Labor Out of Time: Forensic Performance in Kirsten Greenidge's Greater Good and Fullbright's Tacoma

The final scene of kirsten greendige's Greater Good (2019) unfolds at the chronological beginning of its story. The audience, having been physically led throughout Boston's Commonwealth School for over two hours, witnesses to the economic collapse of the fictional school of the play's narrative, experiences the climactic confrontation that the play had heretofore alluded to: an explosive parent council meeting in which the parents despairingly discuss financial straits and debate possible solutions. Suddenly and unilaterally, the council's "scribner," Ann, decides to send an email to the school's entire listserv announcing that all tuition is waived. The other parents on the council, utterly shocked and horrified at Ann's choice, are stricken to silence as she responds,

I started thinking.Do we live by our mission?Do we let it push down into our bedrock? Or does it scatter to the wind?I have the ability to say "here":I have the ability to say "come."So I did.I uncurled my fist.No permission.No permission.Yes to angry.Yes to more. There is a way.To give what exists here.Because it is good.Gordon, it is good.There is a way to make room for more. But for that to happen.We must all shift.¹

After a beat of stunned silence, Michael, one of the other parents of color on the council, lunges to attack her, restrained by several of the others. Soon, everyone's phones begin to ping incessantly with text messages from the parents who received the email. Another parent, Kim, turns to Ann and resentfully tells her, "Please / Just take notes." Then, as in every scene that had preceded this one, the actors freeze in tableau, and the action returns to the present, mediated by "Agents" in black suits who, in between scenes, have been elaborating on the architectural history of the building to the audience as if advertising to bidders in a real estate auction.

As the course of the play has demonstrated, Ann's actions proved catastrophic to the financial solvency of Gleason Street, the fictionalized idealistic

Figure 1.

Christine/Ann, played by Rachel Cognata, from Kirsten Greenidge's Greater Good, staged by Company ONE Theatre, July-August 2019. Photo by Natasha Moustache.

Montessori-inspired private school that serves as the setting within the walls of the real Commonwealth School. And yet we understand Ann's actions to be heroic and justified, effecting a quasi-revolutionary collapse of a system that had come to lose its purpose, mired in teacher underpayment, marginalization of low-income families, and neoliberal-multiculturalist tokenization to obfuscate material disparities among its racially and sexually minoritized. Ann's call for a "yes to more" and "We all must shift" demands an expanded grid of intelligibility, for a radical reimagining beyond the material constraints of the privatized funding structures that Gleason Street has historically relied on.

Greater Good does not offer a realist solution, but rather one that is nevertheless simultaneously speculative and concrete. Its epilogue, which I will later describe in greater detail, is more of a utopian yearning, a participatory, speculative deus ex machina. Greater Good does not offer so much an answer as it does a curious analytic, a temporal archaeology of labor. Through its site-specific staging that guides its audience through corridors of rooms of an actual school to witness scenes of conflict that transpired in the chronology of the play, interact with artifacts and ephemera strewn across the space, and sometimes interact directly with characters in the play's "present," Greater Good takes an approach to theater that is at once forensic and gamic.

Seventy years later, on the science fictional space station Tacoma, we see a speculative world where the privatization of education in Greater Good has reached a dystopian zenith. Much as Greater Good's audience moved through the abandoned halls of the Gleason Street School to witness the interactions of its teachers and parents, the player of the video game Tacoma (2017) moves...