Volume 11, Issue 2

This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right. Engaging in a complex intertextual and intercultural dialogue with its antetext, Pope.L’s staging brings into focus particular aspects of the contemporary moment. While Brown’s play presents race as first and foremost a performative category and stresses the possibility of autopoiesis qua performance, Pope.L reduces slavery to an ontological condition. Its title and manifold multimedia performances notwithstanding, there is no escape from enslavement in Pope.L: The Escape . Performance remains contained in and prescribed by an ongoing condition of physical and psychic enslavement. With this radical adaptation, Pope.L responds to what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “ontological turn” in recent Black thought. In light of the ongoing structural and quotidian violence against People of Color, this approach insists on the central significance of the bodily experience of racializing attributions for understanding social relations as well as Black collectivity. It also provocatively asks whether the performative does indeed suffice to unsettle the structural coordinates of anti-Blackness that continue to impact and overdetermine contemporary lives.

During the last ten years of his life, Lee Breuer, who passed away in 2021, had been interested in framing Tennessee Williams’s canon, particularly the late plays, through the perspective of the grotesque and the Grand Guignol. Mabou Mines’s Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play (2017), directed by Breuer and conceived by Breuer and Maude Mitchell, views Williams’s work alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in order to expose the grotesque truth of the messy and complex creative process. On one level, Glass Guignol is a multilayered exploration of the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose, whose story of courage in facing the mental and emotional challenges that culminated in an eventual lobotomy in 1943 was the inspiration for several of the female characters in both his canonical early plays and his less familiar later works. Developed through various workshops and staged scenes since 2011, the finalized version of Glass Guignol interweaves the story of Rose herself with Williams’s various fictional creations of women who reflect her spirit, if not necessarily her actual experiences: Laura in The Glass Menagerie (1945), Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Clare in The Two-Character Play (revised between 1967 and 1976), and Nance in A Cavalier for Milady (c. 1976). While a symbiotic brother-sister love is at the center of The Two-Character Play , which serves as the primary framework of Breuer’s piece, it was also a common preoccupation for Romantic poets. Glass Guignol uses this relationship to delve into broader territory, asking questions about the relationship between creator and creation, and taking Frankenstein as yet another framework for the complexities and contradictions of this partnership. With its nineteenth-century asylum staging, the play foregrounds the grotesque and the Grand Guignol, both sensibilities that embrace contradiction, instability, and a lack of boundaries. Ultimately, Breuer explores how the artist sews together bits and pieces of identity, emotion, and experience in the pursuit of that seamless and perfect illusion of reality.

In this article, I ask what happens to theatrical performance when it fails. By describing a performance as “failed,” I do not necessarily imply its normative dismissal – as a “flawed” enactment or an artistic vision not properly executed. Instead, I use failure as a conceptual starting point for the articulation of alternative meaning-making practices. In this sense, failure is a form of creative interpretation that capitalizes on performance’s constitutive contingency, its structural unreliability that for many is part of its appeal, the very “magic” only a gathering of live bodies can create. Specifically, the article looks at two recent US American plays and one musical in order to discuss the theatrical politics of failure: Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (2000), Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What (2014), and Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012). By discussing the ways in which these pieces and their performances creatively address failure, I point to three formal and cultural dimensions in which failure can be mobilized theatrically: first, failure problematizes the easy formal subsumption of performance under production, pointing to the ways in which a specific performance may not adequately actualize the conceptual work of the production, be it because audiences intervene in ways not intended by the production or because performers deviate from the production’s script in one way or another. Second, failure can be mobilized to reveal tacit cultural conventions or standards of success that entrench particular (classist, racist, sexist, ableist, etc.) normative behaviors. And third, failure can enable more creative approaches to the relationship between the labor of theater practitioners and its exchange value for spectators, who paid – at least – the price of a theater ticket and typically expect some form of artistic professionalism as remuneration.

The morality tale Everyman has in recent years seen a notable renaissance in contemporary theater: Everybody (2017) by US American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of Everyman (2015) at the National Theatre in London, and director/playwright Milo Rau’s work Everywoman (2020) have turned to it. In this article, I conceptualize these theatrical works as creative appropriations which stage the vexing relation between canonical text and contemporary theater practice. They are marked by an ambivalent dynamic in that they are far less conclusive about their own return to and reworking of the literary source. Their mode of representation oscillates between adaptation, appropriation, and playful de- and reconstruction. Despite evident contrasts in theme and form, these works openly reference their literary source and draw destabilizing effects from their montage of different modes of language and writing (citational speech, self-narration, confession) and performative elements. As I argue, however, these productions cannot be easily aligned with postdramatic theory’s advocation of a deconstructivist approach towards the dramatic text. The text, rather, is treated as an archive of poetic figures, narrative ideas, and moral concerns. In these productions, the textual material is not deconstructed but rather blended, momentarily decentered, and interwoven with vital performative elements (media, dance, collective speaking) which allows each creative appropriation to explore how canonical literary sources may speak to our contemporary culture and society.

The Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant is not known for his work on theater; rather, he has been influential for a postcolonial reconceptualization of Caribbean spaces and the ways in which they are intertwined with a history of colonization. His theory of relation has been paramount for a rethinking of a concept of connection, theorizing the layered, complex, and often surprising relations between peoples and cultures that have shaped, questioned, imagined, and often also jumbled up the Caribbean as a world in transformation. Glissant views relation as a skein of networks and not as essentialist recovery of an authentic and true point of origin. This article addresses the theoretical transformative possibilities that this approach helps elucidate. I will mainly focus on the production of Simon Stephens’s 2012 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , an inventive adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel that was staged in New York City between 2014 and 2016 to much critical acclaim. Finally, in a comparative approach, I would like to read this production with an eye towards Susanne Kennedy’s 2018 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993) for the Munich Kammerspiele and acclaimed Australian theater director Simon Stone’s 2016 rewrite of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901) for the theater in Basel as well as Ulrich Rasche’s inventive 2017 production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck .

The question of how spectators engage emotionally with what they see on stage has always been of interest to theatre scholars and performance-makers. This article offers a small-scale analysis of audience responses to Patricia Cornelius’s SHIT (2015) that was performed by Dublin theatre collective THISISPOPBABY at the Project Arts Centre in March 2022. The vulgar and aggressive protagonists confront spectators directly about what it means to barely scrape by as a déclassée woman who has to protect herself daily from male violence. Thus, the play allows for an intersectional perspective on gender and class by asking uncomfortable questions about the privilege of spectatorship. Deliberately marking them as Other, SHIT opens up a rift between its protagonists and the middle-class audience it constructs, but occasionally bridges the distance by allowing for feminist attachments between the two sides.