Witnessing the Mundane

Abstract

‘Witnessing the Mundane: Spectatorship and the domestic onstage’ by Jessica Nakamura considers how performance can facilitate noticing the mundane and the ethical implications of such noticing. The article analyses contemporary Japanese playwright/director Yamada Yuri’s Wakarō to ha omotteiru kedo (2019) (English title: I’m Trying to Understand You, But … ) to focus on the portrayal of the mundane in domestic settings. Taking place over the course of one evening in the dining room of a woman called Teru’s apartment, Wakarō highlights the mundane elements of our domestic lives while calling attention to their concealment. As the play unfolds and Teru tells her boyfriend Koh about her pregnancy and concerns about it, Wakarō reveals that the home space can contain the potential for pain and domestic everyday activities can conceal harmful acts. By focusing on Wakarō’s treatment of its domestic space and behaviours in it, the article considers the ways in which performance can foster witnessing the mundane. While Wakarō is not mundane in its performance content and style, Wakarō’s setting of the home foregrounds the mundane’s domestic workings and contemplates how we might engage with them. The article follows a major device of the performance: two maids, mysterious, unexplained, yet ever-present in the home space. Through these characters, who are part of the mundane circumstances portrayed onstage and separate enough to observe them, Wakarō models acts of witnessing that can extend beyond the performance itself, enacting a spectatorship to carry forward into future observations of mundane conditions. By extension, the article considers how performances about the mundane can help us expand what counts as witnessing and re-pose questions about the ethics of spectatorship more broadly.