Una Chaudhuri

Private Parts: Sex, Class, and Stage Space in "Miss Julie"

The plot of Miss Julie turns on an unusual conjunction of sexual and spatial determinism, an association which also includes the issue of class. The aristocratic Julie and her valet Jean are literally and figuratively trapped into intercourse when, to avoid being seen together alone, they are forced into hiding in Jeans room. This fateful concealment, which Strindberg is at pains to characterize also as a fated development, renders the disruption of class roles as sexuality, and sexuality (that is, transgressive, forbidden, fatal sexuality) as the inevitable outcome of a momentary and enforced privacy. In acting according to the taboos and dictates of a rigid class society, it would seem, the characters are doomed to transgress two of the orders in which that society inscribes itself, the orders of sexuality and territoriality.

Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas

The scale and complexity of climate change, as well as its often incremental and unspectacular nature, pose formidable obstacles to dramatic representation. Wallace Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors subtly distorts the conventions of the thesis play, or drama of ideas, to reveal the habits of mind that are responsible for our species’ steady progress towards ecological disaster. A ‘drama of bad ideas’ for the Anthropocene, the play also uses some of Shawn’s abiding themes, especially food and sex, to propose a new understanding of the human, beyond psychological subjecthood and socio-political agency: the human as a geophysical force, with behaviours and practices that produce catastrophic ‘scale-effects’ and call for a new species-centric consciousness to cure the ecological myopia of previous group identities.

Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality

This essay uses an animal studies perspective to situate Tracy Letts’s 1996 play Bug at a particularly fraught and complex moment in the long history of an “insect imaginary,” which has variously registered and managed humans’ intense ambivalence toward insects. The complexity includes a dawning recognition—alongside a reluctant admission—that insect species may not be as alien as we have traditionally styled them. In Bug, as in a variety of other recent insect representations, a revisioning of the insect imaginary is linked to a digitally inflected post-humanism in which decentered intelligence and distributed agency offer a welcome alternative to individualistic—selfcentered—modes of political and artistic expression.