Research

My current research focuses on play-making “between the lines.” Addressing the complex, triangulated interplay between text, actor, and audience, I focus on extratextual moments in performance that create, add, enhance, or change textual meaning.

 

Exploring prompt books, performance histories, audience notes, and theater reviews from the early modern period to the present, I theorize a phenomenology of playing and spectatorship that has actors interpreting the texts with their bodies to produce meaning and generate complicity or alienation in the audience. I am particularly interested in how actors’ gendered, raced, and disabled bodies help us to rethink early modern dramatic texts.