ABSTRACT Building from the authors’ own experiment, the conception and creation of Watchlist (Vickery-Howe, 2020), this article interrogates metatheatricality in contemporary theatrical works: How Not To Make It In America (Steel, 2021) and Destroyer of Worlds (Lewis, 2015) and recent television series: Kidding (Holstein, 2018–2020), Landscapers (Sinclair, 2021) and Wakefield (Dunphy, 2021-). It will argue that these works represent a significant movement into alternative, meta-dramaturgies wherein the characters portrayed, and the worlds they inhabit, exist behind a porous and fragile fourth wall, through which they may wink at their audience – not so much stories within stories, but stories reflecting stories.

ABSTRACT “Searching for the Captain’s House” is the documentation of interwoven histories. Family histories, family vacations, and the relationships that solidify or erode across the years. Natural histories, local histories, and geologies shift with the tides. It is also a meditation on taking and viewing photographs – specifically vacation photographs – as one approach to participating in broader, post-anthropocentric/new materialist conversations afoot in performance studies (and the Humanities more generally). This piece uses photography and autoethnographic writing to explore the personal and performative dimensions of a new materialist perspective that examines the ontological foundations of performance as a more-than-human enterprise.

ABSTRACT Is She Mad, or Does She Joke is an ensemble performance piece I scripted based on my almost twenty-year fascination with the Countess de Castiglione and her photograph Scherzo di Follia. I directed the show with a cast of 10 student performers at Augusta University in the fall of 2021.

ABSTRACT Is She Mad, or Does She Joke is an ensemble performance piece I scripted based on my almost twenty-year fascination with the Countess de Castiglione and her photograph Scherzo di Follia. In this artist statement, I briefly discuss some of the questions, considerations, and intentions that went into the scripting and rehearsal process for the show.

ABSTRACT This essay explores the proposition of the relational aesthetics of audience participation in Kirt Shineman's performance Last Words. I describe my own participation in the performance as a modest trickster and question the possibility of moving beyond this modest intervention to truly test the limits of audience interactivity.

ABSTRACT Drawing on a recent case study from Singapore, this essay examines how devising can be expanded beyond notions of “improvisational” and “fixed” into a more emergent, speculative practice that embodies both singular and collective forms of creative performance, and suggests ways in which practitioners may blur the boundaries between being-with as a lived approach to devising, and intercultural performance as a crucial contemporary set of skills for everyday life.