Metatheatre and Dramaturgies of Reception in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present...

Abstract

If metatheatre is having a ‘moment’, it is one that reflects the character of the age – a time of endless parody and deconstruction. Distinct from the often light-hearted pop cultural ‘meta’, however, the current moment is also characterized by ceaseless and endemic violence, a fact inevitably covered over when the mirror otherwise turned towards the world outside is directed only inwards. This article asks what happens when these two aspects of the contemporary come together: how does the metatheatrical form ‘do’ violence and to what effect? To answer, one particular metadrama is examined, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Afrika, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915, as performed at the Soho Rep theatre in New York in 2012. The play depicts a company of actors attempting to devise a performance about the little-known colonial genocide of the Herero by German colonizers. As an explicit work of metatheatre, Drury’s play is a striking example of the affordances that the genre offers when it comes to representing (or non-representing) extreme violence on stage.