Volume 12, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Theater and Community / Issue Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Ilka Saal

Conceptualizations of a “commons” have recently been gaining traction in theorizations of specific locations, gatherings, and activism in and beyond the arts. A theater-based commons that adopts a planetary and relational approach to selfhood, interaction, and future survival on Planet Earth tends to focus on breaking with social, political, economic, and aesthetic hierarchies. I will first introduce how notions of relationality have been integrated in theorizations of solidarity, humanitarian action, and a commons. Then, I will discuss these theorizations within the contexts of theater as communication and action that involves both theater-makers and audience members as actants. Finally, I intend to show how these conceptualizations can be meaningfully applied to unraveling the artistic strategies of a broad array of plays associated with the biannual theater festival Climate Change Theatre Action, which has been taking place before and after the United Nations Conference of the Parties climate conferences since 2015. The examples from the corpus of 250 five-minute plays are to illustrate the intervention of climate-change theater in potentially insurgent commons-based engagement and thinking which tries to avoid virtue signaling and other self-promoting forms of supposed solidarity.

The literary genre of drama and its performative realisation in the theatre are based on dialogue and interaction. In this, drama and theatre have always had a close affinity to the structures of society in general and community in particular. I shall argue in the following that Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground (2023), and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People (2022) can be considered as deconstructions of a traditional understanding of community. I shall argue that the designs of community that emanate from these plays conceptually highlight an alternative model of community, which – following the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben – I shall call an “inoperative” (Nancy) or “coming” community (Agamben). The inoperative nature of these communities, which the three plays not only reflect upon but also constitute by themselves, is marked by a shift to singularity, by an openness to the Other, by fluid dramatic/theatrical/linguistic structures that challenge traditional normative and exclusionary practices and borders. The deconstructive aesthetics at work in all three plays reveals an inoperative community which denotes a potentiality that is always on the horizon, but never fully actualised. All three plays become epitomes for defining the ethical as well as the aesthetic programme of much British theatre in the twenty-first century: they question (and reject) traditional concepts of community that are based on unity or identity, while they also criticise overreaching, neoliberal individualism and the decline of communal interactions.

We-narratives are proliferating in the contemporary novel. Constructing a collective subject that cannot be reduced to a singular individual who speaks for the group, they have been hailed by narratologists as remarkable fictional possibilities. This article registers a similar increase of plural narration in contemporary drama and explores how an analysis of the phenomenon’s linguistic dimension can be combined with a consideration of these plays’ orientation towards performance. Drawing on British examples, we chart an intriguing variety of we-narratives and argue that the political potential of these forms of community building lies in their turn away from mimesis and dramatic realism. Rather than merely representing a collective entity on stage, they also forge one in and through performance and frequently unsettle the conventional identification of one voice with one body. Thus, contemporary uses of “we” model the relationship between stage and auditorium in ways that assert, but also interrogate, the potential for community building in the shared space of the theatre.

Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone is a singular play with a singular heroine, yet both the play and the titular heroine have been part of an ever-growing body of reinventions and adaptations. Slavoj Žižek’s play The Three Lives of Antigone (2016) continues this tradition. Žižek offers three consecutive, different endings to Sophocles’s tragedy: 1. The “original” ending in which neither Creon nor Antigone compromise on their principles, Antigone dies, and the chorus praises her conviction; 2. Antigone convinces Creon, but the city burns in a civil conflict as the chorus laments; 3. The chorus takes action, executes both Creon and Antigone and proclaims Thebes a people’s republic. It is easy to assume that Žižek proposes the third option as the most desirable ending; the text, however, puts the onus to choose firmly on the audience. This article investigates the correlation between individual and community, original and adaptation, ensemble and spectator in Žižek’s play, arguing that through the means of the stage, the 2020 German-language production of Žižek’s adaptation successfully bridged the divide between the singular individual and the community suggested by Sophocles’s and questioned by Žižek’s versions of the myth.

This article closely examines two recent works for the stage by British conceptualist theatre-maker Tim Crouch, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019) and Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel (2022), discussing in particular the manipulative aspects of community formation accentuated in the former and the slight shift in emphasis towards the collective experience of live theatre apparent in the latter, his first play to be staged after the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay argues that by presenting “parallel worlds” to be measured against the present world of crisis, Crouch’s complex metatheatrical work may be seen to explore in practice the ideas of emancipated spectatorship theorised by Jacques Rancière on the one hand and to engage with the influential ideas on community elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy on the other. Crouch’s recent work thus highlights the essential link of community to finitude while maintaining a strong emphasis on imagination being exercised by the individual.

The White Card (2018) and Fairview (2018), two recent plays by contemporary Black female playwrights Claudia Rankine and Jackie Sibblies Drury, raise questions about how overcoming socially constructed racial categories presupposes the idea of a (theatrical) community as the conceptual framework that informs theater’s political efficacy. As such, The White Card and Fairview register the inherent fissures and cleavages that result from various processes of racialization structuring the theatrical performance itself. This article suggests that the plays by Rankine and Drury create a form of theatrical dissensus that fundamentally disrupts how issues of race and racism are rendered tangible in theatrical performances.

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.

This article investigates two case studies of queer performers who counteract discomfort and terror with their acts of hope: Peter McMaster’s A Sea of Troubles (2019) and Split Britches’ Covidian performance Last Gasp (WFH) (2020). In the performers’ work, the politics of queer be-longing is tied to the performance of acts of hope which can function as a means to defy a society/a space that is limiting, hostile, or causing anxiety. This article conceptualizes the performance of acts of hope as ways to create forms of be-longing that position the queer individual firmly in – and, sometimes, “slightly above” (Dolan 5) – the (uncomfortable) present. Be-longing in this context is hyphenated to put an emphasis on the gap between the queer body and the surrounding space and to argue that that body can never merely be. Hope, therefore, is both a bodily and mental positioning that either looks to what is to come and draws its shape from that or, in looking back, reparatively constructs its space via retrospection to an elsewhere. In the two performances analysed, this positioning to be-long in the present constitutes itself via an engagement with one’s (male) theatrical ancestors (McMaster) and a retrotopian looking back on their career (Split Britches) to find words for the present.

In contemporary Britain, the working-class subject is often portrayed as abject, deficient, and undeserving. In this article, I survey how mainstream theatre has often been complicit in replicating and authenticating these representations of the working class without offering an alternative. I argue that queer performance forms are a way of altering and undermining this narrative of working classness as a deficit. The queer working-class subject is defined by a sense of not fitting in to either the queer or working-class community and is therefore in a unique position to challenge a unifying representation of the working class. In particular, the queer aesthetics identified in José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of utopian performance and the dialectic of hope and disappointment offers both a critique of the present and a look to the future beyond the inevitability of capitalism and heteronormativity. I analyse Scottee’s solo autobiographical performances Bravado (2017) and Class (2019) through the lens of utopia and hope and how the performer’s status as a queer and working-class artist allows him to offer alternatives to the here and now.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond boundaries – becomes a key destabilizing figure as the grotesque body becomes a site for transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing a potential space for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure when the stable and the rational have failed. In its embrace of clowning and the comic grotesque, Neighbors questions the stable notion of “community,” particularly in terms of racial and historical identity, and exposes the contradictions of closed constructions, creating a space beyond the boundaries of rational discourse that may begin to engage a more complex reality.

Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope ’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.