First-Person Plural

Abstract

In Daniel Sack’s discussion of Nicola Gunn’s dramatic oeuvre, he finds a through line running between her works—one of self-reference and autofiction, a kind of playful knowledge of the self. In tracing this affinity between her pieces, in particular In the Sans Hotel, In Spite of Myself, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster, and Green Screen, Sack identifies the ways in which Gunn’s work speaks to both a contemporary moment in theater and the history of performance art, acknowledging the different baggage of the forms she references while coyly and fluently crossing between them. Sack sees in Gunn’s work the creation of heterotopias, places that open out onto an elsewhere, toward realities that simultaneously exist outside of the world and connect its disparate cultural manifestations together, from identity to ethics, politics to performance.