• Keeping the Violence Out of Sight:Representing Systems of Oppression with Offstage Violence
• Richard Gilbert (bio)

Sometimes what we don't see with our own eyes can hit harder than what we do, and for those who create theatre that challenges the potent imbedded systems of violence by which our society oppresses so many of its people, hitting hard is crucial. Contemporary theatremakers are often deeply interested in telling stories that thematize institutional or systemic violence. Many contemporary plays thematize the violent structures under which we live in an attempt to come to terms with them, while many older plays are re-imagined by directors and producers in ways that inject the theme of systemic violence where it might have been only latent in or even absent from the source text. In drama, it is hard to directly represent mass violence. Generally a play will focus on a few characters, some of whom will represent systems of oppression by enacting violence on others who represent the oppressed. When violence is represented mimetically on stage in this way, there is always the danger that the audience will receive it as specific violence against a specific character rather than as part of a broader societal issue.¹

Anyone involved in public discourse, whether on social media or in the mainstream news, will be sadly familiar with the experience of trying to talk about a system but inevitably ending up in a discussion of the specific. All too often, for example, discussions of police violence get derailed by interlocutors treating every example as a singular event rather than as evidence of a systemic problem that needs solving. The problem is that focus on a specific incident obfuscates the systemic issue and can end up being misread as an argument that the problem itself is specific [End Page 131] rather than systemic. That is, no matter how many examples there are of police murder, some people will insist on referring to each as "one bad apple." Representing systemic violence onstage through direct mimetic illusions of specific acts of violence (so, for example, showing a cop killing a person of color or a homophobe brutalizing a queer character) can generate a similar cognitive challenge for an audience because we are used to identifying with individual characters. The shock of violence can exacerbate the problem as it tends to increase our empathic response, making it harder for even a critically engaged audience to focus out to the systemic issues at play.

Offstage violence can be a potent solution to the problem of representing systemic and institutional violence. I will argue that there are three primary qualities of offstage violence that make it so effective in this regard. The first is that there are metaphorical links between offstage violence and systemic violence. Like systems of oppression, offstage violence works "behind the scenes." Further, because we do not see the perpetrator enact the violence, there is a faceless quality that again suggests a system rather than an instance. The other two qualities which I want to discuss are a bit more theoretical, but no less effective for all that. Of these, the first is offstage violence's capacity to create tension and the other is its capacity to limit the collapse of aesthetic distance.

There are many contemporary plays and productions which have used offstage violence to solve this problem, from the activist, like Sarah Shourd's The Box or Belarus Free Theatre's Time of Women, to the more philosophical, like Jennifer Haley's The Nether. In this article I will start by discussing a 2013 production of Lee Blessing's Lonesome Hollow, which deals with the American prison industrial complex, and a 2008 production of Marlowe's Edward II, which used offstage violence to effectively focus attention on systemic violence against LGBTQ people. It was in discussing these two plays that I first noticed the connections between institutional and offstage violence, and my preference is always to discuss specific productions when I am making an argument about how things might be staged. But my argument can be extended to scripts, not just productions; I will present a reading of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman that demonstrates...

• 让暴力远离视线：用幕后暴力代表压迫制度
• 理查德·吉尔伯特（简介）

有时，我们亲眼所见的事情可能比我们亲眼所见的事情造成更大的打击，对于那些创造戏剧来挑战我们社会压迫如此多人民的强大的内在暴力制度的人来说，严厉打击是至关重要的。当代戏剧制作人通常对讲述以制度性或系统性暴力为主题的故事非常感兴趣。许多当代戏剧以我们生活的暴力结构为主题，试图与它们达成妥协，而许多老戏剧则被导演和制片人重新想象，注入了系统性暴力的主题，而这些主题可能只潜伏在戏剧中。甚至源文本中不存在。在戏剧中，很难直接表现大规模暴力。一般来说，一部戏剧会集中在几个角色上，其中一些角色会通过对代表被压迫者的其他人实施暴力来代表压迫制度。当暴力以这种方式在舞台上模仿时，总是存在观众将其视为针对特定角色的特定暴力而不是更广泛的社会问题的一部分的危险。¹

任何参与公共话语的人，无论是在社交媒体上还是在主流新闻中，都会不幸地熟悉这样的经历：试图谈论一个系统，但不可避免地最终陷入对具体细节的讨论。例如，关于警察暴力的讨论经常会因为对话者将每个例子都视为单一事件而不是作为需要解决的系统性问题的证据而脱轨。问题在于，对特定事件的关注会混淆系统性问题，并最终可能被误读为问题本身是特定的[第 131 页]而不是系统性的论点。也就是说，无论有多少警察谋杀的例子，有些人都会坚持将每个例子称为“一个坏苹果”。通过对特定暴力行为的直接模仿幻觉来表现舞台上的系统性暴力（例如，展示警察杀死有色人种或恐同者残酷对待酷儿角色）可能会给观众带来类似的认知挑战，因为我们习惯于识别与个别字符。暴力的冲击可能会加剧问题，因为它往往会增加我们的同理心反应，甚至使批判性参与的观众更难关注正在发生的系统性问题。

台下暴力可以成为解决系统性和制度性暴力问题的有效解决方案。我认为，台下暴力具有三个主要品质，使其在这方面如此有效。首先，台下暴力和系统性暴力之间存在隐喻联系。与压迫制度一样，台下暴力也在“幕后”发挥作用。此外，因为我们没有看到肇事者实施暴力，所以有一种不露面的特质，再次暗示了一个系统而不是一个实例。我想讨论的另外两个品质更具理论性，但同样有效。其中，第一个是台外暴力制造紧张的能力，另一个是它限制审美距离崩溃的能力。

有许多当代戏剧和作品都使用台下暴力来解决这个问题，从激进的，如莎拉·舒尔德的《盒子》或白俄罗斯自由剧院的《妇女的时间》，到更具哲学性的，如詹妮弗·哈利的《下界》。在本文中，我将首先讨论 2013 年制作的李·布莱辛 (Lee Blessing) 的《孤独山谷》 (Lonesome Hollow)，该片讲述的是美国监狱工业综合体，以及 2008 年制作的马洛 (Marlowe) 制作的《爱德华二世》(Edward II)，该片利用幕后暴力有效地将注意力集中在针对 LGBTQ 人群的系统性暴力上。正是在讨论这两部戏剧时，我第一次注意到制度暴力和舞台外暴力之间的联系，当我争论事情如何上演时，我总是倾向于讨论具体的作品。但我的论点可以扩展到剧本，而不仅仅是制作；我将阅读马丁·麦克唐纳的《枕头人》，展示……