Winning and/or Losing: The Perils and Products of Insecurity in Postdramatic Autobiographical Performance

Abstract

Billed as a “staged conversation” between long-time friends and artistic collaborators James Long and Marcus Youssef, Winners and Losers is an autobiographical performance event where the audience is invited to consider what the real-world dangers of this contest might be. What at first appears to be an amusing and satirical debate about “winners” and “losers” in popular culture and current events becomes profoundly uncomfortable, even unpleasant as the two protagonists turn on each other. Persistent reality-markers in this postdramatic performance render it difficult for the audience to discern the boundary between reality and fiction. The result is an acute indecidability , generating what Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford call “productive insecurity.” The first aim of this essay is to contextualize Winners and Losers as a work of postdrama in the theatre of the real genre and to demonstrate how its destabilizing strategies operate to create productive insecurity. Second, the essay connects the play’s thematic anxiety pertaining to the insecurity of being “not safe” or being a “loser” with this disruptive paralytic audience effect. This doubled insecurity compels the audience to reevaluate the initial premise of the game and its habituated attachment to confident knowing. When the game messily implodes, audience members are left to ponder how to move forward (or really in any direction) in a world of pervasive uncertainty.