Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene
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Julia Rössler
is a Lecturer at the Department of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she examines the aesthetics and ethics of contemporary US-American and British theater after postmodernism. She is one of the guest-editors of the special issue Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre which appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2019). She has been a postgraduate research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
Abstract
This article situates two works by contemporary American playwright Adam Rapp – Faster (2002) and Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (2014) – in the wider context of the different traditions of ecological theatre that emerged in the United States in the twentieth century. These traditions can be characterised by their distinct spatial orientation, while similarly shifting focus away from the centrality of representing character and human subjectivity. Contemporary eco-drama retains this spatial orientation established by the landscape play (Gertrude Stein) and environmental theatre (Richard Schechner) but breaks with their displacement of character by developing an aesthetic mode which stages the formation of human subjectivity as deeply intertwined with concrete places. This article shows how Rapp’s plays turn places into “symptomatic spaces” in Una Chaudhuri’s sense that signify a deep interdependence between human subjectivity and nonhuman nature. My reading focuses on how Rapp’s plays contribute to the formation and the conceptualisation of a distinctly “Anthropocenic imaginary” in contemporary American drama.
About the author
is a Lecturer at the Department of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she examines the aesthetics and ethics of contemporary US-American and British theater after postmodernism. She is one of the guest-editors of the special issue Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre which appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2019). She has been a postgraduate research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Co-Mutability, Nodes, and the Mesh: Critical Theatre Ecologies – An Introduction
- Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon
- Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation
- An Art Like Nature: Theatre Environment as Territory in Tim Spooner Performances
- Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama
- Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost
- To Be Like Water: Material Dramaturgies in Posthumanist Performance
- “A Missile to the Future”: The Theatre Ecologies of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away on Spike Island
- Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene
- Kinship and Community in Climate-Change Theatre: Ecodramaturgy in Practice
- Eco-Drama, Multinational Corporations, and Climate Change in Nigeria
- Playing the Petrocene: Toxicity and Intoxication in Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill and Ella Hickson’s Oil
- An Ecology of Plants: The Post-Manufacturing Age in Philip Ridley’s Shivered and David Eldridge’s In Basildon
- Alienation, Abjection, and Disgust: Encountering the Capitalocene in Contemporary Eco-Drama
- Elaine Aston. Restaging Feminisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, viii + 132 pp., £44.99 (hardback), £44.99 (paperback), £35.99 (PDF/EPUB ebook).
- Maria Chatzichristodoulou, ed. Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, x + 212 pp., £65 (hardback), £19.79 (paperback), £15.83 (PDF ebook).
- Yana Meerzon, David Dean, and Daniel McNeil, ed. Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 298 pp., €124.99 (hardback), €85.59 (PDF ebook).
- Mark Brown. Modernism and Scottish Theatre since 1969: A Revolution on Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvii + 254 pp., € 80.24 (hardback), € 24.99 (softcover).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Co-Mutability, Nodes, and the Mesh: Critical Theatre Ecologies – An Introduction
- Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon
- Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation
- An Art Like Nature: Theatre Environment as Territory in Tim Spooner Performances
- Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama
- Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost
- To Be Like Water: Material Dramaturgies in Posthumanist Performance
- “A Missile to the Future”: The Theatre Ecologies of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away on Spike Island
- Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene
- Kinship and Community in Climate-Change Theatre: Ecodramaturgy in Practice
- Eco-Drama, Multinational Corporations, and Climate Change in Nigeria
- Playing the Petrocene: Toxicity and Intoxication in Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill and Ella Hickson’s Oil
- An Ecology of Plants: The Post-Manufacturing Age in Philip Ridley’s Shivered and David Eldridge’s In Basildon
- Alienation, Abjection, and Disgust: Encountering the Capitalocene in Contemporary Eco-Drama
- Elaine Aston. Restaging Feminisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, viii + 132 pp., £44.99 (hardback), £44.99 (paperback), £35.99 (PDF/EPUB ebook).
- Maria Chatzichristodoulou, ed. Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, x + 212 pp., £65 (hardback), £19.79 (paperback), £15.83 (PDF ebook).
- Yana Meerzon, David Dean, and Daniel McNeil, ed. Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 298 pp., €124.99 (hardback), €85.59 (PDF ebook).
- Mark Brown. Modernism and Scottish Theatre since 1969: A Revolution on Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvii + 254 pp., € 80.24 (hardback), € 24.99 (softcover).
