수행성의 재현: 사라 룰의 극에 나타난 인용과 반복

This essay discusses Sarah Ruhl’s actor characters in her metatheatrical plays, Passion Play and Stage Kiss, in terms of the ritualized performance of cultural norms and texts. Ruhl thematizes what it means for an actor to perform a script, both cultural and theatrical, using the Theatrum Mundi metaphor in order to dramatize the reality-stage continuum in which drama and real life replicate each other. The characters’ performance of cultural norms repeatedly conflates with that of theatrical conventions as the stage iterates and cites the world, and vice versa. Echoing Ruhl’s notion of writing as translation, the two plays cite the conventions of theatre, appropriating motifs and themes of mystery plays as well as dramatic texts from the past. Drawing on the discourse of performativity, this essay suggests that characters’ onstage performance becomes a locus for change through the process of surrogation and the ritualized reiteration of conventions. The characters transform the stage into a liminal space in which they can reconstruct their identity and thus bring about a reconstitution of their relation to cultural norms.