Creative Interpretation and the Politics of Failure

In this article, I ask what happens to theatrical performance when it fails. By describing a performance as “failed,” I do not necessarily imply its normative dismissal – as a “flawed” enactment or an artistic vision not properly executed. Instead, I use failure as a conceptual starting point for the articulation of alternative meaning-making practices. In this sense, failure is a form of creative interpretation that capitalizes on performance’s constitutive contingency, its structural unreliability that for many is part of its appeal, the very “magic” only a gathering of live bodies can create. Specifically, the article looks at two recent US American plays and one musical in order to discuss the theatrical politics of failure: Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project (2000), Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What (2014), and Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012). By discussing the ways in which these pieces and their performances creatively address failure, I point to three formal and cultural dimensions in which failure can be mobilized theatrically: first, failure problematizes the easy formal subsumption of performance under production, pointing to the ways in which a specific performance may not adequately actualize the conceptual work of the production, be it because audiences intervene in ways not intended by the production or because performers deviate from the production’s script in one way or another. Second, failure can be mobilized to reveal tacit cultural conventions or standards of success that entrench particular (classist, racist, sexist, ableist, etc.) normative behaviors. And third, failure can enable more creative approaches to the relationship between the labor of theater practitioners and its exchange value for spectators, who paid – at least – the price of a theater ticket and typically expect some form of artistic professionalism as remuneration.