Performing the Other: Post-Humanism and Mediatized Senses in The Wooster Group’s Production of The Room

Abstract

The Wooster Group’s 2015 production of Harold Pinter’s The Room addresses the play’s neglected post-human elements. By juxtaposing trans-cultural media and simulacra, among other performance elements, the Wooster Group compelled spectators to engage with how, at the time of its original composition, Pinter raised questions of alterity, identity, and displacement as the United Kingdom was experiencing a demographic shift that challenged then-contemporary racist and masculinist definitions of the “human.” Additionally, The Wooster Group engaged with various aspects of post-humanism through embodied performance: the performers use prosthetic technologies to expose how characters express or fail to manifest agency, and incorporate various trans-cultural aesthetic sources as well as a strict and unconventionally literal adherence to the source text to underscore the distributed nature of selfhood. I suggest that these features of The Room can be brought to bear on more contemporary examples of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and classism and might be staged to speak to recent social movements, including Black Lives Matter.