• From Wilder’s Our Town (1938) to Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016): Mediatization and the Collapse of the Large Into the Local
• Scott Proudfit (bio)

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...

• 从怀尔德的《我们的小镇》（1938 年）到丘吉尔的《独自逃亡》（2016 年）：中介化和大地向地方的崩溃
• 斯科特·普罗德菲特（生物）

尽管相隔近一个世纪，桑顿·怀尔德的《我们的小镇》（1938 年）和卡里尔·丘吉尔的《独自逃亡》（2016 年）探讨了同一个核心问题：当代世界中地方与大地之间的关系是什么？当然，怀尔德 20 世纪初的小镇新罕布什尔州的世界与丘吉尔 21 世纪初的英国郊区后院大不相同。最显着的区别可能是，在《我们的小镇》（实际上在许多现代戏剧中）中，人物和观众通过将他们的当地经历与更大的社会和政治背景进行富有成效的对话来找到意义和情境，在《独自逃亡》中（以及在最近的许多戏剧中），区分和协商本地与大型之间的关系变得越来越困难。这种差异是由于感觉，在后者的戏剧中，大人物已经崩溃到当地，让角色感到不稳定和疏离，抓住背景和意义，这是一种反映21世纪舞台下生活的迷失方向。

这种从 20 世纪到 21 世纪的观念转变的一个来源，也许是主要来源，是过去二十年的技术革命。在后工业时代的西方，充斥着日常生活的电子媒体源源不断地涌现，导致了地方和大的奇怪融合。这场技术革命的影响是丘吉尔在 2012 年的主题焦点与爱与信息。然而，总体而言，地方和大的融合在她的许多早期作品中都发挥了[End Page 313]重要作用，包括喝醉了说我爱你？(2006),遥远(2000),这是一把椅子(1997), 和Skriker(1994)。更具体地研究《独自逃亡》中描述的日常生活的“中介化”可以帮助确定剧中四位女性表达的恐惧和愤怒的根源，并解释为什么游戏世界（可以说是我们许多人发现自己的世界）今天）与怀尔德的 20 世纪小镇相比，感觉如此不稳定。

媒介化研究是本文大部分内容的学科框架，它对地方和大在过去一个世纪中的变化不感兴趣，而是对我们对地方和大的体验如何变化感兴趣。“本地”和“大”是有意宽泛的术语，意在暗示个人在政治、经济、哲学上与他人以及与更大的机构和更大的全球力量的关系中的无数种方式。例如，这些术语暗示了私人和公共思想和表达的对比尺度；当地语言假释和更大的语言系统；个人与政治代表权和权力；邻里动态与全球运动；微观经济与跨国资本主义；和共享的地方真理与普遍真理。在20世纪的戏剧中，这些类型的大体和局部的寄存器显得独特而连续，允许角色和观众将它们联系起来，并将它们投入到富有成效的对话中，通过局部来接近大体。相比之下，在 21 世纪，由于技术的快速发展和日常生活的媒介化，它们被证明越来越重叠、难以区分和混淆。

戏剧学者并没有忽视最近戏剧中反映的媒介化的影响。在丘吉尔的批评中，虽然很少有研究专门针对电子媒体和技术，但许多批评家提出，在日常生活中遇到和协商地方和大的方式是 20 世纪和 21 世纪戏剧之间的主要区别，并且这种区别得到了例证在丘吉尔的作品中。这种批评的一个特别恰当的例子是 Una Chaudhuri 在二十一世纪戏剧（2016 年）中的一章，其中讨论了丘吉尔的遥远（2000）以及华莱士肖恩的千色草（2009 年）。对于乔杜里来说，易卜生、契诃夫、皮兰德洛和品特等现代剧作家“驯化”了哲学和“定位”思维，将[End Page 314]大人物与当地人进行了对话，从而产生了意义。¹他们可以使抽象而遥远的事物变得具体而接近……