debbie tucker green and the Work of Mourning

Abstract

This chapter explores the significance of grief and mourning in debbie tucker green’s work. Mourning begins, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, in the doubling of grief through speech—by speaking, we corrupt the singularity of our experience into a universal language. This is a recurrent theme in tucker green’s texts, which are replete with characters whose experience pushes them beyond the boundaries of the communicable but who speak anyway. For the spectator, facing and interpreting the unbearable grief of her characters becomes a work of mourning. The plays considered here—hang (2015), stoning mary (2005), random (2008) and truth and reconciliation (2011)—give particular voice to topics that Derrida encounters within the aegis of grief and mourning. These are ‘rehearsal’, ‘trace’, ‘silence’ and ‘ghosts’.