, as Benjamin Noys suggests, “intrinsic to the very act of representation itself” (2013, 12). He explains: Theoretical analysis suggests that, in fact, violence is essential to representation, to language, and to the image. It is “empirical” violence, or representations thereof, that is derivative from this “fundamental” violence. The result is that violence isn’t simply at the limits of representation, but rather it is an internal divide within representation. (2013, 12)

In speaking of empirical violence as “derivative” of violence embedded in representation, Noys echoes Judith Butler’s description of violence as fundamentally iterative in nature: If the scene of an originary violence is always derived, if the performative performs only on the basis of its iterability, aren’t we, as it were, “called”

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to give a hearing to what repeats itself here and conceals the violent mechanism of its iterability as it works its power, or which works its power, its violence, in and through that concealment. (1991, 1304)

What both Noys and Butler get at is that violence not only draws upon theatrical means to deploy power, but that performativity as iterative repetition and division is in fact constitutive of violence. Thus, it becomes almost impossible for theatre to fundamentally disentangle representation from violence, even as it seeks to expose its workings. Reflecting this, many of the plays I discuss show their actor or writer characters finally reaching a kind of existential dead end: At the end of Kiss, for example, the actors are described as “defeated” (Calderón 2014, 100), Drury’s We Are Proud to Present shows the actors at a loss for words. Metatheatrical dramaturgies are therefore a way of beginning to acknowledge the coimplication of theatrical practices and violence. Indeed, one might suggest that one of the motivating impulses of postdramatic theatre generally is the desire to avoid the violence inherent in dramatic identification; that is, by eschewing conventional modes of theatrical representation such works attempt to bypass what Ridout describes as theatre’s “wrongness” (2006, 16). Through their focus on what Noys describes as the point of “admission of violence into representation” (2013, 16), metatheatrical responses to violence foreground the “internal divide” that he describes and by staging “divided” representation, situate themselves in what Teresa Macías describes as the “narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation” (2016, 20). She writes: The impossibility of freeing ourselves from the violence of representation requires that we recognize that the space between violence and its representation […] is one of uncertainty, insecurity and diffuseness, and a quicksand that is always shifting and always at risk of falling through, of failing. It is a place not only in which we are always working with representations on top of representation and with the failures of representation, but also in which our own representational practices fail, and their failures need to be shown. (2016, 37–8)

Metatheatrical devices serve in part to recognize this in-between space and to call attention to it through intentionally breaching the border between the real and the theatrical. Indeed, Ridout suggests that “if the promise of performance is to have redemptive force […] it has it only insofar as

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it remains in dialectical tension with the theatre that it constantly seeks to transcend” (2006, 4). Thus, in many ways the more these plays push against the role that theatre has to play in mediating violence, the more they affirm it. As Ridout writes of theatre generally: “it is when it goes wrong, falls short of grace, that theatre is most itself” (29). If violence is foremost a form of objectifying the other, and if theatre is forever implicated in violence by its reliance on objectification by way of representation, then metatheatricality stages this irresolvable tension as a way of trying to break the “deadlock” of despair, suggesting that by embracing complexity and contradiction, theatre might begin, as Butler suggests, to “give hearing” to violence. Significantly, such hearing requires what Helena Grehan calls “the capacity to listen slowly and deeply,” asking listeners to “attune” themselves “to what is being said in all its complexity and to value the interpretive act, the act of attending before we move into the gap in which the contractions and ambivalences of our response might emerge” (2019, 54). In its deconstructive sensibility, metatheatricality may create the conditions required for this kind of slow listening to occur

Metatheatricality and Violence What, then, does theatre look like when it situates itself in the gap between violence and its representation? In this section I briefly identify four key ways in which metatheatrical devices attempt to address the problems I’ve just outlined, suggesting that: metatheatricality foregrounds the creative decision-making process that informs the act of representation; that it emphasizes the structural causes of violence; that it deauthorizes representational privilege; and that it reminds us that spectatorship is never neutral. These categories do not constitute a taxonomy as such but rather broadly describe the overlapping features of the texts to be discussed. I used the term “attempt” advisedly in reflecting on the effects of these devices. As I have just argued, violence can never be completely expelled from the process of representation. However, by foregrounding and dramatizing this bind, I suggest that the various authors discussed in this book, for the most part, bring a great deal of sensitivity and care to the work of addressing violence, in turn providing a highly nuanced version of the kind of contemplative engagement that Nevitt describes when she writes: “Theatre, whether it directly represents real-world examples or employs fiction and fantasy to explore violent possibilities, provides

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us with space, focus and stimuli for a concentrated consideration of the subject” (2013, 9). Metatheatricality Foregrounds the Creative Decision-Making Process In the first instance, metatheatricality stages a critique of theatrical practices by foregrounding the creative decision-making process that informs the act of representation, thereby drawing attention to its various political and ethical dimensions. Indeed, this decision-making often becomes the drama. This is certainly the case in We Are Proud to Present, where the actors argue continually about how they should proceed. The metatheatrical second act of Kiss similarly wrestles with the actors’ problematic approach to trying to stage the Syrian play that they have found. By putting the actors in dialogue with the Syrian author (or so we are led to believe), Calderón emphasizes the political poverty of their creative decision-making process. Similarly, Tim Crouch’s The Author is painful in its exposure of the ethical limits that its creators are willing to trample. One actor remarks on her good fortune in the research process of having met a woman who had been raped by her father: “That’s just like my character, I said!” (2011, 185). Through focusing on the creative labour of representation, these works show the myriad complex decisions made in the process of refining a work for presentation. In the case of dramaturgies of violence, the agency of artists and their ability or willingness to use this agency to combat violent objectification is what is at stake. In exposing the mechanisms of economies of creation and the various factors that influence them, these plays emphasize the contingency and subjectivity of the construction of narratives of violence. In the same way that Macías reflects on her own practice as archivist of violence—“My own representation of violence was representation piled on top of other representations, and my own writing of the representation of violence was itself a violence of representation” (2016, 32)—the plays discussed show that any theatrical reckoning with violence cannot separate itself from the reality of violence as it bears out in the world. Indeed, as Drury shows in We Are Proud to Present, to do so is itself a form of violence that, in the case of her play, denies the persistence of violent racism in contemporary American life.

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Metatheatricality Emphasizes the Structural Causes of Violence In its representational transparency—or at least the illusion of this—a “behind the scenes” approach emphasizes the structural causes of violence and indeed its structural consistency. Moreover, it implicates theatre in relation to those causes in the sense that Ismail writes of Syria, “[i]n the forms of violence enacted, organised mimesis dominates” (2018, 183). Crouch, for example, draws obvious parallels between the carelessness of the actor just described in The Author and the absence of care—the readiness to objectify the other—that underlies violent ideology. In We Are Proud to Present, Drury draws connections between the racialization of acting methodology, normative dramaturgy and the white privilege that fuels violent racism. In Fairview, she extends this structural critique, this time directly including the audience in her calling out of the kinship of racial violence and representational bias. The play strikingly illustrates how metatheatricality can be used to show the processes of both making representation and watching representation, and the politics that privilege one particular version of the represented “real.” Ontroerend Goed’s Audience similarly aims to suggest that theatre may at times serve as a vehicle that rehearses real world violence, dulling spectators’ willingness or capacity to intervene when they see violence in real life. Ella Hickson’s The Author certainly focuses specifically on structural inequality and its impact. By locating theatre within a broader paradigm of patriarchal capitalism, she queries whether it is capable of serving as a form of either protest or healing while it remains captive to such hegemonic structures. If theatre is typically thought of as a type of “mirror” of the real, then metatheatricality serves to show us not only the distortions of that mirror, but also reflects how theatre itself is located within the machinery of objectification. As Ismail writes, “performances [of violence] have their own logic and processes. They generate and follow templates and scripts in which mimicry and parody are at work” (2018, 184). By using selfreflexive mimicry and parody, metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence begin to highlight the “kinship” between theatricality and violence. Metatheatricality Deauthorizes Representational Privilege In both exposing the representational process and showing its implication in structures of violence, metatheatrical texts playfully “deauthorize” theatre’s privileges as a representational medium. By privilege, I refer

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both to the general privilege of representation—choosing what is represented and to whom—and theatre’s specific claims for the value of its liveness and immediacy—the sense in which, as Nevitt writes, it makes distant violence intimately close (2013, 8). In the plays discussed, theatre is not simply the staging ground for multiple unresolved intersecting perspectives, but is itself included as an influencing and implicated factor in the real-world causes and effects of violence. Moreover, metatheatrical scenarios such as Calderón’s highlight the precarity—even with the best of intentions—of appropriation, highlighting the pitfalls of illinformed consciousness raising. Such an approach exposes the solipsism of artists who may be more interested in their artistic labour than in the reality that they are attempting to depict. As Cole asks: “Is the topic merely a professional opportunity or is it part of a long-term commitment to an issue, problem or people?” (2015, 129). Certainly, this is a criticism that could be made of Manifesto 2083 which, rather than focussing on the effects of Breivik’s actions on his victims, instead casts the actor in the metatheatrical monodrama as victim-by-proxy of Breivik’s ideology. Theatre is itself put under the spotlight in these plays and is often revealed as wanting. Such framing resists assuming an authoritative position, implicitly ceding authority to the real experiences that it acknowledges it is unable to represent fully or adequately. Accordingly, metatheatrical responses to violence are often deeply ambivalent in ways that, as Grehan writes, provoke their audiences to “detailed consideration and response” (2009, 10). Metatheatricality Reminds Us That Spectatorship Is Never Neutral The kind of ambivalence apparent in depictions of writing and acting in a number of the plays discussed in this monograph also extends to the audience in the manner that Grehan suggests, challenging spectators to consider the ethical and political relationship that they have to what is being represented to and for them. In the published introduction to The Author, Crouch writes that the narrative foremost presents “the dynamic of ‘wanting to see’” (2011, 164). “The request the play makes,” Crouch writes, “is for us to be okay about ourselves, to gently see ourselves and ourselves seeing” (164). Redhill’s Goodness depicts a playwright’s struggle with the weight of genocidal history but by explicitly positioning him as a witness, dramatizes not only the act of writing but equally the act of spectatorship. “Michael” asks the audience at the

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end of the play: “How does it feel to be out there in the dark? Just watching. Invisible but still a part of everything? A part of this ? How does that feel” (2005, 102)? Through their deconstructive approach to the theatrical event, the metatheatrical plays I discuss necessarily, either implicitly or explicitly, include the audience in their critique. Ontroerend Goed’s Audience, for example, makes the audience directly complicit in the harassment and bullying of a spectator and then calls them to account for their failure to intervene. In examining such metatheatrical depictions of authorship, I draw from Nicholas Ridout’s recent examination of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and spectatorship where he suggests that: “There is indeed a view of the world that has been chosen by and for the bourgeoisie, which places at a spectatorial distance the world in which its own hegemony is the source of suffering, and which has strong affinities and historical connections to the practice of going to the theatre” (2020, 12). That is, the spectatorial paradigm is itself deeply embedded in the hegemonic exercise of power. For dramaturgies of violence this is particularly significant in that they directly confront our seeming helplessness in the face of violent objectification where “confronted with the suffering of others, onstage, spectators can do nothing, except make a full acknowledgement of that suffering” (11). This suffering “matters” to us, as Ridout remarks, but at the same time we are aware that there is “nothing [we] can do about it” (11). Through including spectators in their analysis of the implication of theatre in structures of violence, metatheatrical dramaturgies draw attention to spectators’ participation in the circulation of economies of violence; certainly, Drury’s Fairview forcefully makes this point when it calls white spectators onto the stage, asking them to take on the role of being watched. To summarize: metatheatricality mitigates the risks of reanimating violence by keeping the audience aware of the act of showing itself and the political and ethical implications that flow from this; it resists simplified narratives by exposing the precarity and contingencies of representation, and attempts to recognize the power relations of appropriation; metatheatrical devices remind us that we must take great care with representations of violence and that we need to acknowledge the limits of our ability to fully comprehend the sufferings of others. In many ways, metatheatrical doubling is a way of parodically undermining what René Girard in his discussion of violence and mimesis calls the iterative “monstrous doubling” of violence at the core of its mimetic structure.

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Chris Fleming explains: “[Girard] observes that, as rivalry and combativeness between individuals intensifies, characteristics that had previously distinguished them begin to dissolve—the antagonists effectively become ‘doubles’ of each other: ‘When all differences have been eliminated, we say that antagonists are doubles’” (2004, 42). In his work Girard draws extensively on examples from dramatic literature, tragedy in particular, to indicate this kind of antagonism where “conflict stretches on interminably” (qtd. in Fleming (2004, p. 43). Metatheatre, therefore, may be describes as an attempted interruption of a circularity where “conflict does not merely produce doubling […] it actually depends on it” (p. 42). Importantly, by “doubling” or multiplying what is represented in the sense indicated by Hornby when he describes the audience “seeing double,” metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence tap into a core theatrical anxiety, which is that theatre as an imitative form risks becoming the “monstrous” double of the thing that it imitates in order to oppose. Tim Crouch’s play The Author certainly expresses this fear as his actors unfold an account of essentially doing violence through the process of rehearsing and staging a violent play. At the same time, the critically reflexive double may itself become ensnared in the kind of mimetic antagonism that Girard describes. That is, in the case of a play like The Author, the more the antagonism between inner and out play increases, intensifying the critique that Crouch builds of theatrical approaches to violence, the more the outer play, which itself enacts violence through its description, risks becoming self-same as the very object of its criticism. Such dramaturgy ultimately deflects attention away from victims of violence and back to the artist-subject. As Erik Ehn remarks, we may be left with a situation where “the subject of witness becomes the virtue of the witness (replacing the suffering of what we see with the suffering of our seeing)” (qtd. in Willis 2014a, 400). This study does not, therefore, forward an argument for metatheatricality as a “preferred” response to the challenges of staging violent subject matter, but rather suggests that an analysis of such plays helps us to understand more deeply the very problems that they are attempting to deal with. At its most effective, a metatheatrical approach demands that we assert solidarity with those who have suffered, while at the time ceding authority over the act of storytelling. Only when this stance is taken, these plays seem to suggest, can the act of representation begin to respond to the challenges of the “formative” relationship between theatricality and violence that I have outlined.

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Book Structure The book’s chapters are organized according to three areas: metatheatrical depictions of actors—Chapters 2 and 3, metatheatrical depictions of authors—Chapters 4 and 5, and metatheatrical depictions of spectatorship—Chapter 6. Each of the chapters functions as a close reading of the play or plays that are its key focus, whilst using this analysis to address different facets of metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence. Ideas are progressed across the chapters and cumulatively sketch out my arguments about the potential of metatheatricality as an artistic response to violence. Because the book is also available electronically by chapter, some citations are repeated from chapter to chapter: to readers of the text in its entirely, I apologize for the inelegance of this repetition. There is not a single theorist or particular theoretical paradigm that I seek to apply across the chapters. Rather, I “cross stitch,” as Wai Chee Dimock puts it, between multiple critical perspectives. My intention is to provide a broad range of theoretical voices and to attend to the cultural and political specificities of each of the play texts. For example: my discussion of We Are Proud to Present draws on Tavia Nyong’o’s conception of “Afrofabulation,” Chapter 4’s analysis of The Writer engages Sara Ahmed’s notion of the feminist “killjoy,” my close reading of Calderón’s Kiss uses the work of Ismail and of Jalal Toufic to consider the implications of the author’s dramaturgy. I hope that such a multi-faceted approach is itself responsive to some of the critical concerns that the monograph explores. Following the Introduction, the monograph commences with a discussion of the work of Guillermo Calderón in order to consider in more detail the relationships between self-reflexive dramaturgy and performative violence. I begin with a brief discussion of Neva, Villa and Discurso to establish the self-reflexive dimensions of Calderón’s work before advancing to a fuller analysis of Kiss. Taking American responses to the Syrian civil war as pretext, Kiss features both a play-within-a-play and a substantial metatheatrical “break-out” where the cast of actors discuss the inner play and its staging. In its explicit metatheatricality, Kiss allows me to explore how dramatic self-reflexivity exposes the ethical precarity of a theatre that speaks for the other rather than listening to them. I draw from Salwa Ismail’s explanation of the performativity of violence as a basis for analysing the dramaturgical design of Kiss and its interplay of speaking and listening, and engage Teresa Macías’ concept of the space between violence and its representation to consider how Calderón’s

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elliptical dramaturgy encourages an attentive listening on the part of the audience. Working with Jalal Toufic’s concept of surpassing disaster, I consider the significance of the play’s metatheatrical doubleness as a means of suggesting the “unheard” cultural effects of such disaster. Chapter 3 focuses on Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present, which depicts a company of young American actors, both Black and white, attempting to devise a performance about the German colonial genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes of Namibia. My discussion is organized in three parts. The first examines how Drury dramatizes issues of historical methodology. Through its metadramatic rehearsal room conflict, Drury’s play questions the distinction between legitimate—archived and authorized—memory and “illegitimate” memory, and points to the performative dimensions of both historical memory and the archive. Secondly, I examine the connections that Drury makes between issues of historicization—what Tavia Nyong’o calls “the asymmetries and incommensurabilities of the colonial archive” (2019, 202)—and theatrical methodologies. Thirdly, through reference to both Venus Opal Reese’s notion of “embodiment” (2010, 166), and what Nyong’o in his discussion of Drury’s text calls “Afro-fabulation” (2019, 203), I consider how the play’s Black actors in particular confront not just the issue of the representation of historical Herero and Nama experiences, but finally and more crucially, the irresolution of racial violence in the US. The aim of Chapter 3, then, is to understand metatheatricality’s inherent double consciousness from a perspective that takes account of the structural violence of racism and, moreover, the relationship of that violence to theatrical conventions. Chapter 4 turns to the subject of authorship and draws on three key case studies to frame the discussion: Michael Redhill’s Goodness and subsequent documentary made about the play’s performance in Rwanda, Goodness in Rwanda, and Erik Ehn’s Thistle, part of his series of seventeen plays about genocide, Soulographie. In particular, I am interested in how these texts frame the theatrical author as what Jenn Stephenson calls “performative witness” (2008, 98), or what Ehn describes as “witness by proxy” (2012, 5). In both Goodness and Thistle, the act of performative witness is a response to the “call” of violence with dramatic self-reflexivity grounded in a sense of authorial responsibility. In my focus on how each play stages the act of witness-by-proxy, I am most interested in how the plays and documentary balance exploration of the effect of the act of listening on the hearer, and focus on the teller, i.e., the one who has

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experienced the violence to which they now testify. In this, I am led by Kelly Oliver’s work on the relationship between violence and subjectivity where the victim of violence comes into being as a subject through their ability to testify to what they have experienced. Oliver’s basic premise presents a challenge for metatheatrical plays that dramatize the accounts of the witnesses: how do their authors make sure that the self-reflexive framework within which they position themselves does not dominate the account of the witness? I suggest that without careful attention to subjectivity, metatheatrical self-address may inadvertently reinstate the power dynamics that render the violently othered subject as object. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s invocation of the “unhappy performative” in her critique of whiteness studies—where the anti-racist promises of the whiteness studies fail to perform what they declare (Ahmed 2004)—I examine the limits of metatheatrical “witness-by-proxy,” asking: whose subjectivity is privileged in the account? Chapter 5 continues to unpack the relevance of Oliver’s work, this time examining the relationship between violence, representation and subjectivity from the perspective of gender. The key case study for the chapter is Ella’s Hickson’s The Writer, with consideration also given to Tim Crouch’s The Author and more briefly, Catherine Filloux’s Killing the Boss and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. Hickson’s play is an exemplary text for thinking about how theatre’s governing principles—economic and aesthetic—are determined by prevailing hegemonic norms that control the distribution of subject and object positions. The violence Hickson’s protagonist experiences is not the brutal sexual violence evoked in The Author, but a form of gendered objectification that violently undermines her subjectivity and agency. To think about the specifically feminist dimensions of Hickson’s use of metatheatrical devices, I therefore frame the play’s act of self-witness as a feminist act. In this, I draw from both Oliver’s understanding of the centrality of witness to subject formation and Sara Ahmed’s discussion of willfulness and feminist subjectivity. As Ahmed writes, “feminism is diagnosed as a symptom of failed subjectivity, assumed as the consequence of immature will, a will that has yet to be disciplined or straightened out” (2017, 66). Hickson’s play not only calls out this misogyny for what it is, but stages the act of calling it out. The protagonist writes herself into the dramatic narrative, bearing witness to her own experiences and vividly illustrating the obstacles that impede or silence such witness through exerting artistic “discipline” from both without and within. I consider

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how Hickson’s play seems to suggest that theatrical strategies for countering subject-destroying violence require not just the application of self-reflexive critique that exposes such violence for what it is, but must also embody forms and structures capable of expressing the experiences of those excluded from representational paradigms. Chapter 6 turns its attention to metatheatrical depictions of spectatorship through two principal case studies, Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview. In its format, the chapter departs somewhat from the structure of the rest of the chapters: Audience and Fairview are used as exemplars to open and close the chapter, while in between I return to the texts previously discussed in order to consider how they too stage the role of the spectator. I draw from Ridout’s conceptualization of spectatorship in his analysis of bourgeois subjectivity to understand the political dimensions of how spectatorship is framed in each of the plays. Ridout’s argument provides a compelling explanation for why theatremakers turn to self-reflexivity when dealing with violence in that it is a way of recognizing the structural relationship between theatre, violence and spectatorship. Even if the position of the spectator is not foregrounded in each of these dramas, I suggest it is in fact central to the problems that they address. That is, most of the dramas discussed recognize that the very act of spectatorship is part of an ideological machinery that exerts violence as a way of ensuring its own viability and prosperity. I will finally suggest that the use of metatheatricality by dramatists can disturb metanarratives of violence embedded in hegemonic structures, but that such efficacy is contingent and I outline the conditions required for it to do so. Chapter 7 provides a brief conclusion that summarizes the monograph’s appraisal of what is required for metatheatricality to effectively challenge violent paradigms. It is book-ended by short discussions of two recent works, Brokentalkers’ 2020 Meltdown, and Te Pou Theatre’s 2021 Racists Anonymous. These short case studies allow me to return to the artistic bind that Solnit and Rousset identify, which I opened this chapter with: what precisely is the role of theatre in face of the crises that are shaping the twenty-first century? My final reflection is on the notion of dramaturgy as a form of action and a catalyst for change, and I consider the plays discussed that most effectively model this action.

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Lastly… In the same way that I argue that theatre-makers must consider their own subject position when representing violence, I must do the same when writing about the relationship between theatricality and violence. This book is not about me—and I do not propose to self-reflexively weave myself into the analysis—but it is nonetheless by me and so my own context needs to be acknowledged. I am a cis woman P¯akeh¯a (of European decent) New Zealander, writing from an environment shaped by the violence of the colonial project and the ongoing violence of its neoliberal instantiation. Some of the plays I discuss are written by authors with a similar place in the global genealogy of violenc—Canadian author Michael Redhill, British artist Tim Crouch. My analysis of these plays is perhaps most critical because they in certain ways mirror my own subject position. However, I also address a range of plays that fall outside of the scope of my own experience and in these cases I have aimed to be guided by critical voices with that expertise and to be attentive to not “colonizing” these plays with my analysis. I am aware, as Linda-Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies, that “research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions” (1999, 5). In the range of texts I address and in the diversity of critical voices I put in conversation with those texts, I hope that the monograph might contribute to the ongoing work required of theatre and performance studies to address the biases that shape our own critical paradigms.

References Abel, Lionel. 1963. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York: Hill and Wang. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism.” Borderlands E-journal 3 (2). ———. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, Patrick, and Jisha Menon. 2009. Violence Performed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aragay, Mireia. 2014. “To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship.” In Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre, edited by Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte, 1–24. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aragay, Mireia, and Enric Monforte, eds. 2014. Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Anti-theatrical Prejudice. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Breed, Ananda. 2008. “Performing the Nation: Theatre in Post-Genocide Rwanda.” TDR 52 (1): 32–50. Burns, Elizabeth. 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. London: Longman. Butler, Judith. 1991. “A Note on Performative Acts of Violence.” Cardozo Law Review 13 (4): 1303–1304. Calderón, Guillermo. 2013. “Discurso.” Theatre 43 (2): 98–119. ———. 2014. Kiss. Unpublished. ———. 2016. Neva. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Cole, Catherine M. 2015. “Representing Genocide at Home: Ishi, Again.” In Theatre and Human Rights after 1945, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, 128–150. Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Copenhagen Post. 2012. “Manifest 2083 Brings International Attention Back to Mass Murderer.” Copenhagen Post, October 15. http://cphpost.dk/news/ culture/manifest-2083-brings-international-attention-back-to-mass-murderer. html. Crouch, Tim. 2011. Plays One. London: Oberon Books. Cummings, Lindsay B. 2016. Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2013. “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats.” Critical Enquiry 39 (4): 732–753. Drury, Jackie Sibblies. 2012. We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915. New York: In Stage Press. Drury, Jackie Sibblies, and Erik Ehn. 2012. “Erik Ehn and Jackie Sibblies Drury in Conversation” [post-show talback]. New York: Soho Rep Theatre. https://sohorep.org/erik-ehn-and-jackie-sibblies-drury-in-conversation Duggan, Patrick. 2012. Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance. Manchester: Machester University Press. Ehn, Erik. 2012. Soulographie: Our Genocides. Chicago: 53rd State Press. ———. 2021. “Still Small: Contemplation in Action.” Performance Paradigm 16: Performance and Radical Kindness: 74–98. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. 2018. Rape on the Contemporary Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. 2003. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Fleming, Chris. 2004. René Girard: Violence and Mimesis. Cambridge: Polity. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Gluhovic, Milija. 2013. Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. “Slow Listening: The Ethics and Politics of Paying Attention, Or Shut Up and Listen.” Performance Research 24 (8): 53–58. Grochala, Sarah. 2017. The Contemporary Political Play. London: Bloomsbury. Haughton, Miriam. 2018. Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hawkes, Colleen, and Glenn McConnell. 2017. “Reviewer Refuses to Rate Anders Breivik Massacre Show, Saying it Glorifies Mass Murder.” Stuff , 25 Feb. https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/stage-and-theatre/898 01816/reviewer-refuses-to-rate-anders-breivik-massacre-show-saying-it-glorif ies-mass-murder. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Ismail, Salwa. 2018. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon: Routledge. Little, Suzanne. 2015. “Repeating Repetition.” Performance Research 20 (5): 44–50. Little, Suzanne. 2017. “The Witness Turn in the Performance of Violence, Trauma, and the Real.” In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, edited by Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c and Stuart Young, 43–64. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Luckhurst, Mary, and Emilie Morin, eds. 2015. Theatre and Human Rights After 1945: Things Unspeakable. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macías, Teresa. 2016. “Between Violence and its Representation: Ethics, Archival Research, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Telling of Torture Stories.” Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity and Practice 5 (1): 20–45. Martin, Carol. 2013. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mason, David. 2013. “Metatheatre and Consciousness.” In Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies, edited by Jade Rosina McCutcheon and Barbara Sellers-Young, 209–218. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Nevitt, Lucy. 2013. Theatre & Violence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Noys, Benjamin. 2013. “The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence.” In Violence and the Limits of Representation, edited by Graham Matthews and Sam Goodman, 12–27. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2019. “Does Staging Historical Trauma Re-enact It?” In Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms, 200–210. London: Bloomsbury. O’Toole, Emer, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c, and Stuart Young, eds. 2017. Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Witnessing Subjectivity.” In Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, edited by Shaun Gallagher, Stephen Watson, Philippe Brun, and Philippe Romanski, 180–204. Rouen: l’Université de Rouen. Pelias, Ronald J. 1991. “Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement.” Theatre Research International 16 (2): 142–152. Rae, Paul. 2009. Theatre & Human Rights. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rand, Gord, and John Westheuser, dirs. 2013. Goodness in Rwanda [film]. Canada. Rebellato, Dan. 2013. “Exit the Author.” In Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, edited by Vicky Angelaki, 9–31. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Redhill, Michael. 2005. Goodness. Toronto: Coach House Books. Reese, Venus Opal. 2010. “Keeping It Real Without Selling Out: Towards Confronting and Triumphing Over Racially-Specific Barriers in American Actor Training.” In The Politics of American Actor Training, edited by Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud, 162–76. New York: Routledge. Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ridout, Nicholas. 2009. Theatre & Ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Scenes from Bourgeois Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rodino-Colocino, Michelle. 2018. “Me too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy.” Communication and Critical/cultural Studies 15 (1): 96–100. Rousset, Oliva, and Helena Grehan. 2020. “Expanding Networks of Care: The Humanitarian Storytelling of Olivia Rousset.” Performance Paradigm 15: 81–97. Ruhl, Sarah. 2010. Passion Play. New York: Samuel French. Samuels, Lisa. 2021. “Withness in Kind.” Performance Paradigm 16: Performance and Radical Kindness: 60–73. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Solnit, Rebecca. 2019. “How Change Happens.” Literary Hub. https://lithub. com/rebecca-solnit-progress-is-not-inevitable-it-takes-work/.

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Stephenson, Jenn. 2008. “The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 34 (4): 97–121. ———. 2010. “Re-Performing Microhistories: Postmodern Metatheatricality in Canadian Millennial Drama.” In Re-Reading the Postmodern, edited by Robert Stacey, 249–268. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Sylvester, Christine. 2003. “Dramaturgies of Violence in International Relations.” Borderlands 2 (2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no2_2003/ sylvester_editorial.htm. Tompkins, Joanne. 2014. Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Trezise, Bryoni. 2014. Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Upton, Carole-Anne. 2012. “Editorial.” Performing Ethos 3 (1): 3–5. Vanhaesebrouck, Karel. 2016. “Reconsidering Metatheatricality: Towards a Baroque Understanding of Postdramatic Theatre.” In Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, edited by Angela Ndalianis and Peter Krieger Walter Moser, 48–75. Leiden: Brill. Van Kerkhoven, Marianne. 2009. “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century.” Performance Research 14 (3): 7–11. Wade, Leslie A. 2009. “Sublime Trauma: The Violence of the Ethical Encounter.” In Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, edited by Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, 15–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wald, Christina. 2007. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. WHO. 2014. Global Status Report on Violence Prevention World Health Organization (Geneva). https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978924156 4793. Willis, Emma. 2014a. “Emancipated Spectatorship and Subjective Drift: Understanding the Work of the Spectator in Erik Ehn’s Soulographie.” Theatre Journal 66 (3): 385–403. ———. 2014b. Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Worthen, W. B. 1987. “Review of Drama, Metadrama and Perception by Richard Hornby.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 29 (2): 261–4. Young, Stuart. 2017. “The Ethics of the Representation of the Real People and Their Stories in Verbatim Theatre.” In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adapation and Dramaturgy, edited by Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c, and Stuart Young Emer O’Toole, 21–42. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi.

CHAPTER 2

Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works

Introduction The first two chapters of this monograph focus on dramaturgies of violence featuring metatheatrical depictions of actors. In this chapter, I turn to the work of Guillermo Calderón, in particular his metadrama, Kiss (2016), which shows four American actors trying to stage a contemporary Syrian play found by the cast on the internet. Self-reflexive depictions of actors are amongst the most explicit examples of metadrama, foregrounding the processes and choices involved in the construction of theatrical representations. The backstage genre has long been used in drama, particularly in comic genres—from Molière’s Rehearsal at Versailles to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off to the more recent The Play That Goes Wrong. As the title of The Play That Goes Wrong indicates, it is the mistakes, calamities and accidents that make comic iterations of the genre work as such texts play upon the contingencies of life both onstage and off. In her analysis of Rehearsal at Versailles , for example, Abby Zanger writes that Molière “defines performed representation as a dialogical phenomenon in which the interrupting or interfering elements are shown to be central to the representation” (1986, 180). The appeal of being spectator to the contingencies and failures of representation that Zanger points to, whether by interruption, actorly incompetence or other external forces, stems, Richard Hornby suggests, from the sense in which they illustrate the performative dimensions of everyday © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_2

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life: “When the prevalent view is that the world is in some way illusory or false, then the play within the play becomes a metaphor for life itself” (1986, 45). Put otherwise, such satiric metadrama illustrates the distance between reality and repesentation, which in turn becomes a point of identification—recognition—for the audience. Thematically, such dramatizations of representational contingency and failure undermine power-as-performed, often showing those with authority to be inept “players.” The interest in this monograph is in more dramatic inflections of the “wrongness” that characterizes the comic examples just given. When metatheatrical techniques are employed in a dramatic mode, selfreflexive depictions of actors gesture to the same gap between reality and representation given in comic forms, but more deeply challenge the very act of theatrical representation itself and its implication in structures of power. As noted in the Introduction, there is a significant relationship between theatrical representation and violence, which in this chapter I will refer to as “performative violence.” Performative violence may be thought of in two ways. Firstly, there is performative violence in the sense meant by Jeffrey S. Juris: “symbolic ritual enactments of violent interaction with a predominant emphasis on communication and cultural expression” (2005, 415). Or, as Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon describe: “political resistors have strategically organized around their own substantial power to stage the image and the effects of violence in photographs, low-tech video, street theatre, protests, documentaries, experimental films, pirate television shows, and other performance genres” (1–2). Here, performative violence functions as a form of counter-cultural action (protest), and appropriates the embodied lexicon of violence as a way of drawing attention to its material effects. This mimetic form of performative violence only exists, however, because of the relationship between violence and performance in the first place. This is the second sense in which violence can be described as “performative.” In one sense, this performativity relates to the “spectacular” elements of violence—its performed representations of its own power: its ability to intimidate, dominate, legislate. As Salwa Ismail, political theorist, writes: Violence performs by communicating political messages and producing meanings. Relatedly, it performs by acting on its victims and perpetrators. Performances of violence generate ways of thinking, feeling and relating to

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the world. Thus, the performativity of violence is materialised through its formative powers. (2018, 160)

As Ismail observes, the instrumentality of performative violence isn’t simply its material effects, but the ways in which it shapes perception and feeling. This broader understanding of violence is important in that it recognizes performative violence as self-constituting in the sense given by Judith Butler: If the scene of an originary violence is always derived, if the performative performs only on the basis of its iterability, aren’t we, as it were, “called” to give a hearing to what repeats itself here and conceals the violent mechanism of its iterability as it works its power, or which works its power, its violence, in and through that concealment. (1991, 1304)

Elsewhere Butler gives the example of police racism to illustrate the performative iterability of violence: “[T]he black body is circumscribed as dangerous, prior to any gesture, any raising of the hand, and the infantilized white reader is positioned in the scene as one who is helpless in relation to that black body, as one definitively in need of protection by […] the police” (1993, 10). If we understand violence to be performative in this broader sense of iterability, then we see both part of the motivation for using self-reflexive devices to stage violence—a deconstructive approach to violence that might reveal the concealed structures that Butler and Ismail point to—but also a problem, which is that theatrical representations of violence, even if self-reflexive, may themselves participate in the iteration of violence, not least because of the iterative nature of mimesis itself. Indeed, René Girard (drawing from the examples of Greek tragedy) describes violence as relying on reciprocal mimetic interplay between antagonists (1977, 143). Certainly, the theatrical reiteration of violence is a key concern in Calderón’s Kiss, where the American actors’ appropriation of the Syrian text fails to grasp what is concealed in that text as a form of resistance to violence, thereby not so much refusing violence as extending it. For, if violence conceals its originary aporia, so too is concealment—“fugitivity” as Fred Moten writes—a counter-strategy for refusing violent iteration. As Moten remarks in the American context, “White supremacist intellectual culture in America is committed to the regulation of disorder, the capture of the fugitive” (2018, 109). The tension that Calderón’s play stages is between, on the one hand, the desire

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to capture fugitive meaning and to translate it into something legible for an American audience, and, on the other, the demands of the fugitive for agential autonomy in ways that challenge representational authority. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the relationship between performative violence and self-reflexive dramaturgy, examined by way of an analysis of the work of Calderón. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I briefly consider Calderón’s other plays translated into English to describe how he dramaturgically renders the core theatrical conflict between reiterating and refusing violence described above. In the second, I provide a detailed critical description of Kiss with a focus on the construction of the roles of the actors, particularly the critique that Calderón stages during the metatheatrical middle section of the play. Lastly, I draw from Ismail’s explanation of the performativity of violence in the Syrian context as a basis for analysing the significance of the dramaturgical design of Kiss. I identify a pattern of ellipsis in the play and suggest that this gives presence to what otherwise cannot be spoken as a way of refusing the script of performative violence. I return to the image of the space between violence and its representation forwarded by Teresa Macías and discussed in the Introduction to consider how Calderón’s script attempts to invoke such a space through an elliptical dramaturgy. I build upon this idea by introducing Lebanese artist and theorist Jalal Toufic’s concept of the “surpassing disaster,” which I use both to scrutinize Calderón’s curious use of the soap opera form within Kiss, and also to think about the centrality of repetition to the play’s dramaturgy and its politics.

“Shut-In, but Hearing the Gunshots” Calderón is widely regarded as one of Chile’s foremost theatre artists. His political works have taken on subjects including Chile’s dictatorship, the nature of activism, memorialization of atrocity, political discourse and the 2019 Chilean protest movement, Estallido Social. While Kiss is his most explicitly metatheatrical work, self-reflexivity features throughout his plays; Neva, for example, takes place in a rehearsal room in 1905 St Petersberg while outside striking workers are gunned down in the streets. Although Kiss is Calderón’s first English language play, his scripts have recently begun to be translated into English and have been performed at venues such as the Royal Court Theater in London (B, 2017), and the Public Theater in New York City (Neva, 2013). While the Syrian

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conflict might seem at first a peculiar choice of topic for Calderón, he has certainly lived through the state of “surpassing disaster” in his own country and is very much concerned with the role of theatre in the reconstruction—or “resurrection” as Toufic describes it—of aesthetic and civic traditions. Indeed, much of his body of work is firmly located in the Chilean context and concerned with the legacies of the violence of the Pinochet dictatorship. Villa and Discurso are a paired set of plays that deal with how to memorialize the trauma of the dictatorship as well as the precarity of political leadership in a new democratic context respectively. B turns its attention to the wave of noise bombings carried out by anarchists in the early 2000s. Escuela (translated by Alexandra Ripp but not available in English in publication) concerns itself with the guerrilla activists who precipitated the departure of Pinochet. Clase (untranslated) explored the well-known Chilean student protests of 2011–2013. In a recent interview addressing the relationship between theatre and political change, Calderón remarked: We know that it’s going to be very difficult to enact major change, but we try anyway. So in a way we are just fighting the political system. There is some sense of failure embedded, and other possibility of failure embedded in the political field. Our theatre runs parallel to the difficulties of political transformation. (“Guillermo Calderón on Protest, Lockdown, and Dragón” 2021)

Calderón’s emphasis on persistence despite failure—a form of artistic endurance marked by a willingness to repeatedly fall short and yet continue—illustrates the character of his self-reflexive political dramaturgy. Moreover, he posits a parallelism between theatrical forms and political structures. In this sense, the deconstructive elements of his plays are not simply an expression of the difficulty of theatrically representing violence and political struggle, but also an expression of the difficulties of political action and political change. Attention to acting in his plays is therefore a way of asking broader questions about how social actors, meant in the broadest sense, must perform in order to effectively challenge violence, oppression and inequality. In this section I want to highlight some of the key facets of this questioning and to examine how these questions are expressed both thematically and dramaturgically.

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In the first instance, there is a tension that runs through Calderón’s works between the necessity of art—demonstrated by his own considerable output of political plays—and art’s insufficiencies in the face of political violence. Characters in his plays variously criticize art as escapist, reductive or “emprettifying” (Calderón 2013b, 80). At worst, theatre in particular is no more than a feeling machine that produces what Michelle Rodino-Colocino (cited in the Introduction) calls “passive empathy”— “the feeling of being in another’s shoes without the risk of actually doing so” (2018, 96). Neva explores this problem in some detail. The play is set in the late nineteenth-century in a rehearsal room in Saint Petersburg. While its three actor-protagonists are rehearsing a production of The Cherry Orchard, on the streets outside a political uprising is violently quashed. The play explicitly contrasts the poetic aims of theatre with the need for revolution, ultimately finding the theatre wanting: Outside it’s a bloody Sunday, people are dying of hunger in the street and you want to put on a play. History passes by like a ghost — there is going to be a revolution. And who is idiotic enough to lock themselves in a theatre to suffer for love and for death? I’m ashamed to be an actress. It’s so selfish. It’s a bourgeois trap, a trash heap, a stable full of mares. (Calderón 2016, 66)

Spoken by the character Masha, these lines come from the lengthy excoriation of theatre’s political efficacy that ends the play. Throughout the preceding action, Olga Knipper, a character based on Chekhov’s wife, has sought to draw the other two actors into a series of role-plays that dramatize the moment of Chekhov’s death. As she directs the actors, Knipper allows herself to alter the scene, to say what she was never able to and to revel in the intensity of the moment. The exercise is aimed towards her reawakening as an actor—at the very beginning of the play she declares that she has forgotten how to act and is wracked with anxiety about how the audience will receive her performance. The script emphasizes the role of feeling in the work of the actor—“maybe you should go back to making love. Maybe then you’ll start feeling again,” says Aleko to Olga after she has given a tepid performance of lines from The Cherry Orchard (31). Later, however, Aleko suggests that he can no longer act because he has never suffered enough to understand suffering: “I’m ashamed to be looked at. How can I act if I’ve never suffered enough? Sometimes I feel bad about how the poor live, but my heart has never been broken. How

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am I going to act if I’ve never cried for love” (64). There is a deliberate confusion or merging together on Calderón’s part of political conscience and personal feeling, whereby passive empathy is situated as complicit in the perpetuation of violence. That is, Aleko reveals the ethical precarity of his position, which in fact only aims towards empathy in order to enable him to act truthfully as opposed to live truthfully. The relationship between politics, truth and art is therefore vexed. As Masha explains to the others the violence occurring outside, Olga tries to reassure her of the validity of their role as artists: Don’t burn anything, Masha. Maybe Russia will catch fire on its own. Whatever happens, we will always have art. Perhaps a long time will pass and everything will stay the same. There will still be poor people, there will still be rich people, there will still be soldiers shooting people in the street. But we will always be able to go on dreaming and we’ll be able to go on saying: nothing changes, everything stays the same, we must burn it all. (60)

Olga categorizes art as of a higher order than reality and revolution as nothing more than a passing dream. Indeed, in the lines that follow the passage above, Olga draws Aleko into an improvised scene in which they imagine that there was no revolution and Olga and Anton grow old together. Ultimately, the play refuses such fantastical escapism: How many times can one say I love you and I love you not? I’m tired of it. How many times can you cry and claim truth onstage? And be more real and find new symbols? Enough […] Do you want to do something that’s real? Go out into the street and see the simple power of political violence.” (66–7)

Certainly, political violence is an abiding theme across Calderón’s plays, which challenge the emancipatory capacity of theatre in its bourgeois form at the same time as the author engages the theatrical situation to examine the relationship between the real, political violence and artistic imagination. One must therefore look beyond the damning of theatrical form in Neva—“The theatre is shit. Actors are shit”—towards the conflict that Calderón stages between the real and its theatrical interlocuters (67). The criticism of theatre in this context is that it satisfies itself with a realm of simulated feeling and empathy that, as Emmanuel Levinas worried of

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art in general, substitutes itself for real-world action: “We find appeasement when, beyond the invitations to comprehend and act, we throw ourselves into the rhythm of a reality which solicits only its admission into a book or painting” (1996, 141–2). In the theatrical context, dramas may allow audiences to satisfy themselves with a kind of political or activist “tourism.” Through their self-reflexive aspects, Calderón’s plays thwart this desire by reminding us over and over of the susceptibility of both art in general and theatre in particular to the same logics of violence that apply in the political realm, a point I will expand on in the next section with reference to Ismail’s work. Violence in Calderón’s plays is sometimes present and ongoing—Kiss’s inner play “Boosa” and Neva, for example, which take place with bombs falling outside and guns shots fired respectively. In these cases, theatre and violence are set directly beside one another as a means of both measuring the relevance of theatre to political resistance and pointing to the theatricality of political violence. In other plays, while the time of political violence may seem to have passed its effects persist in the present in ways that continue to effect representational practices. Villa features three women, Carla, Francisca and Macarena, who have been appointed to decide what should be done with the ruins of Villa Grimaldi, a site at which political prisoners under Pinochet’s regime were tortured and executed. The play begins with the committee debating two options: an exacting reconstruction of the Villa that lays bare its violent function or a museum that employs an artistic pedagogy to communicate the site’s history. Theatricality informs both options. Of the former, Carla remarks that the aim would be: To create a sort of realist Disneyland reality. So people would feel like they’re feeling what the people who felt must have felt. And we’d make the people who visit feel like prisoners. And we’d make them wait, we’d ask them their names, we’d separate the women from the men. Anyway, we’d make them suffer. (Calderón 2013b, 73)

The concept relies on the kind of passive empathic identification that Rodino-Colocino describes. The museum option, however, is equally problematic. When Macarena argues that “artistic art gives meaning to the thing in the end” she cannot qualify how it does this: “art does what art does and … Well, you know what I mean; don’t make me explain it…”

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(79). Francisca argues that art may obscure the reality of experience, or “emprettify” it (80), which Carla endorses: If you put art in there, on the one hand you can have someone on the rack, the dog […] Terrible things. But on the other hand, you can also put a work of art up, something pretty. And, wow, beauty triumphed, the human spirit triumphed, peace triumphed […] When actually, the truth is there is no salvation here or anything: women die here, raped and covered in dog shit. (81)

The problem that underpins the whole enterprise, in a sense, is that political violence is unending—it never fully withdraws. This is not simply because trauma by its very nature is irresolvable, but also because there is no simple dividing line between the time of political violence and the time of benign democracy. Violence continues and indeed, as Calderón’s plays suggest, underpins the neoliberal project. Certainly, Discurso, the fictive imagining of Michelle Bachelet’s departing speech at the end of her first tenure as president, grapples with this problem. What then is the role of theatre and of art in these contexts? Calderón’s plays suggest that it is not to try and depict the depths of violent experience. In Discurso, the fictional Bachelet remarks of her own experience of torture—an issue only skirted around and never directly addressed— “this story is like something to write a tragedy about. But playwrights aren’t up to a story like this” (Calderón 2013a, 118). The line is not so much a disparagement of theatre as a recognition of its limits. Certainly, the aim of Calderón’s plays is not to engender a simulacra that pretends to capture the reality of violence—to “make them [spectators] suffer.” Instead, the plays ask us to consider how violence infects everything around it—how it is “contagious” in the sense meant by Girard—from political leadership, to artistic forms, to domestic intimacy (1977, 28). In an interview with The New York Times, Calderón reflected on the impact on domestic life of the context of ongoing violence, suggesting that in Neva he wanted to create a sense of “contrast between the world outside and the domestic world […] shut-in but hearing the gunshots” (qtd. in Rohter 2013). We see such a contrast in other works—the revolutionaries in Escuela, the anarchists in their apartment in B, the “committee” in Villa, and even the actors in the theatre in Kiss. Each of these plays foreground the gap between violence and representation that Macías

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describes through their attention to liminal spaces, connecting this liminality to the existential condition of theatre itself. Calderón, for example, in a programme note for Escuela attributes a certain theatricality to the domestic spaces, noting that “maybe Escuela should provide a space in which we can reenact one of those secret teaching sessions of the past to see how disgusted or enthralled we still are with the idea of engaging in a guerrilla war for the freedom of our country” (MCA 2015 my emphasis). In their liminality and processual emphasis, Calderón’s plays locate themselves in such a zone of uncertainty, a characteristic which is reflected in the lack of resolution at the end of many of his plays. In The New York Times interview just cited, Calderón offered a revealing anecdote about his own “failure” when he described the dissonance of seeing former ministers in Pinochet’s government enjoying a performance of Neva in Santiago. This underscored for him the necessity of making his playwriting more strongly political: “I have to radicalize my work even more” he commented (qtd. in Rohter 2013). Radical dramaturgy in such a context lies precisely in clefting open the space that Macías—herself an archivist of Chilean violence—describes, and moreover in letting this inform the dramaturgical architecture of the plays. In Villa, Carla remarks: At some point you have to accept that you’re a failure. We didn’t achieve anything. It was pointless. And that truth is the truth of the truth […] When I’m swimming in the milk of my death. I’m going to be thinking. Some problems have no solution. They just don’t. (Calderón 2013b, 95)

Showing failure is not simply a matter of philosophical concern, but also a matter of letting such lack of resolution—failure in a normative dramatic sense—guide the formal properties of the work. As Judith Butler remarks: “For representation to convey the human … representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure” (2004, 144). This is where Calderón’s works seem to suggest that art may begin to usefully challenge the logic of violence. His plays are often marked by characters going round in circles, structures of rehearsal and repetition that both replay the past and anticipate the future. In each setting, the characters seem to be caught in something unending—“problems that have no solution.” In Macías’s argument for situating ourselves in “the narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation in order to turn representation into a performative, discursive and self-constituting

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ethics” (2016, 20), she ultimately suggests that it is through attentiveness to performativity that an ethical practice of representation might be arrived at. In the case of her own disciplinary practice as archivist, “performativity is in the minutae associated with research, in routine and quotidian activities, and in the professional discourses that constitute the ‘cultural locus’ of meaning on which […] I can claim belonging in certain disciplinary fields” (34). Ultimately, it is through a reflexive practice that recognizes the performativity of every aspect of the research process that a “self-constituting” ethical position might be staked out. In Calderón’s plays there is scrupulous attentiveness to both the performativity of violence and the performativity of the characters; or rather, the characters themselves dwell on the political implications of their own performativity, even if that performativity is marked by a failure to perform or a failure to act. There is also an attentiveness in Calderón’s writing to his own performativity as author. In Discurso, he repeatedly acknowledges his own presence. At the outset of the play, the fictional Bachelet remarks: I do know I’m not myself, though. It’s like there’s someone else here in my place. Someone putting words into my mouth. Some opportunist taking advantage of my body. (Calderón 2013a, 100)

This reminder of the hand of the “opportunist” playwright becomes an insistent refrain throughout. For the character of Bachelet, the author is a type of ghost. Today I feel like something’s happening to me. Before I came in, I took this speech that I’d written. I read the first few words. It’s hard to explain. I think at that moment a shadow came in through the window. And now I have a voice that isn’t mine. It’s strange. (100).

The image of the shadow that comes in through the window is striking, suggesting not just the voice of the playwright in this context, but more obliquely, figuring the role of theatre itself. That is, in the face of political violence, theatre may function as uncanny double, provoking unease and directing our attention away from the scene before us to another scene,

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the violent substructure upon which both broader society and theatrical representation rest. Lastly, I want to draw attention to the iterations of speaking and hearing that occur throughout Calderón’s work. His description of growing up amidst political conflict—“shut in but hearing the gunshots”—is significant for this chapter. In one sense, it provides an analogy for the relationship between theatre and the real where theatre functions as a type of “inside” that hears what is going on outside, which in turn suggests theatre as techne of listening. The terms of this listening are not so straightforward, however, as simply hearing and reporting “the gunshots outside.” As some of the examples I have pointed to indicate, this listening capacity moves through time, it sometimes reverses direction—Bachelet seeming to hear the voice of the writer, for example. Moreover, there is no uniformity in what is heard; that is, listening is differentiated by the subjectivity of the listener and indeed this may be a source of dramatic conflict. Self-reflexivity is a way of drawing our attention not just to the contingent conditions of listening, but also a means of asking spectators themselves to listen carefully. That is, by making transparent the conditions of representation, and by showing representation as a dynamic and ongoing process that cannot be separated from the reality of political violence, Calderón’s plays, to borrow from Butler, “give hearing” to such violence. In the next two sections, I explore further how this interplay of self-reflexive listening and performative violence unfolds in Kiss, the most explicitly metatheatrical of Calderón’s works to date.

“Bombs Are Falling from the Sky. What Else Do You Need to Know?” In Kiss, originally commissioned by the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in Germany and subsequently performed by a number of companies in North America including Woolly Mammoth (2016), Canadian Stage Company (2017), Odyssey Theatre (2017), Third Rail (2019), Calderón takes up a political and civil conflict far removed from his own geopolitical context. The “hearing” that the play gives to violence, therefore, needs to be understood in this context. Indeed, that the play draws more fully on theatrical self-reflexivity than his previous works may be read as at least partially responsive to this “outsiderness” in that it acknowledges the difficulty and limitations of trying to listen across cultural, political and geographic borders. If anything, the situation in Syria itself remains

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an absence in play, which does not provide a journalistic reporting of events in Syria (see, for example, Sherlock, Wood and Lafferty’s 2012 verbatim play, The Fear of Breathing: Stories from the Syrian Revolution). Nor does it provide the kind of insider’s perspective given in the plays of Syrian writers themselves, for example, the plays of Mohammad Al Attar, whose works have been performed in Europe, the UK and US. Instead, Calderón uses the metadramatic form to expose the ethical precarity of a theatre that speaks for the other rather than listening to them, suggesting that such “speaking for” is itself a form of representational violence. The play is composed of three main sections. The first shows a cast of four American actors performing a contemporary one-act Syrian play called “Boosa,” a “melodrama” as the actor-characters describe it. The play is set in 2014 in the Damascus apartment of Hadeel and unfolds in real time as four friends, best friends Hadeel and Bana, a soap opera actor, and their boyfriends, Ahmed and Youssif, gather to watch the latest episode of Bana’s show. Hadeel is home alone when Youssif arrives early and declares his love for her. After resisting his advances and declaring her loyalty to both Ahmed and Bana, Hadeel eventually admits that she loves Youssif too and agrees to marry him. The next person to arrive is Ahmed. He confides to Youssif that he is going to propose to Hadeel, which he does while Youssif is sent to the shops to buy cigarettes. Cornered, and unable to reveal the truth, Hadeel accepts his proposal. Last to enter is Bana, late from the set of the soap opera. In a state of agitation, she reveals that Youssif broke off their relationship the night before and that she has just kissed someone. Hadeel then confesses Youssif’s declaration of love. During this time the television is switched on, with the soap opera providing a backdrop to the onstage drama. After all the characters’ secrets have been revealed, Hadeel, who has been coughing throughout the play, collapses and dies. The play ends with Youssif wailing in grief and Bana poised to jump out of an open window. It is important to note that “Boosa,” which comprises the first part of the play, is presented to the audience without any explanation. The stage directions simply indicate a living room, kitchen and a projection on the wall that reads “Damascus 2014.” It is not until the mid-point of the play that the metatheatrical frame is revealed (and we understand that “Boosa” is a fictional creation also written by Calderón). Indeed, when the play was performed at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, reviewers were asked not to reveal the metatheatrical turn, as Charles McNulty acknowledges in his review (McNulty 2017). In this sense, Calderón’s use of an inner

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play differs from a more conventional metadramatic paradigm where the inner play sits clearly within an outer play—think “The Mousetrap,” in Hamlet for example. This means that, despite its setting in a site of violent civil conflict, the audience is drawn in the first part of the play into what is seemingly a highly a-political melodrama where the focus is on the characters’ secrets and their revelation. Thus, when the play breaks frame (as I will discuss below) audience members are required to reframe their perception—to listen more closely. While the first part of the play is firmly melodramatic, there are suggestions of the self-reflexive turn to come, principally through the role of Bana as soap opera actor. Indeed, the conflict between the characters mirrors what we might expect from a soap opera. While I will discuss the significance of Calderón’s use of the soap opera form in more detail in the next section, there are some key features of soap opera worth noting here for their impact on the thematic focus of the play and indeed its dramaturgical construction. Firstly, many television critics have addressed the significance of soap opera’s ongoing seriality and the fact that its narratives—ever “to be continued”—“refus[e] the ideological closure of other texts” (Geraghty 2005, 312). This sense of “ongoingness” prevails not just at the end of “Boosa” but also at the end of Kiss, where the actors’ attempt to make the text meaningful for an American audience fails: conflict continues in Syria and their attempt at consciousness-raising is of little to no consequence. Secondly, as Tania Modleski argues, dialogue in soap operas has two characteristic qualities: firstly, “the important thing is for a person to consider a remark’s ramifications, time for people to speak and to listen lavishly” (2008, 98); secondly, “the gap between what is intended and what is actually spoken is often very wide” (99). The emphasis on listening coupled with the gap between intention and reception is central to the meaning of Calderón’s play in which the American actors fail to understand or apprehend the distinction between what is spoken and intended. This failure necessarily includes the audience in its scope, for they too have failed to properly understand “Boosa” when it is first performed. Thirdly, soap opera often works within highly moral frameworks, using melodrama as a vehicle for “the working through of good and evil forces within a family or community” (Geraghty 2005, 313). Certainly, soap operas are an extremely popular form in Syria and a significant cultural export to the wider Arab world. They also have a history of sparking debate and tackling social and political issues. Calderón’s use of soap opera therefore has a contextual specificity. When

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the “author” explains to the actors the context of “Boosa’s” production, we see that soap opera functions within the inner play as a “fugitive” mode that contains within it the expression of feelings or experiences unable to be communicated directly. It is in the metatheatrical middle section of the play that such “fugitive” meaning becomes clear. The section begins as the actor playing Bana is perched on the window ledge. Stage directions indicate an abrupt shift: “She [Laura] takes a microphone and notes from the window. A spotlight comes up. She finds her light down stage” (Calderón 2014, 53). She addresses the audience: As you know the name of this play is Kiss. We discovered it not long ago, by chance, on the internet when we were doing some research about the difficult situation for young writers in Syria during the current war ... over there ... We basically stumbled on this short play called Boosa, which means Kiss, originally, and we were immediately struck by its raw strength and the very interesting and indirect way in which it tries to convey the emotion of what it means and feels like to live in Damascus right now. (53)

She further explains that while they were not previously able to secure the rights because they couldn’t track down the author, they have very recently had a breakthrough: “we received an email from a Syrian film director living Turkey saying that he knew a Jordanian writing living in Cairo who actually knew Ameera [the author] and that she could be reached through a contact at the Red Cross in Lebanon” (53–4). Laura explains that Ameera is now going to join them on Skype to discuss the play. The call is connected and a young woman, whom we presume to be Ameera, “appears on screen in sunglasses and a blonde wig,” clearly a disguise of sorts (54). What follows is a question and answer session between the actors and the author, who is assisted by a translator. The function of the translator is important in that it allows for the incorporation of Arabic into the play—all of “Ameera’s” answers are given in Arabic and translated—and for the sense in which it creates a doubling with each line spoken twice, once in English and once in Arabic. The constant repetition reinforces the centrality of translation (and mis-translation) to the play and the difficulty of hearing what is being said without the cultural knowledge required to interpret this information. As Michaela Wolf writes, “translations […] always reflect the historical and cultural conditions under which they have been produced” (2007, 132). Indeed,

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the re-performance of the inner play in the third section of the play (which I will discuss shortly) functions as a re-translation of the text by the actors informed by their newfound understanding of its context and meaning, but one that still fails to properly “hear” its meaning. The interplay of speaking and listening that comprises the dialogue between the “Woman,” as she is named in the script, and the cast is not free-flowing. For her part, the Woman keeps her answers succinct, sometimes side-stepping the questions put to her. For their part, the actors often fail to pick up on the woman’s cues or the nuances of her explanations. This disinterest is set up from the outset. For example, when Laura asks the Woman to tell them a bit about herself and she plainly states, “I escaped Damascus and right now I’m in Lebanon, separated from my family. I’m living here with the help… with the Red Crescent… I’m alone,” Laura fails to probe further, merely awkwardly replying—“Well… I hope you are well now” (56). She instead asks what the play “means in the context of the current war” (57). The Woman’s reply evades any kind of political explanation, however: “Well, in Syria we are very good at producing soap operas. We like them very much and we usually watch them with family and friends around wonderful food we cook especially for the occasion” (57). When Laura tries to clarify whether the play itself is meant to be a soap opera, the woman suggests that she “can’t really explain it” and Laura doesn’t press the question. Another of the actors approaches the issue from a different angle, asking the Woman about the themes of the play. She finally explains that: “I have to say that the play is above all a fantasy. Our country has been completely destroyed and our lives have been broken, so the plays tries to create a space for nostalgia” (59). The answer is perplexing to the actors, who fail to understand why anyone would be nostalgic for soap opera. Indeed, they later reveal their distaste for the form, particularly its romantic emphasis: “I guess when we talk about love … here. We are never so explicit. We don’t, especially in America, in theatre, we don’t say what we feel, because it may sound tasteless… or even ridiculous. We understand that cultures are different but this kind of melodrama sometimes is just pathetic and even ridiculous” (70). But, for the Woman, there is something intrinsic to the soap opera form that is vitally important. She explains that Syrians miss crying for “simple things” and that the play “creates a fictional world in which one of the only problems is just … love. And for us romantic love is a way of connecting with our identity, our past, and also longing for our lost country” (60). Despite the actors’ misapprehension of the importance

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of the soap opera form—in reponse to the woman’s remarks Laura asks that they “leave that [the question of soap opera] behind for a minute” (62)—it nonetheless remains of significant importance to the play. As Alisa Solomon writes, the play suggests “in a formally self-contradictory gesture that is a beguiling hallmark of Calderón’s work […] that in some contexts, the most radical form of all is a dumb soap opera” (Solomon 2016). The actors’ failure to understand—to “hear”—the nuances of “Boosa” is finally affirmed for the audience when the Woman explains to the actors both the significance of the role of Bana and the reason for Hadeel’s death. Bana, she tells them, is based on May Skaf, a real-life Syrian actress and political dissident who appeared in both films and soap opera: “The real May Skaf is one of the most visible and active fighters currently protesting publicly against the regime” (Calderón 2014, 61). The Woman further explains: “So, during most of the play you don’t really know who Bana is, but when she arrives late, and says that she’s an actress, one immediately understands that she hasn’t actually kissed anyone, but that in fact she’s late because she has been detained by the police, just like the real May Skaf” (61). The “kiss,” therefore, denotes an assault of some kind, strongly suggested in the script to be rape. When Laura presses the question, the Woman replies: “Maybe. Probably… Rape is happening all over Syria” (65). The meaning of Hadeel’s death is similarly obscure for a non-Syrian audience. The Woman explains that her collapse was not the result of heartbreak but caused by exposure to chemical weapons—thus her repeated coughing as indicated in the script. As with other details in the play, Syrian audiences, the woman explains, would have understood this intimation. Finally, as the conversation draws to a close, it becomes clear that the woman is not Ameera at all, but her sister. When Laura asks where Ameera is, the woman simply replies, “She’s dead,” later explaining that she died in a bombing (76–7). This revelation once and for all shows the actors out of their depth. Even if the performance of “Boosa” is understood by the actors as an act of solidarity with Syrian artists and a means of raising public awareness of the situation in Syria, the very pretext of the play operates as form of what Ronald J. Pelias in his study of acting and empathy describes as “imperialist venture,” where the iterative relationship that the actors have with the Syrian subjects of the drama is principally a “speaking for,” an act of “possession” that “claims ownership over their narrative” (1991, 143).

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In the middle section of the play it is finally worth noting that in the interview the Woman emphasizes the location of the play’s performances, explaining to Laura that it was never presented in a theatre because of the political situation. Instead, the play was performed in the living rooms of people’s homes. “In fact our production was done for a few people in an apartment that had holes in the walls due to the recent bombing. But we had no choice. And of course there were real gunshots in the background” (Calderón 2014, 61). This level of detail undermines the production of the play that the audience has just witnessed—the American version can in no way approach the “authenticity” just described by the Woman. Indeed, she reminds the actors “gunshots were in the text” and chides them for failing to realize this detail. Later in the conversation she returns to the importance of where the play was performed in Syria: It’s hard for me to talk about the play in such detail, but let me say that the play is not about the characters themselves but about the audience who gather around to see it and feel for a few minutes something else, something that is not war. But the war is hard and we all have become skeptics when it comes to love... and also... during war love becomes more intense. I don’t know if I’m making sense. (68)

Within the fictive realm, the inner play is not about the characters but about the Syrian audiences who gather to see it. In this setting, “Boosa” provides an ellipsis of sorts, clefting out a space of respite within the real. Thus, for the play to successfully render meaning it must be performed for its intended audience—this is the insurmountable problem that Laura and the others face. But what do we then say of Calderón’s play—the play proper and its audience? Is it too not really about the characters— the fallible actors—but about the audience? If so, what commentary does it provide on their role as listeners? Is it possible to hear and fully understand the experiences of violence taking place elsewhere from within the comfort of our own homes, our theatrical “houses”? Do these houses in fact insulate us from the very hearing that Butler demands? To consider, I need first to describe the concluding section of the play—the actors’ re-performance of “Boosa.” After the Skype call with the Woman ends, the actors huddle together whispering. Laura then announces to the audience—“we’ll start over” (p. 78). The stage directions describe the play recommencing in “a heightened, more intense state.” Of the actors, Calderón writes: “They

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try to get it right this time” (78). The performers then launch into a highly compressed version of “Boosa.” For example, after greeting Hadeel with a simple “hello,” Youssif immediately says, “Choose me, Hadeel… choose me. Forgive me for being so honest. I just want you to be my wife” (78). Within five lines Hadeel has assented to Youssif’s proposal and Ahmed enters two lines after that. The speed serves to make the dialogue feel frantic and anxious. The play continues in this elliptical form until it reaches the climax at which Hadeel dies. The actors then huddle again before announcing to the audience that they are going to “keep going.” The stage directions now indicate “breakneck speed” (88). Hadeel “recovers” from her death, sitting bolt upright. Bana offers her forgiveness. Suspicious, Hadeel probes further only to discover that Bana and Ahmed have been having an affair, and that Bana is now pregnant. Throughout this dialogue, the actors periodically break character to urge each other on. Finally the characters—and actors—reach an impasse. Stage directions read: “The actors sit on the couch and chairs, defeated” (100). Laura, who plays Bana, then picks up the microphone and faces the audience directly. It is important to note that she is referred to in the script from this moment and until the end as “Bana.” That is, while the other actors revert to themselves, Laura remains in character. As this splitting of dramatic worlds occurs, the Woman from Skype—Ameera’s sister—comes on stage and joins the actors on the sofa, though she is unacknowledged by all except Bana. She begins to sing quietly. As she does, Bana speaks: Did you hear that? It sounds like fireworks. I don’t know but today, when I was walking, everything seemed a little bit more empty. I feel like there’s more… space. Or maybe less people. There used to be more. Maybe they stayed at home watching TV. Or maybe they are just… away. By the sea. But I’m sure they’ll be back. They have to. There is a hole in the street and someone might fall into it. I think someone needs to fix that. And they need to paint. The walls are… the color is not right. It’s black. There is a lot of black. Black patches. Someone needs to paint those white. And I need a doctor, for my baby. And I need a school. But the school is empty. There are no children. Someone needs to teach them how to read. They need to learn how to cut paper with scissors. Those little paper dolls holding each other’s hands. Holding hands like this family. And someone needs to teach them how to sing. Pause. Bana: (refers to Ameera’s sister).

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One line from this songs means: I would rather be stabbed than live under the rule of this bastard. (101)

The ending of the play is firmly pensive, providing an image of irresolution in the sense meant by Jacque Rancière when what he describes as “indeterminate expressive logic” serves to “put every conclusion in suspense” (2009, 122, 123). Such irresolution is doubly significant in this context, reflecting both the inability of the actors to understand the Syrian situation and the ongoingness of the conflict for its citizens. In finishing the play with a dual image of the irresolution of the actors’ quest for understanding and an affirmation of continued resistance to violence (as the song “Yama mweil el-hawa” expresses), Calderón asks for the kind of “lavish listening” that Modleski evokes. Such listening requires the actors to relinquish their authority as tellers of this story. Pelias writes that in the “imperialist gesture,” the performer is an “ideologue” whose commitment to their own socio-political programmes eclipses the political voice and demands of the other (1991, 148). As I have suggested, the metatheatrical section of the play illustrates precisely this point. Moreover, in the attitudes of the actors we see embarrassment at the melodramatic tone of the play and a concern with how the audience will react to its declarative style: “We were really afraid … Well, when we were rehearsing the play we didn’t know how the audience was going to react… Because to talk so openly and explicitly about feelings … it’s hard to …” (Calderón 2014, 69). That is, the actors are at least as much concerned with how they will be perceived by the audience as they are with how well they have understood the play. In this sense, one could certainly argue that the actors in their first presentation of the text effect a “de-realization” (Pelias 1991, 148) of the Syrian other because of their privileging of their own positionality as theatrical “activists.” If there is any sense of “dialogic embodiment” in the play—a mode of empathic relationship constituted by “speaking with” that Pelias describes in contrast to “imperialist gesture (147)—then it only comes at the very end. On the sofa we see three of the actors in a state of resignation, having abandoned their performance. Like a shadow that comes in through the window, Laura-as-Bana however for the first time seems to come close to “speaking with”—listening—to her character. Her description of the Damascan “scene” embodies the paradigm of Pelias’ “actor-witness” who “reifies social consciousness and familiarizes the other” for the audience (148). While the play ends with the creation of space for the “other” (Ameera’s sister), the voice of this

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other remains unheard by most on stage. The dramatic irony of this scenario therefore transfers responsibility to the audience, who know that despite the fact that what they are seeing is not real it nonetheless gestures to an unseen and unresolved (forever “to-be-continued”) reality somewhere else. The Woman has already described this reality in the bluntest of terms: “Bombs are falling from the sky. What else do you need to know?” Calderón might therefore be said to be asking this very same question of the audience—what else do you need to know? What else do you need to hear? (Calderón 2014, 69)

Staging Performative Violence At the beginning of the chapter, I referred to Salwa Ismail’s description of the performativity of violence. For Ismail, the significance of the performativity of violence lies not simply in its spectacular aspects but in the motivating intention of the theatricality at the core of its performativity. She attributes three main theatrical characteristics to performative violence: staging, mirror play and mimicry. Within these three elements, the deployment of both affective and narrative strategies play a key role. The principle affective objective of the Syrian regime, she argues, is the production of horror”—“horror as an emotionality of government” (2018, 161). The aim of deploying an affective strategy of horror is to destabilize any sense of stable truth. Events are staged, she argues, “to generate indeterminacy and incite bewilderment” (188), and to effect a “blurring of the lines between the fictional and the real” (164). What Ismail calls the “narrative work” of performative violence, “which is undertaken by perpetrators, survivors, witnesses and bystanders, and by reporters and investigators,” similarly aims towards such blurring and bewilderment (169). The result is a strategy of brutal theatricalized violence that aims concurrently towards installing fear in citizens and at the same time suggesting that any use of violence by its own forces is nothing but a fiction: In theatres of slaughter acts of violence often unfold as endless games of mirrors where the perpetrators and victims are interchangeable. The citizen-spectators are drawn into the theatre of violence to puzzle out the identity of the killers or their victims or, perhaps, to remain uncertain about both. Indeed, it is possible that the citizen-spectators would find

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themselves to be uncertain as to whether the staged slaughter ever took place at all. (178)

While Kiss does not directly depict violence, I suggest that the logic that Ismail describes forms the substructure upon which its dramatic representations are grafted. It is Calderón’s use of ellipsis by way of crafting a series of gaps and micro-intervals in the script that suggest the presence of violence despite its absence in the dramatic action. Ellipsis in this sense operates similarly to the shadow—or echo—that he evokes in his dramatization of Bachelet in Discurso. This is often expressed in the characters’ dialogue as a feeling of things not being right, or of grasping for meaning—of what Ismail calls in the context of Syria a sense of the uncanny. To illustrate, on the page the script is scored through with ellipses in the language of both the inner and outer plays, making room for the unknown, the unsaid and the unspeakable. In the fictional “Boosa,” ellipsis indicates unexpressed sexual feelings, hidden secrets or simply emotions that the characters struggle to put into words: “But… you. You. I’m so dirty, Youssif. I’m so… dirty. And you are so… you disgust me. But… I do want to go home with you. I can’t believe this…” (Calderón 2014, 13). In the second part of the play, ellipsis for the most part signals the gulf of understanding that separates the Woman from the actors. Both parties’ lines are scored with moments of hesitation and of trying to figure out how to put across what they want to say and to understand what has just been said to them. For example, when the Woman asks Laura if she realized that there were gunshots in the text, she replies: “Yes… they were. But let’s … I want to know…” (62). Earlier, when trying to explain why soap opera is important, the Woman states, as cited earlier: “I do miss soap operas because I miss crying for … simple things. The play creates a fictional world in which one of the only problems is just … love” (60). In his crafting of the play’s dialogue, Calderón’s use of ellipsis functions as a form of microinterruption, a pausing, a prompt for heightened listening. As a device that spans the play, it produces a sense of not being able to get at things, at truths being uncertain or inexpressible, underscoring the need for the kind of listening that Helena Grehan describes as deeply “attuned”: “It is this sense of attunement or attention to the ‘in-between’ or to the unsaid as much as the said that is crucial and it is in this gap that both the ethics of listening and in many cases the politics of speaking emerge most powerfully” (2019, 54).

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Certainly, Calderón’s use of ellipsis in the dialogue effects exactly the kind of gap Modleski observes in the soap opera form between both what is felt and what is expressed, and what is expressed and what is heard. Significantly, this indicates a problem of representation itself, both selfrepresentation in the sense of how the characters express themselves, and the issue of how to represent violence itself. I return once more to Macías, who writes that: The impossibility of freeing ourselves from the violence of representation requires that we recognize that the space between violence and its representation […] is one of uncertainty, insecurity and diffuseness, and a quicksand that is always shifting and always at risk of falling through, of failing. It is a place not only in which we are always working with representations on top of representation and with the failures of representation, but also in which our own representational practices fail, and their failures need to be shown. (2016, 37–8)

Significantly, the kind of blurring and indeterminacy that Ismail writes of in her description of the theatrical structure of violence is reflected in Macías’ description of the challenge of representing violence, where she evokes “uncertainty, insecurity and diffuseness.” In this sense the gap (“ellipsis”) between violence and representation, which Macías identifies as an ethical space for dealing with the demands of such critical and artistic labour, “echoes” performative violence as a way of acknowledging both its affects and effects. In the metadramatic premise of the play, in the sense of failure of the actors at the end, and in the use of ellipsis throughout, including his thematization of translation, I suggest that Calderón’s dramaturgy locates itself in the kind of gap that Macías describes. Dramaturgy that occupies such a gap may itself be conceived of as a form of resisting violence. For example, as described by Ameera’s sister, soap opera is not simply a form of escapism but more profoundly a space that refuses the affectivity of violence in favour of community, connection and love. At the same time, as explained in the previous section, the soap opera-like “Boosa” also contains elements of fugitive meaning—that Hadeel dies from exposure to chemical weapons, for example. While this might seem contradictory—that the soap form both fugitively telegraphs narratives that the government denies and at the same time creates a fictional haven of sorts—it in fact recognizes the complex doubleness that

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Ismail points to when she suggests that “subject-citizens as spectators are knowledgable of the workings of the genre in the repertoire of regime staging and theatre. Yet they are horrified nonetheless even when they are cognizant of the farcical elements of the production” (2018, 166). Earlier I cited Solomon, who describes Calderón’s use of the form as a “self-contradictory gesture” that turns the popular form towards radical ends. Such radicality is twofold. Firstly, it creates an elliptical space of relief from violence by producing a significant counter-affectivity and in this sense is strongly humanistic. Secondly, it allows for the transmission of what is otherwise suppressed by providing an emotional and linguistic vehicle for communication. The complexity of this communication lies in the fact that its meanings are most fully realized in what is not said but is nonetheless understood. The problem for the American actors is that they are neither able to recognize—to hear—the significance of the elliptical spaces that mark the Syrian characters’ text, nor the meaning produced therein. This same problem, of course, also pertains to their audience. Jalal Toufic’s concept of “surpassing disaster” allows us to take this idea of the gap, the elliptical space between, one step further. Surpassing disaster, which the Syrian conflict must surely be, is characterized, he suggests, by the withdrawal and subsequent resurrection of tradition and the popular forms that express such traditions (2009, 81). He writes: One of the surest ways to detect whether there’s been a surpassing disaster is to see when some of the most intuitive and sensitive filmmakers and/or writers and/or thinkers began to feel the need to resurrect what to most others, and to the filmmaker and/or writer and/or thinker himself or herself as a person or teacher, i.e., in so far as he or she remains human, all too human, is extant and available. (17 original emphasis)

While tradition may appear to have been saved or preserved—is “extant and available”— these demonstrations of heritage or tradition are in fact, he writes, “counterfeit”: “Following the surpassing disaster, I am confronted with the counterfeit/double in one form or another: without the seemingly absurd attempt at resurrecting what for most people is extant and available, the succeeding generations will have received counterfeit tradition” (30). While Toufic’s concept is complex, the image that it offers of the counterfeit/double is significant in this context, pointing to both the significance of artistic self-reflexivity as a response to violence, and to the relationship between structures of violence and artistic forms.

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There is a striking intersection between Ismail’s description of performative violence and its blurring of the real and the fictional—language which invokes the image of the counterfeit—and Toufic’s description of the effect of surpassing disaster on artists and artistic forms. Ismail writes, “performances [of violence] have their own logic and processes. They generate and follow templates and scripts in which mimicry and parody are at work” (2018, 184). Toufic’s notion of the counterfeit can be read as the appearance of forms that express the template of the original form—that mimic it—but that are in fact hollow illusions. The soap opera form might itself seem to be a hollow illusion, but in the context of Calderón’s fictional world, it is possible to read it as a “resurrection” or surrogate that reveals the very structure and form of the surpassing disaster. Viewed from the perspective of Toufic’s argument, therefore, the centrality of the soap opera to Calderón’s play takes on new meaning. In the inner world of the play, the soap opera form may be said to be “resurrected” by Al Diri’s text and its performance in the living rooms of Syrian citizens. Certainly, the Woman is nostalgic for the time before the surpassing disaster and keeps returning, to the bemusement of the cast, to the subject of soap opera. As cited earlier, she remarks: “Well, in Syria we are very good at producing soap operas. We like them very much and we usually watch them with family and friends around wonderful food we cook especially for the occasion” (Calderón 2014, 57). The play, she explains, allows for a return to this enjoyment and foremost creates a space for the return of “love” in its simplest of terms. Indeed, as Toufic explains, it is only through the return or resurrection of tradition that its loss is able to apprehend. I would suggest that the emphasis on ellipsis throughout Calderón’s text helps to intensify this sense that the soap opera that we are viewing is not simply an extant continuation of a popular form, but a resurrection of it that functions, as Toufic writes, as a form of “appeal” (2009, 25). Through its self-reflexivity, the metatheatrical form in certain ways mirrors the paradigmatic withdrawal and return that Toufic describes by staging the counterfeit double alongside its absent other. That is, metatheatricality operates as a kind of “counterfeit” of the representational economy that exposes its hegemonic bias in the sense meant by Peggy Phelan (1993, 164). Moreover, the notion of resurrecting something that seems to already exist produces the image of two opposing structures—a hegemonic structure that insists upon cultural continuity— and a counter structure that reveals a history of cultural destruction. It is

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in the sense of its doubleness that the resurrected artwork indicates the gap between the counterfeit and the real. What does this all add up to for the audience? While Toufic’s concept provides a very helpful framework for viewing Calderón’s choice of form, one must bear in mind the fictionality of the gesture. Although Kiss has some basis in factuality—the reference to Skaf, for example—this is not the case of a Syrian artist recuperating traditional forms for a Syrian audience, but a simulation of the process for an outside audience, indeed an audience who may fail to understand the political and aesthetic complexity of the gesture (in the same way that the cast of actors fails to understand). The failures of the actors in many ways reflect the problematic nature of western privilege, which allows one to be a spectator to global violence and indeed to satisfy oneself that such spectatorship offers “proof” of concern. However, just as Anderson and Menon write that “images of violence […] act as surrogates for productive transnational discourse,” (2009, 1–2), finding a Syrian play on the internet—as the actors do—doesn’t contribute to productive discourse. The problem here isn’t theatre—indeed, Calderón demonstrates how theatre may refuse performative violence and emphasizes the role of artists within a landscape of violence. The problem lies with the residual imperialist (and racist) paradigms that govern how Western spectators engage with global violence. While I will take up his work in more detail in Chapter 5, Nicholas Ridout’s explanation of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and spectatorship is worth briefly remarking on here. In his argument that spectatorship is essential to the constitution of the bourgeois subject, Ridout argues that this means that such subjects can behold the consequences of imperial bourgeois violence and indeed feel great concern, but ultimately “recognize” that they are powerless to act. He writes: “Theatre, then, offers itself as an alibi. In the act of telling that this suffering should matter, really matter to you, the theatre also tells you that there is nothing, really nothing, you can do about it” (2020, 11). The alibi, like the counterfeit in the sense meant by Toufic, relies on the kind of surrogacy that Anderson and Menon point to. By staging his own twofold counterfeit—the fictional Syrian drama nested inside the fictional world of the actors—Calderón dramatizes the notion of theatre as alibi. His dramaturgy keeps the subject of the play always around the next corner, refusing to “translate” the experience of violence in ways that would offer it as an object for straightforward spectatorial consumption. The play asks that the audience listen attentively—“attun[ing] ourselves

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to what is being said in all its complexity,” as Grehan, cited earlier, writes, “listening to both what is said and what is covered-over” (2019, 54). Indeed, at the end of the play Laura-as-Bana asks of the audience “Did you hear that?” (my emphasis), while Ameera’s sister, unseen by the other actors, begins to sing. What we are asked to listen to is both the fact of Syrian violence—“bombs are falling, what else do you need to know”— and to the violence of our own spectatorship echoed back to us—the kind of meta-affective experience that Bryony Trezise describes when she writes of “hearing herself hearing,” and “feeling herself feeling” (2014, 155). In this sense, Calderón ultimately engages metatheatricality not simply to critique theatrical practices but moreover the very paradigm that relies upon passive spectatorship to deploy its own programme of performative violence.

Conclusion What, then, is the nature of the relationship between theatre, theatricality and violence in Calderón’s plays and in Kiss in particular? In one sense, this relationship is always contingent and conditional: theatre may provide either a space of political refuge, as in the social function of the fictional “Boosa,” or a place to hide from the revolution, as in Neva. Collectively, however, Calderón’s plays suggest that self-reflexive dramatic forms offer some way of extracting meaning from the space between violence and its representation. The terms mimicry, parody, farce and counterfeit, for example, have been central to this chapter. Collectively, this lexicon expresses the performative character of violence and at the same time suggests why self-reflexivity, which is marked by the same qualities but inverts them as a form of critique, arises in response to violence. Such a mode tempers political didacticism and creates space for the unknown, for failure, for self-reflection. From this point of view, the role of theatre is not so much to directly incite change as it is to foster understanding—to create space for listening and reflection—actions that are themselves are framed as quiet revolutionary forces. This quietude is not insignificant as its stands in opposition to performative violence, an act of reflection that perhaps begins to undo the complicit warp and weft of theatricality and violence.

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References Anderson, Patrick, and Jisha Menon. 2009. Violence Performed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1991. “A Note on Performative Acts of Violence.” Cardozo Law Review 13 (4): 1303–1304. ———. 1993. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 1–22. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Calderón, Guillermo. 2013a. “Discurso.” Theatre 43 (2): 98–119. ———. 2013b. “Villa.” Theatre 43 (2): 64–97. ———. 2014. Kiss. Unpublished. ———. 2016. Neva. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Geraghty, Christine. 2005. “The Study of the Soap Opera.” In Companion to Television, edited by Janet Wasko, 308–323. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Grehan, Helena. 2019. “Slow Listening: The Ethics and Politics of Paying Attention, Or Shut Up and Listen.” Performance Research 24 (8): 53–58. “Guillermo Calderón on Protest, Lockdown, and Dragón.” 2021. Arts Emerson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaoOVEo_wXY. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Ismail, Salwa. 2018. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Juris, Jeffrey S. 2005. “Violence Performed and Imagined: Militant Action, the Black Bloc and the Mass Media in Genoa.” Critique of Anthropology 25 (4): 413–432. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Macías, Teresa. 2016. “Between Violence and Its Representation: Ethics, Archival Research, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Telling of Torture Stories.” Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity and Practice 5 (1): 20–45. MCA. 2015. “Guillermo Calderón’s Escuela” [programme]. Chicago Humanities Festival (Chicago). https://bit.ly/35iMZYq. McNulty, Charles. 2017. “‘Kiss’ at the Odyssey: A Rising Chilean Playwright Explores What Gets Lost in Translation.” Los Angeles Times, 16 May. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kiss-play-rev iew-20170516–story.html.

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Modleski, Tania. 2008. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge. Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Pelias, Ronald J. 1991. “Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement.” Theatre Research International 16 (2): 142–152. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator London: Verso. Ridout, Nicholas. 2020. Scenes from Bourgeois Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rodino-Colocino, Michelle. 2018.”"Me too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15 (1): 96–100. Rohter, Larry. 2013. “Rehearsals for the Revolution.” The New York Times, March 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/theater/guillermo-Cal derón-writer-and-director-of-neva.html. Sherlock, Ruth, Paul Wood, and Zoe Lafferty. 2012. The Fear of Breathing: Stories from the Syrian Revolution. London: Oberon Books. Solomon, Alisa. 2016. “What’s Left for Guillermo Calderón.” American Theatre, October. https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/10/07/whats-left-for-gui llermo-calderon/. Toufic, Jalal. 2009. The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster. Forthcoming Books. Trezise, Bryoni. 2014. Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolf, Michaela. 2007. “Bourdieu’s ‘Rules of The Game’: An Introspection into Methodological Questions of Translation Sociology.” Matraga 14 (20): 130– 145. Zanger, Abby. 1986. “Acting as Counteracting in Molière’s ‘The Impromptu of Versailles.’” Theatre Journal 38 (2): 180–195.

CHAPTER 3

“Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present…

Introduction Since winning the 2019 Pulitzer and Susan Smith Blackburn Prizes as well as the Steinberg Playwright Award for her play Fairview, Jackie Sibblies Drury has become one of the best-known American playwrights of her generation. Her writing is politically charged and theatrically inventive, challenging the boundaries of form to undermine and expose hegemonic ideologies, particularly those related to race. In this chapter, I discuss her 2012 play, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915, a formal forerunner of sorts to the genre-busting Fairview, which I discuss in Chapter 5. To unpack the significance of Drury’s use of metadramatic techniques, I will draw from Venus Opal Reese’s conceptual framework of “embodiment” as a strategy for depicting trauma in performance, particularly Black trauma in the American context, and will make use of her emphasis on the technique of “double-conscious” theatrical writing. Reese explains embodiment principally as a form of deconstruction, and explains that “once something has been taken apart, it loses its charge — and can be reconfigured to the specifications of the deconstructionist” (2010, 165). Seen via the lens of embodiment, it is evident that, despite its historical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_3

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pretext, We Are Proud to Present… is in fact concerned with the collective trauma of Black American history and that it engages the kind of double-conscious dramaturgy that Reese evokes in doing so. In working through how this deconstruction takes place, I will also draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “rules of the game” and his notion of “objectifying the practice of objectification” as ways of looking at how Drury critiques the intersection of racism and Eurocentric theatrical convention (qtd. in Lamaison 1986, 111). Bourdieu’s image of power as a game with specific rules allows me to reflect on the “rules” of the theatrical game—the attitudes, values and practices that constitute the field—and the strategic manoeuvring that takes place in the process of constructing and subsequently performing a work. Of all the plays discussed in this monograph, Drury’s gives the most detailed account of how theatre is made, not simply recalling the process, as Crouch does in The Author, for example, but actually showing it. In particular, her emphasis on processes of improvisation shows the degree to which the “rules of the game” are indeed embodied and thus, as Reese suggests, an embodied dramaturgy is required to alter the rules that define that game. We Are Proud to Present features a group of six young actors, three Black and three white, attempting to devise a play about the colonial genocide by Germany of the Herero and Nama peoples of what was then known as South-West Africa (now Namibia). The principal problem faced by the actors is lack of access to Herero and Nama experiences of the period. Indeed, while the mass killing of the Herero and Nama has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century (Cooper 2007, 113), it remains little-known globally as a significant historical event. The genocide unfolded after the Indigenous tribes rose up against the oppressive violence of German rule and were consequently “systematically put down, by shooting or enforced slow death in the desert from starvation, thirst and disease (the fate of many women and children),” while “those who still lived were rounded up, banned from owning land or cattle, and sent into labour camps to be the slaves of German settlers” (Peace Pledge Union 2015). The genocide devastated the populations; for example, after the Herero uprising there were only around 15,000 tribe members left alive. The US plays a particular role in this history in that it was via the US federal courts in 2001 that “the Herero became the first ethnic group to seek reparations for colonial policies that fit the definition of genocide” (Cooper 2007, 113). An official apology from the German government and promises of financial reparation were forthcoming in

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2004. The six actors constructing the play know about this history but struggle to access its affective and felt dimensions. Whereas they have an abundance of German soldiers’ letters from the period, the voices and experiences of the Herero and Nama themselves remain inaccessible other than through the imaginative practice of theatrical improvisation. Drury’s dramaturgy revolves around this central problem and alternates between scenes that show the actors in rehearsal, an “inner” play which she names “process,” and scenes that purport to show finished extracts from the imagined “outer” play, named “presentation.” Towards the end of the outer play, distinctions between these two modes break down, culminating in a scene she entitles “processtation.” This collapse of boundaries is precipitated by conflict and misunderstanding between the Black and white actors throughout the devising process. In keeping with the deconstructive mode of the play and to underscore the multifaceted centrality of race to the narrative, the six characters are not named but simply known as Actors 1 through 6. Actors 1, 3 and 5 are white, while Actors 2, 4 and 6 are Black. In her stage directions, Drury describes the actors as “somewhere in their 20’s, ish […] young, open, skilled, playful, and perhaps, at times, a little foolish” (2012, 20). Actor 6 also holds the important role of director. While the conflict that occurs between the two groups at first appears to spring from methodological quibbles, it gradually becomes apparent that it is in fact deeply rooted in unresolved racial tension within which theatrical methodologies themselves are implicated. That is, the demands of the present begin to overwhelm the theatrical and historical task; the breakdown that occurs at the end of the play shifts the setting of the devised work from occupied colonial Namibia to the US and the uncontained “improvisation” which forms the climax of the play disturbingly features white actors placing a noose around Actor 2’s neck. My discussion of Drury’s metatheatrical text is organized in three parts. The first examines how she dramatizes issues of historical methodology. Through metadramatic rehearsal room conflict, the play questions the distinction between legitimate—archived and authorized—memory and “illegitimate” memory, and points to the performative dimensions of both historical memory and the archive. Secondly, I examine the connections that Drury makes between issues of historicization—what Tavia Nyong’o calls “the asymmetries and incommensurabilities of the colonial archive” (2019, 202)—and theatrical methodologies. In this sense, I am very much interested in how Drury frames theatre as a site of

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territorial struggle—a site of struggle for sovereignty and self-definition. Drury’s employment of an explicitly metatheatrical premise allows her to effectively critique the Eurocentric “normativity” of both conventional acting processes and dramaturgical frameworks; to draw from Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s introduction to Black Acting Methods, Drury’s play functions as a highly effective “intervention” in the hegemonic hold of not just Eurocentric history (through seeking to bring the voices of the Herero and Nama to that history), but also Eurocentric theatrical methods and dramaturgies (2017, 9). Finally, through reference to both Reese’s notion of embodiment and what Nyong’o in his discussion of Drury’s text calls “Afro-fabulation,” I consider how the Black actors in particular confront not just the issue of the representation of historical Herero and Nama experiences, but finally, and more crucially, the irresolution of racial violence in the US. The aim of this chapter, then, is to understand metatheatricality’s inherent double-consciousness from a perspective that takes account of the structural violence of racism and, moreover, the relationship of that violence to theatrical conventions.

“Doing Anything Other Than What’s Real”: Illuminating Historical Injustice There are two key “fields” that Drury critiques in her play: historymaking, in particular what Adi Ophir calls the construction of hegemonic “historical meta-narratives,” and theatrical practices (2005, 277). I wish to first address the former. Throughout the play, Drury troubles the relationship between race, memory and the historical imagination, beginning with the issue of what is admitted to or excluded from historical records and consequently from representation. While the white actors are able to draw on accessible artefacts—letters from German soldiers—the Black actors need to work much more affectively, imagining unrecorded historical memory in a gesture that Nyong’o in his reading of Drury’s play calls, as just noted, “Afro-fabulation”: “a mode of aesthetic endeavour [that] responds to the double bind presented by archival absences and historical traumas with modes of creative invention” (2019, 203). This tending towards Afro-fabulation meets consistently with what Clinesha Sibley calls “resistance” or “dismissiveness” (2017, 25) from white cast members. Such resistance reflects the sway of the “rules” of conventional Eurocentric approaches to theatrical methodology that, as Jonathan Chambers remarks, “sometimes knowingly, but more often than not unknowingly,

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aligns with the winners in ideological struggles, masks its fictionality under a pretext of factuality, imitates (or seeks to imitate) reality without really questioning it, and in so doing ‘collaborates in the work of ideology’” (2010, 34). Such a methodology mirrors conventional approaches to the relationship between history and the archive and in this sense the play certainly privileges what Diana Taylor names the “repertoire” (2003). Or, as Nyong’o puts it (partially cited above), “Drury instead presents us with the asymmetries and incommensurabilities of the colonial archive and its lasting legacy of planetary anti-blackness” (2019, 202). In the first instance, Drury approaches history with an attitude of ironic skepticism. For example, the play opens with a history lesson, described by Drury as “a fast-paced cartoonish overview — a romp” (2012, 29). Directly addressing the audience, the actors in quick-fire fashion explain Namibia’s colonial history, emphasizing the period of occupation by Germany in the years between 1884 and 1915. For example: Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor

6: 2: 3: 6: 1: 3: 2: 4: 6:

1888. The Herero are in charge. Sort of. 1889. The Germans are kind of over the Herero. Over the Herero. So childish and ungrateful. So impudent and unwashed. 1890 (31–2).

The “gameification” of the delivery of this history is significant, and the script clearly satirizes this version of history, exposing not just its inadequacy but also its injustice; the blunt and breezy nature of the actors’ truncated account of the genocide makes any enjoyment of what is a fast and physical scene difficult. As such, Drury cleverly exploits the distance between the physical comedy of the performance, which we enjoy, and its historical content, which troubles that enjoyment. To draw from Helena Grehan, this disjunction serves to generate spectatorial ambivalence, a foundational “unsettling” (2009, 35). Drury’s dramaturgical approach to history is therefore, to echo Reese, explicitly deconstructionist, showing us not just theatre-making but also history-making and emphasizing the contingencies and biases of both fields.

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As noted, the substantive problem faced by the actors is the limited information provided by the German soldiers’ letters. While they provide a degree of “authentic” documentation, they offer little detail and are so culturally “other” that it is difficult for the actors to connect with them. Actor 6 summarizes the problem: “I’m saying that I think that they’re all … kind of the same […] They’re all German soldiers and I’m saying like dramatically they’re all doing the same thing” (Drury 2012, 44). That “same thing” is principally the expression of sentiment directed towards the letters’ recipients: “I miss you like the July sapling misses April rains” (p. 47). Actor 6 puts it bluntly: for a play about genocide, “There’s like no violence, there’s no anger” (p. 47). Moreover, the actors themselves recognize the contingency of the letters. For example, a scene later in the play depicts a German soldier crafting and recrafting a letter. In each iteration, the actor gradually edits out details related to the colonial occupation—“we have come across some problems building this railway into the interior. For one thing, it has been extremely dry — tens, if not dozens of natives drop off each and every day”—until he finally settles on a few short lines about the weather, erasing the details of German occupation altogether (pp. 102–3). The problem, as Actor 6 points out, is not just the occlusion of Black experience from the archive but also the resistance of the archive to techniques of dramatization. In this sense, Drury’s play scrutinizes not just the anti-Blackness of archives but also the complicity of a Eurocentric approach to dramatization in such discrimination. The relationship between race, the historical imagination and the limits of conventional theatrical practices therefore becomes more and more central to the drama of the play, leading the actors to an impasse—to a stalling of the game. Actor 2: Dear Sarah, I’m killing black people every single day but I’m not going to tell you about that not when I can talk some more boring shit about your garden or your tree to your boring skinny ass […] We’re never going to find out anything about the Africans in these letters. Sarah doesn’t care about black people. (p. 104)

In her capacity as director, Actor 6 agrees that the letters are “not enough” (p. 105). The stalling of the game of theatrical invention is significant as it brings to the fore conflict between the cast who find themselves divided along racial lines. While Actors 4 and 6 support Actor 2,

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Actors 1, 3 and 5 defend the letters and their centrality to the production. Below are a series of sections that give a sense of this conversation. Actor 1: We shouldn’t be pretending, we shouldn’t be making things up, we shouldn’t be doing anything other than what’s real. Actor 6: I’m agreeing with you. Actor 2: What’s real is that they don’t even talk about Africans in those letters. Actor 1: But those letters are the only thing we actually know. Actor 6: That’s not true. […] Actor 2: The letters don’t have any evidence of anything happening to the Africans. They don’t mention one prison camp, one hanging, one incident of — Actor 1: So how do we know what even happened to them? We — Actor 2: So you’re saying that we just made up the genocide […] Actor 1: I’m not saying the genocide was made up. I’m just saying we don’t have the physical evidence. Actor 6: So where do you think all the people went? […] Actor 5: He’s just saying that it’s not like the Holocaust. (pp. 106–7)

Actor 2 points out the complicated relationship between so-called “reality” and omission; that is, if experience cannot be verified, it is taken as “unreal” and therefore inadmissible (and un-dramatizable) insofar as the archive is concerned. The dialogue painfully indicates where this rationalization can lead; i.e., to a form of denialism. Or, to return to Nyong’o again, the reliance on the verifiable archive demonstrates precisely the persistence of the “legacy of planetary anti-blackness.” Any attempt to challenge this paradigm for the way in which it limits the representation of Black experience meets with resistance from the white actors not just for methodological reasons but also because the fabulation of Black history by necessity requires a reckoning with white culpability. Actor 5, for example, resists performing a scene in which, as a German soldier, he shoots a Herero tribesman. He explains to the others: “I’m not the kind of person who could have done that” (p. 148). While I will turn to issues of theatrical methodology in more depth in the next section, it is worth noting here that this resistance is premised on an approach to acting that assumes empathetic identification between

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actor and character as well as access to the given circumstances of the character for the actor to draw on. For the white actors, the absence of the Herero from the historical record delimits what they are willing to imagine—i.e., they are reluctant to bear witness to violence of which they have no direct testimony. This position is certainly problematic in the sense that what they cannot (or will not) imagine is any responsibility or culpability for racial violence, a point forcefully underscored by Drury in the final scene of the play. Moreover, from a Bourdieusian perspective, what we see in the example above of white actor’s refusal is a sense in which the rules of the game, both historical and theatrical, do not apply equally to all players. That is, such rules are qualified according to whom they are applied to; to say, “I’m not the kind of person who could have done that” reveals the contingency of the rules of theatrical improvisation and their connectedness to hegemonic whiteness. What Drury’s metadramatic deconstructive framework demonstrates, therefore, is the persistence of structural racism and its subsequent impact on identity-formation, which we see borne out in the actors’ negotiations of the parameters of theatrical representation. For the white actors, this legacy results in denialism where they sever themselves from the past— “I’m not the kind of person who could have done that”—at the same time as benefitting from the ways in which racism “rigs” the game in their favour by affirming their identity as rightful “winners,” as Chambers puts it. For the Black actors, who descend from a genealogy of what Nyong’o calls “lost and unclaimed experience” (2019, 203), the legacy instead produces a disaffiliation from the dramatic narrative, which forecloses their participation in reclaiming this experience. Inasmuch as Drury explores theatre as a site of territorial struggle, then it is precisely sovereignty/autonomy and consequential self-definition that are at stake. This is principally explored through the character of Actor 6. Around halfway through the play she explains to the others her motivation for the project: Like, for me, the whole idea for this whole presentation started when I sat down in my house, in my kitchen and I opened a magazine and I saw my Grandmother’s face in the middle of a page. So I read the story about her face, and the story was about people I’d never heard of, in a place I’d never cared about. An entire tribe of people nearly destroyed. People who looked like my family. (Drury 2012, 93)

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At first, we are led to believe that Actor 6 has a specific historical connection to the magazine image. However, she later clarifies that the woman in the picture was not her actual grandmother but that “the woman in that article looked just like my grandmother” (99). That is, Actor 6 produces what Nyong’o calls a “fabulous double through which she can live a history that is not her own” (2019, 209). This creative appropriation—fabulation—points to Jenn Stephenson’s observation that the focus of millennial metadramas is on the “intimate” and affective relationship that characters have with historical narratives—the sense in which these narratives are able to be felt and “experienced” through their retelling (2010, 254). In such contexts, history is not a truth waiting to be uttered and theatre is not the means by which real history will be revealed. Rather, theatre is a place for activating affiliative affective genealogy as a strategy for justice. Actor 6’s further explanation of her moment of discovery illustrates the point: I don’t belong to a tribe I don’t know where my ancestors were from I don’t have a homeland where people look like me I’m just American, African-American and people tell me I look like other women all the time but I never actually look like these other women they say I look like not really because to some people all black women look the same. But the woman in this article She looks like my Grandmother. And suddenly I feel like I have a lineage. I felt like maybe I could point to a place a specific country a specific homeland and I could say there. (Drury 2012, 99)

The distinction between whether the woman in the magazine was her grandmother or could have been her grandmother is ultimately unimportant. The image comes to represent both an absence—“lost and

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unclaimed experience”—and the possibility that such absence might be assuaged through theatrical mediation that redefines the rules of the game. That the historical subject matter of the play ultimately operates as a pretext for the characters to confront the racism that frames their identities in the present is not in itself unproblematic. In his analysis, Nyong’o suggests that by pivoting the play away from the history of the Herero and Nama peoples, Drury performs her own act of historical erasure: “Viewing the play from the perspective of an American with first-generation African heritage, it has felt like many other attempts to represent modern Africa that end up instead in another representation of the West” (2019, 207). Certainly, Drury has herself addressed this tension in describing the conflated settings as a kind of palimpsest: When I was doing research, there are various pictures of Herero people from that time; very traumatic pictures. There’s one image where it was of an execution where it was black men hanging in a tree. And I saw it, and it was just so difficult for me to not associate that with lynchings in the South, even though it’s obviously a very very different image, and it’s sort of like this palimpsest. (Drury 2014)

For their production of the play, Boston-based Company One Theatre created a brochure—“We Are Proud to Present a Pamphlet…”—that made such a palimpsest explicit, laying out side-by-side the timelines of racial discrimination in Namibia and in the US in the period of 1884– 1915 (Company One 2015). The production I saw at Soho Rep had historical photographs of lynching on the walls around the Studio, immediately making the audience aware of the dual context/setting of the drama. The image of a palimpsest is striking both in terms of the layered metatheatricality of Drury’s text and in relation to Nyong’o’s concept of Afro-fabulation. In her account of palimpsests and literary theory, Sarah Dillion describes the process of their construction as one of layering where “otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (2007, 5). The effect of this interweaving in Drury’s play is what Ophir describes, as cited earlier, as a disruption of “historical metanarrative,” (2005, 277); that is, a disruption of the idea that there is one verifiable account of history that takes precedence over all others. Significantly, it is through the embodied practice of the actors that this palimpsestic disturbance takes place. As

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Saskia Fürst explains: “human bodies can also serve as palimpsests, especially considering the ‘inhabitation’ of ghosts or, rather, ghostly ancestral memories in the form of dreams in the bodies of the protagonists” (2017, 68). The invocation of Actor 6’s grandmother functions in this way. Drury’s palimpsestic approach, like her use of metatheatricality, therefore ultimately functions as a way of making evident the disfunction of the “game” in both historical and theatrical senses. She remarks: To me the play sort of combines two different events, or two different forms of discrimination. And I don’t think that it equates them, but I do think that it puts them next to each other on the same plate. And the actors get confused about it, and I hope that the audience gets confused about it too because I certainly feel confused about it! The slippage of one sort of racial relation into another, there is a build up to me but there’s no cause and effect. The equation of the play is not an equation that works. I think that’s what I mean by it being broken. (Drury and Ostrowski 2014)

It is the ways in which Drury highlights the nature of such brokenness that for Nyong’o redeems the play from its act of historical appropriation—its contrast of the “known unknowns” of the Black characters and the “unknown knowns” of colonial genocide” to which Drury’s Afrofabulation—via her characters, Actor 6 in particular—is a response (2019, 209). Describing how Actor 6, in conjunction with Actor 3, fabulates the memory of her ancestor grandmother, Nyong’o points to what he calls “the specifically impersonal manner in which the transmission of memory occurs” in this context, continuing, “[o]ur memories seem to be what is most personal to us, what makes us most a person. The imagined horror of amnesia, of not being able to recognize a known and intimate face, like the face of a grandmother, is an imagined horror of depersonalization” (2019, 209). Thus, despite reservations, Nyong’o ultimately defends the play, writing that it is because of the not-knowing of the characters that they are able to “fabulate a new character, who is the very soul and spirit of theatre, and endow this character with the capacity to recount a genocide” (2019, 209). As Fürst suggests, this is a “ghostly ancestral memory” whose invocation has a restorative effect in the sense that Colbert et al. refer to in Race and Performance After Repetition as performance that might “repair […] what has been forgotten, overlooked, misremembered, suppressed, dormant or denied” (2020, 8). In its deconstructive sensibility, therefore, Drury’s metatheatrical premise allows her to effectively dramatize questions not just of historical methodology but also of historical injustice. The “seeing double”

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(Hornby 1986, 34) or “double-consciousness” (Reese) that metatheatre effects place the differentiated approaches to and experience of history by the Black and white cast members side-by-side. This dramaturgical approach means that Drury’s play, as Stephenson remarks, “demand[s] a reassessment of what we mean by history […] question[ing] the viability of that basic link between experience and narrative, between the events of the past and their retelling” (2010, 251). The implications of Stephenson’s point are twofold. On the one hand, history is troubled by the fact that its audience finds it difficult to reconcile events and actions that they believe to be absolutely “other”—the actor, for example, who remarks that “I’m not the kind of person who could have done that,” therefore implying that he cannot represent “that,” therefore excluding “that” from the historical presentation. In this sense, Drury is especially attentive to the domination of white accounts of history, with techniques such as embodiment, Afro-fabulation and metatheatricality serving to challenge white historical metanarrative. Secondly, Stephenson’s work suggests the political significance of the transmission of feeling . To quote Stephenson once more, “For these plays, presenting history is not the point. Instead [they] are almost exclusively concerned with the process of how we create what happened — not how we respond to the ambiguity of the past but rather to the fraught exercise of performative power in creating any past” (Stephenson, 264). Bourdieu’s notion of the “rules of the game,” where hierarchically structured fields of power are governed by a gamelike competition—struggle—for control of resources (Johnson qtd. in Bourdieu 1993, 6) helps to illustrate the contingency of such power whereby the conditions of its performative exercise are ascribed by those who, through a legacy of hegemonic inheritance, have most effectively embodied and now express such rules. It is to this issue of performativity that I wish to now turn by considering in more detail how Drury’s interrogation of conventional historicism is conjoined with a critique of theatrical methodology.

“Where Are All the Africans?”: Exposing Theatrical Bias As I have suggested, Drury’s metatheatrical/double dramaturgy emphasizes an ongoing contest between the actors to define the rules of the theatrical game. Through concentrating on the actors’ use of improvisation, Drury foregrounds the nuances of this struggle, showing, for

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example, the “fragility” that arises when white actors lose control of the game at certain points. Consequently, as the play develops we see the structural inequalities that foster and perpetuate racism play out in the rehearsal room. That is, Drury shows how theatre is as entangled in structures of racism as any other discipline. The actors run up against the problem identified by August Wilson, whom Luckett and Shaffer cite: “We cannot share a single value system if that value system consists of the values of White Americans based on their European ancestors” (Wilson qtd. in Luckett and Shaffer 2017, 8). Just as there are hegemonic historical metanarratives that shape historical “knowledge” so too are there metanarratives—accepted conventions—of what constitutes best theatrical and dramatic practice. Certainly, the 2020 “We See You White American Theatre” activist collective articulated these concerns head on in their letter to the white American theatre community, remarking, for example, that “we have watched you un-challenge your white privilege, inviting us to traffic in the very racism and patriarchy that festers in our bodies, while we protest against it on your stages. We see you” (weseeyouWAT.com 2020). Drury’s script is clearly keenly aware of these issues, which are repeatedly returned to throughout the play. In contrast with what Sibley describes as “real diversity”—“people of color and Whites interacting without resistance, and without attempting to make sense of their respective worlds without regard to others’ perspectives” (2017, 124)—Drury’s cast members repeatedly clash over matters of theatrical approach. The white actors, for example, push back against the “fabulist” impulses of Actor 6, challenging the legitimacy of her act of imagination. By way of such conflict, Drury clearly illustrates, as Chambers writes of the dominance of the “System” in American theatre, that it is necessary to “question the espoused neutrality and universality of that now conventional mode of acting” (2010, 33). Moreover, the play considers how assumptions made about racial identity and character type are interwoven into such conventional approaches: “For actors who are perceived as Black, white supremacy often controls and dictates what representations are allowed visibility, and because of this phenomenon, ‘Black’ actors are often pigeon-holed within a limited barometer of what is perceived to be blackness” (Luckett and Shaffer 2017, 5). This theatrical reflection on and expression of structural racism by Drury reaches its peak at the climax of the play when Actor 2 is forced to play the role of a Black man about to be hanged. Nyong’o remarks on the sharpness of this dramatic

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choice: “There is an art of cruelty to ending a play about German genocide with a stage direction given to a black male actor to ‘deal with’ a noose” (2019, 207). That is, Drury painfully parodies precisely what is described in “Dear White American Theatre,” where traffic in racism is given bodily expression by Black actors in service of white audiences. It is Drury’s metatheatrical playfulness that allows her to challenge such dominant racist paradigms. In its construction, the play strikingly demonstrates a number of the techniques that Reese describes as constituting “double-conscious” dramaturgy: “signifying, irony, satire, and camp” (2010, 164). Indeed, parody is one of Drury’s key devices for deconstructing the ideological premise of normative contemporary acting practices with the author skewering many familiar rehearsal room concepts. Actor 3, for example, fixates on the lack of “given circumstances” accorded to him. “I keep hearing that this guy is going to this place that is so different. But what I’m wondering is where he grew up. Like what is this different place so different from” (Drury 2012, 59). This problem also vexes Actor 5. Actor 6 has to coach her to engage her “affective memory” of her deceased cat in order to access sadness. Later the same actor declares: “I don’t know what my perspective is to what’s happening, I don’t know what my motivation is, I don’t know what my active verb is, I don’t know what my spine is shaped like, I know what my — my me means” (70). Significantly, it is the white actors who are most attached to these concepts. While such dogmatism seems silly at first and certainly provokes laughter at the expense of the white actors—imagining a dead cat, for example—their unwillingness to relinquish this fixed set of practices (“rules”) eventually leads to the play’s violent outcome, showing that theatrical “games” have real effects and are capable of producing real violence. It is foremost through the actors’ use of improvisation that Drury examines the capacity of theatre as a device for both showing and challenging racism. The processes she depicts would be familiar to anyone with experience in devising contexts, though the emphasis here is very much on character development—on bringing a sense of personhood to the depersonalized historical archive. What is at stake in the use of improvisation is different for Black and white actors: for the white actors, improvisation serves as a vehicle for building context for the German solider-authors of the letters; for the Black actors, it is a tool for ensuring the presence of African (and contemporary Black) experience within the play’s narrative. For example, when Actor 2 bemoans the lack of an

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African presence in the play—“where are all the Africans?” (p. 86)— Director/Actor 6 responds with an increased emphasis on improvisation: “we don’t need more we need deeper. We need to see more of this world, we need to see more” (p. 81). Later, before the final climatic scene of the play, Actor 6 instructs the company: We keep stopping and we keep talking and we just need to do it. So I’m gonna push you to do it so Everyone is going Keep Going And no one is stopping, no one is done nothing is over because we’re going to stay in it until I say stop. (p. 160)

It is clear from Actor 6’s injunction that it is only through improvisation that they are going to complete the play. It is possible to frame this improvisatory imperative as Afrocentric in character in the manner that Nyong’o articulates when he describes Actor 6’s imaginative latitude as allowing her to “live a history that is not her own” in order to reclaim her identity in the present. The double-consciousness that Reese evokes—where personal history intersects “with collective memory” (2010, 165)—is heightened and extended through how Drury uses improvisation to challenge both the orthodoxies of history and theatre-making and to show the differential effects of these orthodoxies on the Black and white cast members. In his definition of Afro-fabulation, Nyong’o importantly clarifies that it should not be conflated with “the free play of imagination” (2019, 203). This is borne out in Drury’s text through striking distinctions between the imaginative practices and limit points of Black and white actors. For example, in a key section of the play, Actor 3 takes on the role of Actor 6’s Black grandmother, which Drury notes is “not okay” (Drury 2012, 95). The scene reaches a climax when Actor 3 delivers the following speech: You better shut your mouth and listen to me girl. You can’t take no walk in somebody else’s shoes and know anything. You ain’t bought those shoes, you ain’t laced those shoes up, you ain’t put those shoes on day after day, you ain’t broken those shoes in. Now, you can borrow someone else’s shoes, and

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you can walk as long as you want, they ain’t your shoes. You can go ahead and steal somebody else’s shoes and guess what? They ain’t your shoes. (p. 101)

It is important to recognize that Actor 6 resists and indeed tries to prevent Actor 3 from improvising (blackfacing) her grandmother—“Alright, that’s enough,” and, again, “I said that’s enough” (p. 101). That Actor 3 continues despite Actor 6’s injunction clearly frames the speech as an act of violence. Moreover, this violence is parasitic, appropriating the language and perceived experience of Black injustice to subjugate and silence Actor 6. Despite the platitudinous sentiment of the speech (and its wry commentary on the acting endeavour itself), it is not the case that Actor 6 cannot walk in the shoes of her ancestors. Indeed, for her to do so is an urgent personal and political act. While actors such as Actor 3 are comfortable with appropriating Black experience, they refuse such expansiveness of imagination when it comes to confronting their own role in histories of racism. This is best evidenced by the example briefly cited earlier when Actor 1 breaks scene when asked to perform an act of racial violence, explaining that, “I can’t—I’m not that person” (p. 148). Actor 3 tries to help Actor 1 understand how “White Man” could have done what he did (the repeated shooting of an African man) by sharing a story from his family history involving a battle during the Civil War where his great-grandfather, a Union soldier, was pinned in a ditch with a Black Union solider while Confederates approached. Actor 3: My great-grandfather saw the rage in their faces, the confusion, so my great-grandfather looked that Union solider in the eye and said “I’m Sorry.” And shot him. And my great-grandfather saw that the Union soldier was still alive. So my great-grandfather shot him again. And he shot that soldier again, and again, and my great-grandfather shot him in fear — out of fear for his own life and he shot him so that they would see him shooting him and he shot him so that he would be captured and kept alive. He shot him to save his own life. (pp. 151–2)

The anecdote clearly illustrates the kind of denialism, rationalization and disaffiliation that white supremacist ideology uses to justify racism. Actor 3, however, fails to recognize what the account demonstrates of America’s racial history, instead compartmentalizing the story as a psychological explainer to aid Actor 1 in his performance. In response, Actor 2 variously

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states: “It’s about you instead of us,” “All we are doing is hearing the white version of the story over and over,” “I don’t want to hear another story about how hard it is to be a white man” (pp. 153–4). As is evident, the practices of imagination, identification, appropriation and embodiment contained within the broad scope of improvisation clearly have differentiated effects depending on the subject position of the improvisor. For example, in contrast to Afro-fabulation as an act of resistance by Actor 6, the kind of identification performed by Actor 3 in the Grandmother speech may be described as what Ronald J. Pelias in his discussion of the ethics of theatrical identification calls empathy as “imperialist venture.” This iteration of identification allows the actor to “possess others, to name, to claim ownership” (1991, 143) and is hegemonic rather than radically resistant, having the effect, as Pelias suggests of “silencing” the other by bringing them “under their [the actor’s] yoke” (144). An embodied approach, on the other hand, orients towards community, towards the collective. What is most interesting to me is how Drury’s text not only effects a critique of both historical and theatrical practices, but also demonstrates a model of theatricality that effectively resists such hegemony. This resistance, as I have suggested, is located in the text’s self-reflexive attention to embodiment as a device capable of excavating and expressing the truths of racism otherwise suppressed. That is, it is through strategies of embodiment that both Black agency is expressed and white complicity in racist violence is exposed. In terms of acting, this resistance finds form in what Pelias in contrast with empathy as imperial venture calls empathy as “dialogic embodiment.” Here, the actor is figured as a witness who orient themselves towards community (rather towards self or other), and their performance “a dialogue, a multiple voiced narrative, in which the performer through role-playing and standing-beside, strives for consensus naming” [original emphasis] (1991, 148). In describing this stance as a “speaking with,” Pelias’ concept intersects with Reese’s theorization of dramaturgies capable of expressing collective trauma. As she suggests, in order to be able to “stand with,” the specificity of Black experience necessitates a form of embodiment that “is not acting at all”: It is the courage to relive publicly the breaks in belonging that constitute self at the level of community. Said another way, embodiment is the act of historicized enactments distilled, crystallized, and refined to the

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point that the human condition is nakedly and unapologetically exposed. Embodiment is immediate and urgent. (2010, 166)

Such an embodied approach, she explains, sets aside the emphasis on individual experience in method acting—it “is not a fabricated ‘inner life’ or ‘method acting’”—and is instead rooted in “a history of traumas […] at the level of community” (163). She further explains: “Embodiment has very little to do with an individual’s personal experience; it has to do with how a history told through cultural memory, reformation, and representation, impacts a community in which the individual is directly linked to the collective” (163). Most significantly for my own analysis, an embodied approach on the part of the actor requires them, as Reese suggests, to “feel historical traumas” and at the same time “to remain emotionally distant” (163). When this occurs, “[e]mbodiment becomes the actor’s tool for both representing and reshaping collective identity and collective memory for both the performer and the audience” (163). The transitive and collectivist character of what Reese describes is, Sibley suggests, a core feature of Afrocentric dramatizations of memory. She writes: “When the experience is Afrocentric, it is just as important to focus on the history and development of a people, not just a single character” (2017, 129). Indeed, Drury’s play does not provide us with a clear protagonist, with conflict instead arising between members of the collective and their varying viewpoints. In its dramaturgy—and in its concluding scenes—Drury’s play makes a claim for not only the legitimacy but indeed the necessity of this form of collective historical memorymaking; as Sibley writes, “memory is an agent that illuminates injustice” (127). Drury’s emphasis on transitive and collective memory therefore reinforces the understanding that trauma “is linked to the formation of collective identity and the construction of collective memory” (Eyerman 2004, 60). In distinguishing between individual and collective trauma, Ron Eyerman, in the context of his discussion of the history of slavery in the U.S., explains that: “As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric” (2004, 61). This kind of rending of the social fabric is precisely what occurs at the conclusion of Drury’s play as the irresolution of racial violence in the US—its historical consistency—becomes painfully palpable.

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Afro-fabulation as strategic embodied practice in this context is therefore not only an act of individual agential speculation, but also tethered to a collective history of traumatic experience. In “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” Jeffrey Alexander explains the power of imagination in contexts such as Drury’s, suggesting that “events do not, in and of themselves, create collective trauma” (2004, 8), and instead that, “trauma is a socially mediated attribution,” further explaining: The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds; it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstruction. Sometimes, in fact, events that are deeply traumatizing may not actually have occurred at all; such imagined events, however, can be as traumatizing as events that have actually occurred. (8)

Alexander’s theorization of the relationship between imagination and trauma helps to account for how the fabulation or speculative reconstruction of historical events shapes and informs the experiences of the Black actors in the present. As he writes: “Imagination informs trauma construction just as much when the reference is to something that has actually occurred as to something that has not. It is only through the imaginative process of representation that actors have the sense of experience” (2004, 9).While Alexander refers here to “actors” in the sense of social actors, the observation may be said to apply equally to actors who, to draw from Reese, “embody” traumatic history. In Drury’s play, real events, the imagination of those events, the legacies of those events, and the imaginative projection of oneself into another’s experiences, all intersect to finally produce the traumatic experience of the noose around Actor 2’s neck. At this moment we see precisely why the fabulation that Nyong’o describes is so necessary—the force that stands in opposition is the genealogical consistency, ever-present, of racial violence. I therefore now wish to turn to the ending of Drury’s play to consider this in more detail.

Something… It is in the final scene of We Are Proud to Present, “processtation,” that the deconstructive force of “embodiment,” as Reese describes it, is most strikingly evident. As the play moves towards its conclusion, it eschews the

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straightforwardly parodic, expressing an urgency that effects a complex instantiation of the kind of “fugitivity” that Fred Moten speaks of in Stolen Life: Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument. That is, it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety. (2018, 131)

The ending of the play is transgressive in multiple ways. The racism unleashed in the white actors is the most obvious expression of this, encapsulated in the image of Actor 2 with the noose hung around his neck. This act of violence occurs because the actors—the white actors specifically—transgress the usual “rules” of propriety that constrain racism; the seeming openness of the theatrical improvisatory context allows such unconstrained racism to emerge. Further, after Actor 2 “breaks scene” and leaves the stage, Actor 4 holds the gaze of the audience as he attempts but fails to formulate a question in response to what has just happened. In this gaze, the fulsomeness of Black experience escapes translation for white audience members; it remains fugitive, asserting a power that refuses to comply with the demand for explanation. Most significant, however, is the sense in which the play in its final minutes exceeds or escapes the self-reflexive conceits that have hitherto governed its dramaturgy. “Something,” as Drury’s stage directions note, is released as the drama climaxes then draws to a close. To better explain how the play reaches this “something,” I would like to describe the final scene and those that directly precede it in a little more detail. “Processtation,” as Drury calls the last scene, structurally breaks with the play’s previous rhythm of alternation between the distinct modes of process and presentation. The “something” that the play finally arrives at emerges from her complication of the lines of demarcation between past and present, actor and character; the violence of the imperial project and that of America’s own history of racism are shown as intimately “interlaced,” as Anderson and Menon put it (2009, 5), in their cosmology of “planetary anti-blackness.” This revelation is achieved through the sustained use of improvisation. “Staying in it,” as Actor 6 directs the other cast members, is her answer to the arguments between the Black and

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white actors about what it means to “make up” the Herero story and the necessity of “figuring out what it was like for them” (p. 159). At the same time, “staying in it” finally allows for a more substantive development of the Black actors’ historic characters who finally occupy more of the storytelling. This point is important as it in turn precipitates resistance—firstly from the white actors—“don’t you think it would be offensive to them to have us like Make Up their story for them?” (p. 157)—and then from white actors in-character as German occupiers, and finally, from the white actors as racist Americans. That is, it is through “staying in it” that the undercurrents of racism in the rehearsal room become fully manifest. The ontology of “it” in this context is therefore important, denoting the kind of fugitive space the Moten evokes. This “it” space is marked by temporal and rhythmic complexity. Take, for example, the following (truncated) passage related to the German project of building a railroad, which comes shortly before the play’s final scene. Black Man: Dear Sarah. I have been craving a fire. But I don’t want a fire that is just a fire. I want my fire. I want the fire that holds my ancestors. […] Another White Man blows a Whistle Another White Man: Rail Road Building. […] Black Man: For months I have not built a fire. For months I have been building. what the Germans call a railroad. […] Another White Man: Keep up the pace. (pp. 133–4)

The fire and whistle express two opposing temporal schemas. The fire, “okuruo,” contains the souls of ancestors and must be kept alight or else the ancestors will be destroyed, as the actors explain earlier in the play (68). In its continuity, the fire expresses the interdependence of past and present, with identity contingent on this co-presence. Extinguishing the ancestral fire—as happened during colonial occupation—therefore violently disturbs identity construction. The whistle serves as contrast to the flame; it punctuates, severs and divides time. This time of the law,

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of the rule of law, interrupts Indigenous time, asserting its dominance through expressions of violence. The railroad to which the whistle is tethered subjugates Black bodies to the demands of its construction, bringing them forcefully inside its own temporal structure. The “it” space that Drury creates in the play’s concluding scenes emphasizes the struggle between Indigenous time and the legal time of imperialist history and historicization. In this sense, theatrical improvisation serves as a ritual of fugitive resistance to the violent imposition of imperial-historical time. From the perspective of the audience, what occurs in the final passages of the play is a temporal border-crossing of sorts from colonial Africa to pre-civil rights Southern America in the twentieth century. This is set up in the two scenes that directly precedes “processtation.” The first is an intense improvisation between Actors 1 and 2 where they play “White Man” and “Black Man,” respectively. Black Man is trying to return to his homeland while White Man is charged with enforcing the colonial law that prohibits such return. As the scene’s conflict develops, Drury writes in the stage directions, “a slight southern accent slowly, starts to enter Actor 1’s diction” (p. 142). Shortly after, “Actor 2 starts a southern accent” (p. 143). The dialogue that follows is short, sharp and painful as Black Man tries to convince White Man to let him get home. Actor Actor Actor Actor Actor

1/White Man: Don’t make me shoot you. 2/Black Man: I’m not making you do anything. 1/White Man: Do not even take a step over here. 2/Black Man: You’ll shoot me for a step? 1/White Man: I’ll shoot you for breaking the law. (p. 145)

The scene reaches a climax when Actor 2/Black Man takes a step and we hear a loud shot; the shot abruptly wrenches the drama into the present. Significantly, the scene that immediately follows compulsively repeats the moment of the shooting: BLACK MAN immediately falls BLACK MAN is still alive. BLACK MAN is breathing. WHITE MAN shoots him again. BLACK MAN is still alive. BLACK MAN is breathing — gasping. They get into a pattern: Breath in. Click. Shot. Breath in. Click. Shot. (147)

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Like the whistle, the gunshot expresses the violence of the law. As Drury’s text intimates, this violence is not exceptional but rather embedded in the very rhythmicality of white order. “Processtation” extends the emphasis on rhythm and temporal disjunction. It begins as Actors 2 and 4, playing Herero men exiled from their land, walk towards the dangerous German-built wall. One by one other actors enter the scene. The white actors take on the role of German soldiers and begin a chant that again instantiates the rhythm of violent control: “Round them up. Chain them up. Lead them up. Lock them up” (p. 165). This is set against a “slave song” sung by the Black actors. Take me to my home Take me to that place Place that I am from Take me to my home Home that ain’t my home Where do I belong Took me from my home Place where I belong Place that’s now your home Where I don’t belong—(p. 165)

The aural counterpoint of the chant and song is important here, expressing as it does the ideological-temporal conflicts already foregrounded. My recollection of the performance at Soho Rep is that this rhythmical conflict very much drove the scene forward and seemed a radical break from the self-reflexivity of the rest of the drama. The attention to rhythm suggested something closer to ritual and to a kind of psychic re-enactment of the past than theatrical improvisation. That is, the “something” that occurs exceeds representational play in the same way that Drury’s script indicates at this point that the actors are both themselves and their characters; that is, whereas previously the actors had been known as either their actor number in the process scenes or their character name in the presentation scenes, now they are denoted as both. The iteration of the American South and transfer of the drama away from the African setting is completed when White Man and Another White Man capture Black Man. They beat him and force him to falsely admit that he “broke the law.” When Black Man finally “pushes back” and knocks White Man down, White Man instructs him: “You better run n—. I said run. Run n—” (p. 168). As Actor 2 begins to run, the ensemble

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begins “a rhythm of 7: 1–2-3, 1–2-3, 1” by stomping and clapping in alternation with “1–2, 1–2, 123” (p. 168). At this point, the text seems to infinitely expand; Drury’s stage directions twice make note of a show or production for a crowd of a thousand (pp. 169, 170). The final conclusion that this “show” builds towards is the attempted hanging of Black Man, but not before the virulence of racism on stage intensifies from grotesque blackface to reprehensible racist jokes to the all-abiding sense of Black Man as object of prey. Indeed, when he is caught, stage direction notes of Actors 1 and 3: “They threaten and terrify him and enjoy his fear” (p. 174). All on stage are completely absorbed in their roles until Actor 2 breaks the scene. In contrast with the ironic and deconstructive sensibility of Drury’s metatheatrical alternation between “process” and “presentation,” the sense of ritual enactment in “processtation” created—at least for me when I watched the performance—an almost unbearable sense of tension as the action moved towards a seemingly unalterable outcome. In their discussion of Black acting methods, Luckett and Shaffer write that “ritual signifies a connection between the material world and the spiritual world,” elaborating that rituals in this context “are recursive patterns and actions embedded in acting spaces that enact processes and methods, often moving toward product that is never fixed” (2017, 3). Such a “nonlinear” approach—Drury’s play certainly seems to unfold in a circular fashion rather than in a straight line—defies the convention of completion or resolution, deploying instead what might be characterized as a dramaturgy of “complete incompletion,” of fugitivity. Or, as Erik Ehn remarked in a post-show talk back, “it’s like a Venn diagram in motion. These worlds are rotating around each other, influencing each other, so it’s going to have to remain complicated” (Drury and Ehn 2012). The relationship between ritual and theatre in this sense is not simply a way of describing a type of theatrical outcome, or a way of referencing an anthropological perspective on the social role of performance, but rather describes a foundational element of both the creative process and its outcome. The Black actors throughout the play push against certain conventions of both Eurocentric dramaturgy and acting process. They are led by Actor 6, who commits the cast to the sustained ritual of improvisation, which in turn allows them to get at the “something” of the play. This somewhat ephemeral—fugitive—notion of “something” is what Luckett and Shaffer suggest is the aim of ritual: to “‘get at’ something” (2017, 4).

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Indeed, in the concluding pages of the play, after Actor 2 has broken scene, Drury’s stage directions indicate: Silence. And in that silence something starts to happen. The actors start to process what just happened. And there is something… Discomfort. Frustration. Awkwardness. Nerve. Adrenaline. Uncertainty. Buzzing. Embarrassment. Guilt. Shame. Anger. Excitement. Something…” (2012, 174–5)

Gradually the actors leave the space until finally the last actor on stage “looks to the audience”: He tries to say something to the audience but… He might produce the air of a word beginning with the letter ‘w’ like We or Why or What. He tries to speak, but he fails. (p. 176)

The metatheatrical knowingness of the play is replaced by a sense of what Nyong’o calls “unknowing” (2019, 209); or, as Moten writes in Stolen Life, imagination as “fugitively in excess of itself” (2018, 7). In its final scene, Drury’s play foregoes its self-reflexive critique of staging violence in order to allow a kind of pure violence to erupt. Therefore, while showing the limits and failure of representation, the play also delivers us a powerful truth, even if this truth wasn’t the one that the actors set out to find. If the role of theatre was, in the pretext of the play, bringing to light a little-known historical genocide, then the role that the play finally performs is that of showing us just how “confusing” (Drury) and “messy” the process of staging—bringing to life—the past in the present is, and that there is no way of circumventing or occluding the problems of the present in that process and indeed our own responsibility for suffering that we might otherwise consider distant and “other.” Of the ending, Drury in a talkback remarked: “It’s easy to sit in judgement and it’s hard to look inside… I wanted to make sure that everyone was culpable in creating that final moment … everyone is implicated in that” (In Conversation). At the same talkback, an audience member commented: “I felt like I wanted to say something at many points and be part of the presentation, particularly when they walked out [at the end]. It was just silent and I was like, ok, come on, can we all just like

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have a conversation? By the end of it I was really in that place where I wanted to speak to everyone about what I was feeling.” Both comments point to the strategy of embodiment that Reese describes and the sense of urgency and immediacy that it aims towards. And, as I have argued, it is Drury’s choice of the metatheatrical premise that enables her to achieve this, not simply because it is an effective vehicle for critique but more profoundly because its deconstructive sensibility—its tearing apart of both history and theatre—allows for something else to emerge—the yearning for lineage (99), the fire that holds ancestors (159), a “drop of rain” (162)—something… something…

Conclusion One of the principal concerns of this monograph is how metatheatrical texts depict theatre’s own implication in structures of violence. Drury’s text is quite remarkable for the ways in which it addresses this problem directly, showing that rehearsal rooms and the creative and cultural conventions that govern them are in no way exempt from both the effects of historical trauma and the continuance of politics and policies of discrimination and oppression in the present. That is, Drury’s dramaturgy uses the metatheatrical premise of the play to deconstruct and critique not just historical injustice but also theatrical methodology as itself complicit in the same structures of violence. Indeed, it is vitally important that the critique illustrates their inter-relation. In this sense, the play effectively demonstrates the violence of representational practices through showing representational failure as Judith Butler suggests is necessary when she writes “For representation to convey the human … representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure” (2004, 144). At the same time, and what makes the play so compelling, Drury illustrates how theatre can serve as a vehicle for justice through dramaturgy that both privileges collective and transitive genealogical experience. The play’s emphasis on collective experience, its rejection of fixed notions of the character-actor relationship, its looping and spiralling dramaturgy all challenge assumptions related both to historical understanding and how such understanding might be represented on stage. Ultimately, the problems that the actors face are not just ones of theatricality methodology but ones of the ongoing “rehearsal” and enactment of violence paradigms in the present. In this sense, it is possible to draw a connection between doubleness as existential condition in the sense described by W.E.B. Du

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Bois and metatheatrical doubleness. Du Bois writes of what he calls a “second-sight” accorded to the African American subject, a “doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This is, Du Bois writes, a “two-ness” (1903, 2–3). It is precisely because of this doubleness that Reese suggests a double-conscious approach to theatrical writing that is grounded in “the intersection of personal history with collective memory” (2010, 165). Such an embodied approach, as cited earlier, “has very little to do with an individual’s personal experience; it has to do with how a history told through cultural memory, reformation, and representation, impacts a community in which the individual is directly linked to the collective” (2010, 163). One can finally say, therefore, that the use of metatheatricality by Drury is not only a clever way of deconstructing racialized power structures (which it is), but also a way of approximating the very experience of double consciousness and letting that experience provide the framework for the shape of the drama. The outcome or impact of this double-conscious dramaturgy is of course differentiated for spectators according to their own positionality; as a white scholar and spectator there are dimensions to Drury’s play that remain out of reach and I wish to clearly acknowledge this. Nonetheless, the play is an exemplary case study for this monograph in that it illustrates the power of metatheatricality as a tool for both scrutinizing and resisting violence.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: California University Press. Anderson, Patrick, and Jisha Menon. 2009. Violence Performed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Chambers, Jonathan. 2010. “Actor Training Meets Historical Thinking.” In The Politics of American Actor Training, edited by Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud, 31–45. New York: Routledge.

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Colbert, Soyica Diggs, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel. 2020. “Introduction: Tidying Up after Repetition.” In Race and Performance After Repetition, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones and Shane Vogel, 1–28. Croydon: Duke University Press. Company One. 2015. “We Are Proud to Present... A Pamphlet About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915” [brochure]. https://compan yone.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/WAPBrochure.pdf Cooper, Allan D. 2007. “Reparations for the Herero Genocide: Defining the Limits of International Litigation.” African Affairs 106 (422): 113–126. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Drury, Jackie Sibblies. 2012. We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915. New York: On Stage Press. Drury, Jackie Sibblies, and Erik Ehn. 2012. “Erik Ehn and Jackie Sibblies Drury in Conversation” [post-show talkback]. New York: Soho Rep Theatre. https://sohorep.org/erik-ehn-and-jackie-sibblies-drury-in-conversation. Drury, Jackie Sibblies, and Ramona Ostrowski. 2014. “We Are Proud to Present: Jackie Sibblies Drury” [interview]. Boston: Company One Theatre. https:// companyone.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/WAPBrochure.pdf. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications. Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 60–111. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fürst, Saskia. 2017. “Palimpsests of Ancestral Memories: Black Women’s Collective Identity Development in Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand.” English Academy Review 34 (2): 66–75. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Lamaison, Pierre. 1986. “From Rules to Strategies: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu.” Cultural Anthropology 1 (1): 110–120. Luckett, Sharrell D., and Tia M. Shaffer. 2017. “Introduction: The Affirmation.” In Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, 1–15. New York: Routledge. Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2019. “Does Staging Historical Trauma Re-enact It?” In Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms, 200–210. London: Bloomsbury.

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Ophir, Adi. 2005. The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals. New York: Zone Books. Peace Pledge Union. 2015. “Namibia 1904.” Peace Pledge Union. https:// www.ppu.org.uk/sites/default/files/Genocide%20NAMIBIA%201904.pdf. Pelias, Ronald J. 1991. “Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement.” Theatre Research International 16 (2): 142–152. Reese, Venus Opal. 2010. “Keeping it Real Without Selling Out: Towards Confronting and Triumphing Over Racially-Specific Barriers in American Actor Training.” In The Politics of American Actor Training, edited by Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud, 162–76. New York: Routledge. Sibley, Clinnesha D. 2017. “Remembering, Rewriting, and Reimagining: Afrocentric Approaches to Directing New Work for the Theatre.” In Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, 123–135. New York: Routledge. Stephenson, Jenn. 2010. “Re: Performing Microhistories: Postmodern Metatheatricality in Canadian Millennial Drama.” In Re: Reading the Postmodern, edited by Robert Stacey, 249–268. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. weseeyouWAT.com. 2020. “Dear White American Theatre.” https://www.wes eeyouwat.com/statement.

CHAPTER 4

The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle

Introduction This chapter and the next shift focus from metatheatrical depictions of actors to those of playwrights. Whereas representations of actors tend to focus on the how of representation—Drury’s staging of the rehearsal process in We Are Proud to Present, for example—author-characters question the very basis of representation: how is the knowledge upon which the script is based gained? As Dan Rebellato writes of staging dramatic authorship generally, “authorship […] become[s] a ground for aesthetic and ethical questioning […] a way of profoundly investigating theatrical meaning and our capacity for fundamental political change” (2013, 12). In their self-reflexivity, the plays examined across the next two chapters deeply query how the author and their writing may adequately respond to the demands of real-life violence. They do this by inserting the playwright into the drama, framing them as an intermediary witness who translates real-world violence into performable theatrical action. This chapter asks about the conditions of such witness, with particular attention given to the positionality of the author. Three key case studies are used to frame the discussion: Michael Redhill’s Goodness (2005) and a subsequent documentary made about the play’s performance in Rwanda, Goodness in Rwanda (Rand and Westheuser 2013) and Erik Ehn’s Thistle (2012), part of his series of seventeen plays about genocide, Soulographie. The protagonist of Goodness is a fictionalized avatar of Redhill himself © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_4

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and the central dramatic action concerns “Michael’s” encounter with a survivor of an unnamed genocide and subsequent attempt to dramatize her testimony. Given Jenn Stephenson’s excellent analysis of the ethical dimensions of Redhill’s play in her article, “The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness,” I will focus my discussion of Goodness via an account of the documentary in order to build on her insights. The documentary offers a valuable ethnographic account of the play in performance, and the setting of Rwanda helps to highlight some of the key ethical challenges for metatheatrical texts that attempt to witness violence. Ehn’s play also features a character who encounters a witness to violence, and is also concerned with the dramatic translation of such testimony. However, Ehn does not himself feature in Thistle, rather it is the act of authorial interpretation of violent testimony that is the basis of the play’s self-reflexivity. Ehn does this by interweaving the real-life testimony of Rufina Amaya Marquez, sole survivor of the execution of the village of El Mozote in El Salvador by government forces in 1981, with a poetic iteration of her account of events that features a “witness-by-proxy” character (Ehn 2012, 5). Both Goodness and Thistle are deeply concerned with the relationship between violence, theatre and witness, and are invested in the concept of what Stephenson calls “performative witness,” witness understood as a “doing” that incurs ethical responsibility (2008, 98). In both plays, the act of performative witness is a response to the “call” of violence with dramatic self-reflexivity grounded in a sense of authorial responsibility. As “witnesses by proxy,” the plays’ protagonists are charged with both listening to the account given to them and consequently with bearing responsibility for giving their own account of what they have heard. In my focus on how each play stages the act of witness-by-proxy, I am led by Kelly Oliver’s work on the relationship between witnessing, subjectivity and ethics and her argument that “subjectivity is the result of the process of witnessing” (2004, 185). What this means is that victims of violence come into being as subjects through their ability to testify to what they have experienced. Because violence itself destroys subjectivity, to restore subjectivity the act of witness—of speaking back to violence— is essential. While I will go into further detail about Oliver’s thinking later, her basic premise presents a challenge for metatheatrical plays that dramatize the accounts of witnesses: how do their authors make sure that the self-reflexive framework within which they position themselves does not dominate the account of the witness (even if that witness is a fictional

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creation as is the case in Redhill’s play)? Speaking of subjectivity generally, Oliver writes: How we conceive of ourselves as subjects and how we conceive of our subjectivity, are at the foundation of what we believe about ourselves, the world, and other people; and we act accordingly. This is why in order to begin to understand domination and oppression, it is imperative to investigate who we think we are and how we imagine others. (2004, 182)

While metatheatricality lends itself to “investigat[ing] who we think we are,” reflexive awareness of “how we imagine others” is sometimes less well-defined and there is a danger of metadrama dissolving into solipsism. I am particularly attentive to when the subordination of those othered by violence to the authorial witness-by-proxy creates a situation where, as Ehn suggests, “the subject of witness becomes the virtue of the witness (replacing the suffering of what we see with the suffering of our seeing)” (qtd. in Willis 2014a, 400). In the chapter, I therefore scrutinize subjectivity in relation to theatrical witness and suggest that it is especially important for metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence to, in certain circumstances, cede their own representational privilege and authority. Any scrutiny of such solipsism needs to begin with the subject position of the dramatized contemplative author. Whereas Drury’s We Are Proud to Present, discussed in the previous chapter, used deconstruction as a tool to challenge hegemonies of racism and did this via the experiential platform of Blackness, the plays discussed in this chapter are written by North American white men. They are not written out of the experience of directly suffering the consequences of genocidal violence or from belonging to the genealogies of violence depicted in the plays (though Redhill’s protagonist’s Jewish heritage is an important point of identification in Goodness ). Rather, they are an attempt to address “Western” responsibility for genocidal violence. In Goodness, for example, Stephenson writes that through playwright-protagonist Michael’s acts of both listening to the testimony of the plays’ fictional genocide survivor and subsequently dramatizing her history, he moves “beyond listening to accepting a certain culpability in the events he witnesses” (2008, 106). Similarly, a character in Thistle points out that the US helped to finance El Salvador’s military activities and is therefore partially culpable for what happened in El Mozote. While the plays’ acts of theatrical witness are certainly motivated by what Carole-Anne Upton calls “honourable

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intentions” (2012, 3), I suggest that without careful attention to subjectivity, metatheatrical self-address may inadvertently reinstate the power dynamics that render the violently othered subject as object. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s invocation of the “unhappy performative” in her critique of whiteness studies—where the anti-racist promises of the whiteness studies fail to perform what they declare—I examine the limits of metatheatrical “witness-by-proxy,” asking: whose subjectivity is privileged in the account? The chapter therefore extends the work of the previous, continuing to explore the relationship between race, violence and theatrical self-reflexivity, but this time examining how meaning is generated when metadramatic devices are employed from a position of white privilege.

Theatrical Witness and Authorship Before discussing Goodness and Thistle, I wish to briefly remark on what is meant by “witnessing” in the theatrical context. The yoking together of the concepts of witnessing and theatre—“the witness turn,” as it has been described—has been well-canvassed in recent years, particularly by performance scholars such as Caroline Wake and Suzanne Little, who have focussed on the witness function of the audience. Little, for example, writes of a “growing desire by practitioners […] to either configure the audience as witness or to charge the audience with being complicit in the creation of violent or depraved performance texts” (2017, 43). This conceptual and dramaturgical reconfiguration seemingly places greater ethical demands on the audience. As Karine Schaefer writes: “What a witness-producing performer wants to happen to the spectator, then, is that someone who is essentially an onlooker could be so affected by an experience that it becomes a challenge for [them] to question [their] ideas, social responsibility and shared history” (2003, 6). There is, therefore, much at stake when we frame theatre as a venue for witnessing, not least an implicit claim for theatre’s ethical potential. As Little writes: “Recent attempts at reconfiguring audiences as witnesses […] could be seen, in part, as endeavouring to address various charges of exploitation, manipulation, voyeurism, victim silencing, retraumatization, and generally unethical or naïve approaches” (2017, 49). Carole-Anne Upton similarly writes (partially cited earlier) that “The term ‘witness’ has been energetically embraced […] as much to signal the honourable intentions of a given production as to invoke an ethically invigorated aesthetic for performance in the presence of an audience” (2012, 3). The naming of spectators as

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witnesses not only lends scrutiny to the practice of spectatorship, but more broadly alerts us to the framing of performance as a social agent that incurs the same ethical and political responsibilities that we might expect from other domains of civil society; that is, while we may suspend our disbelief, we do not suspend our social responsibilities. When theatre is described as a form of witness, the role of witness is generally ascribed to the spectator who is on the receiving end of a “trans-action” with the performer in the sense that performers generate a theatrical object, which in turns stimulates or provokes what Mireia Aragay calls “ethical speculations” in the spectator: “its potential […] to awaken the spectator’s capacity for ethical reflection” (2014, 6). Where the writer fits in the ethical transaction is less clear, not least because they generally lack visibility in the final theatrical performance. Goodness is an especially helpful example in this regard (as are Tim Crouch’s The Author and Ella Hickson’s The Writer, discussed in the next chapter). This is not simply because Redhill stages the author, but because he dramatizes the very act of writing itself. In this sense, the play is exemplary in showing us how the subjectivity of the author informs their translation or reconstruction of the violent testimony that they hear, emphasizing the affective dimension of the author’s encounter with this history and how it shapes the creative decisions that they make. If theatrical spectators are witnesses inasmuch as they are witness to the performance event, then authors are witnesses to the origin of the representation that spectators now receive, separated by time. Ehn’s Soulographie project as a whole is a useful illustration of the framing of the author-as-witness. The seventeen plays were based on many years of research into genocide, artistic exchange (including multiple trips to Rwanda) and writing. Across the cycle are numerous instances where this authorial witnessing is woven into the dramaturgical fabric of the plays, often by way of an outsider figure who encounters the genocidal history at hand (see Willis 2014b). As such, audiences to Soulographie not only witness the depiction of genocide, but also witness the act of authorial witnessing-by-proxy to these violent histories. In general, by staging the author-as-witness, metadramatic authors suture together the time of writing and time of performance, effecting the immediacy of the spectator-witness as a way of examining the agency and imbrication in networks of power of the author through their imaginative transposition to sites of violence. Caroline Wake’s taxonomy of spectatorial witness is a good basis for beginning to unpack the significance of such suturing, which certainly

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transgresses orthodox distinctions between different modes of witnessing. Drawing from theories of trauma, Wake identifies three different levels of theatrical witnessing: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary witnesses, she explains, are conceived of as direct witnesses to the performance event itself, thereby framing performance as a real-world action. She notes that, “unsurprisingly, then, this type of witnessing is often associated with performance art” (2013, 42). While writers are seldom primary witnesses to violence in the sense meant by Wake, dramatizations of author-characters often demonstrates desire to have been a primary witness, a point I will take up in the next section. The concept of spectators as secondary witnesses, Wake explains, “involves listening to an actor or performer deliver their own primary testimony […] or deliver testimony on behalf of a prior primary witness” (46). Some kinds of documentary theatre, verbatim in particular, may fall into this category. Similar to primary witness, secondary witness in the theatrical context draws affective power from its “anti-theatricality,” its expression of “authenticity.” While Redhill’s play mimics the form of secondary witness through dramatizing Michael’s act of listening to the fictional account, Ehn’s Thistle contains a stronger secondary witness element in that Amaya’s verbatim testimony, voiced by an actor, is threaded throughout the play and provides its dramaturgical spine. Wake’s description of tertiary witnessing in the theatrical context, however, is most relevant to this discussion; indeed, Wake describes this mode as a form of “meta-spectatorship” (50). Tertiary witness plays out in theatrical situations where we watch a character themselves bearing witness. Goodness illustrates this meta-spectatorship explicitly in its scenes where protagonist Michael watches past events played out on stage, alternately commenting on and attempting to intervene in the account being given. Thistle similarly shows the key tertiary witness in the play, “Girl,” watching Amaya’s account unfold. The ethicality of witnessing in the tertiary mode is more precarious than in primary or secondary modes. Wake writes that “the tertiary witness who is temporally distanced is particularly problematic, since his or her imaginative, assimilative recovery of the event comes dangerously close to concepts of false witnessing” (52). This is one of the key points that Redhill sets out to explore, testing the limits of authorial agency and responsibility when it comes to witnessing events to which the author is separated by both time and experience. For example, near the end of the play, the witness character, Althea, challenges Michael, asking: “Where were you with your notebook when

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we needed a witness?” (Redhill 2005, 98). The dramaturgical “messiness” of the play, as Stephenson describes contemporary metadramas generally, (2010, 261), comes from Redhill’s deliberate transgression of temporal distinctions between events as experienced (primary), as testified to by Althea (secondary), and as subsequently received and expressed by Michael (tertiary). Althea’s reprimand rightly queries the ethical value of belated artistic witness, especially when self-reflexively focussed. The reason for elaborating Wake’s taxonomy of witness is that it helps us to understand the complexities of “performative witness,” especially in metatheatrical contexts where the dramatic premise is far from stable. Stephenson, for example, characterizes Redhill’s dramaturgy as “metaleptic,” suggesting that the play’s overlapping temporalities and worlds are what allow the act of performative witness to take place. She explains: Metalepsis, then, as it operates to breach the boundaries of these worlds, not only disrupts space allowing crossovers between here and there but, more disturbingly, time is disrupted and the past and sometimes the future emerge in the ongoing immutable now of the performance in progress. By bringing two or more disparate times together into a shared now, this temporally blended metaleptic structure of the play repeats and complicates the relation between a play and its audience, between a story and its witness. (2008, 103)

In this mode, as cited earlier, the protagonist Michael moves “beyond listening to accepting a certain culpability in the events he witnesses.” Wake’s taxonomy of witness helps illustrate how self-reflexive “performative witness” migrates across the distinctions she outlines, metaleptically interweaving in ways that breach the borders of experience normally observed in the transmission of traumatic narratives. Such interweaving is delicate and ethically fragile. That is, placing the author at the “scene of the crime,” as it were, requires careful recognition of the conditions that allow the act of imaginative transposition to occur in the first place. The distinction that I suggest needs to be maintained even within a metaleptic dramaturgy is what Oliver explains as the difference between “eyewitness testimony” and “bearing witness.” While her philosophical writing is mainly concerned with the ethical imperative to give those objectified by violence a platform to witness to their own experiences, her identification of what she calls the “double meaning” of witness creates scope for its application in a theatrical context: “eyewitness testimony

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based on first-hand knowledge, on the one hand, and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can’t be seen, on the other — is the heart of subjectivity” (2004, 197). As explained, in most instances, aside from exceptional cases of documentary theatre where real-life victims of violence and oppression share their experiences directly with the audience, theatrical witness may only operate within the realm of the second aspect of subjectivity-constituting witness—“bearing witness to something beyond recognition.” It is this “beyondness” that is crucial to both plays discussed in this chapter. How does one performatively witness to something outside the scope of one’s own experience? How does one balance the expression of a poetics of incomprehension (of the felt experience of others) with conveying what we do know of real-world violent events and their causes? In dramatizing and mimetically inhabiting the witness position, the author-as-witness necessarily occupies a speculative position. They imagine the history they are concerned with “as if”: “as if” they saw it themselves, “as if” they heard a first-hand account, “as if” it affects them directly, “as if” they themselves might be partially culpable. The key question for this chapter is whether metatheatrical framing of the act of authorship serves to enhance the ability of drama to witness to “something that is beyond recognition”—the experience of genocide, in this case—through deconstructing the affective flows of history, or whether it forecloses this “beyondness,” remaining trapped within its own self-reflexive structures.

The Unhappy Performativity of Goodness in Rwanda I’m trying to write a play… although, if you can hear me, I guess it’s finished […] You’re sitting in a theatre at this very moment, aren’t you? Somewhere, in the future, you’re in a dark room, and it just got quiet, and you have no idea what’s going to happen to you. You’ve paid money, you’re in your seat and… you’re staring at the playwright. (Redhill 2005, 9–10)

So begins Redhill’s Goodness, immediately introducing the audience not only to playwright as protagonist and writing as action, but also to the overlapping temporalities of the play; the playwright is both acutely present and fundamentally absent—“I’m being played tonight by Jordan

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Pettle” (10). The central action that follows revolves around Michael’s act of listening to the delivery of testimony by fictional genocide survivor, Althea. Althea describes watching guard over a man named Mathias Todd, a former national leader accused of orchestrating a genocide that took thousands of lives, including those of Althea’s family. As the events that Althea has to recount are unfolded, the question, “Why do good people rush to do evil? And what do they become?” emerges as a central theme for the play (21). Althea reveals herself by her account as not only as a victim of violence, but also as complicit in retributive violence that takes place in Todd’s prison cell. As Althea tells her story, a cast of actors bring to life the scenes she describes, including an actor who plays a younger version of herself, which enables present Althea to watch and comment upon the actions of her younger self. As Michael bears witness to Althea’s story, he gradually moves from the position of “passive” listener to active agent, verbally questioning characters and eventually “participating” in the climax of the events as recounted. Around this action, Redhill places a clear metatheatrical frame, as is expressed in the play’s opening. At crucial moments throughout, the audience is reminded of Michael’s role as playwright and indeed of their own role as spectators. This means that the play’s concern with what constitutes “goodness” is not simply directed at the fictional historical characters, but at the writer himself, challenging, as Stephenson remarks, his own culpability for violence. Through drawing our attention to the problems of staging narratives of genocide, Redhill’s play points to a series of broader cultural questions contained within the particular dramatic challenge. How is it possible to understand the complexity of genocide as both historical event and collective trauma from the point of view of an outsider? Moreover, how do we balance the affectivity of such encounters with a clear-sighted understanding of our political and historical relationship to the violent history we are presented with? How much can one’s own personal experience allow one to understand the particular traumas of others? Redhill’s character draws on his family’s murder as European Jews as a point of identification, for example. How much is genocide a universal phenomenon intrinsic to humanity itself, and how much is it geographically, culturally and historically specific in each instance? In defending the non-specificity of the play’s genocide, Redhill remarks that the play is “[m]ore about something that is larger and hangs over us as a human race, rather than about a specific time and a place” (2007, 916). If genocide is understood as such, then is the qualification for grappling with

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genocide the mere fact of being human ourselves? These problems not only inform any dramatization of genocide from a thematic point of view, but also challenge dramaturgical form. Specifically, how might playwrights attend to the both the specific truths of historical subject matter and the general “truths” of human experience that theatre strives to express—the very kind of truth that Redhill gestures towards in the quote above. As Jon Erickson writes in his discussion of the relationship between truth and mimesis in theatre, the “historicist paradox in which the truth of any other historical moment is contingent on one’s interpretation arising from one’s own historical moment, which is also contingent, and the flow of temporality continually challenges that truth […] like trying to shoot from one moving train at a target on another” (2009, 27). Certainly, Redhill’s non-specificity attempts to address this problem. To quote him once more: “There’s another problem with making it about Rwanda or about Germany. The play then has to become factual, correct. It has to be so well researched that the ambiguities that come out of the choices made in Goodness are no longer available to us” (2007, 916). This is why Goodness in Rwanda provides a compelling case study by which to scrutinize the ability of Redhill’s play to “hit its target,” as it were. When performed in the highly specific location of Rwanda, the play’s universalized account of genocide comes under great pressure. I therefore focus on the documentary as a way of unpacking the underpinning positionality of the play itself. At stake is what Fred Moten calls “the terrible interplay of universalism and force” (2018, 4). That is, the appeal to the thematic over the “factual” privileges the concept of both universal experiences and universal values. Great care must be taken in such positioning, with particular attention given to the subjectivity of the author. As I will discuss, the presentation of Goodness in Rwanda stresses the play text precisely because of the tension between the non-specificity of the play and the specificity of Rwandan spectators’ own experiences of genocide. Goodness in Rwanda’s account of Canadian company Volcano’s Theatre’s 2009 tour to Rwanda is roughly structured in three parts: the first shows the company’s preparation and arrival in Rwanda leading up to the first season of the play at a theatre festival in Butare, the second focusses on the company visiting a series of genocide memorials, while the third looks at the company’s second and final season in Kigali. There is a clear emotional arc that connects the three parts. The company arrives with “honourable intentions” but finds themselves challenged in Butare, where the play fails to connect with its audience. Realizing the scope of

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their lack of understanding of the Rwandan context, the company’s subsequent visits to the memorials provide a platform for local Rwandans to speak their own history and for the company to learn. The second season in Kigali is a redemption of sorts, with commentary from the director and actors suggesting that their enhanced understanding of what took place in Rwanda has allowed them to better express the play for Kigali audience members, who are depicted as more receptive than those in Butare. Woven throughout the first and third sections of the documentary are excerpts of the play in either rehearsal or performance. These scenes coupled with the actors’ descriptions of their roles provide a fairly good overview of Redhill’s script for those not familiar with the play. Whereas Stephenson emphasizes the ethical potential of the metaleptic quality of Redhill’s dramaturgy where differential temporalities and spatialities over-lap and intrude on one another, what is most interesting about reading the documentary in relation to the play—for in a sense it adds another link to the chain of witness embedded in the play’s dramaturgy—is its demonstration of metaleptic failure in the Rwandan context. That is, the documentary exposes how the production at times fails to constitute the “shared now” with its audience that Stephenson refers to (2008, 103). For example, when the play premiered to a small audience at the National University in Butare, the response was muted. In a question and answer session that followed, an audience member stood and asked: You’ve been showing us what occurs during genocide time (pause) but I would like to ask you if you’ve been trying to [represent] what occurred [during] the genocide of this nation? And, if you’ve been trying to show that to us, what has been [the] reason behind?

The question is uncomfortable to watch—what exactly is it that you’re trying to tell us, we who have lived it, about genocide—and the director’s answer is evasive, replying that he didn’t know if the play spoke directly to the Rwandan experience of genocide. It is to the film’s credit that it focusses on such moments rather than shying away from them. Nonetheless, such scenes strikingly illustrate how Redhill’s poetic strategies for representing genocide not only falter when presented outside of their original cultural context (North America), but also call into question those very strategies as sufficient in the first place. Is it okay for Redhill’s play to include African folksongs and therefore insinuate itself

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into the African experience of genocide through framing its story as both specific (fictional yet indicative of genocide during the Yugoslav Wars) and universal? Does the writer’s understanding of European genocide provide him with an insight into African experience such that would make the play relatable to a Rwandan audience? Such an assumption would certainly overlook the causality of European colonization of Africa in relation to subsequent political instability and violence. Indeed, Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, has criticized France and Belgium for “what he termed their ‘direct role’ in the ‘political preparation for the genocide’ that killed 800,000 people in 1994” (Cowell 2014). The film makes clear that the legibility—meaningfulness—of the metaleptic pretext of the play’s dramaturgy is limited outside of Eurocentric contexts. In taking the play to Rwanda, therefore, its constitutive whiteness, which underpins its claim to universality, is rendered hyper-visible. This cleaving in the play to “universal” value is articulated early in the film by the play’s director, who remarks on Redhill’s question of why good people rush to do evil: I love that question because I think that is the question when you’re looking at genocide. There’s been so many genocides where the citizenry has participated, either actively or passively by doing nothing, and that’s what’s happened time and again. It’s a human phenomenon, and why does that happen. It’s the question.

The director’s framing of genocide is both de-politicizing and dehistoricizing, pointing instead to essential human failing as the key driver of genocide. Part of what makes the filmed account of staging Goodness in Rwanda so striking is how it renders the whiteness of the play—its claim to universality—so highly “visible.” At surface level, the play is written by a white Canadian author and deals with an unnamed but clearly European genocide. The play suggests the universality of its account by punctuating the dramatic action with folk songs from around the world, which include, as noted, African songs. It is also worth remarking that in both the original production and the touring cast, the character of Althea was played by an actor of colour while Young Althea was played by a white actor, which again underscores a universalizing approach. Significantly, this universalizing “humanist” position fails to engage with the notion of collective trauma. Collective here does not mean universal. I return to a citation given in the previous chapter where Ron Eyerman distinguishes

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between individual and collective trauma: “As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric” (2004, 61). A focus on individuals is of course understandable in the dramatic context, but as Venus Opal Reese and others have argued (see previous chapter), there are strategies for dramatizing collective trauma that might acknowledge that (1) in the genocidal context, collective trauma is the foundation upon which individual trauma rests and (2) collective trauma is culturally specific and not a variant of universal experience. Redhill is highly attuned to these issues and his metatheatrical dramaturgy indeed produces what Reese calls a “double-conscious” effect. The question here, and in specific relation to the depiction of the play’s production in Rwanda, is whether this double consciousness is able to adequately take account of both European and Rwandan experiences of genocide, or whether it instead turns its gaze back towards a contemplation of the suffering of knowing about the suffering of others, effecting what Ahmed describes as a “spectacle of pure self-reflection” that “remov[es] the ‘detour’ provided by the reflection of the other” (2004). It is helpful here to return to both Stephenson’s concept of the performative witness and Ahmed’s description of the unhappy performative as it pertains to whiteness studies. Writing of the author-character of Michael, Stephenson suggests that to become a performative witness means, as cited earlier, to “move beyond listening to accepting a certain culpability in the events he witnesses.” The performativity of the witness denotes not simply a theatricalization of the process of witnessing but that such substitutive witnessing is a doing that incurs responsibility. Michael’s reply to this call to responsibility is the play itself, which stands as testimony to his encounter with Althea’s history. His doubts as to whether this is an adequate response are evident at the very beginning of the play: “I’m trying to write a play… although, if you can hear me, I guess it’s finished. Even though right now I could throw it through a window” (2011, 10). While the image of tossing the script out the window expresses deep frustration, the very fact of the play’s staging suggests performative success of a kind—that the call to witness to genocide has been heard and replied to. But what of culpability? Part of the problem of the play is that exactly what Michael might be culpable for is never made clear. The play is evasive when it comes to dealing with the relationship between whiteness and genocide—it takes on genocide in general but does so

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through the guise of a fictionalized European genocide. Certainly, as a Canadian play, there is no recognition of the country’s own legacy of Indigenous genocide. That is, what is Michael’s culpability attached to? What is Redhill’s? The film, Goodness in Rwanda brings these questions into sharp relief, exposing the partial “unhappiness” of the performativity of which Stephenson writes. At the core of the Ahmed’s description of the unhappy performativity of declarations of anti-racism is the suggestion that these declarations in and of themselves do not perform—put into action—what they state. She writes: “I suggest that declaring whiteness, or even ‘admitting’ to one’s own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be ‘evidence’ of an antiracist commitment, does not do what it says” (2004). Similarly, should accepting culpability in itself be framed as performative? What does such acceptance do? The play’s weakness in scrutinizing this point is manifestly evident when it is performed in Rwanda. As the film emphasizes in its first part, the production fails to perform, sometimes literally; a particular performance in Butare has to be cancelled because the venue has been double-booked by a sports group whose numbers far outweigh the five who have turned up for a matinee performance. But more significantly, it fails to effectively perform its task of witnessing to genocide precisely because those who are bearing witness are not those who have experienced it. Perversely, those who have experience genocide are instead called to listen to this fictive testimony. As the Rwandan audience member asked—for what reason? The director of the film states his own reason in the opening minutes of the film, explaining: My name is Gord Rand and I play the lead character Michael in the play Goodness. When we got the invitation to perform it here I decided to bring a camera. This would be a test… proof that we could show the world that what we did, what I do, has meaning.

Very uncomfortably, Rwanda is framed in this statement as proving ground for the social and political status of the white artist. Rand’s comment suggests expectations of both affinity and gratitude—that Rwandan audiences would not only recognize in Goodness elements of their own experiences, but in so doing realize that they themselves were seen by those staging the play. However, as Christopher Collins and Alexander Jun explain, expressions of empathy or solidarity that posit likeness of experience may easily become a form of what they call “stealing

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down” the pain of others (2017, 26). Collins and Jun use this concept to describe their observation of white participants in anti-racism workshops repeatedly countering the experiences shared by those marginalized by racism with their own stories of pain. Mirroring Eyerman’s distinction between individual and collective trauma, Collins and Jun remark, “Saying ‘I hurt too’ erases the significance of systemic injustices and the systems that perpetuate them. One white person’s isolated, yet painful, experience does not measure the same as the Black American experience, which represents generations of enslavement” (2017, 27). To bring to a play about a semi-fictional European genocide to a Rwanda audience similarly expresses a type of “I hurt too” sentiment. The uncomfortability of this for the actors is depicted in the documentary, as their initial excitement gives way to deep hesitation and even fear about stepping on stage. One remarks, “we have taken so much from this experience but what we’ve given back, I don’t know.” As noted, the documentary is frank in its exploration of the company’s failures to prove the meaningfulness of its tour. After the difficult season in Butare, Rand remarks: I can only speak for myself, but I feel pretty stupid here […] We were worried that we were going to offend them with our words and our actions. And, secretly, we were hoping that we would change their lives for the better. But […] we haven’t offended them, and we haven’t changed them. We haven’t even come close to affecting them, and, well, that makes me feel pretty useless. I’m just a tourist. I didn’t come here to do anything with anybody.

Rand’s reflection certainly illustrates the unhappy or non-performativity that Ahmed points to, where saying does not equate to doing. Indeed, he explicitly (if somewhat awkwardly) points to his “not” doing—“I didn’t come here to do anything with anybody.” The key point here is whether such non-performativity might itself constitute a form of racism. Ahmed writes: “My concern with the non-performativity of anti-racism has hence been to examine how sayings are not always doings, or to put it more strongly, to show how the investment in saying as if saying was doing can actually extend rather than challenge racism” (2004). Her critique strongly challenges both practitioners and scholars to think about the claims we make: what is at stake when we seek to prove the meaningfulness of our practice or research? As someone who has researched for

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some years now in the area of theatre and ethics, I feel the pressure of this question acutely (indeed, it was a key motivator for this study). My point here is not to accuse Redhill or Volcano theatre of racism, but to reflect on their own self-reflection as a way of illustrating how these problems play themselves out not just on stage, but also in the real world in which such productions are received. The performative failure illustrated in the documentary is in fact deeply instructive, even if in ways not always intended by its creators. There are very few such documents that so openly capture the kind of paradigm shift that the company has to make when they realize how ill-placed their original intentions for the production were. The actors openly reflect on their right to tell the story that they are telling in this place and acknowledge their failings. In the end, however, Ahmed’s charge is still worth careful scrutiny, and I now want to turn to the film’s second and third parts, briefly described earlier, to further unpack the relationship between non-performativity and the privileges of subjectivity.

Staring Down Genocide: “A Wonderful Feeling” In the introduction to this chapter, I drew on Kelly Oliver’s discussion of the relationship between witnessing, subjectivity and ethics. To recap, Oliver writes that: “Oppression and subordination render individuals or groups of people other by objectifying them. Objectification undermines subjectivity: to put it simply, objects are not subjects” (2004, 185). Ahmed describes this as “being sealed into the object or thing, not subject, not human; not universal” (2017, 134). This is a particular problem for drama when it seeks to represent the experiences of others: how is it possible to do this in ways that are non-objectifying? Oliver’s arguments seem to suggest that this may not in fact be possible unless those whose experiences are under discussion are given the ability to provide their own testimony. Forms like verbatim theatre have been responsive to this problem—companies have experimented with using earpieces, for example, so that actors hear the real-life testimony of their subjects at the same time as they transit to the audience their “revoicing” of the accounts given. The issue of how theatre can resist the re-objectification of victims of violence through their representation on stage is a core question for this chapter: can a play that seeks to represent genocide without creating space for its real-world victims to speak and be heard be in any way considered ethical? The premise of the tour

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of Goodness to Rwanda illustrates how a representation of genocide that excludes testimony from those who have experienced it and yet seeks to speak to those same survivors undermines their subjectivity. As I have indicated, the film itself acknowledges this problem. After the difficulties in Butare, the company visit a series of genocide memorials, including the well-known sites at Murambi (where bodies of victims are preserved in lime and put on display) and Nyamata, a church that was a scene of a massacre and still bears traces of blood on its walls. During this portion of the film, the directors create space for the testimony of Rwandans to their experiences of genocide, mainly by way of capturing the delivery of the tour guides who explain to the company the significance of these sites. These scenes serve a dual function: they both educate the audience about the Rwandan genocide and demonstrate the company relinquishing their “testimonial” function and ceding this to the Rwandan community. Moving from a speaking to listening position prompts critical reflection in the company members. Rand, for example, remarks on the driving question of the play: That seemed like an important question back home, but here it seems outdated. Rwandans know the answer to that already and we are lucky that we don’t. Here, they’re asking a different question that’s truly beyond my understanding, as Redhill’s was beyond his characters’ understanding: how do you forgive good people who rushed to do evil?

In acknowledging the sense in which the Rwandan experience of genocide is “truly beyond my understanding,” Rand perhaps comes closest to what Oliver means by “bearing witness to something beyond recognition.” Rand’s frank self-reflections, which punctuate the documentary, themselves demonstrate a movement towards “bearing witness” in the sense meant by Oliver, even if only through demonstrating a failure of understanding. This journey is similarly articulated in the play itself. Near the end, after Althea has revealed the violent climax to her story, she asks Michael, “What would you have done?” He replies, “I… I don’t know” to which she remarks: “Now you’ve made some progress” (2011, 98). When I was in Rwanda in 2013, I interviewed Carole Karamera, the artistic director of Ishyo Arts Centre in Kigali, and asked her about how Rwandans perceive “genocide tourism.” She remarked that “It’s not about sharing suffering, which is impossible, but about knowing” (qtd. inWillis 2014b, 201). Such a distinction seems extremely important in this

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context. Part of the pretext for the play—its “honourable intention”—is this objective of sharing suffering, which in turn was borne out by the play’s tour to Rwanda. That such sharing is impossible becomes evident to the cast, and it therefore follows that the documentary—and the experience of the company itself—turns to “knowing,” albeit in the limited context of the tourist encounter. Despite this turn, however, there remains a highly self-focussed quality to the memorial scenes in the film, with particular attention given to the anguish that hearing this testimony provokes in the company—the pain incurred by attending to the pain of another—and the sense in which this pain, rather than left to sit uncomfortably, is turned towards aiding the company’s performances of the play. The play director remarks, “I watched these actors put this trip into what they were doing every night and it made it better.” What does “better” mean in this context? As depicted in the documentary, the Kigali season is more warmly received. The storytelling arc of the documentary thus bends to a “redemption” of sorts for the company. After ceding the testimonial platform to Rwandan voices in its second part, this turn ultimately re-centres white experience, affirming the “goodness” of both the company’s intentions and the effects produced. In many ways, this return is the inevitable outcome of the film never wholly relinquishing its own subjective privilege, a stubborn refusal embedded in its mise-en-scène. I was struck when watching the documentary by how much time the directors devote to shots of passers-by—every day Rwandans going about their daily life. I would best describe these shots as the cinematic equivalent of “staring.” This compulsive staring stages the very problem of performative witness, which is its failure to cede its own subjective privilege (performative whiteness perhaps) so that others may testify to their experiences on their own terms; for the most part, Rwandans themselves remain objects rather than subjects within the film. There is a passing moment where one of the actors points to what might underlie the film’s visual insistence. He remarks: “There’s this phantom that’s always going on in my mind where I play this game of ‘was that person there… which person was… which side were they on.’ Whether they’re imaginary ghosts to me or not, it doesn’t matter to me, they’re real to me.” Did that person commit genocide—or that one? Who is guilty? Who is innocent? What does a genocidaire look like? If I stare hard enough, will I know? It is significant that the actor uses the imagery of the ghost or phantom. He seems to be saying, it doesn’t really matter whether the person I’m looking at committed violence or

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was a victim of it. The very fact of their presence as other provokes in me a feeling of horror in any case that allows me to turn inside myself. That is, the Rwandan other functions as a character of sorts in a personal drama—or “game”—of self-reckoning for the actor. Other performers’ remarks echo this kind of inner emphasis: “I’ve never felt so small in my whole life — in the best way — I feel I’m just such a tiny part of the world, and that’s a wonderful feeling.” Even as the documentary explicitly states its “good” intentions, its mise-en-scène coupled with perspectives such as those described above demonstrate that Rwandan bodies often remain objects within its landscape. I return again to Karamera’s distinction between imparting knowledge and sharing suffering. What underlies the sentiments expressed by company members is that knowledge alone is inadequate. There is both curiosity and frustration expressed through the repeated shots of impassive Rwandans who offer nothing to the camera that might enlighten the eye behind it as to the nature of their experiences. The driving desire for sharing suffering, of being allowed inside this suffering to know how it “feels”—to “steal down” pain—dominates. Within the play itself, this desire to “share” suffering is deeply ambivalent. Early in the second act, Althea gives Michael permission to write down the account that she now shares with him, permission she had earlier denied. Turning to speak directly to the audience, Michael says: “It felt like the darkness of that little room was seeping into me. Whatever was inside of her, I didn’t want it in this book [his journal], infecting my own thoughts, infecting me” (Redhill 2005, 72). Knowledge of violence and genocide is expressed here in highly affective terms, figured as pathological—“contagious” in the sense meant by René Girard (1977, 28). Indeed, the play’s metaleptic dramaturgy serves as a device for transmission of the virus between its various temporalities with Michael’s attempts at prophylaxis—at resisting admitting the disease within his personhood— providing a point of dramatic tension. Very near the end of the play, he strikes out at Althea, accusing her of refusing to let go of her identity as “victim”: “You’d still find a way to lose everything and then lie here in the dark, steeping in your own sick. That’s the life you’ve made for yourself. It’s no one’s fault but yours” (99). There is in the play, and also in the documentary, a concurrent repulsion and desire for intimate understanding of the experience of genocide; Michael both wants to know what happened and refuse that knowledge. Similarly, the company members in Rwanda both accept that certain shared knowledge is “truly beyond their understanding,” and at the same time are compulsively drawn to seek

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an affective insight, such as the desired transmission from “phantom” to actor. This contradictory acceptance of a limit point and concurrent desire to transgress that limit marks both play and documentary. At the outset of her discussion of Goodness, Stephenson suggests that the play’s emphasis on transmission of feeling attains a level of self-reflexivity, which provides its ethical grounding: “In repetition, the question turns the object of interrogation from a direct experience ‘How does it feel’” to a metaexperience of the experience: “What does feeling feel like” and “What does it feel like to be asked the question how does it feel?” (2008, 97). This emphasis, she suggests, “privileges affect over knowledge” and seeks to “translate that affective power” into “an engaged, moral responsibility” (97–8). This is demonstrated in the play by the protagonist when he finally accepts the limits of his own authority. But what of Karemera’s injunction—her reminder that suffering cannot be shared? The “circulation of affectivity” in theatre, as Stephenson describes it, can be used to shore up a sense of “shared suffering” in ways that keep us focussed on the “feelings” of this experience—whether self-reflexively aware or not—rather than on genocide as a fact in the world. As Bryoni Trezise points out in her discussion of the “memory affect” in contemporary cultures of memorialization, “feeling” is a process of self-making (2014, 3). That is, it draws from others to help constitute a sense of self. Part of the danger of a metaleptic dramaturgy in the context of representing genocide is that its “circulation of affect through dramatic creation,” rather than promoting a kind of ethically responsible witness in fact “steals pain” across metaleptic borders. Moreover, its fictionality allows it to do this in ways that would be much more problematic if its subject matter were non-fictional. Genocide, after all, is not a fiction and its extremity challenges the limits of fiction as an adequate response to its moral demands. To be truly self-reflexive, the play would have to ask what is at stake when artists seek to represent genocide as a “universal” experience to which they have shared access. It is true that Redhill’s character finally concedes his unknowing, his uncertainty, and that this is a core meaning in the play. But because this concession is never attached to a context against which his own positionality could be properly scrutinized, the effect is blunted. By reducing knowledge of violence to its affect, Redhill seems to suggest that exposure to this affectivity may lead to greater understanding, a sentiment, as I have just explained, that is shared by company members when they visit Rwanda. But by continually

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returning to the questions of “How does it feel,” the play’s gaze remains trained on the suffering of the witness rather than what they witness.

Thistle: “All This I Saw” I wish to close this chapter with a brief discussion of Erik Ehn’s Thistle (Rose of Lima), which I was fortunate to see when Ehn’s Soulograpie cycle was staged in its entirety by a number of different companies at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York in 2012. The play provides a useful contrast with Goodness, both in its grounding in a specific instance of violence and in the nature of its self-reflexivity. Rather than making the author explicitly present, Thistle instead focusses on the act of authorial interpretation and representation of violent testimony by interweaving verbatim testimony and Ehn’s poetic translation of Amaya’s words. As such, the play provides an exemplar of sorts for theatrical selfreflexivity that does not dominate or overwhelm the subjectivity of victims or violence, but instead uses the deconstruction of seeing, hearing and staging to build a sense of relationality and community. Rufina Amaya Marquez (Amaya, as she is most commonly named) was well-known for her account of the massacre of her village of El Mozote (translated as “thistle” in English) in El Salvador by Government forces, with publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times taking up her story. Her testimony was instrumental in drawing international attention to the violence El Salvador meted out to its citizens in the name of “anti-communism,” an endeavour that was supported by the US government. Indeed, Ehn’s interest throughout Souolographie is not simply in the general subject of genocide, but in American’s specific relationship to genocide in the twentieth century. For example, Thistle explicitly acknowledges that shell casings found at El Mozote were supplied by the US army: “the bullet casings were all stamped ‘U.S. Army.’ You could hold them in your hand. The Atlacatl Battalion was American trained. You bought the massacre” (Ehn 2012, 115). The play does not therefore approach genocide or extreme violence as existential human condition, but rather as the product of specific political decision-making. Moreover, it locates the origin of such decision-making not in some faraway “over there,” but much more uncomfortably close to home. This interrogation of American responsibility for not just global violence but its own domestic history of violence is woven throughout the Soulographie cycle, which foregrounds events such as the Tulsa Race

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Massacre in a number of its plays, including Thistle via the character of “Girl,” a student at Tulsa Junior College through whom we learn of Amaya’s testimony. Ultimately, the play attempts to give equal attention to her testimony, what it means to encounter this testimony, and the responsibility that might issue from such knowledge. Thistle as published is divided into two main parts. The first is a verbatim transcript (translated into English) of Amaya’s testimony. Her account begins with the arrival of the Army in El Mozote on the 10th of December, 1981. Soldiers had been tasked not just with uncovering communist sympathizers within the town but also with taking a “scorched earth” approach to the town as a whole. The following day, Dec 11th, soldiers separated the women and children from the men and began killing the men. Later the same day they started killing the women, and then in the evening the children, burning them alive and stabbing any survivors. Amidst this, Amaya managed to escape by crawling across the ground in the dark and hiding amongst the village’s animals. The next evening, as she heard the sounds of young girls who had hidden in the hills being raped and murdered, she managed to crawl to a neighbouring village, where she hid in an empty house for a further week before she was found and cared for by locals. She then fled to Honduras. As noted, Amaya’s testimony was instrumental in drawing global attention to political violence in El Salvador and to the participation of the American government in supporting the regime. The second part of the play dramatizes the act of hearing Amaya’s account via the character of Girl. It is structured by opening and closing sections, “A” and “C,” and middle section, “B,” which is broken down into a further fourteen short scenes called the “fourteen stations.” Section A establishes the pretext for the rest of the play. As Girl is tuning her radio, one particular signal seems to penetrate her body, causing her to move and dance. The voice of a broadcaster declares, “you found me” (104). The voice is a fictional imagining of underground guerrilla Radio Venceremos, which first broadcast Amaya’s account. In Ehn’s text, this broadcast is out of its proper time, a “ghost radio” (105); somehow, through space and time, the Tulsa student and this ghost-voice find each other. The fourteen subsequent scenes unfold Amaya’s story through interweaving excerpts of her testimony with Ehn’s own poetic filtering or reflection on the events described. The script is particularly open to staging possibilities in its construction, sometimes indicating a chorus or groups of women and children or flocks of animals. In the production I saw at La

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Mama, directed by Tom Dugdale, the play was performed by three actors who played the three principal characters of Rufina, Girl and Broadcaster, and used a range of props and devices to evoke the other characters of the story. Girl is an avatar of sorts for Ehn’s own encounter with this history— what he calls, cited already, “witness-by-proxy”—giving voice to his poetic instantiation of a language of trauma, which the dramaturgy of the play contrasts with Amaya’s unvarnished account. The following excerpt provides an example of how these two modes intersect: RUFINA: After this some soldiers retreated, but the elite continued working in the dark. Because I was so near, and so still, I could hear their moves through the roots of the tree. My hands were over my ears to shut out the screams, the roots became my fingers and I hear anyway. No shots. They were killing them with knives. We dress ourselves in silence for a new ceremony. We cloth ourselves with silence for a marriage to this place. (112)

This practice of interweaving poetic and testimonial language draws our attention to the author’s artistic “translation” of Amaya’s account and is the principal sense in which the play can be described as self-reflexive, attentive to its own construction and to the relationship between the real events depicted and Ehn’s dramatic translation of those events. It is also worth briefly returning here to Richard Hornby’s taxonomy of metadrama, which includes ceremony, self-conscious role play and reallife reference, all elements of Ehn’s dramaturgy. The sum total of these different effects is an emphasis in the play on listening (which may be compared to Hornby’s identification of perception as the key thematic driver of metadrama). The importance of listening is underscored by the script’s focus on aurality via the Broadcaster character. Girl, for example, is explicitly positioned as listener. Near the beginning of the play, Amaya’s first line of testimony keeps repeating as if the recording of her testimony has been scratched. The Broadcaster explains to Girl: “You’re listening. Your attention is the bump that unsticks it” (105). By emphasizing the act of listening, Ehn foregrounds Amaya’s testimony while at the same time investigating the affectivity of such listening for the hearer. In his introduction to the published Soulographie cycle, he explains this emphasis on a dramaturgy of listening:

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In hearing testimony, the desire to own it, to make it the hearer’s problem, is very strong. We become hidden preachers versus engaged listeners. Psychotherapist Dori Laub, writing on trauma, suggests that a witness is effective when “unobtrusively present” — when leaning into and making mutual the speaker’s option for expression, in a way that doesn’t take up space; being a space. (p. 8)

The goal of each of the plays in the cycle, he explains, is to be “unobtrusively present to the present reality of genocide” (p. 10). Ehn’s sensitivity to the emotional impact of the testimonial account is important, echoing Ronald J. Pelias’ concerns about “empathy as imperialist venture,” (1991, 143) or Ehn’s own naming of “colonial empathy” where (as cited earlier in the chapter) “the subject of witness becomes the virtue of the witness (replacing the suffering of what we see with the suffering of our seeing).” The invocation of a dramaturgy of listening is helpful in the context of this project and in particular in relation to Oliver’s injunction to privilege the account of the witness to violence. Such listening does not mean an absence of action or representation. Rather, in the metatheatrical texts discussed in this project, a dramaturgy of listening means, ideally, balancing the self-reflexive account of listening (“how does it feel to hear this?”) with testimony itself (“all this I saw”). Of course, failure to listen—and failure to hear—is also present in some of these texts, either deliberately or unintentionally. Nonetheless, the kind of unobtrusive listening that Ehn argues for provides a helpful way of measuring the efficacy of self-reflexive devices in depicting violence: do they provide space for both speaker and listener? In her work on an ethics of listening, Helena Grehan writes of “a practice that requires the listener to pause and pay attention, or to tune-in to the mode of address, the scene, gesture and tone, the language used and the broader political or social context within which the speaking occurs.” Such listening, she suggests, “is an inherently political act, an act of resistance, that cuts across the flow of communication that confronts us every day” (2019, 53). The multifacted listening that Ehn evokes is grounded in what he describes in the Introduction to Soulographie as “drifted subjectivity.” In contrast to the Levinasian position, which maintains the fundamental separation of self and other (even if it is the through the ethical call of the other that the self is constituted), Ehn suggests that: “Mercy, empathy, is impersonal — the drifted person where “I” and “you” are nicely confused” (Ehn 2012, 8). What Ehn strives to describe here is not the kind of imperial or colonial empathy

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that dominates the other, but a recognition of the interdependence of the listener and the one who gives the account. This manifests within the play through the interweaving of poetic and testimonial text and also through how Amaya’s testimony is narrated. Take, for example, the following stage direction: The BROADCASTER reaches out to start a record — her arms instead of a record player arm; her hand over the spinning vinyl activates sound. RUFINA comes up behind her, puts her hand over the BROADCASTER’S and co-narrates. (2012, 106)

Other iterations of this principle in the text include the repetition of Amaya’s line “All of this I saw” by both Amaya and Girl at different points in the play. Ultimately the drifting of subjectivity recognizes the affectivity of violence and at the same time makes the violence experienced by others the concern of the listener. This means, the text notes at the end of the play, that the Girl as listener has a responsibility to convey what she has heard: “you tell” (116). At the heart of the subjective complexity of Ehn’s play is the sense in which both the delivery and reception of testimonies of violence are embodied practices rather than principally intellectual transfers of knowledge. Ehn remarks in the Introduction to Soulographie: “Allow disaster to move into you. Maurice Blanchot — we must let disaster write us” (7). As noted, when Girl first hears the broadcast signal, it causes her body to move and dance. This attention to dancing and movement continues throughout the play both in action indicated and in the stage directions. For example: “The women hide their hands in each other’s bodies. Their mouths by each other’s ears, they whisper, audibly” (109). It is through attention to embodiment that Ehn’s notion of subjective drift is established; it is not simply the testimonial account that is drifted, but its violent affectivity; consequently, responsibility for violence is shared. One scene in particular titled, “All of This I Saw,” emphasizes this point. The scene recalls the part of Amaya’s testimony where she watched what was happening to the men in the village through a small hole in the house where the women were being held. As this testimony is related, the stage directions note: “The GIRL is forced to wear a SOLDIER’s coat; she is handed a bayonet. She is pushed into the narrative against her will” (108). This “casting” of Girl into the solider role is a significant metadramatic device where, as Hornby writes: “a character for some reason takes on a

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role that is different from his usual self” (Hornby 67). This is important not just as a formal feature of metadrama, however, but for the sense in which “role playing within the role is a device for exploring the concerns of the individual […] in relation to [their] society” (85). That is, Girl here functions as an avatar not just for Ehn, but also for the audience. As Amaya’s testimony continues, read by the Broadcaster, Girl tries to refuse her role as soldier, repeating the word “no” as the account builds towards her cutting the throat of a man. After this, directions note: “The GIRL reels away and stares at what she has done” (108). To be “written” by the disaster is to fully embody the account, to allow oneself to be “drifted” in such a way that listening dissolves the boundaries of subjectivity. The ethical question that follows is how the subjectivity of the listener might be drifted while the subjective integrity of the victim is preserved. In both Thistle and Goodness, there are crucial moments where the authorial avatar is drawn into the violent account in the same way as happens to Girl above. The most notable instance in Goodness is near the end of the play. Althea’s testimony has been building towards revealing her own complicity in the retributive killing of genocidal leader Mathias Todd’s daughter, Julia. As the chorus of actors depicts the events that Althea recalls, Michael tries to intervene in order to save Julia. His efforts to change history are in vain, however, and in the end, it is his words that trigger the gun that kills Julia. As Stephenson writes, the moment in the script emphasizes the passivity of the author—his inability to alter the historical account. At the same time, it indicates that “simple witnessing is an action of import, carrying a moral weight” (2008, 115). In both plays, this instantiation of the author/listener into the account given indicates the complex effects of hearing accounts of violence, provoking responses that range from rejection—a turning away—to solipsistic overidentification. The figuration of the author/listener in each account is an acknowledgement of complicity by way of dissolving of the usual boundaries between speaker and listener. It also acknowledges that writing is itself an embodied process that requires letting the “disaster” move through the body of the author. In both Thistle and Goodness, the moment where the author turns “perpetrator” also indicates the irreversibility of the violent account—neither Michael nor Girl can change the events that are being recounted for their benefit. Yet, where Thistle is distinct is in its continual foregrounding of Amaya’s account. The dramaturgy of Goodness is embedded in Althea’s account throughout, but its fictive status diminishes the significance of the driftedness of Michael

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inasmuch as the violent complicity that it effects has little to attach itself to, thus the melancholic or ambivalent character of both the protagonist and ending of the play, which closes with the lines: “How does it feel to be out there in the dark? Just watching. Invisible, but still a part of everything. A part of this. How does that feel?” (Redhill 2005, 102). What then are the specific theatrical conditions required to ensure that drifted subjectivity produces the kind of ethical effects that Oliver insists upon? To answer, it is worth returning to Pelias’ concept of “empathy as dialogic embodiment” introduced in previous chapters. To recap, Pelias describes a process whereby actors, rather than over or under-identifying with their character, adopt the position of “witness” (1991, 147). Within such a framework, “performance is a dialogue, a multiple voiced narrative, in which the performer, through role-playing and standing beside, strives for consensus naming” (148). Pelias further explains: The phrase “standing in with”, carries quite a different sense than “standing in for”. The change in preposition suggests that performers who are engaged in dialogic embodiment do not speak “of” others but “beside” them. When performers speak “of” or “for” others, they keep others in the background. When performers speak “with” or “beside” others, they share the stage, giving others equal opportunity to be heard. (149–150)

Thistle is exemplary as a dramaturgy of dialogic embodiment. Its driftedness aims precisely towards giving space, sharing the stage and expressing a polyphony of voices. That the testimonial account that structures the play is real is what prevents the drama from dissolving into ambivalent solipsism. Significantly, Ehn argues that theatre-makers should not back themselves into a cul-de-sac where the purported unknowability of the suffering of others forecloses artistic responsiveness. For Ehn, poetic language is a “wounded language” that refuses the “uselessness of language” in responding to genocide (2012, 9). That is, Soulographie (and Thistle as component of that project) refuses the ambivalences that mark what Nicholas Ridout describes as the helplessness that characterizes contemporary spectatorship—what he calls theatre as “alibi” where: “In the act of telling you that this suffering should matter, really matter to you, the theatre also tells you that there is nothing, really nothing you can do about it” (2020, 11). Conversely, Ehn suggests, “We sometimes don’t seem to believe that theatre, which is broken space, can admit of life in all its complexity” (2012, 9). The plays in Soulographie,

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therefore, ultimately affirm the role of theatre in responding to violence. They do this by admitting to the “brokenness” of the author’s efforts, which are scrupulously foregrounded while at the same time clarifying that it is precisely because of such brokenness that theatre is an ideal medium for contemplating violence—remember that Drury remarked of We Are Proud to Present: “The equation of the play is not an equation that works. It think that’s what I mean by it being broken” (Drury and Ehn 2012). Brokenness here is not a source of melancholy or ambivalence but instead a means of conveying both the shattering effects of violence and the nuanced artistic strategies required in response. In the end, ambivalence in the context of dramaturgies of violence—even when it is, as Grehan suggests, a means of locating the spectator within a rubric of complexity—is an expression of privilege that, as Ahmed writes, “remov[es] the ‘detour’ provided by the reflection of the other” (2004). Indeed, in her recent work on an ethics of listening, Grehan extends her previous analysis, remarking that “Before we sit in the gap and experience a sense of ambivalence […] we need to develop or hone the capacity to listen slowly and deeply” (2019, 54). In other words, to privilege the subjectivity of the victim of violence, metadramatic authors must make sure that the image that the dramatic text finally reflects is not that of the author but that of the other; the final task is not to examine “how does it feel?” but “to say this is what happened here,” the repeated concluding lines of Ehn’s text (2012, 116).

Conclusion In its showing of the act of showing, metatheatricality inevitably troubles received understandings of the purported “real.” As Maaike Bleeker writes: “ambiguity and uncertainty result from the exposure of frames at work in our ways of looking. These are frames that otherwise usually remain invisible or go unnoticed” (2004, 31). Bleeker importantly clarifies, however, that “the multiplication of the frame does not so much increase perceptibility of things as they are ‘in themselves’, as point to the inevitable intertwining of what is seen with the expectations, desires and presuppositions that are part of the subjective point of view from where they are seen as such” (2004, 35). While Bleeker is speaking of postdramatic theatre generally, her observation is particularly resonant when applied to postdramatic metatheatre, characterized as it is by what Stephenson calls “messiness.” Through their layered dramaturgies,

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such works expose the conditions and constructions of subjectivities. The “ethicality” of this approach seems dependent on how effectively such reflexivity interrogates the positionality, privileges and responsibilities of the artist. Moreover, to do this seems to require that the artist relinquishes to some degree the subject position itself, entering into what Macías calls the “narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation” (2016, 20). While Goodness trains its attention on the ethical precarity of the writer, for me its emphasis on the transmission of the affectivity of violence ultimately installs a solipsism that obscures violence, satisfying us instead with the “feeling” of having encountered it, equating affective disturbance with subjective displacement. Thistle, on the other hand, remains much more grounded in the “factual” violence that Redhill sets aside. As such, there is much more at stake in its metaleptic dramatization of witness. At the beginning of this chapter, I cited Dan Rebellato on the effect of self-reflexive depictions of theatrical authorship whereby metatheatricality “become[s] a ground for aesthetic and ethical questioning […] a way of profoundly investigating theatrical meaning and our capacity for fundamental political change” (2013, 12). My particular interest in the kind of questioning that Rebellato points to has been in the positionality of Redhill and Ehn and the impact this has upon both meaning in their plays and their potential for effecting change. Goodness in Rwanda provides an invaluable resource in this task, and I have drawn from it in detail to scrutinize both the implicit and explicit configurations of authorial subjectivity in Redhill’s play. In general, I have argued that the act of authorial witness in drama is more effective in Ehn’s play, even if less explicit, because of the greater attention he gives to the political dimensions of authorial subjectivity, in particular the privilege of the author in relation to the object of their witness-by-proxy. The dissonance of Redhill’s play when performed in Rwanda is important for it exposes the asymmetries of global power (not least the asymmetries of race) that are inevitably reflected in the cultural objects produced by those who witness violence from a “distance” and from a perspective of privilege. How do dramatists of privilege use their platform to amplify the voices of those who have testimony to deliver? And, specifically for this monograph, how might the political potential embedded in the deconstructive nature of metatheatricality be employed to such an end? Ehn’s play, and indeed the Soulographie cycle in its entirely, seems to offer one example by demonstrating an approach that balances an appraisal of the affective impact

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of testimonies of violence on the witness-by-proxy with maintaining the integrity of the subjectivity of the true witness to violence. When I saw Thistle performed, Amaya’s verbatim testimony was delivered at the end rather than at the beginning of the performance. This was a powerful directorial decision by Dugdale. After watching the performance move fluidly between excerpts of testimony and poetic and somatic translation of the same language, the actors finally ceded the stage to Amaya’s account. This arrangement of the dramatic material produced, for me at least, a heightened form of listening, as if all that had gone before was preparation for this encounter. To return to Grehan more fully: Before we […] experience a sense of ambivalence — in and in response to a work — we need to develop or hone the capacity to listen slowly and deeply — to attune ourselves to what is being said in all its complexity and to value the interpretive act, the act of attending before we move into the gap in which the contractions and ambivalences of our response might emerge. (2019, 58)

In Thistle, self-reflexivity is ultimately used in service of amplifying our listening—on bettering our ability to hear what the witness is telling us— rather than redirecting our attention back to the act of listening to itself. To reiterate the point made above, metatheatricality in Ehn’s play, rather than providing a “detour” from the “reflection of the other,” places that other centre-stage: “All this I saw.”

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Drury, Jackie Sibblies, and Erik Ehn. 2012. “Erik Ehn and Jackie Sibblies Drury in Conversation” [post-show talback]. New York: Soho Rep Theatre. https://sohorep.org/erik-ehn-and-jackie-sibblies-drury-in-conversation. Ehn, Erik. 2012. Soulographie: Our Genocides. Chicago: 53rd State Press. Erickson, Jon. 2009. “On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23 (2): 21–38. Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 60–111. Berkeley: University of California Press. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. “Slow Listening: The Ethics and Politics of Paying Attention, Or Shut Up and Listen.” Performance Research 24 (8): 53–58. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Little, Suzanne. 2017. “The Witness Turn in the Performance of Violence, Trauma, and the Real.” In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, edited by Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c, and Stuart Young, 43–64. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Macías, Teresa. 2016. “Between Violence and Its Representation: Ethics, Archival Research, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Telling of Torture Stories.” Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity and Practice 5 (1): 20–45. Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. London: Duke University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Witnessing Subjectivity.” In Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, edited by Shaun Gallagher, Stephen Watson, Philippe Brun, and Philippe Romanski, 180–204. Rouen: l’Université de Rouen. Pelias, Ronald J. 1991. “Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement.” Theatre Research International 16 (2): 142–152. Rand, Gord, and John Westheuser, dirs. 2013. Goodness in Rwanda [documentary]. Canada. Rebellato, Dan. 2013. “Exit the Author.” In Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, edited by Vicky Angelaki, 9–31. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Redhill, Michael. 2005. Goodness. Toronto: Coach House Books. ———. 2007. “The Voice Under the Lamp: An Interview with Michael Redhill.” Edited by Marlene Goldman and Kristina KyserIn. University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (3): 913–925.

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Ridout, Nicholas. 2020. Scenes from Bourgeois Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schaefer, Karine. 2003. “The Spectator as Witness? Binlids as Case Study.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 23 (1): 5–20. Stephenson, Jenn. 2008. “The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 34 (4): 97–121. ———. 2010. “Re-Performing Microhistories: Postmodern Metatheatricality in Canadian Millennial Drama.” In Re-Reading the Postmodern, edited by Robert Stacey, 249–268. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Trezise, Bryoni. 2014. Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Upton, Carole-Anne. 2012. “Editorial.” Performing Ethos 3 (1): 3–5. Wake, Caroline. 2013. “The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies.” In Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma, edited by Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake, 33–56. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Willis, Emma. 2014a. “Emancipated Spectatorship and Subjective Drift: Understanding the Work of the Spectator in Erik Ehn’s Soulographie.” Theatre Journal 66 (3): 385–403. ———. 2014b. Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author

Introduction In the previous chapter, I drew on Kelly Oliver’s argument that witnessing is central to the construction of subjectivity—that one becomes a subject through testifying to one’s own experiences—to critically interrogate theatre’s capacity to serve as proxy-witness. In this chapter, I continue to unpack the relevance of Oliver’s work, this time examining the relationship between violence, representation and subjectivity from the perspective of gender. As I have shown so far, metatheatricality is an effective device for exposing the biases that underlie theatrical forms in that it acknowledges the precarity of the representational process and recognizes theatre’s own implication in structures of domination. In this chapter, I read such structural domination as reliant on gender violence, which is understood in this context as both individual objectifying actions and hegemonic structures that diminish the standing of women as subjects. Or, as Bahun and Rajan write: “violence against women […] encompasses an extraordinarily broad and culturally inflected terrain of political, physical, psychological, and cultural acts and actions that delimit […] women’s agency” (2015, 2–3). I ask how the use of metadramatic devices serves a form of speaking back to such violence—of giving testimony in the sense meant by Oliver—and thereby claiming the subject position. As she writes: “Through the process of witnessing to oppression and subordination, those othered can begin to reapir damaged subjectivity by taking © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_5

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up a position as speaking subject” (2004, 185). I am also interested in how feminist uses of the metatheatrical form demonstrate its weaknesses when it comes to affecting structural change. My key case study for the chapter is Ella’s Hickson’s The Writer, an exemplary text for exploring these issues. I will also discuss Tim Crouch’s The Author as a point of comparison, and more briefly refer to Catherine Filloux’s Killing the Boss and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. To begin, let me briefly evoke a section of Filloux’s play. Filloux has had a career long-interest in the subjects of violence and genocide, spurred in part by living for many years in Cambodia. While a number of her plays touch on this subject (including, for example Lempkin’s House, Silence of God and Ghosts of Tuol Sleng ), Killing the Boss is the most self-reflexive of Filloux’s plays. Briefly, the one-act play tells the story of a US playwright and writing teacher, Eve, who has been living and working in an unnamed South East Asian country (strongly suggested to be Cambodia). It opens with Eve asking where she can buy a gun. Overwhelmed by the suffering and injustice she has seen around her during her time as playwriting teacher—“My vision’s been poisoned […] I keep seeing what others don’t have” (Filloux 2011, 155)—she has decided to assassinate the country’s corrupt and despotic prime minister. When I spoke to Filloux about the play, she remarked on the parallels between her own experiences and those of Eve: I was just starting to feel impatient about the fact that the poor artists that I knew were staying just as poor as ever, whereas there was another NGO economy that was starting, then also the Prime Minister is hugely wealthy and corrupt, and I was starting to feel really beleaguered about that problem. And it did cross my mind that I knew some people that made it possible that I could contemplate something like that, and of course I was thinking, I’ll try and write a play instead. (Filloux 2016)

The character of Eve fails in her assassination attempt. When she confronts the Prime Minster (P.M. as given in the script), he instead forces her at gunpoint to perform with him a play entitled, “The Barking Woman,” written by one of Eve’s students and dedicated to her. The play concerns a young man who finds the so-called barking woman and, motivated by empathy for her plight, takes her home to his drunk and violent father, asking him to take the woman in as a domestic worker. The student’s play features a brutal rape of the barking woman by the father, and when the P.M. forces Eve to perform in the play he takes on the role of rapist and

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she that of victim. A third character, a guard, performs the part of the son. Below are a series of extracts that give a sense of the excerpt of “The Barking Woman” as it is enacted under the P.M.’s direction: P.M./FATHER: (Laughing, consulting script, pointing to himself .) Now, in your student’s play, “Father” is drunk. (Reading his lines.) “Barking slut! Who bought you to my house?” (To guard.) Now you, play my son. Enter. […] EVE/BARKING WOMAN: “Baby, swirling in the black seas. No food. No milk. Everyone dies, landmine, husband blows up into the sky, smashed. Baby only survivor. Then no food. I throw my baby in the well.” […] EVE/BARKING WOMAN: (Looking at guard/son.) “Why are your hands blue?” GUARD/SON: “From factory, but I stay up at night writing my play for my teacher.” P.M./FATHER: (Reading stage direction). “Slugging his son.” (Now performing role of Father.) “Yes, writers get hit. Never learn.” (Coming out of character.) Ha, ha. Ha. Yes, good line, writers get hit, Eve! Too bad. […] P.M./FATHER: (Yelling; to guard.) I say when the play is over! (Grabbing Eve; saying lines from the play.) “Come here, you pretty dark-skinned whore.” (Eve screams; P.M. laughs at her.) You scream now. Ha, ha, ha. EVE/BARKING WOMAN: “Woof, woof, woof.” P.M./FATHER: “You live with me, you lie with me. Shut your fucking mouth!” (To guard.) Read stage directions! GUARD/STAGE DIRECTIONS: “He rapes her.” (Filloux 2011, 194–6)

Although Eve manages to escape mid-performance, she is eventually found and executed. Her body, like that of the baby of the barking woman, is dumped down a well. While there is much that could be said about this iteration of the playwithin-a-play device, the most notable in this context is its weaponization. Filloux’s use of metadrama is not unique in this broad sense of weaponization—Frederick Bailey has argued, for example, that “The Mousetrap” in Hamlet similarly functions as “a weapon designed to impose upon the King” (1996, 2). However, in this instance, the play-within-the-play enacts real violence in real time. The original purpose of the play—as

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a form of processing violent experience for the student—is completely perverted by the P.M. as he uses the script as a pretext to render Eve as object, stripping her of the possibility of speaking (testifying) from the subject position by forcing her to enact the role of rape victim. The script is not merely a convenient excuse for him to violently dominate Eve, however, it is also a form of humiliation and degradation that takes aim at theatrical practice itself—“Yes, writers get hit.” Moreover, I suggest that this violent diminishment of artistic practice can itself be read from a gendered perspective. In her writing about the use of sexual violence in war, human rights scholar Inger Skjelsbaek argues that gendered violence is at the heart of the logic of war, explaining: “Women in the war zone are victims of sexual violence in order to masculinize the identity of perpetrator and feminize the identity of the victim” (2001, 215). That is, to claim the masculine position is to dominate, to be subject. Conversely, to be feminine is to be object. What we see in the staging of “The Barking Woman” is precisely this kind of dynamic where both Eve and the script are in a sense feminized as a way of reifying the masculinity of the perpetrator, the P.M. That is, just as Eve is assaulted as a form of domination, so too is the student’s script. I do wish to acknowledge that there is a certain precarity in Filloux casting her dramatic avatar as victim within the play’s setting: can an equivalence really be drawn between the barking woman and all that she represents and the well-meaning but naïve outsider? Is this merely the imagined suffering of the unappreciated “white saviour”? To make this argument I think would be to undervalue the nuances of Filloux’s dramaturgy, which takes up the problem of the empathetic outsider at length within the broader play. Indeed, her use of the inner play in many ways demonstrates how ill-placed Eve’s intentions are. I also suggest that her use of a metatheatrical device in this context is highly perceptive in that it shows how mimesis may be exploited as a cover for violence. By shifting the context of the play’s performance, the P.M. is able to alter its meaning and effects. That he uses a mimetic conceit demonstrates what Salwa Ismail calls the “performativity” of violence, where theatricalization is central to a “blurring of the lines between the fictional and the real” (2018, 164). By controlling the performance of “The Barking Woman,” the P.M. couches his violence as merely fictional, an instrumental feature of performative violence, that, as Ismail argues, leads its victims to wonder whether such violence “ever took place at all” (178). The driving affect of the broader play is one of desperation: we see not only the female

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subject reduced to inarticulate barking in the inner play, but the female artist completely disempowered within the outer play; indeed, it is not until the play’s conclusion that Eve realizes that she has in fact died. That is, violence in the world of Killing the Boss effects precisely the kind of confusion of real and theatrical that Ismail describes. In Filloux’s complex iteration of the play-within-a-play we see how the problem of staging gender-based violence is not simply one of representation, but is in fact more deeply rooted in the structures of power that govern not only the instrumentalization of violence but that also find expression in theatrical forms themselves. This is precisely the focus of Hickson’s The Writer, which foregrounds the objectifying violence of patriarchal theatrical structures. The play is an exemplary text for thinking about how theatre’s governing principles— aesthetic and economic—are determined by prevailing hegemonic norms that control the distribution of subject and object positions. In addition to working through the significance of her metadramatic dramaturgy, which serves as a vehicle for critiquing theatrical and dramatic “norms,” I am also interested in the affectivity of anger in the play and how this shapes its formal properties. Anger is a significant subject within the play— the titular Writer is often accused of letting her anger skewer both her personal and professional decisions, for example. Most significantly, it is a propulsive force that drives both the protagonist and the play as way of challenging prevailing power structures. Rage in the play—which Hickson has described as a “pure shout of rage”—tears things open: characters, form, and ideologies (Hickson 2018a). It is an anti-objectifying mode of violent expression that aims towards reconstituting the subject, giving her a platform from which to testify to her experience. As an “angry-woman” (Hickson 2018b, 31), the Writer embodies the attributes of what Sara Ahmed calls a “killjoy.” In describing patriarchal characterizations of the feminist killjoy, Ahmed writes: “it is because we expose violence that we are heard as violent, as if the violence of which we speak originates with us” (2017, 253). That is, diminishments directed towards the Writer that posit her merely as an “angry-woman” locate the problem of rage (which Ahmed would call a “sensible reaction to the injustice of the world”) not in its object, but in the subject from whom the rage issues (21). The significance of a self-reflexive dramaturgy of rage, therefore, lies in its refusal to accept this framing as it relentlessly redirects our attention towards the real “scene” from which violence originates, reminding us

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that such scenes rely upon performativity to exert power. As Judith Butler writes (cited already in previous chapters): If the scene of an originary violence is always derived, if the performative performs only on the basis of its iterability, aren’t we, as it were, “called” to give a hearing to what repeats itself here and conceals the violent mechanism of its iterability as it works its power, or which works its power, its violence, in and through that concealment. (1991, 1304)

Hickson’s play gives such a “hearing,” exposing the “violent mechanism” that underpins what Ahmed calls “the gender system” (2017, 55). Significantly for this monograph, Hickson does this through a self-reflexive and highly metadramatic structure. Before I give a detailed reading of Hickson’s play, in the next section I will briefly reflect on Tim Crouch’s play, The Author. The Author is an obvious example of a self-reflexive dramaturgy of violence through which to consider the situation of both writers and spectators in economies of violent representation. As in Redhill’s Goodness, the writer-protagonist is morally flawed, unable to appreciate their authorial power as one who bestows subjectivity; writing seems forever doomed as a form of domination. Indeed, Crouch’s play ends with the “death of the author” (2011b, 203). The play has already been extensively analysed, however, and so my focus is not on how it challenges theatrical economies of violence but on how, while taking aim at the hegemonic structures of violence that underpin both theatrical practice and spectatorship, it in fact relies upon the production of certain tropes of gendered violence in order to express that critique. That is, I suggest that the play leans into an economy of representation that privileges male desire and relies upon violence against its female (and child) characters. As a counter-case study to Hickson’s text, the play shows how even within a highly metadramatic deconstructive context, certain patriarchal norms prevail and that ironic or parodic approaches to these norms are not neccessarily enough to effectively displace them. What is needed, Hickson’s play suggests, is both parodic self-awareness and the ability to evoke new forms of both thinking and art-making capable of restoring subjectivity to those objectified by violence.

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The Author: Enraging the Spectator The Author is a play that made some people very angry: [T]alking about The Author to a group of students at Central School of Speech and Drama, London, I joked that there were some people out there who were still angry with me. Nick Wood, the course leader, came back immediately with “Yeah, I know quite a few.” This casual comment knocked a scab. There are some people out there who are angry with me. Nothing so simple as not liking my work, but angry. With me. Still. (Crouch 2011a, 421)

In this section I want to focus on this anger—what it was that made spectators angry and how can the lens of gender help us to better understand it. Part of what is so significant about the angry responses to the play is that The Author did not in fact directly show any violence. Rather, by way of a metatheatrical framework its four key characters—including a dramatic avatar of Crouch himself—reflected on their participation in a fictional production at the Royal Court of a highly violent play. Most triggering for spectators of The Author was the play’s intersection of violent imagery—at the end Crouch describes watching an online video of the sexual assault of a baby, for example—and its involvement of the audience; indeed, Crouch describes the work as a play that “happens inside its audience” (2011b, 164). His intention, he explains, was to draw attention to spectatorial complicity in the circulation of violent imagery—“If we represent violence so casually on stage, the consequence becomes a casual relation to violence in the world” (2011a, 417). Some spectators, however, felt that the play’s convivial entrapment was deeply unfair. One, for example, wrote that she was angry because, “having drawn your audience in, and having demonstrated the negative impact that violent images have on your fictitious characters, you impose an equally disturbing image onto your unsuspecting audience, a type of abuse in its own right” (qtd. in Crouch 2011a, 418). Underlying this anger, as Suzanne Little suggests, is the perception of an imbalance of power between theatrical creators and spectators (2017, 58). Of Crouch’s performance, Little remarks: “The strategy of attempting to reconfigure audiences as witnesses, as well as that of forcing audiences to witness their own unethical spectatorship, places the practitioner above audiences as an ethical authority and it disrespects spectators and their capacities” (2017, 58). In each of the letters

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Crouch cites, the anger expressed seems to reflect such a sense of disempowerment—a feeling of being unfairly objectified as a “bad” spectator. Certainly, there are complex and conflicting affectivities and feelings at work here. As Peggy Phelan writes of the relationship between performer and spectator: “Much Western theatre evokes desire based upon and stimulated by the inequality between performer and spectator—and by the (potential) domination of the silent spectator” (1993, 163). That is, domination can work in either direction and spectatorial hurt may be analysed as variously expressing both the experience of being dominated and/or of being robbed of the opportunity to dominate. Nonetheless, the gendered nature of The Author’s suggested violence does mean that such domination may be framed as predicated on a male gaze and that it was the positioning of the audience as part of the machinery of this objectifying gaze that caused upset. The Author certainly does not exempt theatre-makers from its critique of spectatorship and this is the strength of its metatheatrical ambit. Crouch remarks: This fictional play is a representation of much that I want to question in theatre — particularly the way that it is rehearsed — hyper-naturalistic rehearsal techniques, a writer/director raiding from real life to try and gain authenticity to his fiction, placing his actors into ethically reprehensible positions, subjecting them to graphic images in the name of research. (2011a, 417)

Details of the fictional play clearly place it in the lineage of violent modern drama associated with the Royal Court—Crouch himself refers to the history of violence against babies at the theatre (Edward Bond’s Saved, Sarah Kane’s Blasted)—and in this sense the play forms a response to such dramaturgies (2011a, 417). Crouch’s parodic version of the ultraviolent dramatic genre takes place in a war zone (like Michael Redhill’s Goodness, the inner play is highly suggestive of the 1990s Yugoslav Wars) and focusses on domestic violence that occurs within a single family, primarily the abuse, brutalization and mutilation of daughter Eshna by her father Pavol. The central crisis of the play, which the characters in The Author discuss in some detail, sees Pavol violently rape Eshna with a broken bottle. The play proper is concerned with reflecting on the fallout of the fictional play, in particular the spill of violence from the rehearsal room to the real world. Crouch’s viewing of child abuse at the

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end of the play is explained as a consequence of the distinction between real and fictional violence breaking down within the theatrical process and is indicative of the fact that the theatre-makers themselves—led by Crouch—are clearly responsible for a series of ethical failings carried out in the name of theatre. In her discussion of gendered violence as a way of dividing and defining subjects and objects, Skjelsbaek explains that: “[T]he victim of sexual violence in the war-zone is victimized by feminizing both the sex and the ethnic/religious/political identity to which the victim belongs, likewise the perpetrator’s sex and ethnic/religious/political identity is empowered by becoming masculinized” (2001, 225). That is, gendering extends not only to individual bodies, but to entire communities. Within this framework, “sexual violence is the ‘preferred’ form of violence (because this is the form of violence which most clearly communicates masculinization and feminization)” (2001, 227). While I no way draw an equivalence between sexual violence and the affectivity of theatrical representation, Skjelsbaek’s analysis does allow us to consider whether Crouch’s play iterates certain structures of violence. That is, does the play “feminize” the audience by way of its confrontation with them? Can we characterize its aesthetic domination—which certain audience members described as causing hurt and injury—as “masculinizing” in character? I return here to Phelan, who points out that the structure of desire that underlies “much Western theatre” is contiguous with male desire, where the “machinery of projection, identification, and (inevitable) objectification” serves the male spectator (1993, 163). Similarly, in her landmark text, Feminism and Theatre, Case wrote that “[in] the realm of theatrical production, the gaze is owned by the male” (1988, 118). Certainly, it is the sexual desire of the fictional Crouch that frames The Author. The play begins, for example, when he arrives to redeem a voucher for a session in a floatation tank—as he is welcomed, he imagines sex with the women guiding him: “I think about her being naked. Even at this time, in this state, I think about her naked and stretched out for me! Can you image?” (2011b, 169)—and ends with his suicide, which follows shortly after the revelation of his act of viewing child pornography. Crucially, Phelan suggests it is the absenting of women from representation that fuels such objectifying desire: “Part of the function of women’s absence is to perpetuate and maintain the presence of male desire as desire—as unsatisfied quest” (1993, 163–4). The challenge for Crouch within the play’s metadramatic

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container is therefore to negate this objectifying machinery by reinstating female subjectivity and female desire. The unseen but vividly evoked rape discussed in The Author is a helpful starting point for considering whether the play achieves this. Within the fictional inner narrative, sexual violence is used to dominate the character of Eshna and is described as central to the play’s impact. Actor Esther describes the effect of its staging on the audience: No one knew how it was done. It was really shocking and real […] And a bag strapped to my inner thigh — here — with raw liver in it. So when Vic reached his hand up inside me and tears away at my womb, he just reached into that bag. My god, people would gasp at that moment, groan, faint! (Crouch 2011b, 191)

As evoked, the objectification of the character of Eshna within the fictional narrative is total; denied the status of subject, her character is effectively rendered “absent,” both because her character is silenced and because such violence compels the audience is to look away.. While the character Tim defends the violence of the fictictional play, explaining that it should not be taken as literal but rather as “allegorical,” the gendered nature of the allegory (191–2)—its symbolic emblem is incestuous rape—is significant, and while the rape is not shown in the play proper, its evocation grants it significant presence. As Lucy Nevitt writes, “[s]imulated violence, in which the violence and its physical effects are illusory and no bodily harm is done, is connected with reality in so many ways that it quickly becomes impossible to assign it a simple definition of ‘not real’” (2013, 2). Even though we do not see the rape that the characters describe, to a degree we still experience some of the feelings we would have experienced if we had. What is important here is that even as Crouch critiques the handling of violence in contemporary theatre, he still relies on deploying an image of rape to do this. Rape therefore functions as a dramatic device not just in the inner play but also iteratively within the outer play in the sense described by Lisa Fitzpatrick whereby “[t]he construction of rape and sexual violence within the dramatic text commonly uses normative conceptions of gender and imperial, postcolonial or nationalist narratives to naturalize the representation of sexual violence or to use it as a metaphor for defeat and devastation” (2018, 171). The Author effectively critiques the use of violence as a thematic or symbolic device but, problematically, also relies on the evocation of such

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violence in order to do so. Just because the violence is not shown does not mean it is not felt, as some of the angry responses to the play attest. The violent obliteration of the fictive play’s only female character is echoed in the company’s research process, which is discussed in the play proper. Esther describes the importance of meeting a woman named Karen to developing the role of Eshna: “I went to a shelter for women who had suffered domestic violence. I was really lucky. I met a woman who had been raped as a teenager by her father. That’s just like my character, I said!” (Crouch 2011b, 185). Tim then questions “Karen,” who is improvised by Esther, and he presses her to reveal details about her abuse. Significantly, even in representation, “Karen” is doubly absent. Not only is she replaced by Esther, who imitates her as she replays their first meeting for the audience, Tim then invites Esther to move beyond this meeting to improvise the character of Karen as she interacts with the audience. In light of both Phelan’s critique and Oliver’s theorization of subjectivity, Esther’s remark that “if she [Karen] had come to see the play she wouldn’t have recognized herself” (189), is striking. “Karen” is denied the ability to bear witness to her own experience, thus denied the position of subject. The objectification of Karen in the play is clearly a critique by real-life Crouch inasmuch as the entire play questions the participation of theatre-makers as well as audiences in the production and circulation of violent imagery. Nonetheless, the interlinking of Eshna and Karen demonstrates how much the play leans upon gendered violence in order to shore up its central focus on the effects of our appetite for violence—our “wanting to see” (164). One of the letter writers Crouch cites in his reflection on responses to the play wrote as follows: The one token woman “actress” was just another victim acting a child raped by her father or acting a male victim of Muslims […] now male egos are paid and massaged to give us hideous porn and child torture as an artistic “seductive” journey. I suppose it might help them jack off, but not us women. If we were supposed to be shocked, it worked but the shock was witnessing yet more men appropriating the stage for their own wet dreams. (anon qtd. in 2011a, 420)

While one might easily dismiss the letter writer as a “killjoy,” the perspective of this female spectator is valuable and raises a series of questions: does the status of the off-stage play as unseen fiction diminish its legibility

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in performance? Does the self-effacement of the real Crouch excuse the gendered violence that the fictional Crouch executes through his writing? How is the experience of spectatorship to The Author differentiated by gender identity? Crouch’s play is about the desire to see (an un-met insatiable desire) but does not recognize that such desire is shaped by gender. Little makes a similar point when she writes that the play “assumes that audiences are homogenous groups” (2017, 58). Reading the play, I found myself asking why as female spectator do I need to witness to violence against women and children (which the play vividly evokes even if it does not show) in order to grasp my own complicity in networks of violence? If the violent objectification of both Eshna within the off-stage play and the unnamed child within the framing play is allegorical, then how might the play more effectively refuse or critique such objectification—i.e., reinstate the subjectivity of those whom it silences in order to construct its allegory? The objectification of women within both inner and outer play is only critically reflexive insofar as it is contained within the broader ambit of the play’s interest in the relationship between real world and theatrical violence and in this sense, for me, falls short. The Author is an important metatheatrical work for its critique of theatrical complicity in violence and indeed the performativity of violence as meant by Ismail (see Chapter 2). Its cleverness lies, ironically, in what it does not show but evokes—a vivid demonstration of the power of theatrical imagination. But the core vehicle through which it does this is the problematic trope of allegorical sexual violence. While The Author in many ways challenges the political claims of dramaturgies of violence, it does not significantly disturb the gendered distribution of power that such violence often relies upon. It is true that the play ends with “the death of the author,” but is this enough of mitigation of the violence done against women and children in the world of the play in order to prove its point; is its metatheatrical self-reflexivity sufficient as a means of critique? Does the play in fact, as I’ve suggested already, replicate structures of gendered and gendering violence in ways that cause hurt and injury? To return to Phelan, who is dominating whom in this context and should we be angry?

Dramaturging “Insufferable” Female Rage: Hickson’s Metatheatrical Counterfeit Ella Hickson’s titular Writer is certainly angry. The first act of the play in particular is marked by unvarnished rage against both the objectification

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of women in theatrical representation and their exclusion from the power structures that underpin such representation: Because it’s all part of the same way of seeing, so you know, it’s “sexy” women and “smart” men — but actually it’s this woman being made to present, like some animal and entitlement just dribbling down the front of its suit — but how it’s being given to you is old guys and some fascinating fucking things about time and history. We’re sick, you know that? We’re sick to the back fucking teeth of hearing from old men, with flaky skin, at weddings, patting the back of your hand gently as they explain what they consider to be the truths of the world, like I share the same truths, like his truth and my truth are anywhere near the fucking same when it’s you that gets to make the world and me that’s got to live in it. (2018b, 14–15)

The violence Hickson’s protagonist experiences is not the brutal sexual violence evoked in The Author, but a form of gendered objectification that violently undermines her subjectivity and agency. To think about the specifically feminist dimensions of Hickson’s use of metatheatrical devices, I therefore frame the play’s act of self-witness as a feminist act. In this, I draw from both Oliver’s understanding of the centrality of witness to subject formation and Ahmed’s discussion of willfulness and feminist subjectivity. As Ahmed writes, “feminism is diagnosed as a symptom of failed subjectivity, assumed as the consequence of immature will, a will that has yet to be disciplined or straightened out” (2017, 66). The Writer’s expressive anger and the Director’s resistance to hearing what this anger articulates—his fixation on the anger as a “symptom” of the Writer’s artistic and personal “immaturity”—is a key dialectic throughout the play and indeed he takes on the disciplinary role throughout. Hickson’s play not only calls out this misogyny for what it is, but stages the act of calling it out; the protagonist writes herself into the dramatic narrative, bearing witness to her own experiences, vividly illustrating the obstacles that impede or silence such witness. As an example of feminist dramaturgy, the play therefore significantly challenges what Phelan calls “homosocial” representational norms through both its form and content (1993, 164) and is defiant and oppositional in ways that articulate, as Cindy Brizzell and André Lepecki write of the feminist potential of the role of the dramaturge, “ever renewed, ‘yet-to-be-scripted,’ artistic and political practices” (2003, 16). Her use of self-reflexivity is not just a means of critique, however, but importantly also a vehicle for imagining, by way of dramaturgy, what she calls in the play, “the architecture of our

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wanting […] A structure. A System. A Scheme” (2018b, 64). That is, the dramaturgical formulation of the play is itself a complex iteration of such an architecture—“utopian performativity” as José Muñoz puts it—which employs metatheatrical devices but ultimately exceeds them (2009, 99). I want to frame Hickson’s complex instantiation of the metadramatic form in terms of Phelan’s notion of counterfeiting the currency of the representational economy in order to challenge its norms. Phelan writes that: The task, in other words, is to make counterfeit the currency of our representational economy—not by refusing to participate in it at all, but rather by making work in which the costs of women’s perpetual aversion are clearly measured. Such forms of accounting might begin to interfere with the structure of homosocial desire which informs most forms of representation. (1993, 164)

My understanding of what Phelan means by “make counterfeit” is performances that foreground the unseen “others” excluded by hegemonic structures of representation and that at the same time make clear how those structures perpetuate such exclusion. That is, the cost of women’s enforced disappearance from representation can only be measured if such disappearance is itself represented. Hickson’s text does this not only descriptively—in the polemical dialogue from its eponymous lead character—but more significantly through its own metadramatic structure. The metatheatrical counterfeit that she constructs is complex, alternately refusing, parodying and reimagining the structures of desire that inform dominant representational frameworks. It is important to note that Phelan points to the structure of desire embedded in representational frameworks. Hickson’s dramaturgical “interference” is deeply embedded in an examination of the relationship between desire and dramatic form; her metatheatrical counterfeit challenges the dominance of the desires that gives rise to those norms and also directs our attention to what a feminist paradigm not governed by those norms might look like.

The Writer: An Outline Because of the complexity of Hickson’s dramaturgy, I want to begin by providing a brief outline of the play’s structure and action. The play is divided into five acts and though each is highly deconstructive and

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quite idiosyncratic, cumulatively they progress a dramatic narrative that roughly charts the Writer’s development of a new play. The play features six characters—Writer, Director, Female Actor, Male Actor, Girlfriend, Boyfriend—who are performed by a company of four actors; the Female Actor and Male Actor are double-cast with the Boyfriend and Girlfriend roles. It is worth noting that in the premiere season of the play at the Almeida Theatre, London, the Writer was played by a white actor, Romola Garai, and Female Actor/Girlfriend played by a Black actor, Lara Rossi. While the character list does not specify the race of the characters, the dialogue implies that the Girlfriend—and hence Female Actor—is not white. I say this because it needs to be acknowledged that the whiteness of the protagonist limits in certain ways its feminist politics in the sense Ahmed writes that “reclaiming willfulness as a feminist inheritance requires centering on the experience of Black women and women of colour” (Ahmed 2017, 83). Certainly, this is something that Hickson herself is aware of (and I am aware of in applying Ahmed to this chapter). At the end of Act One, the Writer is asked: “Is it weird that your character talks about power so much and being a woman and doesn’t mention race?” (2018b, 34). The casting choice is therefore an interesting one, which certainly doesn’t suggest the author’s ability to speak for Black experience, but does gesture to the inadequacy of confining the play’s expression of feminist subjectivity to white experience. It also nuances the end of the play, where it is the Girlfriend who calls out the Writer’s own need to dominate, her need to be “bigger” than her sexual partners (87), a point I discuss later in the chapter. The first act of The Writer takes place in a theatre, specifically on a stage after the end of a performance that the Writer has just attended. She lingers and is spotted by a middle-aged man, later revealed to be the play’s director, who stops to ask her what she thought of the performance. This question unleashes a polemic from the writer, which drives the entire act. She rages against the play, the theatre and “the system” (21): “With Trump in, with the monstrosities going down, the world is cracking open and what I just saw is meant to heal us? We should be screaming, we should be speaking in tongues, in a fit, in a fucking — rage, naked, raging, arms open, screaming at the sky…” (15). Her lengthy monologue eventually gives way to a back-and-forth argument between Writer and Director: she decries everything about bourgeois theatre culture and its ability to effect social change while the Director attempts to defend it. Their argument is interrupted when the real Writer and Director enter

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near the end of the act, revealing that what we have just witnessed is two actors performing a draft of the Writer’s play in the context of a workin-progress showing. The four characters discuss the scene that has just been performed in dialogue that is punctuated by interactions with audience plants. In this reframing, we see the explicit tension between Writer and Director in the first part of the act transformed into a subtler form of power struggle, with the Director using his status to maintain the upper hand. Act Two takes place between the Writer (played by the actor who played the Writer in the second half of Act One) and her boyfriend (played by the same actor as the Male Actor in Act One). The Act is set in their flat. This is putatively the real Writer from Act One in her real life. She and her boyfriend argue about a film commission that she has just turned down to adapt one of her plays, “Angry Young Woman,” for the screen: he wants her to take the money while she wants to retain her artistic agency. To begin, the act plays out as a fairly conventional realist domestic scene, exploring ideas of gender and power within heterosexual relationships. As it progresses, however, a similar reframing to Act One occurs. When the conflict between the couple reaches a crisis, the Director appears in the wings and surveils the action. He is unseen by the Boyfriend but clearly apprehended by the Writer. His presence destabilizes the seemingly realistic scene we think we have been watching, creating a palimpsest of dramatic and “real” worlds. The psychological reality of the scene breaks down completely at the end of the Act: the set comes apart, the Boyfriend reverts to being the Male Actor, and the voice of a crying baby which has intruded throughout the scene is revealed as nothing more than a recording. On one level, the act shows us a scene from the play that the Director demands the Writer deliver at the end of Act One. At the same time, because the Writer herself plays the Writer, the scene is also an expression of her “real-life” experience. Significantly, the Writer loses agency as she advances the narrative that the Director has demanded she write. Act Three breaks entirely from the heightened realism of the first two acts. It is also less metatheatrical in its construction, more ritual than deconstruction, with stage directions indicating that the act “should be an attempt at staging female experience” (57). The Act begins with the Writer relating the experience of having an IUD fitted. After passing out at the medical clinic, she is helped by an old woman: “She’s got a mane of grey hair and a cowboy’s stride; heading, legs akimbo, down Goodge

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Street. They say her name’s Semele” (58). Semele takes the Writer 1000 miles out into the wilderness and through a cold lake, where she gathers with a multitude of women in a forest. The act details the journey, the women’s ritual and the lovemaking that takes place between the Writer and another woman that she meets on her journey. The tone of the act is decisively utopian—“a new state has been achieved. The new world is built ” (65). The sense of communitas between the women in this act, and between the lovers, is characterized, as Jill Dolan writes of theatrical utopia, by a “lucid power of intersubjective understanding” (2001, 479). This state is interrupted when the Writer feels herself being watched. In imagery that evokes the figure of Pentheus, she describes a tourist on a nearby peak, “with binoculars held to his eyes” (Hickson 2018b, 65). The effect for the Writer is similar to her surveillance by the director at the end of Act Two, where watching converts her from subject to object position. Act Four returns us to the familiar territory of the Writer and Director arguing over the play. This time they clash over the act that we have just seen, which the Director describes as “not real,” later declaring: You know what I think? I think all this breaking-form shit is an intellectual exercise that lets you jump out of whatever difficult and uncomfortable thing just getting on and writing the scene would lead you into to… you’re a coward, you fly off to feminist manifestos and dancing in the fucking woods because you’re scared of what you might actually want to say if you followed through. (71)

The argumentative construction of the Act is a sharp contrast to what we have just seen, and ends with an ultimatum from the Director to the Writer that she must find a new ending or else the play won’t go on. Act Five is a creative reiteration of Act Two and takes place between the Writer and her Girlfriend. Stage directions indicate “the West End version of the apartment,” and that we should recognize the Girlfriend as a version of the partner the Writer speaks about in Act Three (75). Reference to the “West End version” suggests that what we are now seeing is an excerpt from the finally realized version of the play. In this take on the earlier act, there is a much greater sense of ease between the Writer and Girlfriend than there was between Writer and Boyfriend. This is most clearly expressed through the contrasting sexual encounters—awkward and unfulfilling in Act Two and “good sex, the best we’ve seen” in Act

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Five (78). Later in the Act, however, the dynamic alters. The Girlfriend wants to use a pegging penis with the Writer, something we learn she has so far resisted. She eventually relents but decides that she wants to wear it. In this sexual encounter, it is the Writer who is fulfilled and the Girlfriend left unsatisfied. This second sexual encounter creates distance between the characters and deep anxiety for the Writer: “I feel like I’ve done something terrible” (87). As the play draws to a close, the Writer is herself drawn to reflect on the relationship between subjectivity, desire and domination and also, as I’ve suggested, race. After the encounter that leaves her unsatisfied, the Girlfriend asks: “And you don’t think you’d fuck a tall girl or a white girl? Or just the small ones” (87). Thus, the play finally ends by challenging the Writer’s own location in the very power structures she has spent the play railing against.

A “Pure Shout of Rage” On perceptions of feminist willfulness, Ahmed writes that: “To be filled with will is to be emptied of thought: as if speaking about injustice, about power, about inequality, is just another way of getting your own way. Those who get in the way are often judged as getting in the way” (2017, 77). Such an infantilizing attitude is consistently expressed by the Director towards the Writer, who marks her anger as a form of immaturity and the main impediment to her artistic and personal progress: “move yourself out of the child position, stop playing the victim” (Hickson 2018b, 29). Such an attitude, as Ahmed writes, is itself a form subject-denying violence: “willfulness comes up in part as a mechanism for justifying violence by those who are violent […] You are being punished for your subjectivity, for being the being you are […] And then: you become the cause of the violence directed against you” (2017, 72–3). While the Writer is both accused of being angry and acknowledges her own anger, framing this anger as an expression of willfulness—the articulation of “a voice as a refusal to be beaten” (p. 73)—helps us to understand both the violence that it responds to as well as its dramaturgical generativity. For the angry insistence of the protagonist as killjoy (and of Hickson) does not “ruin things” (73). Rather, it serves as a force for building anew according to the will of the Writer, a willfulness determined to shape its own subjective outline. The play opens by attacking subordinating objectification head on as the Writer seizes the position of “speaking subject,” and I’ve given a

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number of quotes already that indicate the tone and content of this text, which functions as a feminist treatise of sorts. When the “real” Director speaks during the work-in-progress showing at the end of Act One, his comments underscore the sense in which the Writer’s anger and willfulness is framed as a problem. The director remarks, for example: You know, obviously it’s got real punch — I think we, I mean I really commend it for that. I think it’s got real — uh. It’s urgent, but I guess the question is, you know — that’s not a play unto itself — that’s not enough of a play, just like that — so we’ll need to get a sense of where it’s going to next. It’s maybe not enough to just — you know, scream and shout. (2018b, 31)

The conflict here between what a play needs to be and the authenticity of lived experience is significant. According to the director, who asserts dramaturgical authority in this context, the Writer’s anger needs to be shaped into an acceptable dramatic form—it needs to be disciplined. The Writer, though much less stridently than her fictional avatar, pushes against this injunction and reflects on the problem of staging female anger: “you get stuck between this — you know moany-victim place or angry-woman place — and it doesn’t feel like you can get heard anywhere in between” (31). If theatre privileges the male gaze, as Phelan and others suggest, then the willful angry woman challenges that gaze by refusing to accept the desires projected onto her. The question of dramaturgy is significant here as a set of conventions that distributes power. When the director suggests that “ranty” anger is inferior to “well-structured argument,” the Writer points out that the very form of argumentation reflects a male bias: “Argument, you know, formally — is pretty, it’s his side of things. They’re the terms he wants to be on” (31). Clearly the formal organization of Hickson’s text comprises her own assertion of a feminist dramaturgy that refuses the dramatic discipline that the fictional Director insists upon. Metatheatrical self-reflexivity is therefore central to this refusal. For example, through her use of a self-reflexive setting, Hickson draws attention to how the Writer’s speech is received. In listening to her impassioned (and enraged) outpouring, the Director does not so much provide a point of address and response in the sense meant by Oliver when she suggests listening is essential to repairing the damage of objectification (2004, 185). Rather, his listening is an act of appraisal which assesses

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how the Writer’s anger might benefit him as a saleable artistic commodity. When he offers her a commission, he explains that it is the authenticity of her anger that sets her apart from her peers: “They’re not angry. They just want the job. Every time they pretend to be angry you can tell they’re secretly doing it because they think angry will get them the job.” The Writer retorts, “And my anger will get bums on seats,” to which the director replies, “Yes, it’s zeitgeisty” (2018b, 21). What the metatheatricality of the play affords, therefore, is a clear illustration of how Hickson’s willfulness is concurrently diminished as immaturity and at the same time absorbed into the machinery of gender production as a means of objectification. Hickson further exploits the metatheatrical paradigm to give depth to her dramaturgy of refusal in ways that point to the “unstageability” of female desire. For example, there is a small exchange in the first act that gestures to an earlier draft of the play, which the audience doesn’t see. Director: But as I said, the argument is good. We had to work hard on that. It was a real outpouring when we first got it. Writer: I guess that’s how anger/ Director: /And we really had to knock it into shape. It desperately needed rigour and logic — the parts where it gets — you know, ranty — it can become insufferable. Writer: I think she’s just trying to get heard. (32)

This unseen early draft serves as more than a pretext for the characters to debate dramatic form, or for Hickson to satirize male bias. Rather, it directs our attention towards the unrepresented—to precisely the kinds of absences from representation that Phelan writes of. The early draft, which is variously described by the characters as “mad,” “fucking great to do,” “self-involved” and “self-indulgent” (2018b, 32–3), functions as a type of disappeared object. Phelan writes: “The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered” (1993, 147). While Hickson’s play is highly self-reflexive in its metatheatrical construction, at the same time it reaches out to and includes within its orbit those desires that do not conform to representational norms. These desires, “long,” as Phelan puts it, for representation and increasingly make themselves felt in Hickson’s text. In this sense, it is important to acknowledge not just the feminist elements of the play but also its queerness. As Steve Greer wrote in his programme notes for the Almeida production: “The Writer is a play

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which takes desire seriously, which puts it in a queerly precarious place. It’s precarious because desire is the engine of change and the very thing which makes change difficult; it’s queer because it understands desire can be political” (2018). It is in the Act Three, the centre of the play, that we have the most intimate and most dramaturgically transgressive depiction of the writer’s unfiltered desires. Hickson’s stage directions note at the beginning of the act: THE PROVOCATION: What follows should be an attempt at staging female experience, the director should be aware of avoiding the inherently patriarchal nature of theatre: Female characters should do— they are not having things done to them. Bodies are for action, not titillation or decoration. There should be no looking. The protagonist should own the space. (Hickson 2018b, 57)

The act unfolds as both a description and enactment of ritual. As indicated above, the protagonist describes women convening in a forest, dancing and evoking Semele. The faint cracking of twigs underfoot. Others come. From out the forest. A tribe. Wide-eyed and seeking, we who have felt too long lost — here tonight. Once alone, now found. The joy at last in belonging is — [ Smiles, almost tears, the heartbreaking exhalation of relief of finally finding home.] [A beat starts, the tribe, start to gently stamp — to move — to find a. They Dance — Tribal — Fire.] (61–2)

Throughout the act, the text is remarkably open to directorial interpretation and the language dense and evocative. The published script features accompanying photographs and drawings. In its form, the act is perhaps an answer to the question posed by Case: “Is there a woman’s form — a feminine morphology” (1988, 127). Some of the terms that Case assigns to that morphology are certainly apt here: “elliptical,” “fragmentary,” “ambiguous,” “interrupted” (129). Setting aside questions of essentialism, Case’s discussion of a feminine morphology is useful in this context as it helps to frame the dialectical interplays of gender, power and desire in Hickson’s play. Certainly, as I have suggested, Hickson interlinks her critique of “masculine” theatrical forms with an exploration of female sexual desire. For example:

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What’s nicest, is being allowed to be the right size. With men, I was always playing small to try and make sense of them having to mount you. But you’re also having to be mother so you can manage the insecurity of their dick being in the open air. It can be exhausting. Not being allowed to fully fill your own skin for fear it knocks them, painfully, off their perch. And once it’s done and you try to sleep, I find I never can. Next to men, I feel like I’m left in the shadow of something. (Hickson 2018b, 63)

The problem of “playing small” is also a dramatic one that involves female artists yielding to male dominance. Significantly, Act Three articulates a radical dramaturgy much more capable of expressing the structure and substance of female desire. That is, Hickson claims willfulness as what Ahmed calls a powerful “charge”: As with other acts of reclaiming negative terms, reclaiming willfulness is not necessarily premised on an affective conversion […] On the contrary, to claim wilfulness might involve not only hearing the negativity of the charge but insisting on that negativity: the charge, after all, is what keeps us proximate to scenes of violence. In willingly receiving the charge of willfulness, we stay close to those scenes of violence; as we must. (2017, 84)

Act Three is a willful interruption of both the inner and outer play’s dramaturgical shape that both gives expression to the Writer’s desire— her will—and shows how threatening this is to patriarchal order; thus, the image of the modern-day Pentheus with his binoculars, spying on the women. As I have suggested, the act also temporarily moves the play out of its self-reflexive register, making itself its own “cause” in the sense meant by Ahmed (p. 84). Here, female desire is not formulated in response or even in opposition to male desire, but on its own terms. While temporary, as a break from the metatheatrical framing of the play, the explicitly utopian third act is significant in that its “vision of radicalism,” as Greer describes, indicates the limit of self-reflexive criticality. He writes: “one of the things queerness might challenge is theatre’s investment in its own powers of critique, particularly when so many of its structures remain fixed in place. Theatrical innovation might remain just that: a vision of radicalism that ends with the performance and travels no further” (2018). What is required, the formulation of the act suggests, is not simply a critique of the violent dominance of the other, but the creation of an autonomous space that excludes the other’s demands: “We

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feel the possibility of new constructions — systems, schemes and structures — We are making a space conceived entirely of the architecture of our wanting.” (Hickson 2018b, 64) Significantly, this “architecture” remains incomplete, speculative, within the play, indicating not what the future should look like, but expressing an otherwise. As Muñoz writes: Utopia is not prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema. It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be. (2009, 97)

Indeed, taken as a whole, the play’s fragmentary, spatially and temporally complicated dramaturgy expresses the kind of vision of queer futurity that Muñoz writes of. For this monograph, it is Hickson’s movement between metadramatic and utopian registers—her dramaturgical “flux”—and the way that this keeps violence “close” that is particularly significant. Hickson’s play is marked by a both/and quality that comprises clear-headed critique and utopian vision. Such oscillation gives her dramaturgy a particularly fluid quality in the sense meant by Elaine Aston when she describes dramatic realism’s potential for an enhanced “fluidity,” and a “heterogeneity that invites us to think not of realism, but of realisms, realisms expressive of a shifting socio-political climate” (2016, 19, 20). In “Room for Realism,” Aston returns to the feminist arguments advanced by herself, Case and others against dramatic realism and thinks about the potential of the form in the twenty-first century. Using the metaphor of a virus (written preCovid but oh so apt now) she writes of: [V]iral realism — realism as infectious, contagious and spreading from a “host” of playwrights. With its capacity for genetic mutation, “new” strains of realism find fertile ground when realities are such that the humanity that cannot be lived needs to be expressed, revealed and to make itself felt; when the inhospitable environment demands critical scrutiny and to be held to account. (2016, 33)

What makes Hickson’s work so striking is its mutation of realism, and its invention of a dramatic form capable of expressing “lived needs” in

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an “inhospitable environment.” Her play shows this process in action, providing a sharp and uncomfortable critique at the same time as it offers an alternative. If, as Case suggests in conventional dramatic realism, “female characters are usually frustrated and unfulfilled […] they wait for the male to take the subject position of action [and] make no attempt to act for their own fulfilment” (1988, 122–3), then Hickson’s play stages the drama of subject formation itself. This is a struggle in process, a movement back and forth between utopian promise and real-world compromise. If one becomes a subject through witnessing to one’s own experiences, then the essential dramaturgical labour of The Writer involves the construction of female subjectivity through the articulation of feminist willfulness. The metatheatrical layering of the play allows Hickson to both make evident the impediments to female subjectivity and to offer an exemplary dramaturgy informed by female experiences and desires. Hickson has described the play as “selfish” in the sense that she “was writing something for myself and not writing it for the sake of commission or getting a job done” (2018a). The play does not accommodate, but speaks loudly and asks to be heard. At the core of this testimony is anger and desire, both framed as generative and necessary for change. In the interview just cited, Hickson remarked: [It] was incredible to write from that pure shout of rage. But, that’s not always art. That’s not always the responsibility of art. That pure shout of rage creates a lot of feeling in people, but then they don’t know what to do with that feeling. It’s hard. It’s not clear. You just have to trust that it’s doing something, that it is waking people up, that it makes you feel a thing. And that that energy has applications somewhere. (Hickson 2018a)

That energy is expressed in the text by way of what Phelan speaks of as the desire of objects who long for representation—who long to be subjects (1993, 147). The desire takes different forms in each of the acts but remains a consistent yearning. The play in totality speaks this desire and at the same time shows the complexity of bringing this desire into representation within given structures. In Act One, the Writer says that she wants the world to “change shape” (Hickson 2018b, 20). As noted earlier, in Act Three stage directions include an image of a circle as a “A Structure. A System. A Scheme. For a new world.” The desire

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constitutive of this new world exceeds the parameters of patriarchal structures of representation: its subjects too shouty, too angry, too explicit, too long, too complicated. It also exceeds the metatheatrical container of the play. In this way, Hickson’s play seems to suggest that theatrical strategies for countering subject-destroying violence require not just the application of self-reflexive critique that exposes such violence for what it is. For theatre, where artists stand in relation to theatrical norms and conventions governs the conditions of the self-reflexive articulation, and self-reflexivity is limited by its captivity to—and mimicry of—existing forms. Therefore, for “selves” excluded from those forms, new structures, systems and dramatic worlds are required. Placing these new worlds alongside the old is jarring, destabilizing, confounding. But in this, such juxtaposition or queering begins to sketch out the kind of reformulation of practice that Hickson’s play both demands and demonstrates.

Conclusion: Changing the Subject Position In 2018, I was fortunate to see Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me at New York Theatre Workshop. I was doubly fortunate to attend the evening that Lisa Kron facilitated an audience talkback after the performance and I want to briefly reflect on some of the discussion as a way of closing the chapter. Schreck’s play takes up the subject of gender violence by way of filtering her own family history through an appraisal of the US constitution. While the play is not directly metatheatrical in the sense of a play-within-a-play, it is highly self-reflexive in its approach to storytelling in ways that map onto the categories of real-life reference and self-conscious role play in Richard Hornby’s taxonomy of metadrama (1986). The play is premised on Schreck re-enacting a speech she gave when she was fifteen. As she explains to the audience, “I travelled the country giving speeches about the Constitution at American Legion halls for prize money. This was a scheme invented by my mom, a debate coach, to help me pay for college” (Schreck 2020, 11). The setting for the play is a mock Legion hall, and Schreck performs much of the work behind a podium as if she were giving a speech. The text weaves in and out of moments of that speech and seemingly extemporaneous digressions related to it. As the performance unfolds, Schreck relates a narrative of domestic abuse in her own family, which she traces back to her settler grandmother. At the same time, she begins to deconstruct the ways in which the Constitution and its agents have failed to

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protect women, pointing to specific examples from case law. The second part of the play, shorter than the first, comprises a debate between Schreck and a fifteen-year-old girl. The subject of their debate is whether to keep the Constitution or throw it away and write a new one. The debate—a re-enactment of sorts of what Schreck had both described and performed earlier—is lively and energetic, drawing the audience into the competition and installing a strong sense of community (and civic investment) at the end of the play. There are two components to Schreck’s play that I want to comment on in relation to Hickson. The first relates to Schreck’s framing of the play as a form of ritual and the second is its focus on female subjectivity. In her discussion of the play at the talkback, Schreck emphasized its performativity and remarked that the play was an “enactment,” and indeed an enactment of female humanity, rather than an “explanation.” She also described it as a healing ritual made in response to violence. The play aspired, she suggested, to facilitate a sense of community, somewhere audiences could “feel together.” Given the statistics she cites within that play on how many American women are assaulted during their lifetimes (statistics that she asks be updated every time the play is performed), Schreck is highly aware of the fact that for most women in the audience, the story she shares is one that they can intimately relate to either because they themselves have been a victim or because they know someone else who has. In both Schreck and Hickson’s plays, therefore, we see an emphasis on ritual that aims towards, to return to Dolan, effecting between participants in the theatrical event the “lucid power of intersubjective understanding,” or what Michelle Rodino-Colocino in the context of Me Too calls “transformative empathy” (2018, 97). To enfold ritual within a self-reflexive context—reflective awareness of theatre in Hickson’s play and storytelling in Schreck’s—means to understand ritual as its own form of critical praxis, but a form that escapes the kinds of measures that govern either the formulations of a “good play” or winning debate strategy. Schreck’s ritual is premised on an ironic re-enactment, but ultimately works at a deeply affective level, gathering force as its dramaturgy interweaves personal testimony and factuality. Indeed, Schreck’s personal testimony is what makes her such a strong subject—as she remarked in the talkback, “the power is it’s true and it’s me.” Thus, in the sense that Oliver writes that “the act of witnessing itself can help restore self-respect and a sense of one’s self as an agent or a self even while it necessarily recalls the trauma of objectification” (2004, 187),

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Schreck’s witnessing is restorative. Significantly, it is not simply restorative for Schreck, rather, it aims towards a catharsis for the audience and in the talkback with Kron, Schreck described catharsis in this context as a political act. We can therefore say that Schreck’s ritual ultimately aims towards the restoration of subjectivity for its female audience by way of making visible and audible their lived experience. In reflecting on the political potential of not just Schreck’s play but theatre in general, Kron remarked that its power lies in its ability to “change the subject position.” By this she meant, in quite simple terms, that the power of representation derives from its perspectival position and therefore there is always the capacity to change this perspective: “this is what it looks like from here.” What Hickson and Schreck make evident is the considerable effort required to show “what it looks like from here” and the structural resistances that consistently try and divert attention away from such a view. Their “counterfeit” structures therefore serve to make evident that which has been disappeared from representation and also expose the mechanisms responsible for such disappearance. As Schreck remarked, the play is “trying to see things that have remained invisible” and attempts to translate that “into a structure.” As I’ve argued throughout the chapter, it is the fact that women’s experiences have been excluded from representation that makes the use of self-reflexive forms by writers like Hickson and Schreck so powerful. Where Crouch’s play ends with the “death of the author” because of the author’s own enmeshment in hegemonic patriarchal structures, Hickson and Schreck aim towards an enlivening, an affirmation of female subjectivity. This is the final aim of the plays, which are not simply exercises in critical or ethical scrutiny but more profoundly enactments of the very thing that they expose as missing from dominant representation forms: civic and aesthetic spaces “conceived entirely by the architecture of our wanting.” These are willful plays that remind us that violence is always close by and at the time defy its objectifying logic by creating their own dramaturgical systems. Systems that unashamedly advocate, as Hickson writes, for “a new world” (2018b, 64).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Aston, Elaine. 2016. “Room for Realism?” In Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, edited by Siân Adisehiah and Louise Page, 17–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bahun, Sanja, and V. G. Julie Rajan, eds. 2015. Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate. 2nd ed. Farnham: Ashgate. Bailey, F. G. 1996. “Cultural Performance, Authenticity and Second Nature.” In The Politics of Cultural Performance, edited by David J. Parkin, Lionel Caplan, and Humphrey J. Fisher, 1–18. Providence: Berghahn Books. Brizzell, Cindy, and André Lepecki. 2003. “Introduction: The Labor of the Question Is the (Feminist) Question of Dramaturgy.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 13 (2): 15–16. Butler, Judith. 1991. “A Note on Performative Acts of Violence.” Cardozo Law Review 13 (4): 1303–1304. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1988. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen. Crouch, Tim. 2011a. “The Author: Response and Responsibility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 21 (4): 416–422. ———. 2011b. Plays One. London: Oberon Books. Dolan, Jill. 2001. “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative.’” Theatre Journal 53 (3): 455–479. Filloux, Catherine. 2011. Dog and Wolf & Killing the Boss. South Gate: NoPassport Press. ———. 2016. Interview with Catherine Filloux. Conducted by Emma Willis: Unpublished. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. 2018. Rape on the Contemporary Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Greer, Steve. 2018. “Ella Hickson’s The Writer.” Almeida Theatre. https://ste vegreer.org/ella-hicksons-the-writer/. Hickson, Ella. 2018a. “It’s Ella Hickson’s Moment (of Honesty)” [interview]. conducted by Riley Rudy: The Theatre Times. https://thetheatretimes.com/ its-ella-hicksons-moment-of-honesty/. ———. 2018b. The Writer. London: Nick Hern Books. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Ismail, Salwa. 2018. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Little, Suzanne. 2017. “The Witness Turn in the Performance of Violence, Trauma, and the Real.” In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, edited by Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c, and Stuart Young, 43–64. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Lucy, Nevitt. 2013. Theatre & Violence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Muñoz, José. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Witnessing Subjectivity.” In Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, edited by Shaun Gallagher, Stephen

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Watson, Philippe Brun, and Philippe Romanski, 180–204. Rouen: l’Université de Rouen. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Rodino-Colocino, Michelle. 2018. “Me too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy.” Communication and Critical/cultural Studies 15 (1): 96–100. Schreck, Heidi. 2018. “What the Constitution Means to Me Post-performance Talkback” [author’s personal notes]. Facilitated by Lisa Kron. New York: New York Theatre Workshop. ———. 2020. What the Constitution Means to Me. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Skjelsbaek, Inger. 2001. “Sexual Violence and War: Mapping Out a Complex Relationship.” European Journal of International Relations 7 (2): 211–237.

CHAPTER 6

Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview

Introduction In 2012, I attended a performance of Ontroerend Goed’s Audience in Leeds. The work was programmed as part of Ludus, a festival that ran alongside the annual Performance Studies International conference hosted that year by the University of Leeds. The night I attended, there were a number of theatre academics in the audience. With their critical antennae freshly tuned by the conference, these scholars were fit for a fight. Ontroerend Goed’s work deliberately goads the audience, as I shall soon explain, attempting to make them complicit in an incident of audience bullying. The provocation aims to make spectators think about their individual responsibilities when part of a collective audience, challenging spectatorial anonymity and neutrality. The scholar-spectators, however, were having none of this, loudly interrupting, speaking back and generally refusing to go along with the “game” being played. By design, Audience invites the direct engagement of spectators, but in this case a certain line seemed to be crossed with the performers becoming more and more flummoxed by the resistance of the audience. Indeed, of the reception of the play in the UK, the company reflected that it “caused outrage and indignation, due to ‘questionable ethics,’” prompting sit-ins, sabotage and shoes being thrown at the stage (398). I begin this chapter with a brief description and evocation of the performance for it raises a number of critical issues related not just to the ethics of spectatorship, but also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_6

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to the question of how spectators are figured within metadramatic works concerned with violence. I then turn back to other plays discussed in this monograph to consider their depictions of the audience, before finally reflecting on Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, in particular its ending. The case study discussions in this chapter are shorter and more comparative than in previous chapters, aiming towards an integrated discussion that leads towards the monograph’s final reflections in the short concluding chapter that follows. Audience While not a typically scripted play, a written account of Audience is available in Ontroerend Goed’s collection of performance “blueprints,” All Work and No Plays, published in 2014. My discussion draws from that book as well as my own memory of the performance. In their introduction, the company writes that when first conceived, the work was intended as both “an homage to ‘being an audience’” and an update of Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (Goed 2014, 396). Rather than directly confronting spectators as Handke’s play does, the company instead wanted to “seduce,” drawing audience members into a theatrical game before confronting them with their collusion in its violent outcome (396). This is done very playfully to begin with. Once seated, spectators are briefed about the rules and conventions governing the performance in a speech that exaggerates the obvious codes of behaviour that apply to theatre-going more generally. Audience members are also included in the performance mise-en-scene, with a camera frequently projecting images of either the entire audience or individual spectators onto a backdrop at the rear of the stage, reminding them of their role as subjects of the performance. This mirroring is funny to begin with. For example, an amplified voice attempts to guess the thoughts of individual spectators captured on camera: “I’m beginning to look more and more like my father,” “I want to see a mirror of myself in which I look strangely recognizable” (407– 8). Once the tone and format of the performance is established, an actor comes on who functions as a comic compere. Although humorous to begin with, his routine becomes more and more offensive until his attention lands on a single female spectator (a plant) whom he proceeds to violently bully. She is shamed for her appearance, personality and sexuality, culminating in the compere attempting to lead the audience in a chant of “spread your legs” (421). Another audience plant eventually interrupts

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the action, calling out the compere, which leads to an extended “debate” amongst the performers about the ethicality of what has just occurred. This debate also turns its attention to the “passivity” of the audience. The audience that I was part of forcefully rejected their implication in the action, loudly denouncing the entire theatrical conceit. As the debate begins to wind down, the performance moves into its last phase, a critique of crowd or mass mentality. This is accompanied by various video clips of religious gatherings, sporting and political events. The performers invite audience members to get up and dance during this part of the work, though when I attended, this invitation was refused. Despite its problematic manipulation of the audience, which I shall discuss shortly, Audience draws attention to the fact that theatre is a venue that rehearses the exercise of power by spectators outside the theatre. In her review of Fairview, for example, Miriam Felton-Dansky writes that “rehearsing [spectators] onstage offers us a dose of the courage we need out in the real world” (2018). In its “gamified” construction, Audience emphasizes this idea. Indeed, the company state that part of their interest in the performance was examining the “unwritten rules that govern our public life … codes of behaviour” (404). In its self-reflexivity, Audience suggests that these two codes—theatrical and public—are interlinked. As such, the performance makes clear that spectatorship always involves power—that it is embedded in a transaction of power. As Peggy Phelan suggests (cited in the previous chapter): “much Western theatre evokes desire based upon and stimulated by the inequality between performer and spectator — and by the (potential) domination of the silent spectator” (1993, 163). At the very least, the audience empowers the performance through their attention, which is the point that Audience tries to make. After the incident of bullying, for example, the compere remarks to the other actors of audience that “they should be ashamed of themselves for not stopping him” (Goed 2014, 424). Through provoking the audience in this manner, the performance, even if not wholly successful, reflects debates in both theatrical practice and scholarship that focusses on the role of the audience. Mireia Aragay, for example, writes that such scholarship emphasizes that “the audience constitutes the core of whichever ethical significance a theatre event may have” (2014, 2). In his description of an “ethics of responsibility,” Hans-Thies Lehmann similarly identifies the centrality of the audience:

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The performance addresses itself fundamentally to my involvement: my personal responsibility to realize the mental synthesis of the event; my attention having to remain open to what does not become an object of understanding; my sense of participation in what is happening around me; my awareness of the problematic act of spectating itself. (2006, 143)

A key issue in this problematization of spectatorship is the perceived passivity of spectators, which is often set in opposition to the action required to affect change. As Tim Crouch’s play, The Author, suggests, watching violence means participating in a broader economy of violence. Similarly, the indictment that Ontroerend Goed makes of its spectators— why didn’t you do anything?—ultimately advances the overall thesis of the performance, which is that theatrical violence both reflects and rehearses external violence—the violence of the real. As Jacques Rancière (whose work has been crucial to the field of theatrical spectatorship) points out, the problem of how to “activate” the spectator has long been central to theatrical theorization and experimentation specifically concerned with theatre’s political and ethical role. He suggests, for example, that at a philosophical level, both Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, despite their radically different approaches to theatre, each began with the desire to reform the opposition of spectator and action: They intend to teach their spectators ways of ceasing to be spectators and becoming agents of a collective practice. According to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes them conscious of the social situation that gives rise to it and desirous of acting in order to transform it. According to Artaud’s logic, it makes them abandon their position as spectators: rather than being placed in front of a spectacle, they are surrounded by the performance, drawn into the circle of action that restores their collective energy. In both cases, theatre is presented as a mediation striving for its own abolition. (2009, 7–8)

Similar critiques recur in analyses of contemporary theatrical practice that locate theatre’s ethical aspect in relation to its ability to make spectators social actors—the work of Augusto Boal, for example, which seeks to overturn oppression by creating scenarios in which “the spectator starts acting again” (1979, 119). From Rancière’s point of view, however, in their seeming “passivity” spectators are not “ignorant” and in need of

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correction by way of the theatre. Instead, he suggests, actors and spectators need to be seen as having distinct but fundamentally equal roles to play in the construction of meaning. Spectators, he writes, “play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own” (2009, 22). In certain ways, the reactions of UK spectators to Audience expressed a Rancièrelike position: If the performance was an elaborate game intended to teach spectators a lesson about themselves, then they rejected this “education” in spectatorship, asserting their agency and intellectual capacity. The sexual violence at the centre of the offence taken by the audience warrants further scrutiny, however, as there is a subtle but important distinction between taking offence at an “act” of gender-based violence, and taking offence at being implicated in such violence. To illustrate the strong emotional responses this sequence provoked, let me quote a few excerpts: You’re the girl who makes everybody feel: I’m glad I’m not her. (Goed 2014, 416). You know that song, “you are beautifuuul, no matter what they say…”? You know that song? Don’t lie to me, you know that song. You listen to it every day. And you know why? Because YOU FUCKING NEED IT. (417) You make me waste the sympathy that I’ve built up with these people. They like me less because of you. And the more I give you what you deserve, fuckface, the more they’re going to start thinking: Hey, back off … she’s one of us. (417)

As so it goes on. It is worth noting that the vocal “dissenters” during the performance I attended were mainly men. I have thought about this as well as my own relative silence—my retreat from the fight—and wondered if this was an act of self-preservation ingrained from my life-long experiences of being a woman: just keep walking, ignore him, don’t make eye contact, don’t inflame the situation. There is a degree to which any person who has experienced harassment and then witnesses it occurring

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to another (even if it is clear that this harassment is a theatrical “set-up”), cannot help but feel that this harassment is also directed at them, that they might also be in danger; there is a visceral identification—a deep understanding of the feelings and affective “churning” that takes place when one is subject to such abuse. One weakness of the performance is that while it aimed at heightening a sense of individual responsibility in spectators, it failed to account for the differential experiences that spectators bring to the theatre in the sense indicated by Suzanne Little when she writes of the problem of theatre that attempts to challenge spectators assuming “that audiences are a homogenous group” (2017, 58). At the same time, I wondered if the contempt of the scholar-spectators came as much from a feeling of being slighted—that it was as much an expression of perceived intellectual superiority as offence at the abuse. I wrote a note for myself: “is this a reaction to gendered violence or to that fact that this is clumsy theatre that fails to rise to a level of sophistication that would satisfy those angered by it?” The rowdy spectators who interrupted the performance seemed to take offence not just to the content, but also to the role into which they were cast, where their “passivity” characterized them as bad, shameful and weak. Certainly, if the performance aimed to hold a mirror to the audience, then at this point the most vocal objectors rejected their reflection as composed by the company. When it comes to depictions of the audience in the plays I’ve discussed a certain double bind becomes evident. On the one hand, the audience is the necessary witness for the act of theatrical “confession” made by dramatists—something we see clearly in Redhill and Crouch’s plays, for example. On the other, the audience is also included within the scope of the plays’ critiques: “How does it feel to be out there in the dark? Just watching. Invisible, but still a part of everything” (Redhill 2005, 102). Helena Grehan’s notion of ambivalence as “a form of radical unsettlement” that keeps the audience engaged with the work long after the performance has ended perhaps comes closest to capturing the duality of feeling towards the audience that we see in the plays (2009, 22). It also points to the double bind just outlined where metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence address themselves to the audience: such dramaturgies may seek to politically “activate” spectators but at the same time require them to be theatrically passive in order that this point be made. Moreover, self-reflexivity that extends to the audience is ethically fragile by virtue of the fact that spectators need to “agree” to participate in the act of self-examination, an agreement that can never wholly take account of the

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differences between spectators. Indeed, any attempt to include the audience within the scope of a metadramatic text is extremely difficult. For example, despite its pretence at openness, the dramaturgical framing of spectators in Audience is pre-determined—as one stage direction notes: “if audience members want to interfere, they can always have their say. The performers are prepared for possible interruptions” (425). Moreover, in talking about the work’s construction, Ontroerend Goed refers to a “net being woven” (403), speaks of “playing cat and mouse” (417) and of the audience being “dragged into the game” (416). The fact that the play’s “blueprint” lacks flexibility was evident in the performance I saw, where the performers determinedly continued, despite having “lost” the audience. Certainly, spectators attending the performance of a work called Audience from a well-known experimental company are going to expect a level of interaction and provocation. But the ethical value of such engagement depends on at least some level of willingness to “play the game”—on the interpretive agency of spectators. The reason I shared my thoughts about the gendered responses to the performance I observed is because I think there is something significant in the defensiveness of those spectators. Such audience members were willing to attend a performance that set out to challenge the ethical dimensions of spectatorship, but only if such a challenge did not affront their sensibilities. Perhaps, therefore, we must question the commitment to the agency and ethical consciousness of the individual spectator as the nexus at which the ethical value of a given performance is realized. In the next section, I wish to draw on the work of Nicholas Ridout and Judith Butler to think further about the value of individualism that often underlies contemporary discussions (and metatheatrical depictions) of spectatorship, and the relationship of this individualism to the nature of theatre as a collective enterprise. While Audience attempted to mount a critique of mass mentality suggesting that collective violence is a consequential failure of individuals not accepting social and political responsibility for one another, perhaps the failure in fact lies in an over-inflated valuation of spectatorial agency when dealing with violent subject matter: whom, precisely, is most in need of emancipation?

Staging the Power of the Spectator What, then, is the nature of the power that the spectator wields and why the recourse to metatheatrical techniques to challenge this power? To

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answer, I first want to turn to Nicholas Ridout’s Scenes from Bourgeois Life, where he develops his earlier discussions of ethics and spectatorship to argue that the act of spectatorship is a constitutive feature of the bourgeois subject. He explains: There is indeed a view of the world that has been chosen by and for the bourgeoisie, which places at a spectatorial distance the world in which its own hegemony is the source of suffering, and which has strong affinities and historical connections to the practice of going to the theatre […] The spectator’s powerlessness […] is in fact a constituent element of a distinctive spectatorial subjectivity produced by the defensive self-construction of a colonial bourgeoisie, and that theatre (and the theatrical as it appears in other media) functions as a most effective technology for maintaining it. (2020, 12–13)

In one sense, the double-bind of the spectator in a number of the plays discussed in this monograph—the sense in which they are urged to become active and at the same time required to remain passive—reflexively depicts such a melancholic affect, where the reality of violence is recognized at the same time as spectators’ ability to meaningfully disrupt such violence is questioned. That is, the ambivalence that marks these plays may be understood, if we apply Ridout’s analysis, as a reflection of bourgeois subjectivity. Theatre, he suggests, is an exemplary site for the exercise of bourgeois power in that “confronted with the suffering of others, onstage, spectators can do nothing, except make a full acknowledgement of that suffering” (11). This suffering “matters” to us, as Ridout remarks, but at the same time we are aware that there is “nothing [we] can do about it” (11). Therefore, if we return to one of the original questions that this monograph asks—why do theatre-makers use metatheatrical devices to represent violence on stage—then Ridout’s arguments provide a compelling reply: metatheatricality is a way of recognizing and foregrounding the structural relationship between theatre, violence and spectatorship. Even if the position of the spectator is not foregrounded within each of the dramas I have discussed, it is in fact central to the problems that they address. In considering Ridout’s arguments, it is important to bear in mind their contextual specificity. He does not make universal claims about the nature of spectatorship, but rather examines how spectatorship figures in

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the exercise of power of a particular social grouping: a white, “Western” bourgeoisie with its roots in eighteenth-century imperialism. This being the case, it follows that spectatorship can also function in other ways and that metadramatic technique may orient itself in varying directions. Drury’s Fairview, for example, critiques the kind of bourgeois spectatorship that Ridout identifies through a reversal of the normative spectatorial paradigm (more on this in the next section). Calderón’s Kiss (see Chapter 2) similarly gestures to a configuration of the audience that resists hegemonic demands by positing two very different audiences: one that is complicit in the kind of spectatorial domination that Ridout describes, and another that resists it. The first audience, the audience for the American actors’ production of “Boosa” (and audience for the play proper) is, like the actors themselves, “in the dark” when it comes to the meaning of the Syrian text (fictional as it is), imposing their own values and assumptions in ways that diminish its culturally specific meanings. There is another audience, however, that we don’t see but hear tell of, the Syrian spectators who gathered in their living rooms to watch “Boosa.” Their spectatorship serves not to maintain hegemonic order by way of distance, but instead facilitates a community of intimacy—of closeness and proximity—as a refusal of violence. When in Act 2 the original context of “Boosa’s” performance is revealed, the actors—and by extension, the audience—are asked to reflect on the parasitic character of their engagement with the play. In this way, Calderón’s dramaturgy draws attention to the distance essential to what Ridout calls bourgeois spectatorship: “Bourgeois distance is both the necessary pre-condition for the bourgeoisie to come to know itself as a class, and also the deliberate, if not always conscious means for the maintenance of that class and its own economic, social and psychic well-being” (2020, 40). Applying this to the broad category of “Western” plays that attempt to raise consciousness about violence taking place in other parts of the world, we see that such consciousness-raising may in fact be grounded in shoring up the consciousness—subjectivity—of the bourgeois spectator. That is, while aiming to raise awareness of the suffering of others, ultimately—even if unintentionally—such dramas may tell us more about who we are than the purported subjects represented. What way out of such solipsism? How might spectatorship be configured so that representations of violence done to others function not simply as a means by which spectators are provided with what Ridout calls an “alibi” (11) whereby they might, as Ella Hickson’s protagonist

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in The Writer suggests, “appease their soul for a few hours” (2018, 20)? Moreover, how can metadramatic techniques contribute to such reconfiguration or reorientation of the spectator? In The Illuminated Theatre, Joe Kelleher draws on Adi Ophir’s work to consider the demands on those who bear witness to violence through their spectatorship to it. For Ophir, responsibility for the memory of suffering would have to acknowledge “the untranslatable moment of private suffering” and also “relinquish in advance a unitary and unified historical time into which suffered time is gathered,” which for Ophir also means the deconstruction of “any historical metanarrative.” (2015, 9)

The gathering of any audience asserts a unitary and unified time— the time of the performance event. When read alongside Ridout, what Ophir’s work suggests is that this unitary perspective is itself nested within a hegemonic device. Deconstruction of the very premise of spectatorship therefore seems required as a response to its implication in economies of violence. The evoked but not shown “other” audience in Kiss, for example, aids in such deconstruction, decentring the bourgeois audience through depicting a scenario in which their spectatorship is not required. Indeed, the play formulates itself as a kind of paradoxical refusal of the type of parasitic/touristic spectatorship it critiques by enacting a typical theatrical paradigm only to highlight its insufficiency. As I suggested in Chapter 2, what Ophir calls “the untranslatable moment of private suffering” is given the last word in Calderón’s play through the song which ends it, “Yamma Mwel el Hawa,”: which includes the lines: “‘Oh night,’ the dew drops cried out/Testifying for my wounds.” Certainly, in Kiss Calderón attacks bourgeois theatre that thinks that it can foreclose geographic, temporal, experiential and political distance through its own act of imaginative will. In its metatheatricality, it addresses the very nature of such spectatorship, foregrounding the melancholic affect that Ridout evokes where one is moved but also believes that one is powerless to act; the final stage directions for the actors read: “The actors sit on the couch and chairs, defeated” (Calderón 2014, 100). The deconstruction of paradigms of spectatorship is therefore one way of disturbing what Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” the “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (2006, 12). Such deconstruction

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aims to augment the usual distribution of power by directing attention back to the power and agency of spectators, refusing the helplessness that Ridout describes. Self-reflexivity in Calderón’s plays serves as a continual reminder of the embeddedness of theatre in the political, and of the contiguity between the various positionalities that constitute both the theatrical event and the civic-political domain. From Ridout’s point of view, this is a mode of spectatorship that continually reminds the spectator of the historicity of their own act of spectating, what he calls “catching a glimpse of the processes by which they are being produced” (2020, 177). While Calderón’s two-part structure certainly challenges a bourgeois perspective, Drury’s dramaturgy in We Are Proud to Present is a more complex and sharply focussed deconstruction of historical metanarrative. In its oscillation between scenes of processes and presentation, the play rigorously confronts the forces of history-making and it effects as felt in the present. Maike Bleeker and Isis Germano’s notion of “focalization” provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the implications of this perspectival movement. In drawing attention to the distance that sustains spectatorship through continually breaking then reinstituting the fourth wall, the performance, to draw from their description of focalization, “illuminat[es] how staging and spectator are mutually implicated and draw[s] attention to how a staging is constructed as an object of perception in relation to a position from which it is perceived” (2014, 365). The metatheatrical content of the play—its focus on how staging is constructed—heightens spectatorial self-awareness. Indeed, of the original production design, Drury stated that “[a]udience watching audience was very deliberate” (Drury and Ehn 2012). The production I attended at Soho Rep followed Drury’s direction, with the audience on three sides of the action, meaning that it was very much part of the mise-en-scene. But more importantly, the play’s oscillatory dramaturgy draws attention to the “why?” and “for whom?” of the performance. This occurs most strikingly when, after a noose is put around a Black actor’s neck by white performers, the audience is addressed through the searching gaze of Actor 4, another Black cast member, who tries to formulate a question, but fails (Drury 2012, 176). Of the ending, Drury has remarked: “It’s easy to sit in judgement and it’s hard to look inside […]. I wanted to make sure that everyone was culpable in creating that final moment […], everyone is implicated in that” (Drury and Ehn 2012). To implicate the audience is to involve them in the deconstruction of the historical

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metanarrative, pointing out that the unitary nature of their act of spectatorship is itself embedded in a paradigm of violence. The endings of both We Are Proud to Present and Fairview finally turn the spectator’s gaze towards the historical, political and cultural dimensions of their own act of spectatorship, allowing them the kind of “glimpse” that Ridout gestures to. Throughout the monograph, I have explored the potential political efficacy of metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence. I wish to make clear, however, that I am not suggesting that metatheatricality is an ideal theatrical response to the challenges of staging violence. There is a fundamental distinction between Goodness, for example, a play in my reading as much about the depressive bourgeois subject as it is about genocide, and a writer like Drury whose works such use metadramatic techniques to critique the relentless focus of white bourgeois culture on its own image. That is, metatheatricality can either serve to disturb the construction of critical distance that enables bourgeois subjectivity a privileged position in the culture, or it can reiterate that distance as a way as assuaging the conscience not only of spectators but also theatre-makers. Rather than reifying metatheatricality, I am suggesting that its frequent use as a device for depicting violence reflects a recognition of the complexity involved in making such representations for largely bourgeois audiences (and the attendant complexities of trying to unravel this as a white bourgeois theatre scholar). Indeed, this is why the documentary Goodness in Rwanda is so revealing and why I spent so much time discussing it in Chapter 4. When Michael Redhill’s play was transferred from its original North American and British spheres of reception to Rwanda, where genocide is not an abstraction used to measure the ethical acuity of the bourgeois subject but a daily reality to be lived with, the internal struggle of the protagonist made little sense. As cited previously, the question of one Rwandan spectator was, in effect, why are you trying to show us a play about what we already know and of which you know nothing? The question made evident that the play is not really about genocide at all, but something else: the feelings that the genocides suffered by “others” provoke in us, fortunate as we are to never have experienced such sense-destroying violence. As Stephenson points out, the repeated refrain of the play is: “how does it feel?” Ridout writes that “complex seeing involves seeing something of this history of your seeing” (2020, 176). Certainly, this seeing one’s own seeing is at the core of Redhill’s dramaturgy, where Michael in the present looks back on Michael from

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the past literally watching the account related to him being acted out by a chorus of performers. That is, there is a sense that the protagonist sees his own seeing and, by extension, the audience are also asked to apprehend their own spectatorship, sometimes by direct prompting from the character of Michael. But, as I suggested in Chapter 4, the abstraction of genocide as a subject—the play avoids naming a particular genocide and locating itself in relationship to that violence—obscures the kind of “history of seeing” that Ridout speaks of. In this case, without precision or specificity, one must ask where this self-reflexivity about our own spectatorship gets us. The same question pertains to The Author. As the title suggests, the play applies a certain level of forensic detail in its scrutiny of the ethicality of the writer’s actions. This self-reflection is so intensely felt that the “author” takes his own life at the end of the play. It is in dramaturgy and design, the play also asks the audience to consider its relationship to depictions of violence on stage—as Crouch remarks, it is a play that “happens inside its audience” (2011, 164). Like Audience, Crouch’s text seeks to draw a connection between spectatorship to violence inside and outside the theatre. Audience members are asked to reflect on the role that they play within a broader culture of violence; from Ridout’s point of view, they are asked to consider how the very act of spectatorship enables such a culture to endure. There is a striking line near the opening of The Author where Adrian, who plays the role of audience member to the offstage play that the cast discusses, reflects on the performativity of being an audience member. But I often think — I think — I think that sometimes the most fantastical — the most made up thing in the theatre is us! Don’t you…? I saw a play last year. And I remembered thinking, “that writer has poorly imagined me.” I’ve been imagined! Poorly imagined! The audience has been badly written. We’re all going to have to pretend ourselves! Do you know that feeling…? (167)

By way of Adrian, Crouch not only offers a canny observation of the implicit positioning of the audience within any given dramaturgical configuration, but also conveys that self-conscious spectatorship is not uncommon; the audience to Audience the night I attended certainly felt that they had been poorly imagined. What is significant here is the sense

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of a schism in spectatorship, an identificatory failure whereby we suddenly apprehend the effort required to do what we would normally do unthinkingly: “Oh no, now I’m going to have to ‘play along.’” Certainly, this kind of “break” leads some way towards revealing what Ridout calls the “history of our own seeing.” But what effect does such knowledge have? As cited in Chapter 2, in an interview with The New York Times, Calderón remarked that his playwriting was shaped by a moment when he saw two former members of Pinochet’s cabinet, “‘people who are the embodiment of evil,’ attending the play [Neva] in Santiago and departing in a happy mood, ‘for certain on their way to have a drink somewhere’” (qtd. in Rohter 2013). The memory recounted is striking—two agents of brutal violence enjoying a theatrical meditation on the relationship between staged and real-world violence. As with Ella Hickson’s observation in The Writer of former public school boys entranced by the representation of their own problematic culture in The History Boys, these former politicians were able to happily enjoy the performance (Hickson 2018, 17). The Oxbridge set described by Hickson or Pinochet’s ministers certainly have the same capacity as anyone else to apprehend the political implications of their own spectatorship. In this case, self-reflexivity seems to have served to enhance the confidence of those whose values and behaviours are represented, rather than lead them to question them. Taking a cue from Judith Butler, I therefore suggest that metadramatic dramaturgies of violence that rest solely on the political value of self-reflexivity rely too heavily upon an underlying assumption of the efficacy of self-critique. In Giving an Account of Oneself , Butler argues that the limitations of one’s ability to give an account of oneself are systemic and irreparable: “The ‘i’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence” (2005, 8). Similarly, a spectator as interpellator of an account given by another cannot disentangle her or himself from the “social conditions” of the “emergence” of their response to the performance. That is, any perception of the history of one’s own seeing is inevitably shaped and informed by that very historicity. As Jon Erickson writes (cited earlier in Chapter 4): “[the] historicist paradox in which the truth of any other historical moment is contingent on one’s interpretation arising from one’s own historical moment, which is also contingent, and the flow of temporality continually challenges that truth […] like trying to shoot from one moving train at a target on another” (2009, 27). Butler not only points out the difficulty of achieving subjective self-knowledge, she further argues that “it is precisely by virtue of

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one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that is it precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds” (20). Butler’s work provides an important provocation for theatre artists who use metatheatricality to “double-bracket” their depictions of violence. Her arguments suggest that the self-reflexive “knowingness” of metatheatrical devices needs to be met with other dramatic and theatrical features that might sustain the “opacity to itself” of the theatrical event. Drury and Ehn, I believe, provide examples of where this successfully occurs (see Chapters 3, 4). Fairview, for example, refuses the desire of white spectators to enter into the experience of Blackness. Similarly, Ehn uses a highly poetic formulation to qualify the transparent act of theatrical translation of Rufina Amaya’s testimony. If self-reflexivity is limited in its political capacity, then the notion of collectivity—an idea that has been problematic for theorizations of spectatorship—becomes important to consider. Hickson gestures to such collectivity in The Writer, particularly in the third act, where the protagonist realizes the desire expressed earlier in the play for a theatre that returns to its ritual origins. As described in the act, dithyrambic performance elements—music, dance, incantation—become tools for transformation. Significantly, this performance has no audience. Indeed, the spell of the ritual is broken only when the Writer realizes that she is being watched by a tourist with binoculars (an oblique reference to Pentheus). The longing that the protagonist expresses for this kind of theatrewithout-audience suggests that it is only by an over-turning of the entire spectatorial paradigm that theatre can fulfil its social function as agent of change. While Hickson’s third act is a kind of utopian fantasy—“a vision of radicalism” (Greer 2018)—there is nonetheless something intriguing in the sense of collectivity that arises from her imagery, the sense in which we come into the knowledge required for change collectively and in reciprocity. In an article entitled, “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” Thornton Wilder wrote of the importance of what he called “group mind” to theatre, remarking that “the excitement induced by pretending a fragment of life is such that it partakes of ritual and festival, and requires a throng” (1998, 267). In this way, Wilder emphasizes the collectivity of the audience over the individual particularities of each audience member. He was, of course, writing at a very different time—this essay was published during WWII in 1941. It is striking, however, to mark the

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turn towards individual responsibility in contemporary discourse related to theatrical spectatorship—and given full expression in a performance like Audience—from an affirmation of the collectivity of the audience. Implicitly an emphasis on “group mind” recognizes the limit of self-knowledge and the importance of the communal: individual responsibility is of significance, but only becomes meaningful when enacted collectively. Thus, while the apprehension by individual spectators of the historicity of their own act of seeing is significant for the individual spectator, it is limited by its very captivity to notions of individual agency. Certainly, the agency and indeed identity of the individual is important, but it is the expression of collective will that forces systemic change. As Artaud, writing around the same time as Wilder, puts it: “we insist that the first Theatre of Cruelty show will hinge on these mass concerns, more urgent and disturbing than any personal ones” (1989, 110). While Rancière argues an inherent anti-theatricality in Artaud’s work (see above), describing his emphasis on the affective absorption of the spectator into the spectacle as “theatre striving for its own abolition,” one might more usefully think of Artaud’s emphasis on what he and Wilder both call the “throng” as a recognition of the fundamental interdependence of spectators in their heterogeneous collectivity—their proximity rather than their distance. Certainly, we are in a historical period of great social upheaval where we are once again concerned with the idea of the “mass” and mass mentality, for both good or ill. Judith Butler’s writing on “assembly” is instructive in this area as she writes of the significance of embodied “social solidarity” where “gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance” (2015, 23). Butler’s work must be located in the context in which it was written and its responsiveness to the Arab Spring. Nonetheless, the assertion of embodied solidarity as political strategy may be thought of as a refusal of sorts of the paradigm of the bourgeois spectator and the ideological individualism that underpins it, favouring instead an assertion of collective responsibility that eschews the primacy of spectatorial agency through foreshortening the distance that it relies upon.

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Fairview They took it all in. And in their estimation they found all of it, their view over all of it, the sum of all of it, to be fair. (Drury 2019, 87)

To build on these ideas, I now turn finally to Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, in particular the third act, which strikingly illustrates the kind of collective dynamics that I have just described. I will begin with a brief evocation of the play to give a sense of its overall shape and focus. Because I have not had an opportunity to see the work performed, I draw from published critical accounts, which are helpful in indicating both the qualities of the play in performance, and illustrating how audiences engaged with its ending. The play is structured in three acts. The first is a seemingly realistic domestic comedy-drama that shows the Frasier family, led by mother Beverly, preparing a birthday dinner for Grandma Frasier. In her review for Theatre Journal, Faedra Chatard Carpenter describes the family members as “archetypical characters: Beverly, the frenzied mother and B. Smith wannabe […]; Dayton, her placating husband […]; Keisha, their smart, athletically gifted high school senior […]; and Jasmine, Beverly’s fierce and fabulous sister” (2020, 66). While the act follows the pattern of an escalating farce with mishap upon mishap, subtle emphasis is placed upon representation, appearance and surveillance. For example, Drury’s stage directions make note of “a pretend mirror hung on the fourth wall […]” in which the characters check their appearance—“a very normal thing to have happen in a play” (Drury 2019, 10). As Miriam Felton-Danky points out, however, the real mirror in this play is directed towards the audience, which becomes apparent as the drama progresses (2018). The play’s heightened performance style draws attention to this watching/being watched dynamic. In her discussion of the play, Kyle Frisina draws on Ju Yon Kim to suggest that this heightening shows how representations of race by and for white audiences “‘renders [representations of non-whiteness] theatrical,’ in part because it makes them ‘the objects of spectacle or surveillance’” (2020, 200). The first act therefore sets up questions about looking at Blackness and what white audiences in particular expect Blackness to look and sound like. Such reflection may not come until later in the play. As Frisina writes: “more critics (and

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audience members) than have thus far admitted it may find themselves wondering if the traces of racial stereotypes they see in the first act have been intentionally deployed by the playwright and director or supplied by their own (sub)consciousness” (2020, 200). The play’s second act extends these concepts more explicitly. Departing from the “exuberant” realism of the first act (Frisina 2020, 201), it completely replays the action of the first, which culminated in Beverly fainting from stress. This time, however, the actors’ voices are inaudible. Instead, we hear, but do not see, the voices of four new spectatorcharacters who comment upon the action. Reviews and articles point to how the overlaying of audio and action was achieved in different productions. For the Wooly Mammoth Production in Washington D.C., for example, Carpenter explains that shadows were framed within the upper windows of the play’s set. For the 2019 New York season at Theatre for a New Audience, the lighting design for Act 2 featured a “textured wash of blue and purple hues” that suggested “the home is now physically bruised by the interruption of voices” (Breaux 2020, 83). These interrupting voices are what Frisina describes as “white archetypes: the virtue-signalling woman who thinks herself more woke than she is (Suze), the sensational gay friend (Mack), the blunt European (Bets), and the bro (Jimbo)” (2020, 201). These “audible signs of white gazes” (Carpenter 2020, 368), begin by animatedly discussing what race they would be if they could switch, then move to commenting on the Frasier’s household drama. In their obvious prejudice, the voices express what Kate Tinney in her review calls “bad” whiteness, the monstrous id of “good” white spectators in the audience: “the [white] people in the audience are the good ones and they’re all pointing a finger and judging the bad ones onstage” (Tinney 2018). This perception of a good/bad divide inflects the reception of the offensive and difficult to listen to voices in Act Two. Shane Breaux writes, for example, that “Robertson’s vocal performance as Jimbo became invasive as he continued screaming for several minutes in increasing volume and vitriol to the point that some audience members actually plugged their ears” (2020, 83). The violence of white supremacist ideology is “difficult” for white spectators to listen to, and therefore a strategy for coping with this is to distance oneself, as Tinney points out, to disaffiliate from such expressions of whiteness. Significantly, however, she writes that ultimately in the play “a good white person and a bad white person look the same […] both drown out the words of those trying to speak with their “loud guilt.” What Drury’s third act makes clear

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is that such distancing (which Ridout suggests is central to white bourgeois subjectivity), only ever instantiates white supremacy for its primary relationship remains to the white “other” even in rejection of that other. Act 3 picks up where Act 1 left off. Beverly is now recovered and calls upstairs to Grandma Frasier, asking her to come down for dinner. When Grandma Frasier enters, she is played by Suze. During the earlier discussion in Act 2 of which race each character would choose if they were not white, Suze chose “African-American,” explaining a deep connection to a Black woman called Mabel—a family employee—who helped raise her (Drury 2019, 43). Of the four white characters, Suze stands out as a representation of the problems of liberal whiteness; the “loud guilt,” for example, that Drury writes of and to which Tinney refers, and the deeply paternalistic attitude she expresses when she explains her desire to help educate the Black community. It is therefore significant that Suze enters first, paving the way for the racist spectacle that dominates the first part of the third act. When she comes down the stairs as Grandma Frasier, all of the family bar ones fail to perceive that she is an interloper, a convention that carries on for much of the rest of the act. It is Keisha who senses the problem of her presence: “I just feel like something is wrong. I have a pit in my stomach and my heart is—” (66). Keisha’s role as the one who understands the wrongness of the situation is important as it heightens the dramatic irony of Suze’s appearance—the fact that the audience know more than the Black characters on stage—and exposes the deeply problematic power imbalance that Suze’s liberalism rests upon. As Frisina writes: “The white characters’ actions are so outrageous, their pleasure in inhabiting what they believe to be black life so apparent, that the white gaze is fully converted from an invisible to a hypervisible force on the stage” (2020, 202). Drury intensifies the discomfort of the dominance of the white gaze by continually escalating the offensiveness of the white characters’ representations of Blackness as they enter. For example, when Jimbo enters as Beverly’s brother, Tyrone, Drury indicates in the stage directions: Jimbo makes an entrance with music, stunting. He’s probably wearing a baseball cap and some sneakers. Maybe a chain. He raps along to his entrance music for us and the family, and he might try to get the crowd on their feet. The whole entrance should probably end with a bad-ass pose. (Drury 2019, 68–9)

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Drury’s suggestion that the actor gets the audience “on their feet” is significant, showing how firmly Drury tests the audience through inviting their participation in the racist spectacle: do they participate as the actor urges them, accepting the invitation to laugh at this version of blackface, or do they refuse in acknowledgement of the offensiveness of the act? In this sense, each entrance places more pressure on the audience. Mack, who plays Keisha’s best friend Erica, “is dressed like a drag version of a black teenage girl,” and again solicits applause from the audience. When Bets enters it is from the top of the stairs as “a sultry jazz version” of Suze’s entrance music plays. She wears “a bigger, golder turban. A bigger, golder everything” (73). Through her manipulation of dramatic irony, in particular her focus on the “permission” that ironic distance provides, Drury exposes the structural participation of spectators in hegemonic racism. Carpenter helpfully describes this ironic appropriation of racial stereotypes and its effects as a form of “puppetry” where “white fantasies of Blackness shape and form—birthed into caricatures that invade the once-seemingly stable space [ …] perverting sitcom slapstick into destructive, prop-obliterating pandemonium—the madness of racism incarnate” (2020, 368). The seemingly autonomous representation of Black family life established in Act 1 is finally revealed as nothing more than a pretext for the projection of white fantasies of Blackness in Act 3. The radical movements of perspective from act to act requires of the audience a kind of rapid re-focalization, to return to Bleeker and Germano, where the real drama lies in the tension between the perceptive positioning of the audience and the objects of perception before them. By creating a group of spectator-actors in Act 2 and then allowing them to fully enter into the dramatic action in Act 3, Drury immediately highlights the power of the spectator and the manner in which their surveillance governs not only how the Black characters are perceived but also the choices available to them. That is, by dramatizing white spectators, Drury shows precisely the kind of hegemonic power embedded in their act of spectatorship. Thus, when the white characters enter, they determine how the Frasier family drama will unfold: “Erica” tells the family that Keisha is pregnant, Beverly is outed as a drug addict, while Dayton is revealed as both philanderer and habitual gambler who has sent the family bankrupt. The reversal of what was formerly true to/for the Black characters disorients and decentres them. When Beverly learns of Keisha’s pregnancy, for example, she declares that “the scales have fallen from her eyes,” telling Keisha “I no longer recognize you” (Drury 2019, 75). In this moment, Drury

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crafts an instance of concurrent recognition and misrecognition, where the force of the lie makes it seem true. Most painful in this moment is the loss of dignity afforded to Beverly as she is fully stripped of agency and capacity. A similar exchange takes place when it is “revealed” that Beverly is on drugs and Dayton asks her why she has been lying for so long. The gaslighting of the Frasier family by the white intruders becomes the driving force of the entire act. When Keisha calls out Suze’s phony allyship, she claims victimhood, declaring: “I don’t know what I did to make you treat me this way. All I’ve done, all I’ve ever done, is to try to be good to you” (82). This determined undermining of the Black characters is central to Drury’s dramaturgy, suggesting both that such misrecognition of one’s true identity is a phenomenal consequence of racist representation, and that spectators are crucial not simply in receiving such representations, but also in generating them—complicit in “silent domination” as Phelan writes (cited earlier). The racist spectacle of Act 3 comes to a climax when a food fight breaks out, incited by the white characters who are described in the script as the “agressors.” In her stage directions, Drury writes: Surprising things happen. Some of it is silly, but eventually the silly gives way to violence that feels more consequential Something is actually broken. The set feels destroyed. (p. 80)

Similarly to We Are Proud to Present, real violence emerges out of dramatic play. As Drury points out, this is world-destroying violence that forces a point of no return. Whereas the earlier play ended with an unformulated question, in Fairview Drury dramatically extends such a moment by empowering Keisha to stop the play by stepping through the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience. Stage directions note: “Everything stops, or lets go. All listen to Keisha” (p. 81). She begins: I know what you’re going to say because … Because you have told me every story I have ever heard. And I … I need you to listen. Because I need to ask you something. (p. 81)

While this line is directed at Suze, it clearly speaks to white culture more generally, which has invented its own images and understanding of the

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Black community. The effect of this is overwhelming: “I can’t hear myself think. I can’t hear anything but you staring at me,” Keisha explains, asking for listening in place of the speaking over/speaking for that has just occurred. Keisha therefore asks the white characters to leave the stage “so that I can have some space to think. I can’t think in the face of you telling me who you think I am with your loud self and your loud eyes and your loud guilt—I can’t hear myself think” (p. 82). She then says that she has a request, which is for white audience members to switch places with the Black actors on stage: Could I say, Come up here folks who identify as white, you know who you are. You can choose to come up here to where I’ve always been, where my family has always been. Sit on the couch. Make yourself a plate. Look out from where I am. And let me and my family go out to where you’ve always been. (p. 83)

The request inevitably shifts the dramatic focus from the actors to the audience, asking them to make an active choice that will signify their position. As Carpenter observes, “the play asks audience members to either perform or disavow racial kinship or ally-ship, consequently engendering critiqued dynamics of surveillance. Either way, inescapably, someone’s choice is watched and evaluated” (2020, 369). Through Keisha’s request, Drury’s dramaturgy enacts a reversal that asks white spectators to both recognize and forgo their usual privilege. Of this turnaround, Carpenter asks: “Does a reversal of circumstances really alleviate tensions or bias?” (369). Her question is important for, as many reviews point out, the play has drawn largely white audiences. I wish to quote Shane’s Breaux’s reflection on this point at length, for it illustrates the political complexity of Drury’s engagement of the audience: As the house lights came up, the entire cast joined Boateng and dropped their characters, and the white stagehands reappeared to set up ramps providing self-identified white spectators easy access to the stage. […] Nearly everyone in the theatre, apart from the black actors and ushers, occupied the set on the evening I attended, overwhelming the Frasier

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home with white bodies and leaving the auditorium nearly empty. This experience made visible the disparity in audience demographics in commercial U.S. theatre, making the racial dynamics of both theatrical institutions, as well as theatrical realism, impossible to ignore. (2020, 85)

Drury calls attention to the experience of being “spectated” and the implicit power and violence of the spectator through their occupation of the position of the one who is granted rights of surveillance. Pointedly, the reality of “commercial” theatre means that the request for changing places is not executed as a simple division or reversal of the audience. Instead, the inequality of the theatrical economy itself is starkly highlighted. Indeed, Keisha addresses this when she points out to the audience that the seats they are sitting in do not belong to them as a right in perpetuity: Could I tell them that those seats are not theirs, even though they paid for them? That no one can own a seat forever? That no one should? (Drury 2019, 85)

The fact that the auditorium at the performance Breaux attended in Brooklyn was virtually empty attests to the fact that, despite the liberal allyship of the audience expressed through both their attendance of the play and their act of taking the stage, the fact of their domination of representational paradigms and economies remains steadfast. Similarly, the stage is reiterated as a space of surveillance that underpins such privilege. As Keisha explains, the lights are not there to help the actors/characters see better, but for the sake of the audience (85). The stage therefore becomes a metonymic expression of structural racism, starkly illustrated by the lack of “colourful” spectators left in the auditorium (85). As the white audience assembles on the stage, Keisha closes the play by imagining the story she would tell for a “colourful” audience, if she could tell that story. This is the story of “A PERSON TRYING”: So they tried and they tried and they looked around at the mountains of effort that they had built with their trying at the piles of half-built bests at the heaps of family at the hills of good enough hills and better next time,

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and as they looked around, as they took in the view, they saw what they had done to make the life that they had lived. And they looked to the left and saw what you had done to try to make the life that you have lived, and they took in that view. And they looked to the right and saw what you had done to try to make the life that you have lived, and they took in that view. They took it all in. And in their estimation they found all of it, their view over all of it, the sum of all of it, to be fair. (pp. 86–7)

What is required for this to occur, the play suggests, is for white people to cede power and cede space. This requires foregoing attention to individual sensitivity (white fragility) instead focussing on the demand for white spectators and citizens to take collective action against racism. This relinquishment of focus on the individual is important, for, as Tavia Nyong’o observes in his analysis of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, there is a certain demand that black performance that challenges racism “repair and make good the hard feelings that crop up for contemporary white subjects when forced to confront the traumatic origins of their own enjoyment of, and possessive investment in, whiteness” (2020, 30). I return again to the distinction that Eyerman makes between individual and collective trauma in Chapter 3, and Collins and Jun’s observation, “Saying ‘I hurt too’ erases the significance of systemic injustices and the systems that perpetuate them. One white person’s isolated, yet painful, experience does not measure the same as the Black American experience, which represents generations of enslavement” (2017, 27). Keisha, and Drury through Keisha, addresses the white audience collectively while privileging the specificity of Black experience; although white spectators end up on stage, they are not invited to speak, nor addressed as individuals, but asked instead to listen as a community. Such listening, as Helena

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Grehan writes, “demands that we focus in more detail and with more attention on the speaker and on what is being said before moving to a consideration of how it is this might be responded to by the spectator, who is listening to both what is said and what is covered-over” (2019, 54). Drury’s division of the audience into white and “colourful” spectators has implications for my own analysis, which I want finally to address. I begin by returning to Carpenter’s review of the play: I found myself (a Black woman who is always-already sensitized to “the real” dramatized in Fairview) confronted with a stark sentiment: I really liked the play’s last moments, dramaturgically speaking, but the breadth of this play was not meant for me. My Black presence in the audience may be required to serve the play’s turnabout, and I certainly appreciated Fairview’s novelty, but I was also keenly aware of the fact that the play’s potential to ignite a conceptual revelation is not for those that live its commentary. (Carpenter, 369)

That is, the fact the ending of the play is a revelation for white spectators—Breaux, for example, remarked that the play “served as a performative rehearsal for me and for the other white spectators for life beyond the theatre, to make room and to listen, and to consider other perspectives in order to seek a more complete and fairer view of the world” (2020, 86)— reveals an intransigent problem: that the experience of racism of the white spectator still dominates. Certainly, in my own analysis I too have focussed on the experience of white spectators. In the same way that Drury asks her white spectators to “make room” for Black voices and Black experience, I am cognizant of the problem of repeating the problem she draws attention to within an academic paradigm. The under-representation and misrepresentation of race within the academic sphere is not helped simply by white scholars writing about the work of artists of colour and I am aware of the problem of my own positionality as a white scholar writing about Black performance. Are the declarations of white spectators and scholars in response to Fairview merely what Ahmed frames as “unhappy performatives,” anti-racist promises that fail to perform what they declare? I cite once more a passage from Sara Ahmed given in Chapter 4, where she writes: “My concern with the non-performativity of anti-racism has hence been to examine how sayings are not always doings, or to put it more strongly, to show how the investment in saying as if saying was

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doing can actually extend rather than challenge racism” (2004). The problem with white scholarship on plays such as Fairview is that it may itself become a “spectacle of pure self-reflection” that “remov[es] the ‘detour’ provided by the reflection of the other.” Given Drury’s emphasis on the mirror in the play, Ahmed’s own anxiety is certainly apposite here. I am myself unsure how to properly respond to this problem, except to foreground the limitations of my own understanding and the problem of the power of the position from which I write. One of the aims of this monograph has been to thread throughout expressions of the anxieties that emerge—theatre artists,’ scholars’ and my own—when it comes to accounts of theatrical ethics. That is, to recognize that white scholars and white culture are also at the centre of the very problems we are trying to address. I have attempted to be attentive to the particularities of representations in the texts discussed, aware of the problem of “universalism” and of making claims that seek to assert cultural authority. Metatheatricality is a device that allows theatre-makers to enter into this complex but urgent territory. As this monograph has illustrated, this is sometimes to generative and sometimes to problematic effect. Similarly, scholarship that attempts to recognize its own subjective bias sometimes advances the discussion and sometimes ends up reiterating the emphasis on dominant perspectives, a failure I cannot fully extricate myself from. Of metatheatricality as a response to violence, I would therefore finally remark that it is most politically powerful when used as a tool by those not in a position of cultural dominance—that is, when it is wielded as a mirror directed outwards, not inwards.

Conclusion This chapter has traversed a number of texts and concepts and I want finally to reiterate the conceptual connections I have made. Discourses concerned with spectatorship and ethics tend to focus on the experience of the individual spectator, considering whether they are active or passive for example, or arguing for the significance of their contemplative engagement. As I have suggested, the question remains, who is it that really requires emancipation; or, more properly, from what conditions does the spectator require emancipation? I have drawn on Ridout to show how white bourgeoisie spectatorship is in fact already emancipated in the sense that the spectatorial paradigm shores up its own cultural hegemony. The production of distance that is part of the spectatorial machinery

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serves to fix metanarratives that serve this subjective position. Metatheatricality can disturb such metanarrative, but its efficacy is contingent. I have suggested that it is weakened by an over-reliance on the assumed ethical effects of the individuated self-reflection of the spectator-subject, and also by the use of ironic devices to maintain distance. In contrast, effective metatheatricality requires the recognition of the need for collective action, and for a relinquishment of the discourse of individual rights (insofar as these rights pertain to hegemonic whiteness): it’s not about just you spectator. As I have just stated, metatheatricality is most powerful as a device when exercised by those not in a position of cultural dominance. Indeed, in Race and Performance After Repetition, the editors use the image of metatheatre to frame the first section of the book. This kind of metatheatricality turns its attention not so much to individual morality or culpability as to the architecture of the theatre itself; to the stage and auditorium, as Ridout puts it, as an exemplary site for the exercise of bourgeois power.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism.” Borderlands E-journal 3 (2). Aragay, Mireia, and Enric Monforte, eds. 2014. Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Artaud, Antonin. 1989. Artaud on Theatre. Edited by Claude Schumacher. London: Methuen Drama. Bleeker, Maaike, and Isis Germano. 2014. “Perceiving and Believing: An Enactive Approach to Spectatorship.” Theatre Journal 66 (3): 363–383. Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-odilia Leal Mcbride. London: Pluto Press. Breaux, Shane. 2020. “Seeking a Fairer View: Smashing Theatrical Mirrors in Contemporary Black Drama.” PAJ 125: 75–87. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself . New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2015. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. London: Harvard University Press. Calderón, Guillermo. 2014. Kiss. Unpublished. Carpenter, Faedra Chatard. 2020. “Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury (review).” Theatre Journal 72 (3): 367–369. Collins, Christopher S., and Alexander Jun. 2017. White Out: Understanding White Privilege and Dominance in the Modern Age. New York: Peter Lang.

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Crouch, Tim. 2011. Plays One. London: Oberon Books. Drury, Jackie Sibblies. 2012. We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915. New York: On Stage Press. ———. 2019. Fairview. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Drury, Jackie Sibblies, and Erik Ehn. 2012. “Erik Ehn and Jackie Sibblies Drury in Conversation” [post-show talback]. New York: Soho Rep Theatre. https://sohorep.org/erik-ehn-and-jackie-sibblies-drury-in-conversation Erickson, Jon. 2009. “On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23 (2): 21–38. Felton-Danksy, Miriam. 2018. “Jackie Sibblies Drury’s ‘Fairview’ Asks Hard Questions About America’s Racial Divide.” Village Voice, June 25. https:// www.villagevoice.com/2018/06/25/jackie-sibblies-drurys-fairview-askshard-questions-about-americas-racial-divide/. Frisina, Kyle C. 2020. “Contemporary African-American Drama at Visuality’s Limits.” Modern Drama 63 (2): 197–220. Goed, Ontroerend. 2014. All Work and No Plays. London: Oberon Books. Greer, Steve. 2018. “Ella Hickson’s The Writer” [programme note]. London: Almeida Theatre. https://stevegreer.org/ella-hicksons-the-writer/. Grehan, Helena. 2009. Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. “Slow Listening: The Ethics and Politics of Paying Attention, Or Shut Up and Listen.” Performance Research 24 (8): 53–58. Hickson, Ella. 2018. The Writer. London: Nick Hern Books. Kelleher, Joe. 2015. The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images. London: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen JürsMunby. Abingdon: Routledge. Little, Suzanne. 2017. “The Witness Turn in the Performance of Violence, Trauma, and the Real.” In Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, edited by Emer O’Toole, Andrea Pelegrí Kristi´c, and Stuart Young, 43–64. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2020. “So Far Down You Can’t See the Light: Afro-fabulation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ‘An Octoroon.’” In Race and Performance After Repetition, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel, 29–45. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso.

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Redhill, Michael. 2005. Goodness. Toronto: Coach House Books. Ridout, Nicholas. 2020. Scenes from Bourgeois Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rohter, Larry. 2013. “Rehearsals for the Revolution.” The New York Times, March 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/theater/guillermo-Cal derón-writer-and-director-of-neva.html. Tinney, Kate. 2018. “Jackie Sibblies Drury Rattles the Notion of Spectator in ‘Fairview.’” University Wire, October 19. https://www.dailycal.org/2018/ 10/19/jackie-sibblies-drury-fairview/. Wilder, Thornton. 1998. The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder. Vol. II. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Beyond the Death of Theatre In 2020, Irish theatre company Brokentalkers, lead by Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, created a short video work called Meltdown. The piece was commissioned by Project Arts Centre as part of a wider programme called Future Forecasts. In the highly self-reflexive video, Cannon pitches to Keegan a script for their Future Forecasts project, which he has called “Meltdown.” The script is a monologue, which begins with Cannon on stage: “I’m facing the audience, and I’m holding a microphone in my right hand, and I’m about to sing a song. And all of a sudden, there’s this electrical short circuit and this wild beautiful flash of light, and then the bulbs smash and sparks start to fly from the lighting grid.” The sparks starts a fire, which eventually becomes an all-encompassing conflagration. All the while, Cannon continues to sing. The fire quickly spreads to the auditorium: “the stage manager is pleading with everyone to stay calm but they don’t, they don’t. They all push and crush and they rush to the doors, fighting for their very existence […] The exit doors in the theatre, they open inwards […] but in all the confusion, none of the audience remembers that and they all press against the doors, keeping the doors shut, and I’m singing.” As the audience screams and cries, Cannon continues to sing. In the video, Keegan stops Cannon shortly after this point in the script—after he has described a future in which people, afraid, refuse to return to the theatre after it re-opens. The script © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6_7

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draft is, as Cannon himself indicates, a metaphor: both a response to the impact of Covid 19 on the theatre industry in Ireland, and a reflection on how it is expected to pick itself up and keep going—to keep singing; or, as Miriam Haughton writes in her response to the work, an expression of the peversity of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism” (2021, 40). I evoke the work here for the image that it provides us of theatrical impotence, of a theatre unable to reconcile itself with the demands of the real, even as the flames of that real send its audience up in smoke. Cannon’s imagery is one of despair—as he remarks when Keegan chides him about sticking to the commission brief of focusing on bravery, hope and new ideas: “Yeah, well I can’t see any hope […] When I look forward, I see death of theatre.” I opened this book with two contrasting quotes: Is it enough to “live inside ideas” as Rebecca Solnit suggests (2019), or, as documentarian Oliva Rousset argues, is it the case that “If all we are left with is the capacity to be moved, or to know and share the information, it’s no longer enough” (2020, 83)? In evoking theatre’s death, Cannon gestures to what he identifies (as Haughton explains in her article) as a decade of systematic undermining of the viability of artistic practice in Ireland. But he also points to the critical artistic bind that Solnit and Rousset articulate: what is the role of art, and of theatre, in response to the existential crises we find ourselves facing in the twenty-first century? Does theatre continue to “sing” as violence engulfs the real? The metatheatrical works explored throughout this monograph each grapple with the same question—what is the role of theatre in responding to violence— whether historical violence, violent phenomena such as genocide or the violence of racism or of gender discrimination. How can theatre both address such violence and stand against it? How can it divest itself of complicity in the very structures that perpetuate the kinds of objectifying practices of violence that I’ve discussed throughout the monograph? In this brief conclusion, I want to reflect on some of the ways in which metatheatricality functions as a response to these challenges and to think about where it succeeds and where it falls short and what this tells us about the relationship between theatre and ethics more generally. If, as Christopher Balme argues, “theatricality is a mode of perception that brackets moments of action or particular places in such a way that they are imbued with extreme concentration and focus” (2007, 6), then the focus of plays I have discussed is on the architecture of such perception—not so much what is represented but how it is represented.

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In this sense, the plays may be described as “double-bracketed.” By bracketing the bracketing that constitutes the theatrical, the plays illustrate the fact that theatre is not a blank, empty, neutral space. Rather it is a space already deeply encoded with conventions of behaviour, aesthetics and methodologies that determine the representations it produces. That is, theatrical processes are part of a wider field of practices embedded within a hegemonic order, even if artists attempt to resist such order from within. In We Are Proud to Present , we see the white actors’ lack of understanding of the workings of structural racism limit both their imaginative capacity and their ability to let go of the processes of working that they feel most comfortable with. Both theatrical methodologies and dramaturgical conventions are a vehicle for shaping the real in ways that privilege the experiences of those empowered by those conventions, thereby excluding or diminishing other forms or points of view. As Hickson argues in The Writer, “good” drama is not a universal principle for the effective communication of human struggle, but a set of conventions designed not only to reflect the concerns of a specific social group but to also ensure that these narratives remain dominant (see, for example Hickson 2018, 67). Indeed, the problem of universalism was a focus of my discussion in Chapter 4, which drew on Fred Moten’s critique, where he describes “the terrible interplay of universalism and force” (2018, 4). The danger, not just for metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence but theatrical depictions more generally, is where represented violence is abstracted and generalized, something that Tim Crouch is very much aware of in The Author. In that play we see what happens when the creative decisionmaking process is determined not by ethical care, but by attention to theatrical effect—i.e., by proceeding as if violence were a subject like any other. Despite their self-reflexive orientation, the danger of generalization or universalism still applies to metatheatrical depictions of violence. I argued, for instance, that the critique contained within Redhill’s Goodness is blunted by the fact that it responds to genocide as an element of the human “condition.” Such universalization means that the positionality of the self-reflexively depicted artist—the playwright, in this instance—can never be fully accounted for. If plays such as Goodness or The Author suggest authorial complicity in the circulation of economies of violence, then what is the precise nature of such complicity? The plays I have been most critical of in this monograph feature representations of violence that serve primarily as a means of effecting self-reflection in

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the spectator by way of depicting theatre artists themselves undergoing self-reflexive examination. The problem here is that by putting the artist and their spectator-surrogate at the centre of the account of violence, the violently objectified other remains precisely that—an object rather than subject in the sense given by Kelly Oliver. A subject comes into being, she argues, through their ability to witness to their experience of being othered (2004, 185). When the critical self-examination of the artist eclipses such testimony, then self-reflexive dramaturgies risk tipping into solipsism. Therefore, when turning attention to the how of representation, it is necessary for theatre artists to also acknowledge the impact of their own positionality on what it is that they represent, which in turn requires accounting for theatre’s own implication in the structural causes and consequences of violence. Indeed, in a number of chapters I have drawn on Salwa Ismail’s description of what she calls the performativity of violence, which itself draws on “mimicry and parody,” to illustrate the nature of this implication (2018, 184). Certainly, violence derives its authority from denying the rights of subjectivity to its victims, by making them objects. As such, by bringing forth the usually “disappeared” and “hidden” dimensions of theatrical practices, metatheatrical texts allow a nuanced reflection on theatricality’s participation in distributing the effects of violence. Judith Herman writes that the violent perpetrator “does everything in his power to promote forgetting” (2015, 9); in their self-reflexivity, these plays effect a kind of remembering, not just of violent narratives, but of the role of theatricality as agent of violence. The subject position of the theatre-maker is therefore crucial in this, for the point of view of someone who usually occupies a dominant subject position is different from someone excluded from such cultural dominance. Thus, when metatheatricality is deployed by a writer like Drury as a way of challenging the violence of racism, or by Hickson in challenging violent misogyny, what is at stake is not so much a reflection on artistic complicity or compromise as it is a challenge to or refusal of the very structures that rely upon violent objectification. As I have suggested, what is significant about these particular plays is that their metatheatricality eventually lets go of mimicry and parody to yield something more powerful. These plays stage a critique of hegemonic power, but they also begin to demonstrate for us through their dramaturgy what Hickson calls new systems. That is, their dramaturgy becomes itself a model for change, perhaps a rehearsal of the kind of action that Rousset calls for.

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What is important about plays such as Fairview and The Writer, therefore, is that they keep alive the possibility of change; they render, as Muñoz writes, “potential blueprints of a world not quite here” (2009, 97). Some of the plays discussed in this monograph are deeply ambivalent about the theatrical form and by extension their protagonists are ambivalent about the possibility of social change: Redhill frames the finished play by Michael as a “failure,” for example, while Calderón’s actors end the play “defeated.” This ambivalence is also an expression of privilege— a way of looking at the world that recognizes its injustices but doubts the individual’s ability to effectively challenge these, as if the melancholic observer does not themselves both contribute to and benefit from such injustice. Put another way, this ambivalence expresses the power of spectatorship as constitutive of bourgeois subjectivity in the sense described by Nicholas Ridout (discussed in Chapter 6); it is a way not only of looking at the world but also rendering that world (2020, 12–13). The production of distance that is part of the spectatorial machinery serves to fix metanarratives that serve this subjective position. Metatheatricality can disturb such metanarrative, but its efficacy is contingent. I have suggested that it is weakened by an over-reliance on the self-reflection of the spectator-subject, and also by the use of ironic devices to maintain distance. In contrast, effective metatheatricality recognizes the need for collective action and for a loosening of the hold of the discourse of individual rights. As I have argued, metatheatricality is most powerful as a device when exercised by those not in a position of cultural dominance. This kind of metatheatricality turns its attention not so much to individual morality or culpability as to the ideological and representational architecture of the theatre itself as an exemplary site for the exercise of power. At its weakest, even under the guise of critique, metatheatricality may simply shore up the dominance of the theatre as an objectifying medium by diverting attention away from those othered by violence and towards the effects of this othering on the self-reflexively depicted artist (and by extension the spectator who identifies with them). At its best, metatheatrical dramaturgy not only reveals the blueprint of such architecture, locating the various parties that comprise the theatrical event within it, but also begins to model new forms and new points of view in ways that don’t simply mourn the violent loss of subjectivity, but work towards its restoration. Finally, then, an analysis of metatheatricality is useful not merely for how it engages with the demands of responding to violence; that is, not

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only for the sense in which it indicates a particular form or mode of theatre capable of dealing with some of these challenges. Rather, these plays provide compelling commentary on theatrical practices more generally and on how theatricality may be used in service of violence as well as a means of resistance to it. The plays clearly lay out a series of ethical problems related to subjectivity, empathy, ethical responsibility and the need for real-world action. Self-reflexivity is a way of putting these questions clearly on the table, but not in and of itself fully capable of replying to them. A study of such plays, therefore, is most useful as a kind of ethnographic survey of theatre-makers’ own anxieties and hopes for the form itself. They also allow us to consider the political efficacy of deconstruction in twenty-first-century theatrical practices. As I’ve suggested, the latter plays I discuss suggest a certain limit—that out of deconstruction needs to emerge new forms and “new systems,” as Ella Hickson puts it. What is powerful about plays like Fairview is that this doesn’t happen belatedly as post-event contemplation, but is woven into the dramaturgical fabric of the play itself: change begins in the here and now of the performance.

Bringing It Home… Racists Anonymous As I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I went to see a performance called Racists Anonymous. The project was staged at and produced by Te Pou, a M¯aori-run theatre venue in T¯amaki Makaura, Auckland. The interactive and participatory performance was programmed as part of an annual city-wide comedy festival. Like its real-world inspiration, the form of Racists Anonymous was modelled on the AA meeting format. The audience was seated in a large circle and asked to begin the performance by collectively speaking the mantra: “I’m a racist and that’s okay, because I keep changing everyday.” In the 90-minute performance that followed, a character called Paku convened the meeting, following a structure that asked for specific audience participation throughout. For example, one of the first topics of the meeting was a discussion of racism in the news of the previous week. A good deal of time was spent on this section, which relied entirely on the audience contributing examples. Amongst the audience were a small number of actors who at times interjected, argued or simply drew into conversation the people around them. As the performance unfolded, it was not always clear who was an actor and who wasn’t: for example, early in the meeting after Paku had laid out the ground rules,

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a man raised his hand wanting to clarify that participants couldn’t actually “say racists things.” When Paku confirmed this was the case, the man got up and left. As he made the long trek across the circle (there was an audience of at least 60 people), an older woman criticized Paku for just letting him leave, arguing that the space should be inclusive. Neither of these people were actors. In fact, when the actors were asked to stand at the end, there was general surprise at how performers there were. At first glance, this was not an explicitly metatheatrical performance. However, in its parodic elements, its nesting of scripted play within the wider open format and its engagement of the audience in a dialogic process, Racists Anonymous was exemplary in its illustration of critical selfreflexivity expressed through a dramaturgy of anti-violence that moved beyond contemplative reflection to active engagement and change. It is these elements of the performance that I want to briefly touch upon. As the audience first entered the performance space, they were given a photocopied handout that contained extracts from a 1985 New Zealand government document given to Polynesian immigrants. The document was intended to explain elements of P¯akeh¯a (white New Zealander) society and character, including various attitudes and customs. As I read through the document, I was struck by how seldom P¯akeh¯a culture is so straightforwardly described. As a scholar located within the broad field of the Humanities, I have a fair understanding of the dominance of white culture and its postulation of its particular characteristics as not merely cultural but “universal” (as discussed above), but reading the document provoked in me something other than this kind of critical recognition of racism. Reading the descriptions of P¯akeh¯a attitudes to family, to money, to independence, prompted a flood of memories for me of my childhood and family environment, and reflection on how the affective structure of those formative relationships was so profoundly shaped by P¯akeh¯a ideology. Of course, spectators to the performance came from a range of cultural backgrounds, so I do not wish to project my own response onto other spectators. Indeed, one Spanish audience member remarked that if someone had given the document to him when he arrived, he might not have stayed, which prompted a good deal of laughter. Nonetheless, for me what occurred here was precisely the kind of excavation of the mechanisms of structure violence that work so hard to conceal themselves that Judith Butler argues is necessary (1991, 1304). In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, while M¯aori sovereignty is crucial to our legislative frameworks, the very persistence of racism and structural

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inequality shows how P¯akeh¯a “scripts” prevail. Part of this is because of the unwillingness of P¯akeh¯a to consider themselves from the kind of cultural perspectives that the government document explains. “Paku” made note of the fact that no such government definitions of P¯akeh¯a culture have been written since its publication in 1985, which is why they drew on what in certain ways felt like a very old-fashioned kind of document. Where a more conventional metadramatic performance might include recognizable forms such as a play-within-a-play, which allow the audience to clearly define the inner and outer play, such distinctions were less obvious in this context. As I have explained, actors were embedded within the performance. The core actors were evident as actors, particularly as they enacted certain pieces of set action. In this sense, the audience was aware of the scripted dimensions of the performance sitting within the wider meeting framework. Thus, there was a dual sense of both watching a play be performed and participating in its enactment, a dramaturgy which lent itself to the kinds of metadramatic self-reflexivity I’ve discussed so far. Significantly, Racists Anonymous much more directly engaged its audience in the self-reflexive action of the performance— Drury’s Fairview is probably the closest example discussed of this kind of direct participation of the audience. This meant that the focus of the performance—the object of its self-reflexivity—was directed towards the audience. While audience members could remain “anonymous,” and certainly no one was obliged to speak, audience engagement in the meeting format—responding to different topics, prompts and so on—was central to the dramaturgy of the work, which was essentially dialogic in both format and political orientation. Significantly, the last ten minutes of the work were entirely given over to the audience. Paku set a timer for ten minutes, which he displayed to us, and explained that it was time for us to lead the discussion in whichever direction we wanted. Out of silence emerged questions, reflections and hopes from P¯akeh¯a and Tauiwi (non-M¯aori more recently arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand) spectators, from rangatahi (young people) and kaum¯atua (elders) who were present. We were invited at the end of the performance to stay for kai (food) and k¯orero (conversation). Earlier, I suggested that the dramaturgies of Drury’s and Hickson’s metatheatrical works model or bring into the being the change that they aspire to: Drury, for example, asks white spectators to give up their seats in the auditorium, seats that in themselves signify power from the

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point of view of the dialectic of surveillance and surveilled that her plays pivot around. If, as Ridout suggests, spectatorship is central to bourgeois power, then the integration of the audience into the action of the performance interrupts the deployment of spectatorial paradigms that affirm the self-certainty—the subjectivity—of the spectator. Racists Anonymous similarly used theatrical self-reflexivity as a vehicle to harness the power of theatre as embodied, time-based and collective; the sense in which it happens through people, in real time, together. By doing this it both showed how power performs—specifically from the perspective of P¯akeh¯a culture—and modeled a different kind of performance, one significantly embedded in te ao M¯aori (the M¯aori worldview). At one point in the performance, Paku put forward the argument that P¯akeh¯a are “the other Indigenous people of New Zealand,” suggesting that P¯akeh¯a, as distinct from the broader designation of “white,” exist only because of their relationship to M¯aori. This was a significant point in the performance that wove together both scripted and spontaneous responses. Paku’s plea in the end was for P¯akeh¯a to “get in the waka (canoe),” to embrace the rich potential of truly embedding M¯aori values into the P¯akeh¯a way of life so plainly evoked at the outset of the performance. From a theatrical point of view, the performance in its dramaturgical design functioned as such a waka; indeed, it relied upon the audience “getting in” in order to undertake its journey. Thus, as a work that was metatheatrical in character (containing a play embedded within the broader dialogue as performance, in its use of parody, and in its self-reflexivity), Racists Anonymous for me modelled where self-reflexivity can be most powerful as a strategic response to violence, which is as a tool for speaking back to power and letting the interplay of speaking and listening that constitutes such dialogue shape the dramaturgy. If violence seeks to conceal itself within forms such as the myriad iterations of institutional racism, then metatheatricality is a starting point for not only exposing such violence for what it is, but also for beginning to re-construct out of the ruins of the deconstructed object. From a political point of view, a play that stays in the ruins created by perpetrators of violence, that mourns one’s affiliation to such violence, is capable at best of ambivalence. What artists like Drury and Te Pou demonstrate is that what the world needs right now is recognition, action and change.

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Last Words This book developed from the observation that theatre-makers were using self-reflexivity as a way of dealing with the most challenging subject matter and has subsequently asked both why this is and what such a dramaturgical approach produces. By their very nature, metatheatrical plays offer a compelling insight into the critical enquiries of theatre artists themselves. The book has offered my own critical analysis of the plays selected, but it has also attempted to foreground artistic criticality, for theatre artists do not only make performances, but they also spectate, they analyse, they challenge. In this sense, taken together the plays offer an overview of some of the attitudes and questioning that artists themselves apply to their own practice. Moreover, it takes a good deal of bravery to include oneself with the scope of such criticality, as artists such as Redhill and Crouch have done. I hope that in certain ways the monograph has also expanded beyond its remit of examining metatheatrical dramaturgies of violence specifically. As I noted in the Introduction, the extremity of violence and subsequent representational challenges get to the core of theatrical anxiety—the fear that it may cause harm. While I have focussed on plays dealing with violence, I hope that the monograph has offered some broader insight into the contemporary challenges facing theatrical practice more generally. As I studied each of the plays and wrote each of the chapters, certain themes emerged that I did not necessarily anticipate; racism, for example, is a key topic that I have returned to throughout the book. Certainly, there is a historical journey mapped out throughout the book, from plays such as Redhill’s which first appeared almost twenty years ago to Te Pou’s production in 2021. During that time, the emphasis on theatrical self-reflexivity has shifted. Critical practices, particularly those of white scholars, must also shift. This is to say that the book I set out to write and the one that I have written are perhaps a little different, but I hope that my own reflections might contribute to the ongoing conversation about theatre, the demands of the real, and the necessity of change.

References Balme, Christopher. 2007. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Butler, Judith. 1991. “A Note on Performative Acts of Violence.” Cardozo Law Review 13 (4): 1303–1304. Cannon, Gary, and Feidlim Keegan. 2020. Meltdown [online performance]. Ireland: Project Arts Centre. https://vimeo.com/425551714. Haughton, Miriam. 2021. “‘As Much Graft As There Is Craft’: Refusal, Value and the Affective Economy of the Irish Arts Sector.” Performance Paradigm: Performance and Radical Kindness 16: 40–58. Herman, Judith Lewis. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: Aftermath of Violence— From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Hickson, Ella. 2018. The Writer. London: Nick Hern Books. Ismail, Salwa. 2018. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press. Muñoz, José. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Witnessing Subjectivity.” In Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, edited by Shaun Gallagher, Stephen Watson, Philippe Brun, and Philippe Romanski, 180–204. Rouen: l’Université de Rouen. Ridout, Nicholas. 2020. Scenes from Bourgeois Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rousset, Oliva, and Helena Grehan. 2020. “Expanding Networks of Care: The Humanitarian Storytelling of Olivia Rousset.” Performance Paradigm 15: 81– 97. Solnit, Rebecca. 2019. “How Change Happens.” Literary Hub. https://lithub. com/rebecca-solnit-progress-is-not-inevitable-it-takes-work/. Tukiwaho, Tainui, dir. 2021. Racists Anonymous [live performance], May 22. Auckland: Te Pou Theatre.

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Abel, Lionel. 1963. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York: Hill and Wang. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism.” Borderlands E-journal 3 (2). ———. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: California University Press. Anderson, Patrick, and Jisha Menon. 2009. Violence Performed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aragay, Mireia. 2014. “To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship.” In Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre, edited by Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte, 1–24. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aragay, Mireia, and Enric Monforte, eds. 2014. Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Artaud, Antonin. 1989. Artaud on Theatre. Edited by Claude Schumacher. London: Methuen Drama. Aston, Elaine. 2016. “Room for Realism?” In Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, edited by Siân Adisehiah and Louise Page, 17–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bahun, Sanja, and V.G. Julie Rajan, eds. 2015. Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate. 2nd ed. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Index

A Abel, Lionel Metatheatre: A New View of the Dramatic Form, 13 Absence, 57, 66, 82–84, 128, 145 Affect, 9, 17, 21, 65, 71, 83, 88, 109, 110, 112, 123, 124, 133, 158, 162, 172, 174, 176, 182 Afro-fabulation, 36, 78, 84–86, 89, 91, 93 Ahmed, Sara “Declarations of Whiteness”, 108, 117–119, 132, 191 Living a Feminist Life, 37, 120, 149, 151, 154, 158 Amaya, Rufina, 106, 125–127, 129, 134 Ambivalence, 16, 32, 123, 131, 132, 172, 174, 201, 205 and privilege, 201 Anderson, Patrick and Menon, Jisha Violence Performed, 3, 8, 9, 17, 18, 20, 24, 27, 46, 70, 94 Anger

in The Writer, 141, 149, 154–156, 160 Aragay, Mireia “To Begin to Speculate”, 9, 26, 109, 169 Artaud, Antonin, 170, 182 Aston, Elaine “Room for Realism”, 159 Audience Ontroerend Goed, 167–173 Authorial avatar, 11, 105, 127, 130, 140, 143, 155 B Bahun, Sanja and Rajan, V.G. Julie Violence and Gender in a Globalized World, 137 Bailey, Frederick “Cultural Performance, Authenticity and Second Nature”, 139 Balme, Christopher Pacific Performances , 198 Barish, Jonas The Anti-theatrical Prejudice, 3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Willis, Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85102-6

219

220

INDEX

Bleeker, Maaike “Look Who’s Looking”, 133 Bleeker, Maaike and Germano, Isis “Perceiving and Believing”, 177, 186 Boal, Augusto Theatre of the Oppressed, 170 Bourdieu, Pierre rules of the game, 76, 82, 86 Breaux, Shane, 184, 188, 189, 191 Brecht, Bertolt, 170 Breed, Ananda “Performing the Nation”, 20 Brizzell, Cindy and Lepecki, André “The Labour of the Question”, 149 Brokenness, 85, 132 Burns, Elizabeth Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life, 14 Butler, Judith “A Note on Performative Acts of Violence”, 28, 47, 142, 203 “Endangering”, 47 Giving an Account of Oneself , 180–181 Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 182 Precarious Life, 54, 100

C Calderón, Guillermo, 180 biography, 49 Discurso, 1, 53, 55 dramatic ellipsis in Kiss, 66–67 Escuela, 54 Kiss , 67–71, 175–177 Neva, 2, 51 “On Protest”, 49 soap opera form in Kiss , 59, 61, 68, 69

Villa, 53, 54 Carpenter, Faedra Chatard, 183, 184, 186, 188, 191 Case, Sue-Ellen Feminism and Theatre, 145, 157, 160 Catharsis, 163 Catherine Filloux Killing the Boss , 138–141 Chambers, Jonathan “Actor Training Meets Historical Thinking”, 78, 87 Change, 161, 163, 182, 200–202, 204, 205 Colbert et al. Race and Performance After Repetition, 85, 193 Cole, Catherine “Representing Genocide at Home”, 1, 18, 24, 32 Collins, Christopher and Jun, Alexander White Out , 118, 119, 190 Counterfeit, 163 in Phelan, 69, 150 in Toufic, 68 Crouch, Tim “The Author: Response and Responsibility”, 30, 32, 143–150, 179–180 Cummings, Lindsay Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance, 25, 26

D Dillion, Sarah The Palimpsest , 84 Dimock, Wai Chee “Weak Theory”, 35 Dolan, Jill

INDEX

“Performance, Utopia and the ‘Utopian Performative’”, 153, 162 Doubt, 1, 16 about the real, 16, 141 Dramatic irony, 65, 185, 186 Dramatic realism, 159–160 Dramatic theatre definition, 9 Drury, Jackie Sibblies acting methodologies in We Are Proud to Present , 93 Company One interview, 85 Fairview, 183–192 issues of historiography in We Are Proud to Present , 86–87 We Are Proud to Present , 23, 87–101, 177–178, 199 Du Bois, W.E.B., 101

E Ehn, Erik drifted subjectivity, 11, 23, 128, 129, 131 on witness, 34 on witness, 107 Soulographie, 22, 109, 125, 126, 131 “Still Small”, 22 Thistle, 23, 132 Embodiment, 25, 64, 75, 78, 84, 86, 91–93, 100, 101, 129–131 dialogic embodiment, 25, 64, 91, 131 Empathy, 24–26, 50, 51, 61, 64, 91, 118, 128, 131, 162, 202 Erickson, Jon “On Mimesis”, 114, 180 Ethics, 8, 9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 54, 66, 91, 106, 120, 128, 132, 167, 169, 173, 192, 202

221

F Failure of representation, 99, 100, 118, 120 Feeling, 21, 24, 26, 46, 47, 50–52, 66, 71, 86, 100, 123–125, 133, 160, 172, 179 Felton-Dansky, Miriam, 169, 183 Feminine morphology, 157 Fitzpatrick, Lisa Rape on the Contemporary Stage, 146 Fleckenstein, Kirstie “Embodied Literacies”, 10 Fleming, Chris René Girard: Violence and Mimesis , 34 Frisina, Kyle, 183–185 Fürst, Saskia “Palimpsests of Ancestral Memory”, 85

G Game, 16, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84–87, 122, 123, 167–169, 171, 173 Gaslighting, 187 Genocide, 113–116, 125, 179 of Herero and Nama, 76 Rwandan, 116, 122 Geraghty, Christine “The Study of Soap Opera”, 58 Girard, René Violence and the Sacred, 18, 33, 47, 123 Goodness in Rwanda, 114–125, 178 Greer, Steve “Ella Hickson’s The Writer”, 156, 158, 181 Grehan, Helena Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age, 79, 132

222

INDEX

“Slow Listening”, 29, 32, 66, 71, 128, 132, 134, 191 Grochala, Sarah The Contemporary Political Play, 9, 10

H Haughton, Miriam “Refusal, Value and the Affective Economy of the Irish Arts Sector”, 198 Staging Trauma, 11, 19 Herman, Judith Trauma and Recovery, 19, 200 Hickson, Ella The Writer, 149–161, 180, 181, 199 Historical metanarrative, 84, 86, 176–178 Hornby, Richard Drama, Metadrama and Perception, 14, 15, 45, 129, 161 Human Rights, 18

I Identification, 18, 52, 81, 113, 131, 172 and Afro-fabulation, 82–84 Identity, 60, 82, 87, 89, 92, 95, 117, 140, 145, 187 Improvisation, 88–91, 98, 147 Ismail, Salwa The Rule of Violence, 26, 27, 31, 46, 47, 65–69, 140, 141, 148, 200

J Joanne Tompkins Theatre’s Heterotopias , 2 Juris, Jeffrey

“Violence Performed and Imagined”, 46

K Kagame, Paul, 116 Karamera, Carole, 121, 123 Kelleher, Joe The Illuminated Theatre, 176 Killjoy Living a Feminist Life, 141, 154 Kron, Lisa, 163

L Lehmann, Hans-Thies Postdramatic Theatre, 16, 169 Levinas, Emmanuel, 12, 51 Listening, 56, 58, 60, 64, 65, 70, 118, 121, 129, 130, 156, 188, 190 Little, Suzanne “The Witness Turn”, 108, 143, 172 Luckett, Sharrell D. and Shaffer, Tia M. Black Acting Methods , 78, 87, 98

M Macías, Teresa “Between Violence and its Representation”, 28, 30, 54, 67, 133 Male gaze, 144, 146, 155 Manifesto 2083, 21, 32 Martin, Carol Theatre of the Real , 9, 20 Mason, David “Metatheatre and Consciousness”, 14 Massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, 126 Meltdown

INDEX

Brokentalkers, 197–198 Metaexperience, 124 Metalepsis, 111, 115, 123 Metatheatricality and creative decision-making, 30 and representational privilege, 31–32 and spectatorship, 31–33 and structural causes of violence, 31 as critique, 11, 12, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 71, 86, 91, 100, 108, 147–149, 157–161, 200, 201 as double-bracketing, 181, 199 beyond, 142 beyond critique, 99, 150, 158–159, 161, 201, 203 challenge to dramatic conventions, 155 contemporary theorization, 17 double, 14, 17, 25, 34, 55, 67–70, 76, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 100, 101, 111, 117 double bind of audience, 172–173 feminist dramaturgy of, 155, 156 limits of self-reflection, 192 limits of self-scrutiny, 182 solipsism, 32, 107, 125, 128, 131, 133, 200 Method acting, 87–92 Mirror, 31, 39, 65, 172, 183, 192 Misogyny, 37, 149, 200 Misrecognition, 187 Modleski, Tania Loving with a Vengeance, 58, 64, 67 Moten, Fred Fugitivity, 47, 94, 98 Stolen Life, 47, 94, 99 The Universal Machine, 12, 114, 199 Muñoz, José Cruising Utopia, 150, 201

223

N Nevitt, Lucy Theatre & Violence, 3, 20, 21, 29, 32, 146 Noys, Benjamin “The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence”, 27, 28 Nyong’o, Tavia “Does Staging Historical Trauma Re-enact It?”, 77–79, 81–83, 85, 87 “So Far Down You Can’t See the Light”, 190

O Offending the Audience, 3, 168 Oliver, Kelly “Witnessing Subjectivity”, 18, 106, 107, 111, 112, 120, 162, 200 Ophir, Adi, 176 The Order of Evils , 78, 84

P Palimpsest, 84, 152 Parody, 4, 31, 69, 88, 200, 205 Passion Play, 3–8 Pelias, Ronald “Empathy and the Ethics of Entitlement”, 25, 61, 64, 91, 128, 131 Phelan, Peggy Unmarked, 69, 144, 145, 147–150, 155, 156, 160, 169, 187

Q Queerness in Muñoz, 159 in The Writer, 156, 158

224

INDEX

R Racism, 31, 47, 78, 82–84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 98, 118, 119, 186, 187, 190–192, 200, 202, 203 and the archive, 80, 82–84 structural racism, 82, 87, 189, 199, 205 “unintended”, 12 Racists Anonymous Te Pou Theatre, 202–205 Radio Venceremos, 126 Rae, Paul Theatre & Human Rights , 8, 18, 26 Rancière, Jacques The Emancipated Spectator, 64, 170–171 The Politics of Aesthetics , 176 Rand, Gord, 118, 119 Rebellato, Dan “Exit the Author”, 16, 17, 105, 133 Redhill, Michael Goodness , 22, 33, 112–114, 116, 117, 121, 123, 130, 178 “The Voice Under the Lamp”, 143 Reese, Venus Opal “Keeping it Real Without Selling Out”, 36, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 88, 89, 91–93, 100, 101, 117 Rehearsal at Versailles , 45 Responsibility, 22, 82, 99, 109, 129, 177, 182, 202 of authors, 11, 106, 118 of spectators, 143 of witnesses, 117 Ridout, Nicholas Scenes from Bourgeois Life, 33, 70, 131, 175, 201 Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems , 3, 28, 29

Ritual, 46, 96–98, 152, 153, 157, 162, 163, 181 Rodino-Colocino, Michelle “Countering Cruelty with Empathy”, 24, 50, 162 Rousset, Olivia, 1, 198

S Samuels, Lisa “Witness in Kind”, 25 Satire. See Parody Schaefer, Karine “The Spectator as Witness?”, 108 Schreck, Heidi What the Constitution Means to Me, 161–163 Sibley, Clinesha “Remembering, Rewriting and Reimagining”, 78, 87, 92 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 3 Skjelsbaek, Inger “Sexual Violence and War”, 140, 145 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai Decolonizing Methodologies , 39 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, 21 Solnit, Rebecca “How Change Happens”, 1, 2, 198 Solomon, Alisa “What’s Left for Guillermo Calderón?”, 61 Spectatorship and collectivity, 181–182 and distance, 33, 175 and gender, 148 as refusal of violence, 175 critique of, 144 deconstruction of, 176 domination, 144 ethics of, 169–171

INDEX

meta-spectatorship, 177, 178 Stephenson, Jenn “Re-performing Microhistories”, 16, 83, 86, 111 “The Notebook and the Gun”, 106, 111, 115 Subjectivity, 5, 11, 12, 17–19, 21, 30, 37, 56, 106–109, 112, 114, 120, 121, 125, 129–134, 137, 142, 146, 147, 149, 154, 160, 163, 201, 202, 205 bourgeois subjectivity, 33, 70, 174, 178, 185, 201 feminist, 149, 151, 160, 162, 163 objectification, 18, 120, 140, 141, 146–148, 154, 156, 200 of artists, 12, 107–108, 200 spectatorial. See Ridout, Nicholas, Scenes from Bourgeois Life Surveillance, 5, 153, 183, 186, 188, 189, 205 Sylvester, Christine “Dramaturgies of Violence in International Relations”, 24 T Taylor, Diana The Archive and the Repertoire, 79 Testimony, 82, 106, 109–111, 113, 117, 118, 120–122, 125–130, 133, 134, 137, 160, 162, 200 Theatre and power, 33, 169 Tinney, Kate, 184, 185 Toufic The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, 70 Trauma, 11, 19, 20, 22, 53, 75, 92, 93, 100, 110, 117, 127, 128, 162, 190 collective, 76, 91, 92–93, 116, 117, 119, 190 definition of, 19

225

Trezise, Bryoni Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory, 21, 71, 124 U Unhappy performative, 37, 108, 117, 119, 191 Universalism, 113–114, 116–117, 124, 192, 199 Upton, Carole-Anne, 24, 108 Utopia, 7, 150, 153, 158–160, 181 V Vanhaesebrouck, Karel “Reconsidering Metatheatricality”, 16–17 Van Kerkhoven, Marianne “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century”, 24 Violence and gender, 137, 140, 145, 147, 148, 171 and metatheatricality, 34 appropriation, 24–26, 119, 122–123 definition, 18 gap between violence and representation, 28, 29, 53, 67–68, 133 genocide, 18 interrelation of real-world and theatrical violence, 8 irresolution, 64 performativity of, 48, 66, 140, 200 rape, 138, 144, 146 re-animation of, 22 relationship to theatrical representation, 29, 56, 71 resistance to, 12, 67, 101, 192, 205 role of art in response to, 56 sexual violence in Audience, 171

226

INDEX

simplification of, 23 theatrical ontology of, 146 W Wade, Leslie “Sublime Trauma”, 5, 12, 16, 23 Wake, Caroline “The Accident and the Account”, 110 We See You White American Theatre, 87 White fragility, 87 White gaze, 184, 185 White privilege, 31, 87, 108, 188 White saviour, 140 White supremacy, 87, 184, 185 Wilder, Thornton “Some Thoughts on Playwriting”, 181 Willfulness feminist, 149, 151, 154–156, 158, 160 Witness, 91, 106, 130, 131, 137 and authorship, 112

and spectatorship, 109 and subjectivity, 106–107 bearing witness, 82, 112, 118, 121, 176 by proxy, 13, 22, 106–108, 127, 133, 134 performative witness, 36, 106, 111, 117, 122 self-witness, 149 World Health Organization. See violence, definition Worthen, W.B., 15

Y Young, Stuart “The Ethics of the Representation of the Real People and Their Stories”, 20

Z Zanger, Abby “Acting as Counteracting”, 45