Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance

Notes

147 Notes Introduction 1. “The Visit to the Sepulchre (Visitatio Sepulchri) from The Regularis Concordia of St. Ethelwold,” in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 27–28. 2. “The Resurrection of The Lord (from Wakefield),” in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 620. 3. The Wakefield audience has just seen Christ incarnated by an actor who arose from the sepulchre and delivered a 107-line complaint. 4. Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 225–26. 5. Gravitational pull is a Newtonian concept; such instantaneous action-at-adistance is inconsistent with the principle of relativity. Thus, in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is not a force acting between distant bodies but the curvature of space-time itself. 6. In the late 1990s astronomers postulated a previously unknown and allpervasive dark energy to explain why the expansion rate of the universe is speeding up rather than slowing down. Einstein left room in his equations for such a “cosmological constant.” 7. “We have been handed a Universe that is overwhelmingly dark to our eyes and our telescopes—one that is roughly three parts dark energy to one part dark matter, with only a pinch of the familiar sprinkled throughout the cosmos like a handful of glitter on a vast sea of dark felt.” Evalyn Gates, Einstein’s Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 4. 8. See Hanna Scolnicov, “Theatre Space, Theatrical Space, and the Theatrical Space Without,” in Themes in Drama IX: The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11–26; Michael Issacharoff, 148 • Notes to Pages 3–4 Discourse as Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Anne Ubersfeld, L’école du spectateur: Lire le théâtre 2 (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1991); Karel Brušák, “Imaginary Action Space in Drama,” in Drama und Theater: TheorieMethode -Gesschichte, ed. Herta Král Schmid and Hedwig Král Schmid (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1991), 144–62; Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), especially 17–23; and William Gruber, Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 9. Marvin Carlson, “Indexical Space in the Theatre,” Assaph 10 (1994): 4. I am grateful to the author for this reference. See also Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), 21–27. 10. Issacharoff, in Discourse as Performance, claims, “Mimetic space does not require mediation; in contrast, diegetic space is mediated by verbal signs (the dialogue ) communicated verbally and not visually” (56). Critiquing such a distinction between perceived (onstage) and conceived (offstage) space, McAuley remarks, “Fictional place is ‘conceived’ whether it is on or off (Nora’s drawing room is not, in fact, a drawing room)” (Space in Performance, 29–30). The distinction between enacted (mimetic) and narrated (diegetic) modes of representation goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics; useful discussions of offstage space in ancient Greek theater can be found in Lowell Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); and Rush Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 11. See, for example, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146–66; and Elinor Fuchs, “Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking Theatre after Derrida,” Performing Arts Journal 9 (1985): 163– 73. Janelle Reinelt, “Staging the Invisible: The Crisis of Visibility in Theatrical Representation ,” Text and Performance Quarterly 14 (1994): 97–107, critiques Phelan’s “utopian” insistence on rupturing the representational economy, writing that “resistance [to the hegemonic] does not lie in denying the power of the visible, but rather in co-opting it” (105). Like Elin Diamond, who in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997) appropriates Irigarayan mimicry and Brechtian gestus to dismantle patriarchal mimesis, Reinelt reclaims representation as a viable political practice. 12. See especially Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” trans. Alan Bass, in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 40–62. Conversely, for Jane Goodall, in Stage Presence (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), “The real challenge may be not to demystify presence, but to discover just how this...