My wound is my geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. --Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides Part of the task of new playwrights has always been to re-envision theatrical representation to reflect cultural shifts. The political and technological upheaval of the last quarter century has dissolved the old map, the margins to a certain extent moving to the center, and engendered the hope of a new freedom governing social relations, a culture less hierarchical. Yet, for so many characters in contemporary English plays, such a landscape is not so empowering. (1) Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) employs graphic depictions of sex and violence as well as radical peripatetic spatial shifts that act as emblems of this alienation, challenging the conventions of realistic theater by extending to the audience her characters' estrangement from their environment. This essay's title alludes to the first spoken line of Kane's explosive play in which world-weary, tabloid journalist Ian enters a very expensive hotel room in and wryly declares, I've shat in better places than this. (2) His comment not only betrays his defensive insecurities but lays the groundwork for the play's lavatorial sensibilities and the author's obsession (to be explored in her later work as well) with what Michel Foucault calls heterotopic spacing. (3) With Blasted, Kane seeks to dismantle the old psycho-geographical dramaturgy and construct onstage a new model of place and identity from the devastation. Committed to returning the repressed, Kane in Blasted strives to represent onstage what is often only implied or relegated offstage, moving the margins to the center. She attempts to represent the political, ethical, and existential unconscious while avoiding euphemism through abstract symbolism or metaphor. Her realism understands the subconscious not as a Stanislavskian signified but as the matter of theater itself. She resists neoclassical discretion in her representation of violence, mandating us to confront what comfortable theatergoers in the West put aside in our day-to-day lives. Pared down to basics, Blasted's plot concerns what transpires in a Leeds hotel room between Ian, a middle-aged writer in poor physical and moral health, and Cate, a young, innocent girl prone to strange unconscious fits. He manipulates and eventually rapes her, an act Kane chooses not to represent onstage. The following morning, Cate bites Ian's penis and escapes through a bathroom window. A soldier arrives through the door, and the room is hit by a mortar shell. Afterward, the nameless soldier talks to Ian about atrocity, sodomizes him, sucks out and eats Ian's eyes, and then shoots himself. Cate returns with a baby who quickly dies, and she buries it in the floor marked by a cross. After she leaves, the newly blinded Ian eats the baby and crawls into the floorboards. At the end, Cate returns, bleeding between her legs but carrying food. The by-now infamous premiere of Blasted occasioned a media maelstrom and assured a sold-out run. Engaged in the worst sort of faux-intellectual mastication, critics bombarded the production with cranky diatribes lamenting the content of the play and the spirited audacity of its author who quickly became a theatrical sprezzatura. While the macabre Jacobean energy that drives Blasted largely encompasses its notoriety, critics as strongly objected to Kane's violation of quasi-Aristotelian place as to her strident bounds over the lines of decency. What Aleks Sierz identifies as the play's deliberately unusual and provocative form (4) is a function of two elements: the rejection of a unity of space and the unflinching representation of corporeal suffering. As Una Chaudhuri has convincingly argued, twentieth-century drama has perpetually wrangled with reconceptualizing theatrical environments beginning with realism and naturalism, generic modes based on the principle of spatial intelligibility, on the idea that where an action unfolds goes a long way towards explaining it. …