Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene

Abstract This article situates two works by contemporary American playwright Adam Rapp – Faster (2002) and Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (2014) – in the wider context of the different traditions of ecological theatre that emerged in the United States in the twentieth century. These traditions can be characterised by their distinct spatial orientation, while similarly shifting focus away from the centrality of representing character and human subjectivity. Contemporary eco-drama retains this spatial orientation established by the landscape play (Gertrude Stein) and environmental theatre (Richard Schechner) but breaks with their displacement of character by developing an aesthetic mode which stages the formation of human subjectivity as deeply intertwined with concrete places. This article shows how Rapp’s plays turn places into “symptomatic spaces” in Una Chaudhuri’s sense that signify a deep interdependence between human subjectivity and nonhuman nature. My reading focuses on how Rapp’s plays contribute to the formation and the conceptualisation of a distinctly “Anthropocenic imaginary” in contemporary American drama.