Comparative Drama

Though separated by almost a century, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016) investigate the same central question: what is the relationship between the local and the large in the contemporary world? Of course, the world of Wilder’s early 20th century small town New Hampshire is vastly different from Churchill’s early 21st century English suburban backyard. The most striking difference may be that, whereas in Our Town (and indeed in much of modern drama) the characters and the audience find meaning and situatedness by putting their local experiences into productive conversation with larger social and political contexts, in Escaped Alone (and in much recent drama), it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish and negotiate the relationship between the local and the large. This difference is due to the sense that, in the latter play, the large has collapsed into the local, leaving the characters feeling destabilized and alienated, grasping for context and significance, a disorientation that reflects 21st century life offstage.

One source of this shift in perception from the 20th to the 21st century, perhaps the primary source, is the revolution in technology of the past two decades. The continuous stream of electronic media that has saturated everyday existence in the postindustrial West has led to a bizarre conflation of the local and the large. The effects of this technological revolution were a thematic focus for Churchill with Love and Information in 2012. However, the conflation of the local and the large, in general, plays an [End Page 313] important role in many of her earlier works, including Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006), Far Away (2000), This Is a Chair (1997), and The Skriker (1994). Examining more specifically the “mediatization” of daily life as depicted in Escaped Alone can help identify the source of the fear and rage expressed by the four women of the play and explain why the play world (arguably the world in which many of us find ourselves today) feels so unstable compared to Wilder’s 20th century small town.

Mediatization Studies, the disciplinary frame of much of this essay, is not interested in how the local and the large have changed over the past century but rather how our experience of the local and the large has changed. “Local” and “large” are intentionally broad terms meant to suggest the myriad ways individuals situate themselves in relation to others and in relation to larger institutions and even-larger global forces, politically, economically, philosophically. The terms suggest, for example, the contrasting scales of private and public thought and expression; the local linguistic parole and the larger langue system; personal versus political representation and power; neighborhood dynamics versus global movements; microeconomies versus transnational capitalism; and shared, local truths versus universals. In 20th century drama, these types of registers for the large and local appear distinct yet continuous, allowing characters and audiences to connect them and to put them into productive conversation, to approach the large through the local. In the 21st century, by contrast, they prove increasingly overlapped, indistinguishable, and confused because of rapid technological development and the mediatization of everyday life.

The effects of mediatization as reflected in recent plays has not gone unnoticed by theatre scholars. In Churchill criticism, while little research specifically addresses electronic media and technology, many critics have proposed that the ways the local and the large are encountered and negotiated in daily life is a primary distinction between 20th and 21st century drama, and that this distinction is exemplified in Churchill’s work. A particularly apt example of such criticism is Una Chaudhuri’s chapter in Twenty-First Century Drama (2016), which discusses Churchill’s Far Away (2000) as well as Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009). For Chaudhuri, modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, and Pinter “domesticated” philosophy and “located” thinking, putting [End Page 314] the large into conversation with the local in ways that enabled meaning-making.¹ They could make the abstract and distant concrete and closer...