Staging the Theatrical Public Sphere in The Laramie Project
-
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
Baglia, Jay, and Elissa Foster. “Performing the ‘Really’ Real: Cultural Criticism, Representation, and Commodification in The Laramie Project.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 19.2 (2005): 127–145. Web. 22 Jan. 2024. <https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/view/3512>.Search in Google Scholar
Balme, Christopher B. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.10.1017/CBO9781139051668Search in Google Scholar
Bottoms, Stephen. “Putting the Document into the Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?” TDR: The Drama Review 50.3 (2006): 56–68. Print.10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.56Search in Google Scholar
Claycomb, Ryan M. “(Ch)oral History: Documentary Theatre, the Communal Subject, and Progressive Politics.” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 17.2 (2003): 95–122. Print.Search in Google Scholar
–-. In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2023. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Dawson, Gary Fisher. Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print.10.3998/mpub.119520Search in Google Scholar
Forsyth, Alison, and Chris Megson. “Introduction.” Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Eds. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1–5. Print.10.1057/9780230236943Search in Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25.26 (1990): 56–80. Print.10.2307/466240Search in Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchung zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2021. Print.Search in Google Scholar
–-. “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 39.4 (2022): 145–171. Print.10.1177/02632764221112341Search in Google Scholar
Kaufman, Moisés, and Barbara Pitts McAdams. Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater. New York: Vintage Books, 2018. Print.Search in Google Scholar
–-, and Tectonic Theater Project. The Laramie Project. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Magagna, Tony R. “‘Say It Right, Say it Correct’: Documenting the American West in The Laramie Project.” Western American Literature 51.2 (2016): 199–229. Print.10.1353/wal.2016.0033Search in Google Scholar
Paget, Derek. “The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance.” Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Eds. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 224–238. Print.Search in Google Scholar
Reinelt, Janelle. “The Promise of Documentary.” Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Eds. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 6–23 Print.Search in Google Scholar
–-. “Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age.” Performance Research 16.2 (2011): 16–27. Print.10.1080/13528165.2011.578724Search in Google Scholar
Seeliger, Martin, and Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky. “Reflections on the Contemporary Public Sphere: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Theory, Culture & Society 39.4 (2022): 67–74. Web. 29 Jan. 2024. <https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211066260>.10.1177/02632764211066260Search in Google Scholar
Soloski, Alexis. “What’s Up, Doc? The Ethics of Fact and Fabulation in Documentary Performance: A Forum.” Theater 43.1 (2013): 9–39. Print.10.1215/01610775-1815451Search in Google Scholar
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2022. Print.10.2307/j.ctv1qgnqj8Search in Google Scholar
Weiss, Peter. “Notes on the Contemporary Theatre.” Theatre in Theory 1900–2000. Ed. David Krasner. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. 381–386. Print.Search in Google Scholar
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- 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).
Articles in the same Issue
- 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).
