Performing Collective Trauma: 9/11 and the Reconstruction of American Identity

Abstract

On 11 September 2011, as the United States was attempting to negotiate between simultaneous commemoration of, and mourning for the tenth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, Mark Kennedy from the Associated Press published an article with the provocative title ‘10 Years after 9/11, Where are the Iconic Plays?’ Kennedy delineates a laundry list of works that take the attacks and their aftermath as subject, yet concludes that ‘theatergoers expecting more than these small, intimate, off-Broadway looks at 9/11 in subsequent years were out of luck.’ Where is the play, Kennedy (2011) asks, that makes a ‘definitive theatrical statement,’ that carries the cultural weight equivalent to, to use the authors’ example, Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising?