Tragedy? Ecologies of Suffering in Contemporary Tragic Drama

1 “Less-Than-Human” Tragedy? Ecologies of Suffering in Contemporary Tragic Drama Kelli Lynn Shermeyer Newark, Delaware Honors B.A., University of Delaware, 2012 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia May, 2019 2 ABSTRACT “‘Less-than-Human’ Tragedy?” forges an intellectual and performative alliance between tragic drama and the critical school of posthuman theory, emphasizing their shared interest in entangled agencies, cyclical destruction, irreparable loss, and the interactions of human and nonhuman entities. I explore what we stand to gain by broadening the category of tragic actors to include figures often indexed as “less-than- human” (or “less-than-fully-human”): children, animals, and forces of nature. My readings of contemporary plays focus on the reverberation of suffering across ecosystems composed of human and nonhuman actors. This approach both underscores tragedy’s historical commitment to acting out the neuroses and recoveries within a more-than- human community, as Wole Soyinka writes, while inviting us to consider nonhuman characters in our calculations of tragic suffering and responsibility. The project ultimately illustrates how tragedy remains central to theorizing how lives come to matter: one of the most urgent and foundational inquiries of the humanities. In my work, “posthumanism” covers a range of critical projects that challenge humanity’s place as the referential center of being, including thinkers from feminist science studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, queer theory, and performance studies, among others. These fields tend to emphasize our embodied entanglement with entities who are ultimately unable to be fully assimilated into human systems of meaning. By focusing my analysis on the “less-than-human” characters that populate contemporary tragedies, my work also engages with the branch of theater studies interested in divesting performance of its anthropocentrism by imagining more inclusive forms of ecologically conscious theater. My first chapter argues that the 3 paradoxically not-quite-human children in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman challenge the value of human survival in worlds that seems bent on self-destruction. In the second chapter, I use Edward Albee’s The Goat and Peter Shaffer’s Equus to demonstrate the difficulties of escaping anthropocentrism in human attempts to forge more ethical relationships with animals. The third chapter considers the vital and violent forces of nature in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides that embody both the catastrophes inherent to all dynamic systems and the unassimilable, impersonal materiality of the more-than-human world. My analysis shows how posthuman theories that trace the entanglement of matter and meaning enrich our understanding of contemporary tragedy, just as the narrative structures of tragic drama enable a clearer articulation of challenges we face in the Anthropocene. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction 38 Chapter One Out of the Mouths of Babes: Tragic Children in Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh 98 Chapter Two Putting the “Cat” in Catastrophe: Tragic Animals in Martin McDonagh, Edward Albee, and Peter Shaffer 163 Chapter Three The Future is Fey: Forces of Nature in Wole Soyinka and Caryl Churchill 220 Coda Tragic Art for Present Living 226 Appendix 231 Bibliography 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It seems especially fitting to begin a dissertation focused on articulations of our entanglement and co-dependence by acknowledging the many people who have nurtured and enriched this project. I’m immensely grateful to be in a community of scholars and collaborators who are incredibly generous with their time and thoughts. Thanks first to my inimitable director, Rita Felski, for guiding this process with kindness and rigor. Under her tutelage, I’ve learned much about being an engaged, curious, and generous reader and writer. Thanks to committee members Victor Luftig and Michael Levenson for their constant encouragement and excellent suggestions throughout. I’m also grateful to my writing group, Caleb Agnew, DeVan Ard, Emelye Keyser, and Grace Vasington, for their incredible patience and erudite comments on my work. Lara Musser, Rebekah Slodounik, and Samantha Wallace have provided not only helpful editorial suggestions, but also essential moral support along the way. I especially want to thank Steve Arata, Alison Booth, Steve Cushman, Colette Dabney, Debjani Ganguly, Dan Kinney, Kate Kostelnik, Michael Levenson, Katherine Maus, Vicki Olwell, Jim Seitz, Patricia Sullivan, Randy Swift, and Brandon Walsh for facilitating the many opportunities I’ve had at UVa, as both a researcher and teacher. Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, and mentors that have provided encouragement and stimulating conversations, including Sophie Abramowitz, James Ascher, Franc Auld, Sarah Berkowitz, Kyle Bishop, Jeremy Boggs, Jesse Bordwin, Carrie J. Cole, Alyssa Collins, Anastasia Curley, Andrew Ferguson, Kelly Fleming, Annie Galvin, Ben Gillespie, Ali Glassie, Jen Gunnels, Danielle Hillanbrand, Barry Houlihan, Christian Howard, Margaret Kelleher, Katherine Kerrane, Kevin Kerrane, Steve Kirvan, Isabelle 6 Lachat, Eva Latterner, Purdom Linblad, Lotta Lofgren, Jasmine Mahmoud, Adrienne Oliver, Alayne Peterson, Liz Philips, Holly Pickett, Tyler Jo Smith, Erin Stoneking, Ethan Reed, Angela Tenga, Elliott Turley, Miranda Wilson, and many others. Deep gratitude to my brilliant mentor, Bree Luck, for always holding space for me and providing me opportunities to hone my artistic craft alongside my intellectual one. A warm expression of thanks is due to the Keogh Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures, the PVi Collective, the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, and the Scholars’ Lab, for funding my research. My experience at both the 2016 Irish Seminar on “Classical Influences” and the 2017 Mellon School on “Research, Pedagogy, and Activism” fundamentally shaped how this dissertation developed. I’m particularly grateful to my writing group at the Mellon School, led by Larry Switzky, for providing very helpful feedback on my first chapter. I’m immensely grateful to Katie Martin (and Josh and Jack), Danielle Pisechko (and Harry and Gus), Tyler Rodriguez (and Melissa and Arden), and Alita Tulsi for their unending encouragement, as well as to my goddaughter Cassie (and her parents Dan and Cara Spinosa), for reminding me of the vast potential for creativity and kindness we humans still have in us. Thanks to my parents and Andrew for all the love and good humor throughout this and every stage of my journey. And finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kurt Meusel (and Elise) for the love, support, patience, and much else besides. 7 INTRODUCTION This dissertation argues that the landscape of tragic drama can be remapped through an attunement to theories of the posthuman, which—like tragedy—ask us to reconsider our models of agency and contingency. I explore what we stand to gain by broadening the category of tragic actors to include figures often indexed as “less-than- human” (or “less-than-fully-human”): children, animals, and forces of nature. My readings of contemporary plays focus on the reverberation of suffering across ecologies composed of human and nonhuman actors. This approach underscores tragedy’s historical commitment to acting out the neuroses and recoveries within a community, as Wole Soyinka writes, while inviting us to consider nonhuman characters in our calculations of tragic suffering and responsibility.1 An intervention of this kind emphasizes how tragic actions affect not only humans, but nonhumans, whose tragic dimensions have been often, if not wholly, neglected, and how possibilities for action are conditioned by the interactions of a wider ecology of entities. “‘Less-than-Human’ Tragedy?” ultimately contends that contemporary tragedy is an ethically necessary vehicle for ecological awareness and social justice because tragedy—and scholarship on tragedy—teaches us about how lives come to matter. In my work, “posthumanism” covers a range of critical projects that challenge humanity’s place as the central reference point in ontology, including thinkers from feminist science studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, queer theory, and performance studies, among others.2 These fields tend to emphasize our embodied entanglement with entities who cannot ultimately be fully assimilated into 8 human systems of meaning. There’s a gap, argues Timothy Morton in Humankind (2017), between the symbiotic real—ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman in our biosphere—and reality—the human-correlated world.3 My dissertation explores various aspects of the space between reality and the real; as a narrative or dramaturgical structure, tragedy is one way that we correlate human agency with the seemingly incommensurable activities of other-than-human forces. For example, Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994) imagines the kind of being that would arise from the correlation of entities such as natural environments, global capitalism, war, and time. Edward Albee’s The Goat (2003) and Nick Jones’ Trevor (2014) both explore how we might relate to animals whose desires, despite our best efforts, remain always at least partially unintelligible to

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