Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
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Julia Rössler
is a Research Assistant at the Chair of North American Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. In her dissertation
Drama After Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage , she examined the aesthetics and ethics of mimesis on the contemporary stage after postmodernism. She is one of the guest-editors of the special issueReflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre which appeared inThe Journal of American Drama and Theatre (2019) as well as the focus issueFrom Page to Stage which was published in theJournal of Contemporary Drama in English (2023). Her essays have been published inThe Journal of American Drama and Theatre ,GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism , andJournal of Contemporary Drama in English . She was 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
Contemporary documentary theater has become a favored genre in scholarship to investigate the relationship between theater and the public sphere (Reinelt, “Promise”; Balme; Claycomb, Lurch). Drawing on Christopher B. Balme’s concept of the theatrical public sphere and other scholarship, I examine how The Laramie Project (2000) by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project stages the idea of the public sphere and, in the process, rethinks the form of documentary performance. On one level, the play reflects a discursive turn in documentary practice as multiple narrative layers dramatize the collision of opposing value systems and civic voices in order to challenge established boundaries between the private and the public, the liberal and the conservative, the rural and the urban, poverty and wealth, life and art. The theatrical sphere is constructed as an imaginary space not just of rational debate but of negotiating questions of accountability by appealing to the affective engagement of the audience. On another level, I argue, the play operates as a metatheatrical piece, using strategies such as a narrator and anti-illusionism to establish the theatrical public sphere as a conceptual framework that fuses sociopolitical engagement with a self-reflexive theater practice.
About the author
is a Research Assistant at the Chair of North American Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. In her dissertation Drama After Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage, she examined the aesthetics and ethics of mimesis on the contemporary stage 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) as well as the focus issue From Page to Stage which was published in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (2023). Her essays have been published in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism, and Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. She was a postgraduate research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, the CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
Works Cited
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Acknowledgements
- Articles
- Introduction: Theater and Community. Poetics, Politics, Performances
- Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction
- The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre
- The Poetics and Politics of We-Narration on the Contemporary British Stage
- “You Are Alone”: Singularity, Community, and the Possibility of Solidarity in Slavoj Žižek’s The Three Lives of Antigone
- Community and Manipulation in the “Parallel Worlds” of Tim Crouch
- Dissensual Performances of Race and Community in Claudia Rankine’s The White Card and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview
- Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
- Mary Kathryn Nagle in Conversation with Nina De Bettin Padolin and Ilka Saal
- The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster’s Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches’ “Zoomie” Last Gasp (WFH)
- Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class
- “Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors
- Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?
- Reviews
- Avra Sidiropoulou, ed. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2022, 276 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £35.99 (paperback), £32.39 (ebook).
- Michael Meeuwis. Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, vi + 144 pp., £130.00 (hardback), £38.99 (paperback), £35.09 (ebook).
- Nicola Abram. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii + 224 pp., $109.99 (hardback), $109.99 (softcover), $84.99 (ebook).
