Carceral Theaters: Genet, Beckett, and Weiss between Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre situates playwrights Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Peter Weiss as early contributors to the shift from a dramatic to a "postdramatic" avant-garde theater in the late 1960s that began to emphasize the dynamics of the theatrical event rather than the representation of a dramatic text. As forerunners to this shift, I argue that these three earlier playwrights re-conceive the relationship between stage and audience, specifically in their attempt to grapple with changing forms of incarceration and social control. I focus primarily on the scripts and several productions of Jean Genet's Haute surveillance (1949), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953), and Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1963). These "theaters of incarceration" convey an historical shift in built carceral confinements toward more pervasive, mobile and flexible practices of social control arising after World War II. I identify a theater-within-a-play-within-a-theater structure in each work that overlaps these two forms of incarceration.

These mid-century "carceral theaters" anticipate the widespread critique of disciplinary power and institutional confinement in the late 1960s and 70s in philosophy, history, sociology, psychiatry, prison reform, and even in theater practice. Theater and acting theories since the late sixties have often rejected the bodily regimentation, formal rigidities, and spatial confines of drama. They instead present theater as a rehabilitative medium, mining the actor for buried wellsprings of spontaneity, and freeing the public body of its inhibitions through an integrative theatrical event. During this period, theater also increasingly left the theatrical enclosure for the public spaces and also into institutions such as prisons, asylums, hospitals, and work spaces, where it was often used as an effective tool for rehabilitation and normalization. The earlier "carceral theaters" I analyze, however, present potential problems of integrating audience and theater performance into a single community that later postdramatic theater espouses, even as these earlier plays deconstruct dramatic theater's formal enclosure and metaphorical "fourth wall" between stage and audience. Genet, Beckett, and Weiss accentuate the confines and panoptical arrangement within the theatrical enclosure to create an ambiguous experience of stifling confinement and precarious exposure.