The TAPS Graduate Students host Dr. W. B. Worthen for the March First Friday in Roble Gym 137. 

ABOUT THE LECTURE

Although theater is conventionally seen as an essentially human or humanizing art form, acting represents the human as richly technologized: whether using masks and kothurnoi, the teapot stance, or the Zoom camera, acting is suspended in the apparatus of theater. How is this recognition framed in contemporary performance? In Jordan Harrison’s plays, actors play “inorganics” with the slightest nuance of difference (“Organic, inorganic,” says a character in The Antiquities, “A false dichotomy, meant to give you comfort.”); for The Wooster Group or in the recent Picture of Dorian Gray, “live” acting is inseparable from digital mediation; in Prometheus Firebringer, Annie Dorsen’s impassioned critique of LLM is phrased as a kind of artisanal intelligence, individual expression as digital citation. How does acting explore the interface of the technologized human, and, in challenging the happily captive fantasies of the theater’s originary human essence, how does this kind of work also engage a critique of theater as what Leif Weatherby has called “remainder humanism?” 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. W. B. Worthen is Professor of Theatre at Barnard College, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he also co-chairs the Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance. Worthen has often written from the intersection of dramatic writing, theoretical inquiry, and the materiality of performance: among many articles, books, and edited collections, his most recent books include Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (2010), Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (2010), Shakespeare Performance Studies (2014), Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre (2020), and last month, Theatre as Technology: Apparatus, Nostalgia, Obsolescence. (2026). He is working now on acting as technology.