Exploding History: Queer Temporalities and Chronobiopolitics in Contemporary Playwriting

In the last ten years, a ‘queered’ dramaturgy of historical playwriting has moved inexorably towards the mainstream. Sometimes this queering of conventional approaches to dramatising the past involves fragmented, episodic and splintered narratives that span disparate historical periods. Sometimes, conversely, it blends eras and histories that are usually kept on separate timelines. Plays by Robert O’Hara and Sarah Ruhl, among others, helped establish these patterns, which correspond to Jaclyn Pryor’s (2017) concept of time slips, “moments in performance when linear time is momentarily queered,” when “time was given permission to do those deviant things it is not supposed to ― move backward, lunge forward, loop, jump, stack, stop, pause, linger, elongate, pulsate, slip” (Pryor 3, 9). My recent book The Contemporary History Play: Staging English and American Pasts (2024) sought to group new writing with historical settings according to four dramaturgical formations: the biographical play, the intergenerational play, the polychronic play, and alternate and fantastic histories. Many of the case studies discussed queered time through such techniques as the puzzle (157), the hinge (158-60) and the time loop (210-12). However, a strand of more recent productions has even further away from familiar chronological and relational structures; we might think of Family Tree by Mojisola Adebayo (2023), of Shed: Exploded View by Phoebe Eclair-Powell (2024), The Legend of Ned Ludd by Joe Ward Monroe (2024), and The Flea by James Fritz (2023). What happens when these plays disrupt, dismantle or even explode the assumptions of linear, cause-and-effect storytelling that the conventions of historical realism were built upon? And is this effect particularly potent when recuperating queer histories, or might dramaturgy and subject matter be working at cross-purposes?