Keeping the Violence Out of Sight: Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence

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• Keeping the Violence Out of Sight:Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence
• Richard Gilbert (bio)

Sometimes what we don't see with our own eyes can hit harder than what we do, and for those who create theatre that challenges the potent imbedded systems of violence by which our society oppresses so many of its people, hitting hard is crucial. Contemporary theatremakers are often deeply interested in telling stories that thematize institutional or systemic violence. Many contemporary plays thematize the violent structures under which we live in an attempt to come to terms with them, while many older plays are re-imagined by directors and producers in ways that inject the theme of systemic violence where it might have been only latent in or even absent from the source text. In drama, it is hard to directly represent mass violence. Generally a play will focus on a few characters, some of whom will represent systems of oppression by enacting violence on others who represent the oppressed. When violence is represented mimetically on stage in this way, there is always the danger that the audience will receive it as specific violence against a specific character rather than as part of a broader societal issue.¹

Anyone involved in public discourse, whether on social media or in the mainstream news, will be sadly familiar with the experience of trying to talk about a system but inevitably ending up in a discussion of the specific. All too often, for example, discussions of police violence get derailed by interlocutors treating every example as a singular event rather than as evidence of a systemic problem that needs solving. The problem is that focus on a specific incident obfuscates the systemic issue and can end up being misread as an argument that the problem itself is specific [End Page 131] rather than systemic. That is, no matter how many examples there are of police murder, some people will insist on referring to each as "one bad apple." Representing systemic violence onstage through direct mimetic illusions of specific acts of violence (so, for example, showing a cop killing a person of color or a homophobe brutalizing a queer character) can generate a similar cognitive challenge for an audience because we are used to identifying with individual characters. The shock of violence can exacerbate the problem as it tends to increase our empathic response, making it harder for even a critically engaged audience to focus out to the systemic issues at play.

Offstage violence can be a potent solution to the problem of representing systemic and institutional violence. I will argue that there are three primary qualities of offstage violence that make it so effective in this regard. The first is that there are metaphorical links between offstage violence and systemic violence. Like systems of oppression, offstage violence works "behind the scenes." Further, because we do not see the perpetrator enact the violence, there is a faceless quality that again suggests a system rather than an instance. The other two qualities which I want to discuss are a bit more theoretical, but no less effective for all that. Of these, the first is offstage violence's capacity to create tension and the other is its capacity to limit the collapse of aesthetic distance.

There are many contemporary plays and productions which have used offstage violence to solve this problem, from the activist, like Sarah Shourd's The Box or Belarus Free Theatre's Time of Women, to the more philosophical, like Jennifer Haley's The Nether. In this article I will start by discussing a 2013 production of Lee Blessing's Lonesome Hollow, which deals with the American prison industrial complex, and a 2008 production of Marlowe's Edward II, which used offstage violence to effectively focus attention on systemic violence against LGBTQ people. It was in discussing these two plays that I first noticed the connections between institutional and offstage violence, and my preference is always to discuss specific productions when I am making an argument about how things might be staged. But my argument can be extended to scripts, not just productions; I will present a reading of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman that demonstrates...