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waste Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Cen- tury Theater. Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Rizzo. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/li- censes/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2020 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-88-5 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-89-2 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.302.1.00 lccn: 2020938428 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Copyediting: Lily Brewer Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Headlong Dance Theater, The Quiet Circus: River Charrette 2 at Recycled Artist in Residency. Photo by Jillian Jetton. © Headlong Dance Theater. Jessica Rizzo WASTCapitalism and the Dissolution Eof the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater Contents Introduction 15 Prometheus Contrite • Existential Shame 1. Staging Capitalism: Dramatic Surplus and Inefficiency 29 Dramaturgies of Waste • Failures of Sublimation: Harley Granville-Barker • Ibsen: “Life Is Work” • Policing Catharsis: The Passion of Politics and the Politics of Passion in Brecht • Postdramatic Theater/Postideological Theater • Wallace Shawn’s Predramatic/Postdramatic Soliloquies • Elfriede Jelinek, Regietheater, and the Disposable Text • The Merchant’s Contracts: Shoveling Shit 2. War: Abjection and Oblivion 71 Heiner Müller, Hapless Angel • Revolution as Theater/Theater as Revolution • Elfriede Jelinek: Trümmerfrau of Language • Bambiland and the Society of the Spectacle • Rechnitz and the Exterminating Angel of History • Planned Obsolescence: Death of a Salesman • Phallic Coprophilia: Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament 3. Crisis of Imagination: The Anthropocene 109 Chekhov and His Discontents • “The Economy is the Crisis”: Ibsen and Ostermeier’s Enemy of the People • Despoiled Shores • Pathological Superiority: Grasses of a Thousand Colors • Posthuman Otherness • Rachel Rosenthal’s Ecofeminism • Stifters Dinge: Posthuman Theater 4. Debt and the Refugee 135 Fassbinder and West German Schuld • Sarah Kane’s Blasted and the Bedrock of Sexual Difference • Charges: Amnesty and the Unforgivable Epilogue: America 161 Bibliography 163 Acknowledgments This book is the consequence of many inspiring conversations and artistic experiments with cherished mentors, colleagues, and friends. I am indebted to my long-suffering first advisors on this pro- ject, Paul Walsh and Magda Romanska. Magda also played a significant role in my development as a writer by inviting me to contribute to the Theatre Times. My meetings with Paul over the past eight years have sustained me through good times and bad, and I will be forever grateful to him for being my champion and my friend. I have also benefitted from the models and mentorship pro- vided by my other teachers at the Yale School of Drama. Cathe- rine Sheehy, Jim Leverett, Marc Robinson, Gordon Rogoff, Tom Sellar, and Elinor Fuchs have all had a hand in shaping the way I write, the way I think, and the way I experience the theater and the world today. Through my ever-challenging, ever-rewarding work with Robert Woodruff, I learned the importance of trusting my in- stincts, and the power of productive negativity. My dear friend Ilinca Tamara Todoruț read and appraised an early draft of this project. She gave me the courage and the tools to make it the book I truly wanted it to be. I sincerely thank her, and sincerely look forward to returning the favor. Phillip Wilcox assisted me with proofreading and citation management, for which I am thankful. I have had the good fortune of working with many talented editors of both my scholarly and popular work during the years this book was in development. I learned from them all, particu- larly Karen Jurs-Mumby, Allyson Fiddler, Imani Roach, Gelsey Bell, Casey Beal, Cristina Modreanu, and the great Bonnie Mar- ranca, whose own indispensable reflections are liberally quoted in the pages that follow. It has also been a great privilege to work with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, and Lily Brewer at punctum. Elfriede Jelinek’s work is in many ways the heart of this book. I am immensely grateful to her, to her translator Gitta Honeg- ger, and to my Shadow. Eurydice Says collaborators for giving me the opportunity to explore the possibilities of Jelinek’s dram- aturgy in real space and time. Mary Round, Kathleen Dimmick, Mollie Wise, Susy Brickell, Cho Young Wiles, Josephine Pizzi- no, Arianne Recto, Azusa “SheShe” Dance, Eloise Harris, Annie Dauber, Eli Green, Laura Petree, Lizzy Emanuel, Ariel Sibert, and Ashley Chang gave me their time and their faith, and I am beholden to them all. I thank my mother Monica Rizzo for believing in the trans- formative potential of education, and for teaching my extraordi- nary sisters and I to be skeptical of received wisdom. Finally, I thank Mark Lord for his steadiness, his gentleness, and his love. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was waste and void. — Genesis 1:1 Introduction In its clamorous polyvocality, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land can be read as a variety of dramatic text — one with a dense, if dis- persed, form that might have been unrecognizable as drama to readers in 1922 when the poem was first published but which would be all too familiar to twenty-first-century theatergoers acquainted with the bricolage dramaturgies of such playwrights as Heiner Müller and such directors as the Wooster Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte. Eliot quotes liberally, in several languages, from sources ranging from Shakespeare to the Buddha to popu- lar songs of the poet’s day. High culture mixes with low. The sacred becomes entwined with the profane. Snatches of throwa- way dialogue that could have been overheard in any bedroom or any bar come into conversation with the most exalted of ut- terances. No single, authorial voice unifies; the model of con- sciousness the poem proposes is a skittering one. It takes a step in one direction, then pivots before permitting itself to advance too far and sets off in another direction, only to pivot again. In- sofar as each shift in tone or source text represents a foray into a worldview, avenues of inquiry are foreclosed nearly as quickly as they are opened. Eliot’s grace and writerly poise collapse into a scrum of conflicting impulses comprising a self that fundamen- tally lacks confidence in itself. 15 WASTE The poem even struggles to end itself: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot announces.1 Language gets de- moted to matter, to something with heft that can be defensively positioned between the self and the world. Language props up civilization. Language holds it all together and is now itself fall- ing apart. The glue won’t stick. The poet can’t write, only pick up and rearrange the pieces. The poem then concludes several times, rehearsing a mastery it never attains. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, “[w]hy then Ile fit you. Hieonymo’s mad againe,” suggests an acquiescence that truth, even if knowable, is uncommunicable.2 Language cannot overcome this divide. Yet, Eliot chooses to quote Ham- let’s lesser-known urtext rather than the more iconic cultural artifact, which allows both plays to come alive in the reader’s mind; the one invokes the other, and this invocation points to language’s resilience, if not its efficacy. One play will close, one character will die, only to be resurrected and revised by some as yet unknown collaborator. The very impotence of language may speak across the generations, may create the continuity that sustains culture. The penultimate ending, “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata,” comes from the Upanishads, holy text of the Hindu religion, one of the world’s oldest wisdom traditions.3 In his notes, Eliot translates these words as “Give, sympathise, control.”4 Else- where, they have been translated as “give,” “be compassionate,” and “restrain yourselves.”5 In the Upanishad from which Eliot draws it, this tripartite admonition is broken up, delivered by the creator god Prajāpati to his three species of children: gods, men, and demons. Prajāpati repeats the same syllable, Da, three times, and his different categories of offspring hear, or interpret, 1 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005), 81. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 86. 5 Robert Hume, trans., The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 150. 16 INTRODUCTION a different message. In this way, then, to the gods he recom- mends restraint.