SPEECH/ACT

As a language play, SPEECH/ACT is a piece of performative writing (and writing for performance) exploring linguistic performativity. It personifies speech and action to stage a dialogue playfully testing the limits of J. L. Austin’s famous claim in How to Do Things with Words (1955) that performative utterances cannot be “felicitous” within the theatre. As the character ACT contentiously notes in a footnote to Act III: “Though Austin famously asserted that theatrical utterances are necessarily ‘hollow’ or ‘void’ as performatives, this notion has been vigorously contested by theatre and performance theorists for half a century.” My text’s humorous yet melancholic meditation on hollowness, emptiness, and the void—in relation to speech acts and linguistic performativity in particular, but also climate change and existential dread more broadly—moves across stylistic, tonal, affective, and structural registers to test the edges of narrative description and performative action. In the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods, my script grammatically and syntactically stages speech and action as ambivalently entwined amidst a backdrop of continuously shifting theatrical, poetic, and philosophical contexts. Ultimately, it invites the reader to contemplate the criteria for “felicitous” performative utterances within a dematerialized theatre of the mind.