F r pt l Dr t r

Hana Worthen

Theatre Topics, Volume 24, Number 3, September 2014, pp. 175-186 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/tt.2014.0037

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 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy

Hana Worthen

This essay situates dramaturgy at the intersection of performance processes, aesthetics, and the
political framework within which theatrical propriety finds its expression. I assume a dramaturgy
that stands in a critical relation to an exclusive politico-cultural rationality and the normalizing
role that the theatre plays in it, the dramaturgy of a skeptical performative. To unfold this phrase, let
me begin with a series of questions: What kind of discursive authority links itself to the aesthetic,
creating the perception of what theatre is and what it is supposed to be? What kind of accord does
it strike? And what kind of displacements, perhaps of other modes of theatre, does this raison d’être
produce while creating a unified subject—of theatre, of dramaturgy—with its craft? Leaning on these
questions, my essay addresses the consensual rhetoric, the rationalized space and conduct of political
discourse in the United States, which, in turn, impairs other forms of the sensible, particularly those
in which it understands the political as conducted by aesthetic means. Contextualizing the work
of dramaturgy in relation to the consensual dimension of “liberal rationality”—what is reasonable,
how the political sphere is rationalized, meaning both conceptualized and distributed—I am also
contextualizing the crisis that dramaturgy has been caught in: dramaturgy has less been asked to
“think” for itself than to conform to what has been “thought” for it, to its own domestication by a
theatre tamed by the discursive and affective coherence of the cultural sphere, a theatre assigned to
the innocuous sphere of an “apolitical” art.

Much as the political field has already been rationalized, so too has the artistic field, the field in
which a consensual process sustains and is legitimized in theatrical production. As Chantal Mouffe
has argued, liberal rationality desires an inclusive public sphere animated by the presumption of “non-
coersive consensus.” Yet, at the same time, the fact that the space and terms of liberal discourse have
been rationalized, tends to circumscribe consensus, excluding nonconsensual voices and perspectives
as outside the proper arena of political engagement. “Instead of trying to erase the traces of power
and exclusion” inherent in this sense of liberal rationality, “democratic politics requires that they be
brought to the fore, making them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation” (2013a,
127). Such “traces of power and exclusion” are not only intrinsic to democratic representation, they
also inform artistic representation, the art-making of theatre. Making these “traces of power and
exclusion” entwining the theatre with liberal rationality “visible” is, I believe, a compelling function
of dramaturgy, the dissent of dramaturgy.

I take here an admittedly ambitious vision of dramaturgy: the dramaturg impels a searching
inquiry into the material conditions and cultural work of theatre animating each production. More
specifically, what concerns me, as a dramaturg, is how to bring that which must be thought to rupture
the rationalized political and aesthetic consensus, to contest what the dominant discourses assert
as the illusion of the unthinkable. Contemporary liberal (and neoliberal) rhetoric capitalizes on
notions of individual liberty as a freedom from political influence. In terms of theatre, if the theatre
is already constituted within the rationalized consensual sphere of this liberal polity, even its most
overt critique—if it is recognized as theatre at all—reproduces that order. What dramaturgy is able
to offer, then, is a vision and practice for a critically independent theatre. This conception of drama-
turgy is skeptical toward the normative notions of theatre in two ways. First, it defamiliarizes and so
intervenes in the illusory singularity of both the theatrical landscape and the inevitability of mise en

175
176 Hana Worthen

scène, estranging the consensual assumption of what an ideologically dominant “we” understands
theatre to be and what it can be. Second, it others what has been assumed and produced by that
consensus as a simulacrum, displaying its relation to hegemonic coercion. In this sense, both “the
human” onstage and in the auditorium becomes what we must rethink as dramaturgs. A sustainable
dramaturgy needs to work to make known the indiscriminate conjunction between the hegemonic
political and aesthetic pressures on the theatre, its stage, its auditorium.

Theatre is a liminal site into which and from which sociopolitical sensibilities and perceptions
are carried; rather than a hermeneutically sealed space, theatre collects a permeable public, is a public
art, par excellence. Insofar as theatrical performance is a public affair, conceiving and sharpening the
address of both the mise en scène and the performance is the dramaturg’s affair. Dramaturgs enunci-
ate an understanding of theatre, an understanding of performance, an understanding of the ways
theatre and performance relate to social reality beyond the theatre. A dramaturg’s responsibility is to
understand that reality, to formulate its contestable nodal knots in relation to the material of a given
production, be it a dramatic play, a performance text, or a series of images from which the verbal
and visual language of the production develops. Dramaturgy arises at the politico-aesthetic nexus
of performance: between its conception and its execution, between its practices and its purposes,
between its aesthetic and artistic aims and its action with and through the audience. The theatre’s
public—institutional and aesthetic—nature is its condition of existence: the theatre both presumes
and produces its public.

Occupying the juncture of theatre practice, aesthetics, and cultural theory, dramaturgy is a site
of ethical inquiry. In The Politics of Truth, Michel Foucault argues that determining what is “true or
false, founded or unfounded, real or illusory, scientific or ideological, legitimate or abusive” is less
effective than to ask: “[W]hat are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of
coercion and elements of knowledge,” such that “a given element of knowledge takes on the effects
of power in a given system” (59)? Dramaturgy, in this sense, operates at the interface of power/
knowledge and should be especially alert to the coercion implied by the “rational, calculated, techni-
cally efficient” means of doing what we do, the coercion, in other words, embodied in the “ordinary”
practical and artistic discourse and work of making theatre. At the same time, dramaturgy needs to
destabilize the subjects of theatre: the thematic subject matter of a production, of course, but also the
terms through which the makers—on both sides of the proscenium—are subjected to and through
the practice of the performance.

My remarks here coordinate with my thinking about dramaturgy for professional theatre and
as part of university education, too, where dramaturgical thought marks a critical position against
the unwitting assimilation of cultural production to social and political hegemonies.1 One of the
purposes of education is to develop a critical sense of self-reflection, and dramaturgical thought
also interrogates its own limits, remaining alert to its own incapacitating assumptions. I believe
that this agenda, an important dimension of critical humanities, could play a considerably larger
part in theatre training and studies programs in the university. As part of an educational mission,
dramaturgy should not be sidetracked alongside the visibly materialized artistic functions—acting,
directing, design—but should engage in a mutually sustaining dialogue with them, one that alters
the rationalized consensus by which theatre is taught, created, and reproduced. Much as in the
political sphere, in the liberal sphere of theatre education, it is precisely the notion of an existing,
rationalized consensus that “by its very nature, will disqualify every move to destabilize it” (Mouffe
2013a, 127), a rationalized consensus often palpable in the structure of a theatre department’s
curriculum. For me, dramaturgical work needs to acknowledge its ethical dimension, involving
the economic-political de-reification of theatre and performance. As an artistic, intellectual, and
educational practice, dramaturgy opens the possibility of a self-consciously transformative aesthetics,
an aesthetics of dissent, underpinned by the effort to understand that there is no such a thing as an
impartial concept of theatre, or of the human within the theatre, on the stage or in the auditorium.
The task of dramaturgy is to expose this impartiality for what it is: a strategy for forming the social,
 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy 177

in part by forming the public’s, the spectator’s, the student’s gaze on and within theatre. To think
dramaturgically is to open the production to think what must be thought and yet what is, within a
rationalized hegemony, cast as unthinkable.

This conception of dramaturgy demands a constant othering from and of the functional roles
and purposes assigned in the conventional practices of theatre-making. The dramaturg not only
others the given social reality, its assumptions of theatrical propriety, its power effects, but also needs
to other the practice of dramaturgy itself as an instrument. In this sense, dramaturgy can be framed
along a political analogy. As Étienne Balibar has argued, in democratic societies, “law” is difficult to
distinguish from the regulation of “justice” for the benefit of those who have access to the institu-
tions and the power to advance their interests. As Balibar asks, on the wider stage of the social world,
“[w]hich force of justice does remain ‘just’?” (13). Much as the pursuit of justice must resist its petri-
fication as law, the pursuit of theatre, and of justice in the theatre, must resist its petrification in the
rationalized, stabilizing canons of the “law of art.” To retain the “just” in justice, we—citizens and
theatre-makers—would have to enter into what I would call a skeptical performative, taking “uncondi-
tional responsibility toward a justice that is always other than all its finite (‘constructed,’ ‘constituted’)
representations” (20). Translating Balibar’s philosophical potentiality into a dramaturgical one, our
theatres, and the artistic work they perform, have to question how they function as cultural and
material institutions, and the way in which their representations, practices, and aesthetics provide an
active process for envisioning a differential performance, the spectator’s productive labor of imagining
justice. Inhabiting the skeptical performative, then, articulates the potentiality of dramaturgy across
the diverse activities and engagements involved in theatrical production.

To demonstrate some of the challenges faced by this contestatory dramaturgy, I will briefly
turn to a theatrical review that, under the influence of liberal consensual rationality, necessarily
“miscomprehends” the work of a contemporary stage production, a theatrical event confronting the
rationalized consensus of the relations between art and politics. The “common sense” inscribed in
this particular review dramatizes a blind spot of theatre criticism in the United States: the enfolding
of theatrical propriety within the dual rhetoric of liberal rationality and its humanism, in which
the distinction between the artistic and political spheres and between drama/text and stage/mise en
scène is both accepted and reinforced.

The piece in question is Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review of Ein Volksfeind, Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, with dramaturgy by Florian Borchmeyer,
which toured to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) from Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner
Platz in November 2013. What interests me here is less this conceptually rich theatrical event than
its representation for the New York Times’ readership, the rewriting of the event according to the
imperatives of liberal rationality. While Isherwood conceives theatre as the zone and practice of an
ineffable artistry distinct from analytical and political critique, he also displaces the notion of the
mise en scène as the site of aesthetic thinking in order to foreground “uncritically codified certainties”
(Said 28) attached to the mastering page and playwright rather than to the stage and the director/
dramaturg.

Ein Volksfeind toured internationally during 2013–14, including performances at BAM; I saw
several productions there and at the Schaubühne as well.2 In the performance, the mise en scène
undertakes a provocative act of socio-theatrical imagination: Ostermeier/Borchmeyer reconstitute
Stockmann’s climactic speech to the townspeople about pollution poisoning the spa, about his
“morally corrupt,” “self-deceiving,” and “spiritually bankrupt” society, about “the social pollution
that poisons the wellsprings of life” (Lambert 626), substituting for Ibsen’s language a speech drawn
from The Coming Insurrection, written by The Invisible Committee, an incendiary pamphlet that
was described in 2009 by the New York Times as “a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians”
(Moynihan). The Coming Insurrection, denouncing the seizure of democracy by neoliberal practices
and embracing radical revolution to subvert the current state of affairs, came to be known to the
178 Hana Worthen

French public when it was published in 2007 by La Fabrique and introduced into the 2008 trial of
nine individuals accused of the sabotage of the French national high-speed rail lines, “causing mas-
sive train delays.” Labeling the manifesto a “manual of terrorism,” French Interior Minister Michèle
Alliot-Marie characterized the nine defendants as “‘ultra-leftists’ who share a ‘total rejection of any
democratic expression of political opinion, and an extremely violent tone’” (Bohlen). The group
(known now as the Tarnac Nine), though charged with involvement in “a terrorist enterprise” was
eventually released, remaining in the transnational imagination as an instance of the complicity of the
state, the police, and the media in producing “terrorism” as a self-justifying cause for the suspension
of democratic civil order, indeed for suspending the ideals of liberal democracies.

Ein Volksfeind ’s dramaturgy develops a specifically theatrical inquiry, opening the space of
aesthetic performance to the performance of both “democratic” discourse and “representation.”
Facing the political suppression of the truth, Stockmann is radicalized, reflected here by the address
he delivers from The Coming Insurrection. Stockmann, played by Stefan Stern, calls for the house
lights to be raised, and the audience is then cajoled for fifteen minutes or so into a discussion by
the play’s political and media elite (Stockmann’s brother, city mayor Peter Stockmann, and the city
newspaper publisher/printer Aslaksen). As might be expected, at some performances the discussion
evolves rather slowly and fails to catch fire; at others, the audience is already hotly engaged, booing
the compromised politicians and press onstage even before the discussion begins. There is often
someone who complains (“Get on with the play!”), and the quality of engagement with the issues
of liberal democracy, and with the power of politicians, the press, and the market to hijack it, differs
from night to night (fig. 1).

In New York, on opening night (6 November 2013), the vocal spectators—who frequently
shouted out their thoughts, not waiting for the actors to bring a microphone—sided with the more
radical dimension of Stockmann’s remarks. Calls for revolution, comments about the similarity
between Ibsen’s polluted spa and Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, and a wry joke about Burning Man
were all part of a lively event in which the majority of the audience applauded and laughed, engaged
with the issues, and had a great time, evoking Brecht’s sense that the epic theatre must be pleasur-
able, fun. But for Isherwood, “the audience was playing precisely the wrong role” on opening night.
“Ibsen’s drama” became merely “an occasion for the audience to indulge its own political views.
Most of us prefer to express those at the polls, not the theater” (emphasis added). Tellingly, it is the
“audience,” and not a few spectators, Isherwood speaks about here, since it was the majority of the
audience that was engaged by the performance; characterizing the audience’s enthusiastic participa-
tion as “wrong,” he discriminates against the dramaturgical labor of Ein Volksfeind, rewriting the
event according to the prescriptions of liberal rationality. The overt performance of the present
audience is silenced by Isherwood’s pen in favor of the proper reactions of the “most of us” of the
liberal, consensual imagination.

The second-night audience, perhaps forewarned by Isherwood’s review appearing in that

day’s Times, performed rather differently. Many more spectators, around fifteen I would say, walked
out, especially during this discussion scene. I found this phenomenon surprising at the time, pre-
cisely because—having been inspired by the pre-show conversation between Ostermeier and Simon
Critchley about truth and lies in democracy—the audience’s commentary and discussion seemed
as lively as on the previous night, but also more focused on the issues; indeed, more of a dialogue
ensued among individual spectators, as well as between spectators and the performers onstage and
circulating through the house.3

For instance, one spectator spoke at some length about the economic crisis, to whom Aslaksen,
played by David Ruland, responded:
 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy 179

Fig. 1. After his speech from The Coming Insurrection and the ensuing discussion with the theatre audience, Thomas Stock-
mann, played by Stefan Stern, is attacked for his radical views on the work of (neo)liberal democracy and the undue power
of its consensual majority. (Photo: Arno Declair.)
180 Hana Worthen

SPECTATOR: In with as few words as Audre Lorde says, you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the
master’s tools. (Another spectator shouts in protest “Po-po-po-po-po”) The economy is the crisis
and yet we try to push through our economical crisis with the only tools we understand or were
taught to understand which is through the terms of economy, which is really skewed or possibly
incorrect or distorted in its foundation, in its basis. (Silence, then laughter, applause, vocal support)

ASLAKSEN: For me it’s a little bit too easy to say that the economy is the problem. It’s a little bit too easy.
Sorry, but . . . (Laughter)

S: What is the problem in your opinion? (Some spectators laugh)

A: There are many problems. I would say that this is the problem, of course we have the problems. But
we have to find the reasonable solution for the problems, we have to find a democratic, reason-
able solution.

S: (Rather forcefully) And so the reasonable solution for you is to continue to let the baths pollute and
poison your citizens.

A: Is the bath really polluted? Do we know that? (A few spectators shout “Yes!”) Do we know . . . how big
the problem really is?

ANOTHER SPECTATOR SHOUTS: E. Coli (Spectators laugh and applaud almost simultaneously)

A: He [Stockmann] says we have a problem. He says it. But I think we have to ask other people, other
scientists, and I give you my promise tonight, if the problem is really as big as he says, we will
find a solution at once. I give you my promise tonight. (Spectators laugh rather skeptically)

S: Can you show us . . . can you tell us who pays the salaries of the scientists . . .

The “democratic, reasonable solution” that Aslaksen promises the audience becomes a screen for
undemocratic practices, politics connected to systemic economic interests, politics that produce a
counterargument having less to do with truth than with a manufactured discourse of truth, a dis-
course less truthful to the citizenry at risk, to most of us, than advantageous to the growth of profit
and political power.

Arranging the audiences into both a demos, a voting voice, and voicing agents within the
frame of each performance, the dramaturgy of Ein Volksfeind insists on the public and democratic,
plural and indeterminable confrontation between the auditorium and the stage, between spectator
and character, and between citizens and artists. Ein Volksfeind both marks and suspends the privacy
attributed to the audience of fourth-wall realistic theatre. It stages the “private” spectators for what
they are and for what they agree to be: the economic and the democratic agents of the aesthetic
politics of performance. In this sense, Ein Volksfeind undermines both the rationalized sphere—the
public sphere, the sphere of theatre—of liberalism and the dramaturgy of a “reductionist” humanist
theatre, a theatre correlating with Edward W. Said’s “commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and
uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the
rubric of ‘the classics’” (28). Ein Volksfeind stages the becoming of an active and pluralistic spectator-
ship, an audience whose performance produces the event and its significance rather than merely
consuming them, consonant with Said’s sense of a radically refigured humanism, one that contests
the contemplation of an unchanging series of monuments with a “practice of humanism” defined
through “the practice of participatory citizenship” (22).

Said’s “participatory citizenship” demands both self-criticism and a “worldly,” inclusive dimen-
sion. Recalling Balibar’s idea of “justice,” Said’s self-critical humanism remains “attuned to the emer-
gent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused” (11). At
 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy 181

the same time, his humanism does not assume the value of its texts, scores, and art, but sees them
as the instruments for a uniquely critical engagement with history, with the political, and with the
forms of social life. Although Said does not explicitly take theatre or dramaturgy into consideration
(here, as throughout much humanist writing, theatre figures as the “other” of literature), this critical
approach to and vision of humanism and the humanities is, or could be, a crucial element in the work
and training of dramaturgs. For Said, critical “[h]umanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idées
reçues, and it offers opposition to every kind of cliché and unthinking language” (43).4 Contemporary
dramaturgy, too, should pay specific attention to claims of “apoliticality” that nonetheless displace
plurality within the social and theatrical landscape and within theatres themselves.

This inclusive, democratic dramaturgy of Ein Volksfeind as performance event is illegible to

Isherwood, illegible within the consensual discourse of a dominant liberal rationality that he takes at
face value. He draws a clear distinction between the “us” at the performance—who seemed (wrongly,
in his view) to be enjoying and participating in the airing of political views—and a larger “most of
us” to whom his review appeals. Isherwood’s asserted identification with “most of us” (Times read-
ers) dramatizes the ideological power of the alliance between unreflective liberalism and uncritical
humanism: while liberal thought upholds an opposition between theatre and politics, “reductionist
humanism” insists on a stage engrossed by its (often literary) desires, the assumed value of the “clas-
sic.” The text of a drama, in other words, is transplanted from page to stage, the order of the literary
sustaining the stage’s claim to matter and meaning. In this vision of a theatre of textual ventriloquism,
the stage itself cannot articulate an independent skepticism, a critique of the social or cultural rela-
tions of coercion or force. This ideological bond, which asserts limits rather than allowing for the
transgression of limitations, generates the “apolitical,” merely “artistic” sense of theatrical propriety,
a theatre committed to the enforcement of consensual, “universal” values inscribed in the humanist
documents of the dramatic tradition.

Isherwood’s implicit participation in the rationalized sphere distinguishing art from politics
negates the contestatory, democratic dramaturgy of Ein Volksfeind and witnesses a deep suspicion
of any compromise to the spectator’s public individuality. The “autonomous,” humanist spectator
of contemporary liberal and neoliberal thought requires the freedom to think for her-/himself, a
freedom framed in terms of independence, of private citizenship, as a freedom from politics in the
public sphere of art. In this sense, an intellectually or politically committed theatre, a theatre critical of
systems underpinning this rationality, is understood not as a framework for dialogue, but as a coercive
means to limit the individual’s exercise of autonomous judgment. Asserting itself as a specifically
political form of participatory event, Ein Volksfeind resists this conception of theatre; it provokes a
plural confrontation, a confrontation with dominant liberal thought. Ein Volksfeind insists that the
becoming of the voting and voicing audience within the event manifests a crucial indeterminacy, the
potentially agonistic performance among spectators, and between spectators and actors/characters.

Granted, this potentially transformative experience is only narrowly accessible, as the audi-
ence itself is constrained—differently in the different locations of Ein Volksfeind ’s global tour—by
the cost of a ticket, class and education, the location and repertoire of the theatre in which Ein
Volksfeind is produced, and by the ways theatre figures into the sociopolitical landscape. At the same
time, however, it might also be said that while Ein Volksfeind both assumes and addresses a liberal
majority (“We, we all of us, in every seat here in this theatre, and every place in the whole country,
we all are the problem,” as one New York spectator observed), this orientation frames a more visible
form of political self-understanding and self-criticism for that audience. During a September 2013
performance at the Schaubühne in Berlin, one spectator remarked that the discussion reflected the
exclusionary nature of political representation, in which the homeless, poor, and immigrants are
absent as much from German/European parliamentary representation as from the theatre itself. This
comment highlights an important dimension of Ein Volksfeind: despite the character of any pro-
jected audience, these offstage performers give voice to a range of pressing and conflicting attitudes,
approximating the tensions inherent in Mouffe’s notion of democratic negotiation. The performing
182 Hana Worthen

audience stages its contradictoriness to itself, reframing the uniformity of perspective encoded in
fourth-wall realism as a multiplicity of diverse, sometimes unassimilable views. Distinct from the
merely apparent participation offered by productions advertised as “immersive” (I am thinking,
for example, of Punchdrunk Theatre’s Sleep No More or Rachel Chavkin’s Natasha, Pierre, and the
Great Comet of 1812 ), the conversational dramaturgy of Ein Volksfeind offers both an indeterminate
presentness of the participatory and an active counterpoint to the neoliberal industries’ monopoliz-
ing of meaning, tellingly doing so at the moment at which participation in the civic dimension of
theatre is conceptualized.

In terms of a dramaturgy of the skeptical performative, theatre journalism provides a crucial

resource to the dramaturg, dramatizing as it often does the background of assumption, the deep
commitments to an ideology of art projected through every dimension of theatre touched by the
journalist, by the review: the institution, the audience, style, and content. In geopolitical locations
(such as the United States) where democracy and free-market economics are close to exchangeable
paradigms, the one place where this reciprocity apparently should not be discussed is the theatre,
where it would violate the assumed sanctity of art. Isherwood, noting “the radically revised new
adaptation used here,” observes that when “Stockmann darkly intones” the phrase “The economy
isn’t in crisis. . . . The economy is the crisis” (from The Invisible Committee manifesto), the audi-
ence responds enthusiastically: “This glib but rather vacuous phrase earned cheers and applause,”
prompting the discussion that soon ensued. Here, Isherwood’s understanding of the illegitimacy of
Ostermeier’s/Borchmeyer’s tactics is reinforced by his sense of the audience, which, by playing its
public part, is cast as partial, inappropriate, and finally undemocratic within the underlying liberal
democracy of theatrical artistry. After all, the production is, as Isherwood enlightens his New York
Times readers and potential spectators, “[a]ll good fun,” but only “if you happen to like attending
wildly disorganized meetings of left-leaning activist organizations.”

In refusing to see the production as at once challenging and redefining the “apolitical” aes-
thetics of liberal-humanist theatre, Isherwood forsakes the theatrical logic of Ein Volksfeind, and it
is here where the scandal of theatre criticism finds its force. “[T]he audience was playing precisely
the wrong role: Instead of shouting the provocateur down, we were pretty much ready to storm the
barricades of the conservative majority with him, as a show of hands clearly indicated. Bring on the
tumbrels!” Isherwood, briefly and disingenuously joins the misguided “we” of the audience, whose
politics (“Bring on the tumbrels!”) resonate with an unthinking mob violence, which is apparently
the only political alternative Ein Volksfeind has to offer. But in the end, his deeper commitment is to
that wider, absent, dominant public: “Most of us prefer to express” our political views “at the polls,
not the theater.” For me, Isherwood’s ironic dis/identifications reveal the trap of a contemporary
liberal consensus unwilling to reflect on its own limits and exclusions. At a time when civil disobedi-
ence in the United States can readily be characterized as “terrorism” (the Tarnac Nine were finally
cleared of the charge of “terrorism”), this review pursues and legitimates performative violence, in
which the affect of critical difference can only be conceived as a misguided, illegitimate act of terror,
materialized by the tumbrels of La Terreur.

While Isherwood’s review characterizes the audience’s unruly mingling of dramatic and local
politics as unreasonable, as outside the proper work of theatre, his manufactured consensus (“we,”
“most of us”) illustrates both a common and a constitutive tendency: that “political liberals refuse to
open rational dialogue to those who do not accept their ‘rules of the game’” (Mouffe 2013a, 122).
This coercive judgment of the audience’s behavior encodes a specifically liberal gesture into the vision
of theatre. Isherwood’s assumption that theatre works to produce a form of aesthetic consensus dem-
onstrates an effort to locate theatre within a constructed political and social hegemony, “endowing,”
as Mouffe might say, “a historically specific set of arrangements with the character of universality
and rationality,” a preconceived rationality that finally “rejects democratic indeterminacy” altogether
(125). Precisely this “democratic indeterminacy” is staged by Ein Volksfeind’s public discussion. Rep-
resenting the audience’s dynamic, aesthetico-politically motivated behavior as unreasonable within
 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy 183

the “historically specific set of arrangements” characteristic of modern theatre, Isherwood’s review
displaces the undetermined democratic pluralism produced by Ein Volksfeind ’s mise en scène, reifying
the theatre within the liberal ideal of its necessary impermeability to the political.

Ein Volksfeind vividly models the skeptical thinking of dramaturgy in practice. In performance,
it gains its force from the dialectics of hailing, from dramatizing the coercion and force, the effect
of interpellative, performative processes—patterns of seeing, thinking, acting—conditioned by the
signifying regimes of everyday life, regimes refined and represented by theatre, too. Rather than hail-
ing the spectator as a passive, internalized consumer of the performance, Ein Volksfeind alienates and
others, and so foregrounds, the theatre’s implicit address and provides a performative framework for
the spectator to recognize, to respond to, and to respond within the structure of the performance.
Soliciting the spectator as a present participant, a co-creator of the event, Ein Volksfeind accentuates
the entwined embrace of realistic theatricality, which locates the spectator as the politically passive
recipient of a purely aesthetic experience. Here, the spectator is engaged as a political subject, whose
instrument of performance—and subjection—is a mutually civic, aesthetic, and economic discourse.
Ein Volksfeind not only alters the spectator’s performance; it alters the process and meaning of the
spectator’s subjection in the performance, literally changing the subject of the performance. The
spectators do the work that is often assigned to the metonymic force of realistic theatre: rather than
allowing the performance merely to seem continuous with an offstage world, they bring the politics
of both the local and the global into the performance (in both New York and Berlin, for example,
spectators remarked on the importance of water as a global resource and about global warming as well).

An important part of dramaturgy is to create consequential relations between the onstage and
the offstage, between “aesthetic” and “ordinary” performatives. Colin Crouch conceptualizes liberal,
market-based democracy as “post-democracy,” having “little interest in widespread citizen involvement
or the role of organization outside the business sector” (3). In the era of the corporatization of the
university, Crouch’s remarks are pertinent to an increasingly market-based model of liberal education,
what might be called the “neoliberal arts.” In our work with students (dramaturgy students, but also
actors, directors, and designers), I wonder whether a skeptical performative might provide a critical
instrument for theatre-makers and theatre audiences to approach modes of subjectivation within
the liberal rationality that compromises itself through a too-easy linkage to both the neoliberal and
the neoconservative humanist processes of theatre, that theatre of a dominant “most of us.” Jacques
Rancière proposes an “emancipated spectator,” a subject who resists the coercive “distribution of the
sensible” (12); producing the possibility of that emancipation through theatre work and teaching is
one way, I believe, to account for the work of the dramaturg.

The skeptical thought and practice of dramaturgy assumes dramaturgy as a counterforce to its
own contemporary crisis. Even though producing theatre in an economized space, dramaturgs need
to open theatre to aesthetic thought, to critical, self-critical, and transformative ways of seeing and
doing. Rather than merely reiterating the dominant “common sense,” dramaturgy needs to pursue
and to articulate both cognitive and affective dissent, for what is artistic is political—indeed, what
is artistic is by necessity political. Theatrical performance is a public affair, reaffirming theatre as a
civic institution. Dramaturgy needs to take issue with an “essentialist conception of a social totality,
and the myth of a unitary subject” (Mouffe 2013b, 101), the subject articulated with and within a
hegemonic consensus assumed in contemporary liberal rationality, a compromised rationality that is
eager to be staged as unerring, a rationality engrossing the stage into a simulacrum, into an illusion
of the unthinkable, a mere illusion of what cannot be thought.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my colleague, Professor Peter Connor, for his subtle suggestions, and
the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität, Berlin,
for the fellowship allowing me to develop this essay.
184 Hana Worthen

Hana Worthen is an assistant professor of theatre/performance studies and dramaturgy at Barnard

College, Columbia University, where she is also on the faculty of the PhD in theatre program and
an affiliate of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; she serves as an associate direc-
tor of Barnard’s Center for Translation Studies as well. Her publications include Playing “Nordic”:
The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage (2007),
a coedited anthology Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History (2013), and articles in such journals as
Contemporary Theatre Review, TDR: The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and Theatre Journal. Her
scholarship takes up the intersection between theatre and political/social/aesthetic ideology, perfor-
mative acts and totalitarian regimes, dramaturgy, and cultural translation. Currently, she is writing
a book on liberal humanism and theatrical performance.

Notes

1. In this essay, I am concerned to lay out a wider theoretical grounding for the work of the dramaturg, but since
readers of Theatre Topics may be concerned with pedagogical practices, let me outline the design of a dramaturgy
course aligning itself with my claims here, a course I have undertaken with students in the Barnard College
theatre department (which hosts the theatre major for all Barnard and Columbia University undergraduates),
conceived within my fashioning of a dramaturgy concentration.
The incentive for the Barnard/Columbia instigation of an undergraduate dramaturgy concentration
was the lax educational practice of allowing students to “concentrate” in dramaturgy by undertaking a senior
thesis as production dramaturgs without actually studying either the history or the contemporary practice of
dramaturgy, as no dramaturgy classes were offered. Adding to this problem, literature departments, predominantly
English, supplied the theatre major with much of the more advanced academic coursework, inevitably (and
understandably) representing theatre from an alternative disciplinary perspective, that of “dramatic literature.”
Reifying a sense that intellectual/critical work took place outside the theatre department, which provided artistic
training and introductory surveys mainly of the European and United States canon, this paradigm placed the
dramaturg in an untenable position with regard to stage production: an ornament of decay meant not to interfere
with the production process. Although corresponding circumstances may be pervasive in theatre education
in the United States (at Barnard, I was initially expected to comply with the consensus of local practice, “how
things have always been done here”), I found it vital for the department’s intellectual and artistic creativity,
and especially for the productions the department mounts as part of an educational curriculum, to develop a
program in dramaturgy directly incorporating critical and theoretical work where the student’s gaze is turned
on the ideological and material conditioning/conditions of theatre, theatrical production, and, of course, the
practices and processes of dramaturgy itself.
One of the classes I teach in this program, folded into the category of “Production Dramaturgy” (given
the structure of the theatre curriculum, the course—for now—has to be offered under this title), is specifically
concerned with a practically oriented exploration of aesthetic and cultural theory and devised in two parts. The
first part, “Problematizing Dramaturgy,” provides a critical introduction to the historical and contemporary
role of both the dramaturg and dramaturgy; the second part, “Ideologies and Devising,” motivates the class
to think about dramaturgs as subjects within and of cultural ideological formations (state, society, citizenship,
art, theatre, dramaturgy, representation). What concerns us is to locate the intersections of social and theatrical
normativities, to locate the self in relation to these norms, to articulate non-normative positions with regard
to perceived art/aesthetic “truths” while addressing self-production—as students, citizens, theatre-makers—as
the effect of ideological governance. In a processual way, the students work toward a “performance text” for the
stage, a theatrical text testifying to a dismantling of the ontological and epistemological frameworks of prevailing
conventions. More concretely, the first assignment invites each student to begin to develop a performance text
problematizing the theatrical “subject” (the performer/the character/the spectator/you, the theatre-maker),
specifically in response to readings on ideology by Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, and Göran
Therborn. A second assignment asks the students to reimagine their texts critically, refashioning them as a kind
 For a Skeptical Dramaturgy 185

of performative “assemblage” (we are reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in combination with Donna
Haraway, at this point), making recognizable “layers” (references) to a week’s worth of news reporting (texts,
images) from the New York Times. The subsequent assignments, keeping the idea of layered assemblage in mind,
ask them to incorporate multiple temporalities and then to think about spatiality, always accompanied by
theorists both outside and inside the field of theatre, yet important for opening notions of theatre/performance/
representation/image/form (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, W. J. T. Mitchell; Antonin Artaud, Bertolt
Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Erika Fischer-Lichte). I select both specific
fragments and essays/chapters by these theorists; the theoretical material is rich though not overwhelming,
and I encourage the students to read individually beyond the required material. Working with theoretical texts
engages the students in an intellectually and artistically demanding way, which neither allows a separation of
theory from practice (the majority of students arrive in class both accepting and asserting this distinction) nor
models what form the final, creative performance text should take. As the course progresses, the performance
texts increasingly reflect each student’s interests, artistic sensibilities, and commitments. We analyze the phases
of students’ work continuously and end up with final presentations/performance demonstrations in class. Some
of the students have taken this work out of the classroom, developing it with student performance groups on
campus.

2. During 2013–14, An Enemy of the People was seen in Athens (Athens Festival, July 2013), Venice (Biennale di
Venezia, August 2013), São Paulo (Teatro Paulo Autran, September 2013), Buenos Aires (Festival Internacional
de Buenos Aires, October 2013), New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, November 2013),
Moscow (NET Festival, November 2013), Reims (Comédie de Reims, December 2013), Paris (Théâtre de la
Ville, January/February 2014), Rennes (Théâtre National de Bretagne, March 2014), Siegen (Apollo Theater,
May 2014), Istanbul (Istanbul Theatre Festival, May 2014), and Bergen (Bergen Festival, May/June 2014).

3. Thomas Ostermeier was featured with Simon Critchley in a discussion titled “On Truth (and Lies) in
Democracy,” BAM Fisher Hillman Studio, Brooklyn, New York, 7 November 2013.

4. Although I am pointing to Said’s “worldly humanism” here, I would like to expand this link to works in
performance and theatre studies dealing with the decentralization of “Man,” while challenging the reduction of
politics to a politics of identity. Matthew Causey and Fintan Walsh’s Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political
Subject is a rewarding collection of essays on this topic.

Works Cited

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Bohlen, Celestine. “Use of French Terrorism Law on Railroad Saboteurs Draws Criticism.” New York
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trains.4.18410484.html> (accessed 25 June 2014).

Causey, Matthew, and Fintan Walsh, eds. Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject. New York:
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Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Politics of Truth. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lisa Hochroth.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. 41–81.
186 Hana Worthen

Isherwood, Charles. “An Ibsen Who Rages Over Ritalin and Economic Austerity Plans.” New York Times,
7 November 2013, available at <http://mobile.nytimes.com/images/100000002540913/2013/11/08/
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Lambert, Robert G. “An Enemy of the People: A Friend of the Teacher.” English Journal 54.7 (1965): 626–28.

Mouffe, Chantal. “Politics and the Limits of Liberalism (1993).” Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the
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———. “Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern? (1988).” Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the
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Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.