Abstract

Adrift: petites histoires/little stories for children and lovers and renegades of the american revolution -- a five-act play with a dramaturgical excursus-- explores the relation between text and counter-text, and the intersection of identity, history, myth, and spatial perception in performance. The dramaturgical excursus maps the wor(l)ds of play which shape the playtext, serving as an intertext and counter-text to Adrift , and engaging the discourses (spatial, historical, bodily, and linguistic) which orbit and construct it. In Adrift , six actors play multiple parts, attempting to make sense of themselves and each other as they traverse a desert landscape in search of adventure, drama, utopia, and home. Disparate scenes and characters perform in a shared theatrical space: a sandbox serves . as playground, desert, utopia, and hieroglyph to each character who wanders into it. Adrift introduces outcasts, runaways, and actors-- in alternating states of exodus, exile, and odyssey--converging upon the metonymic and mythic American cities of Paris, El Dorado, and Washington, D.C. The play employs fragmentary collage structure, while subverting the genre of historical re-enactment. Adrift shifts back and forth in narrative time, space, and memory as identities and scenes shift, and as stories clash, intersect, or correspond to one another. Lacunae and aporiae haunt the wanderers' versions of their past, present, and future selves and histories; to fill in the gaps, characters suture personal narrative to myth in the reconstruction of the self