Volume 13, Issue 2

The impact digital phenomena – such as social media, fake news, or deepfakes – have on democracies has become a growing concern. Jennifer Haley’s “tech plays” explore these concerns by depicting fictional worlds where corporate structures have replaced democratic ones, and digital innovations disrupt social relations. In this article, I focus on two of Haley’s plays: Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom ( N3RD ) (2008/2009) and The Nether (2014). N3RD portrays an American suburban community divided by a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) popular among teenagers. The Nether is set in a future where most of public life has shifted into the digital realm due to an ecological catastrophe. I argue that the primary dystopian theme in both plays is the impact of deregulated corporate control over digital spaces on social and political life. Through their themes and aesthetics, Haley’s plays suggest that digital realms are not separate from physical reality but extensions of it. The possibility of disembodiment in virtual spaces is critiqued as a myth that has enabled corporate domination and a lack of democratic regulation of digital realms.

This article takes key terms from Lacanian psychoanalysis to read Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane (2010). The play represents the aftermath of a possible traumatic event, wherein the characters display their deepest unconscious desires. I will consider the play as a site of unresolved, contradictory meanings in which access to truth becomes an almost impossible task. I will further argue that the text of the play turns into a narrative that works with alternative scenarios to provide potential reasons that could explain the actions of the characters. Ultimately, while the protagonist offers himself as healthy, it turns out that he is an unreliable character who cannot get out of his fantasies.

This article explores the significance of stage directions in Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man (1989) in accomplishing his reformist agendas. Aparna Dharwadker and Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri emphasize his stagecraft as “an inventive dramaturgy” (Dharwadker 277) that has emancipated Indian English drama from the label of a literary tradition. Dattani has carved a niche for himself by realistically representing urban Indian middle-class homes and their pervading sociocultural issues. The article takes cues from Dharwadker’s assertions and examines Dattani’s stagecraft in the play, which complements the dialogues and adds a visual appeal to the playtext. It argues that his stage directions help create what Bjørn Thomassen calls a “liminal space,” which Dattani uses to portray the invisible issues pervading Indian urban middle-class society. Dattani’s utilization of the stage as a multi-modal entity that simultaneously projects multiple spatiotemporal dimensions is an essential strategy for a realistic representation of intergenerational conflicts. The article examines, through Thomassen’s ideas, the representation of spatial and temporal dimensions of liminality in the playtext and studies it in comparison with a stage production by Lillete Dubey’s PrimeTime Theatre. It concludes by establishing that Dattani’s stage directions are an equally significant component of his dramaturgy that complements the other constitutive elements of his plays to present contemporary issues.

Matthew López’s epic play The Inheritance (2018) has been hailed as the new Angels in America (1991/1993) but also criticized for failing to live up to its political agenda. Joining an intertextual feat of commemorating and updating E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) with the chronicle of a multi-generational New York-based set of gay men ridden by AIDS, love, guilt, and betrayal, López’s play strives to bridge the British legacy of a famous and famously closeted writer and his signature Edwardian novel Howards End and the US-American post-Stonewall era up to the first Trump presidency. While being an elegy especially for AIDS victims in many ways, the play’s transtemporal and translocal perspectives offer readings that move beyond its specific setting and into a quasi-mythic realm of probing universal issues. The article addresses questions such as: how does a feeling of nostalgia/regret for a purposeful/spoiled past correlate to the enduring vulnerability caused by the AIDS pandemic? Did the verdict of the play on the psychic continuity of the AIDS pandemic and on the wasteland of Trump’s presidency offer resilient LGBTQIA+ strategies to cope with COVID-19? How can we understand López’s treatment of death as a model – both on a personal and national level – for offering hopeful spaces of resilience and sustainable solace?

This article reconsiders the affective architecture of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996) through the lens of xenobiotic intimacy, a framework drawn from posthumanist ecocriticism and toxicity studies, wherein love is not plenitude or lack but a contaminant. Love is not a pharmakon nor cathartic residue, but a slow-acting biological insurgent. In Kane’s tragic ecology, it corrodes rather than heals, destabilizing the skin envelope of the self and leaking into porous membranes between desire and death. Phaedra’s relation to Hippolytus is metastatic: a mutually pathogenic intimacy accruing like waste – chemically unstable, ecologically unlivable. Kane does not revise tragedy; she decomposes it. What remains is not a purified ruin, but a theatrical toxicology of feeling, where love signals not transcendence but systemic collapse. Bodies are not represented but disarticulated, rendered vulnerable to saturation, exposure, decay. This reading situates Kane within affective materialism and ecological temporalities, tracing love as a xenobiotic force that unsettles the anthropocentric ground of passion. In Phaedra’s Love , love is neither inside nor outside the body but entangled in its necrobiotic processes, echoing late-capitalist ecologies of leakage, exhaustion, and irrevocable exposure. Intimacy, in Kane’s theatre, is no longer redemptive, but a form of metabolized – yet unassimilable – slow violence.