Ruined: From Spectacle to Action

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2020

Lynn Nottage’s award-winning play Ruined (2007) dialectically dramatizes how the genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the deadliest genocide since the Holocaust—must be understood within the context of global capitalism. However, as the play critically suggests, the dominant centers of global capitalism disavow their responsibility for this genocide by exclusively focusing upon and fetishizing sexual assault. This article explores how Ruined critiques Western discourses on African genocides, a critique animated by Afropessimism, a theory that challenges normative understandings of genocide. As Afropessimists argue and Ruined dramatizes, Black genocide is not a historically bounded event, but rather, a structure that enables the modern world.

Journal of University of Human Development, 2019

Lynn Nottage's Ruined, a Pulitzer Prize play, tackles the plight of women's survival during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The play is a loud scream for the whole world to view the physical violence of women and hear their traumatic memories, hoping that this attempt might save them from their disastrous lives resulting from the brutalities of civil war. In this play, women are portrayed beyond victims of the political and armed conflicts as they serve as a reflection of a serious issue that threatens the human race in general: the continuing dehumanization whereby women are considered minorities and the "others," even within their own society. By applying a critical analysis technique, the current paper aims to shed light on women's experience of their violated bodies and their unspeakable suffering in the context of their trauma.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is recognized as " the rape capital of the world. " (UN-news center) During the Civil War in Congo, rape and sexual assault had applied as potent weapons to attain military and economical purposes. The sexual violence perpetrated against women had been brutal, and it had resulted in physical and social destruction and psychological trauma. Nottage's choice to set Ruined in the Democratic Republic of Congo was guided by the severe attitude towards women during the civil war, portraying the female characters as the victims of the war. The study is a brief description of women's situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, it concerns of how the female playwright Lynn Nottage depicts Congolese women's social struggles, psychological traumas, and physical destruction. The research also discusses the motives and the purposes of writing about a sensitive subject as the violence against women. Consequently, it applies a feminist reading of the text, and it is supported by numerous academic journals, books, articles, and reports from international organizations. It concludes that Lynn Nottage succeeded in presenting the violence against women on stage.

YAEL FARBER’S MOLORA AND COLLEEN WAGNER’S THE MONUMENT AS POST-CONFLICT REDRESS THEATER BRENDA CARR VELLINO AND SARAH GABRIELLA WAISVISZ If transitional justice is “a new discipline in human rights” (Andrieu 2010), theater is increasingly recognized as a medium in which unresolved human rights claims and transitional justice questions might be compellingly represented (Becker 2013, 14, 12). However, as Paul Rae points out, there is no one-to-one correspondence between theater and human rights (2009, 71). Yet the metaphors of theater practice are rich indicators of their potential collaboration. Theater ofers to the artistic and production teams, performers, and audience members alike the opportunity to try out, rehearse, and stage responses to mass violence, even if the implicated societies are not ready to enact them through legislation. Theorist of transitional justice Judy Barsalou emphasizes that this work requires repeated eforts from multiple, interdisciplinary angles as part of a long-term process (2005, 1, 8, 11). We are interested in the ways redress theater can work as an adjunct to the legal and quasi-legal mandate of oicial transitional initiatives: it can rehearse the reckoningwith human rights violations and/or their aftermaths; create rituals of grief and mourning; contribute to the countermemory archive; imagine what coexistence or reconciliation might look like between former antagonists; and function as a microcosm of complex negotiations between victim/survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and/or beneficiaries. Playwrights responding to human rights violations or to transitional justice efforts often point to unresolved issues in excess of institutional mechanisms of social redress. At one and the same time, they evoke what commissions and tribunals cannot do and the necessity of doing redress work into the future. COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 40.3 Summer 2013 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © West Chester University 2013

Women rape at warfare was considered a consequence of war in the social, literary and political world for a long period of time. Some criminals of rape escaped justice and others were persecuted on the basis that they were involved in mass rape because it was a natural consequence of war. But, women are targeted with rape in time of war because they are the symbolic representation of a culture, ethnicity, and the unifying fabric of their people and nation. The objective of this paper is to show that war rape is not a result of war; instead it is a means of human destruction through moral attack and emasculation. It aims to show that women rape in warfare is neither a misogynist act nor a sexual violence but it is a pre-planned weapon used strategically and systematically to fulfill certain political and military agenda. The study focuses on the sexual abuse of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo in time of war in Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize play, Ruined (2007). The study applies Jonathan Gottschall's Strategic Rape theory, which highlights war rape as a pre-planned military strategy. The enemy emasculates men and attacks them morally by raping their women. Consequently, men's failure to protect their women causes them to give up resistance, leave their lands and families because of shame and humiliation. The study concludes that women rape in time of war is a tactic followed by conquerors intentionally to facilitate and guarantee the achievement of certain pre-planned goals as was the case of mass rape in the DRC.

College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 2013

Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, a play which probably dates from 1592 but has reached posterity in a mangled form, enacts the incorporation of religious and state politics in the theatre. Through a sequence of short scenes characterized by senseless brutality and black humor, Marlowe revisits one of the darkest episodes of French history, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which took place on the 24 th and 25 th August 1572. Dramatizing the slaughter of thousands of Protestants by Catholics, the play not only reflects on the significance of massacre as a political term for an increasingly absolutist Renaissance Europe but also translates the violence of massacre into aesthetic form. Itself alien within the body of Marlowe's dramatic works, The Massacre at to recent wars and atrocities and rejoice in the irony of the play. This paper seeks to investigate the play's ability to convey political thought and provoke contemporary audiences by reading it together with Delaveau and Mitterer's adaptations. The challenge of reworking the Massacre for our age involves the question of the theatre's potential to expose the audience to the horror of history.

2022

This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century. Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre, Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works “Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview Conclusion

2021

The dissertation Topographies of Cruelty: Radical Performances in South African and British Theatre, maps physical, social, political, aesthetic, and psychological landscapes of cruelty performed on the body, in the imaginary, in language, in performers, and on the stages through radical theatre performances. By identifying and locating the forms, features, and functions of cruelty employed in the selected plays, this dissertation aims to provide a valuable contribution to the field of literary and cultural studies and to discourses on global violence, crisis, and oppression, the power of literature, and the human capacity for kindness in the face of terror. It also attempts to investigate forms of cruelty in South African and in British theatre on equal terms, thereby countering the hegemonic Eurocentric bias by taking a decolonial, feminist stance. The radical performances investigated in this doctoral thesis render extreme acts of cruelty and confront their readers and audiences, as witnesses, with actually exercised or experienced pain and violence. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse (1980) and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) deal with psychological cruelty, verbal cruelty, and cruelty in the imagination. Yaël Farber’s A Woman in Waiting (1999), Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise (2000), and He Left Quietly (2002), as well as Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament (2005), in turn, negotiate extraordinary and ordinary acts of cruelty as well as life-in-crisis on stage as a conscious mode of giving testimony to committed atrocities and inflicted trauma in recent South African history. The performances #JustMen (2018), a South African workshop play against gender-based violence, and Mojisola Adebayo’s The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (2017), a theatrical response to the Black Lives Matter movement, are both collective activist pieces advocating for social and political change.

Hromadske International, 2019

Molodyi Teatr London, a Ukrainian-British theater group, is rapidly earning a name for itself as the migrant cabaret par excellence in the United Kingdom. Intending to deliver migrants’ voices – and Ukrainian stories – to the stage, Olesya Khromeychuk, theater member and teaching fellow in Modern European History at King’s College London, spoke with Hromadske about their productions and movements. https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/this-british-theatre-is-bringing-ukrainian-culture-to-the-fore