A Drama of Potentialities—Toward an Ontology

Abstract

This article proposes an intensive dramatic theory based on the notion of potentiality. It shows that classical examples of dramatic theory follow entelechial scenarios, whereby potentiality is exhausted in the actual and probability becomes necessity. Newer forms of theatre, however, carry a different ontology, whereby the actual gestures toward a constitutive virtual region. Both virtual and actual are equally real, and the relation between them is reversible. In this way, a drama of potentialities plays itself out at the very interface between actual and virtual. Finally, instead of seeing postdramatic theatre as “a theatre without drama,” this article suggests that the latter could pertain to a drama of an ontological cast that is especially attuned to an engagement with the virtual.