UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Notes from a Fugitive City: Situated Theater in Neoliberal Los Angeles

By

Guy Zimmerman

Doctor of Philosophy in Drama

University of California, Irvine, 2015

Professor Bryan Reynolds, Chair

In the context of L.A.’s countercultural theatre scene in the neoliberal 1980s, this dissertation explores resonances between tragic drama, democracy and finance. Using Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as paradigmatic of a postmodern “neo-tragic” drama, I focus on a sequence of Beckett-influenced plays linked to L.A.—The Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard, Mud by Maria Irene Fornés, Storyland by John Steppling and The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice by Reza Abdoh—to show how the city’s roots in the financial speculation of the late 19th Century continue to mark it as a cultural milieu. Situated between what Donna Haraway calls “the God trick” of abstract thinking, and the “coin trick” of reductive binarisms based in money, I further show how these plays trouble the standard division of contemporary theater into dramatic and postdramatic aesthetic regimes. The central argument of this dissertation, which is also its critical intervention, is that theater cannot be fully understood without examining its persistent conversation with the social object of money—with, in other words, the broad domain of the financial. By financial, I point far beyond the banal topic of funding, and gesture toward the modes of financialized thought, sociality, experience, materiality, and life characterizing the social worlds of the Anthropocene. I locate these relationships in the situated, post-Beckettian plays I analyze, which are linked to L.A. as a center of finance and entertainment, and therefore to the production of neoliberalism as a sociocultural experience. I trace the link between theater and ethics, meanwhile, to a contradictory both/and embrace of the ceremonial and the mimetic aspects of the art form. These lines of inquiry converge to situate countercultural theater of 1980s L.A. within a larger shift in the West from episteme to techne as the dominant mode of knowing, a shift with broad implications for thought and politics. I conclude by pointing toward how the situated L.A. aesthetic pertains to the new modes of political protest and activism (e.g., the Zapatistas, Anonymous, and the Arab Spring) by which oppressed populations are seeking to mitigate the social and environmental injustices of our new Gilded Age.