Abstract:

Two plays focusing on the postincarceration experiences of sex offenders opened in 2018: Life Jacket Theatre Company's America Is Hard to See and Bruce Norris's Downstate. Both plays ask spectators to recognize the humanity of sex offenders while also keeping in mind the harm they caused. The questions at the heart of these plays are ultimately about ethics and space: how close do we as a society want to allow sex offenders? These plays stage the movement, space, and time—the spatiotemporality—of postincarceration carceral geographies and the embodied state of what I term "criminalized liminality." In this article, I pursue a two-pronged approach to examine how these plays explore the spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality: primarily, I employ critical spatial perspectives to address how the focus on the ethics of space in America and Downstate emphasizes theatre itself as a space of ethical engagement for artists and audiences; and, secondarily, that as a result of their content and form, each play invites spectators to consider what it means to act on and offstage. I ultimately conclude that although these plays invite consideration of alternatives to the criminal punishment system like abolition, their real power lies in their ultimate ambivalence. Each unsettles spectators without providing clear answers. The spatiotemporality of criminalized liminality and the slippage created by acting produce a certain generative uncertainty.

 抽象：

2018 年上演了两部专注于性犯罪者监禁后经历的戏剧：Life Jacket Theatre Company 的《America Is Hard to See》和布鲁斯·诺里斯 （Bruce Norris） 的《Downstate》。这两部剧都要求观众认识到性犯罪者的人性，同时也要牢记他们造成的伤害。这些戏剧的核心问题最终是关于道德和空间的：作为一个社会，我们想要允许性犯罪者有多接近？这些戏剧上演了监禁后囚禁地理学的运动、空间和时间——时空性——以及我所说的“刑事化阈限”的具身状态。在本文中，我采用双管齐下的方法来研究这些戏剧如何探索被定罪的阈限的时空性：首先，我采用批判性的空间视角来探讨美国和下州对空间伦理的关注如何强调戏剧本身作为艺术家和观众的道德参与空间;其次，由于其内容和形式，每部戏剧都邀请观众思考在台上和台下表演意味着什么。我最终得出的结论是，尽管这些戏剧引发了对刑事处罚制度（如废除死刑）的替代方案的考虑，但它们的真正力量在于它们最终的矛盾性。每个人都让观众感到不安，但没有提供明确的答案。被定罪的阈限的时空性和行为造成的滑坡产生了某种生成的不确定性。