For both Foucault and Artaud, plague represents a kind of morality crucible, a liminal space in which the conditions of social discipline are exploited by those who find themselves empowered by its collapse. In Foucault's text, the empowered are those already in control, those members of the network of surveillance and punishment whose disciplinary authority is held in check by the conventions and status of social normality, but whose power increases when it founders. For Artaud, the onset of a plague empowers the peripheral masses, those abjected cogs in the disciplinary machine who find liberation in the madness of panic. Released from the obligations of conscience, class, and nation, they create new roles for themselves, "provoking acts without use or profit" (24). Ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly, this progression of events leads directly into the theatre. For Foucault, the creation of a panoptic prison represents the institutionalization of the disciplined plague response; each prisoner, like each member of the plague-stricken town, is encased in a cell, "like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible" (200). The theatres maintain order in an era of chaos. Conversely, Artaud's mad masses begin to theatricalize themselves at the very moment they let go; irrational behavior, driven by primitive instinct and "frenetic gratuitousness" (24) is the "essence" of theatre. For Artaud, theatre maintains chaos in an era of order.

Of course, that Foucault and Artaud stress different axes of discipline and chaos doesn't necessarily preclude some major theoretical affinities. After all, a tension between the empowerment of the masses and the empowerment of juridical institutions at moments of social collapse initiates a conversation about determination-about the focused will of an empowered people. For empowerment is always focused, even if the result is chaotic and the drive irrational. Artaud's moment of "frenetic gratuitousness"-theatre-is inevitably a theatre of "cruelty," signifying "rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination" (101); it is the discipline of being irrational. For Foucault, the shadow plays in the network of theatrical cells that comprise the Panopticon enact the same kinds of "cruelty." If his argument proposes a subversive hierarchy of disciplinary forces as the successors to the systemic tortures of the early eighteenth century, what he chronicles is the birth of an Artaudian conceptualization of sustained and determined submission. Artaud writes,

Cruelty is not synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies. In the practice of cruelty there is a higher determinism, to which the executioner-tormenter himself is subjected and which he must be determined to endure. Cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity. There is no cruelty without consciousness and without the application of consciousness. It is consciousness that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red color, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone's death. (102)

In the Panopticon, the guard is as watched as the prisoner; both are conscious of the surveillance that surrounds and appropriates them. As Foucault concludes, "Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (201). Both the guard and the prisoner are inmates in Foucault's paradigm; while the literalization of the watchtower assumes control over the inmate, the self-discipline prompted by this literalization in no way requires that the inmate is watched at all:

[I]t is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. (201)

It is at this moment when both guard and inmate engage in a theatre of cruelty-the guard is determined to endure the surveillance of the inmate, at the risk of the consequences of his own surveillance, and both are required to enact certain roles as a result. It is their submission to necessity that governs their actions. Put under the consequences of plague, the conditions of this "necessity" change; the strictures of government threatened by disarray make behavior less of a necessity, and intuition more of a drive. The urge to "do as one likes" (in the horrified phrasing of Matthew Arnold) takes precedence, and becomes the conditions of necessity. Whether one does as one likes as a cog in the machine, or a juridical henchman, the impulsive drive consequent of plague circumscribes the theatre of cruelty's possibilities for action.

Both Artaud and Foucault characterize the rise of the plague and its theatrical consequent as a play within a play, disruption of the quotidian that can be easily identified as exceptional. Additionally, this play within a play is a play about play; it is self-aware in that it knows it's being watched, knows it's behaving within extra-normative conditions of necessity, and connects with its audience in a tacit exchange of gestural language. Two of the works we've engaged this semester address these "theatre through chaos" discourses, Maria Irene Fornes's The Danube and Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, both of which employ a play within a play during a plague, and use this twice-behaved behavior as a pivotal metacommentary on performance itself.

Susan Sontag's "Preface" recognizes that Fornes's work has always been a "theatre about utterance (i.e., a meta-theatre) and a theatre about the disfavored" (9) but as plague is invoked in The Danube, I think we begin to see that these two characteristics form an almost causal relationship, and consequently lead to far broader implications concerning the social impact of theatre. As articulated in The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud's connection between plague and theatre is a reaction to what he considers the complacency of the world's attitude toward "culture." The concept of "a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life" is, Artaud asserts, the product of "this generalized collapse at the root of our present demoralization" (7). In a sense, he chides the disciplinary culture Foucault will document in Discipline and Punish as a reaction to the complacency of a culture suffering, as Artaud puts it, "a rupture between things and words, between things and ideas and signs that are their representation" (7). The inadequacy of language, signifying the failure of human communication, bears on all relationships-interpersonal, spiritual, internal-and leads to cataloguing, discipline, empty searches for distraction and superficial entertainment. Artaud urges for an idea of culture that is not so distinct from life, culture as (among other things), a nonverbal "presence of mind" (8) that allows for "everything, in short, that might determine, disclose, and direct the secret forces of the universe" (10). The frenzied state where "theatre" is born through plague is the moment when this new definition of culture asserts itself as a force.

For Artaud, the connections between theatre and epidemic are several and complicated. In both the plague death and the theatrical experience, one is pushed to the limits without collapsing; the body of the plague victim is drawn toward laceration but isn't ruptured, and the theatre, he writes, "without killing, provokes the most mysterious alterations in the mind of not only an individual but an entire populace" (26). This straining to the limits of endurance, a freeing "moment when something essential is going to be accomplished," produces in both cases an "extreme strengthin which all the powers of nature are freshly discovered" (27). In this state of potentiality, the individual's unconscious drives are released; their sheer individuality is discovered and transformed into strength, the victim/actor becoming a "grandiose and overwhelming being" (30). Foucault's analysis of the sudden superiority of the power figure, translates the theatrical moment into the ubiquitous, juridical gaze, "ensuring the proper obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates" (196). This surveillance "is based on a system of permanent registration" (196)-like Artaud's "language in space and movement," (45) Foucault's tables and ledgers textualize the body as a system of symbolic codes and functions, communicating through placement and gesture. It is with this recognition that the construction of a "plague discourse" can be identified as a theatrical method-a stain through which the episodic, cathartic, and transformative impact of particular works can be viewed.

Of course, that which is "grandiose" and "overwhelming" rarely surfaces in the plays of Maria Irene Fornes as anything other than a kind of exaggerated or grotesque manifestation of the quotidian. But her 1982 work, The Danube, is a notable exception, given the play's idiosyncratic mise-en-scène. The stylized, postcard backdrops of the early scenes, the formulated language tape, the banal conversations, appearances, and personalities of its characters, all are constructed as hermetically-sealed existences within a specific time and place that quickly become universalized, petrified, transportable. In conversations, the characters discuss vague institutions like language, work, or organized sports, when in restaurants, they order the only dishes available (unseasoned "beef broth" and "hot ham") and drink colorless drinks; they talk of buying nameless gifts for nameless relatives, and when they decide to visit museums, they choose the "economic museum" because, "it is interesting" (50). These early scenes abstract and exaggerate the very "slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our worldthe asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses" that Foucault sees dominated and Artaud wants transformed by the richness and danger of the "plague/theatre" (31-32).

Suddenly, and in what may read as an intended response to Artaud's vision, Fornes's play takes an unexpected turn, literally infecting the characters' scenes with a plague and forcing them to interact with its novelty. In the middle of a restaurant scene, where the characters Eve and Paul are ordering dinner and dessert, Eve faints abruptly, and for a few brief moments the other characters are forced out of their "scripted" roles. The Waiter responds by checking Eve's dessert order and returning to his post, and Paul pays for their meal and clears up their table, leaving Eve on the floor throughout, self-consciously avoiding any deviation from the script. When she wakens, in a moment that could possibly return the play to its comfortable banality, the scene ends, not knowing how to "repair" the force of such an unexpected social fissure. This inane devotion to ritual becomes even more absurd as the play progresses, reducing the characters to banal discussions of soccer while their bodies contort violently, and the masking of any acknowledgement of illness and hospitalization with a genre-specific war story, socially appropriate and explicable fictions confronting the horrors of the unidentifiable.

As the effects of the plague intensify, and the ridiculousness of the fiction wears on the scenes, the language tape is discarded and the characters are pulled toward what Artaud considers the cusp of the real and the unreal, where "the mind believes what it sees, and does what it believes" (27). Paul, at last unable to stand his own decomposition, tells Eve he is leaving, "I can't take this any longer. You take care of the place or burn it if you want. I don't care what you do" (60). He asserts that it is Eve who has "polluted him," (61) gendering the plague, and situating it specifically within her. The association causes her to explode with rage and violence, screaming "and hitting him repeatedly" (61), a revolt which, in Artaud's terms, "disturbs the senses' repose, frees the repressed unconsciousand imposes on the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic" (28). Paul can thus only respond in kind, smashing a table, waking Eve's father "as if from a nightmare" and emitting a "loud and plaintive sound" as the scene fades (61).

It is at this moment that Fornes's work, firmly situated within a plague discourse that has reached its spiritual apex, transforms its very metaphor into Foucault and Artaud's referent, replaying the "plague" scene as "theatre" through a puppet stage. The association between the heightened effects of plague and theatre is solidified in this scene and the next, in which the character-puppets prepare for their escape. But it is the play's final scene that provides the most intriguing and explicitly Artaudian and Foucauldian referent. While the puppet stage brings the desperation of plague discourses into an overtly theatrical mode, the final scene re-plays that in which the character-puppets start their final exit. In the re-enactment, Eve and Paul are in the final throes of the plague's effects, "both in a state of physical and emotional restraint which hampers their speech and movement" (63). As they pack, precisely and by rote, driven to leave by what we must assume an internal fire, they have taken on a totemic significance-what Artaud considers the final, local effect of theatre:

The theatre restores us all our dormant conflicts and all their powers, and gives these powers names we hail as symbols: and behold! before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, one charging against another in an impossible melée; for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible begins and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

These symbols, the sign of ripe powers previously held in servitude and unavailable to reality, burst forth in the guise of incredible images which give freedom of the city and of existence to acts that are by nature hostile to the life of societies. (27-28)

The incredible image into which Paul and Eve "burst forth," as they walk offstage is a "brilliant white flash of light" and an immediate "Black out" (64), both directions unique to the play, as every other scene ends with the "lights fading" through diffused smoke. The moment of the plague/theatre, a moment literally "connected" by the puppet-plague, is brought to an apex in the light that swallows Eve and Paul.

The plague that disrupts the quotidian in Caryl Churchill's 1990 work, Mad Forest, is more figurative, but equally cryptic. Opening in a mise-en-scène equally as transportable as that in The Danube, Churchill's play "officially" concerns the Romanian revolution, but its scenes, titled in both Romanian and English, and read to the audience like a language tape are, at least initially, largely devoid of "place." Act one begins in silence, with universalizing gestures Artaud would not endorse as "plague/theatre" largely because of their lack of drive, or passion; the source forcing the actor/characters into submission is not at first acknowledged. Merely titled, "Lucia has four eggs," the scene could largely exist anywhere; as Foucault reminds us, surveillance lurks behind and within every social hierarchy, it's omnipotent and omniscient and relies largely on the belief of its existence to enforce its aims. While the disciplinary matrix is more obviously oppressive in this scene, in the "world" of this play, its very nature renders it unidentifiable, and the scene's location strategically unknown. Similarly, the second scene, "Who has a match?" is differentiated only by class; the surveillance is still oppressive, forcing the characters to conduct their conversations in the dark, conversations which specify nothing but Radu's name.

The conversations, however, are more pointed than those in The Danube; they address issues of particular personal importance, with more fervor than, for example, Paul's discussions with Mr. Sandor and Kovacs about family occupations, interests, and such. Flavia, Radu and Mihai debate the problematics of marriage into the Vladu family, Lucia and Florina discuss a love letter from Lucia's American lover, and Flavia, in the first expositional passage, loudly and brightly lectures her students on the glories of their country's leader, Nicolae Ceauescu. After this scene, the discussions become less transportable, more grounded in a particular time and place. Bogdan's interview with a member of the Securitate makes specific mention of Romania, the government, and the silencing of dissenters; Lucia's layered discussion with a doctor about abortion, his comment that it's a crime in Romania, and the obvious references made to surveillance once more situate the play, if not the surveyor, in a particular historical moment. Unlike the evacuated dialogue of The Danube, conversations in Mad Forest are grounded within less socially regulated parameters. But the limitations enforced by the surveillance do indeed curb language, connection, communication; the small rebellions, written, joked, whispered, and talked through the blare of a radio are the first symptoms of the plague in the socialist machine.

Conversations with fictional, dead, or otherwise extra-normative organisms create an even higher tension, bringing the conditions of "necessity" prerequisite to Artaud's and Foucault's plague/theatres one step closer to chaos. A conversation between a Priest and an Angel in Act one effects the most poetic, layered dialogue yet: "This is so sweet, like looking at the colour blue, like looking at the sky when you're a child lying on your back, you stare out at the blue but you're going in, further and further in away from the world, that's what it's like knowing I can talk to you" (21). Language in this scene evades the previous dichotomy of literal word and literal action, even subverts Lucia's double-discourse scene with her doctor. By employing similes, run-on construction and connections with the natural world, the conversation is brought out of the dialogue itself, opening the possibilities into an endless "blue" of meaning. Language here offers an escape rather than a summation, and engagement with politics and discipline.

Similarly, a conversation with Flavia and her dead Grandmother not only enters the world of daydreams, but massages the space-time continuum, as well. Grandmother tells Flavia that her "life will soon be overbut you don't think you're old. you think it's ahead" (25). Flavia remembers "being six years old in the mountains," (25) while her Grandmother pulls her completely out of her own mind, her own memories, saying, "You're pretending this isn't your life. You think it's going to happen some other time," then moving into the future: "When you're dead you'll realize you were alive now" (26). Flavia's response to this, back within the realm of "possible" communication, asks Mihai, her husband: "Do you ever thinkif you think of something you'll dodo you ever think you'll be young when you do it? Do you think I'll do that next time I'm twenty? Not really exactly think it because of course it doesn't make sense but almostnot exactly think it but" (26). With his response, "Mihai shakes his head and goes back to work," (26) Flavia's Grandmother tells her to "start" living, and Flavia refuses. The scene moves from Flavia's youth, to age, to her youth again, to someone else's life, to Flavia's death, to reliving her life, to the realization that she's never lived, to the decision that she doesn't want to. The scene has effectively removed from the constraints of surveillance into the world of fantasy, where not only one becomes free to think, but one can choose when to "begin" one's life. It is this kind of determination, this kind of freedom that marks the beginnings of the plague/theatre.

Act two is an orchestrated account of the Romanian "revolution," spliced into a series of conflicted reports. The chaos is palpable; some of the overlapping character-witnesses introduce themselves, some do not, some were at "the scene," some watched it on television, some are officers, the Foucauldian juridical mass, some were passers-by, barricaded by the police. But just as the sickness's causes in The Danube are unknown and its effects played out by Paul, Eve, and the other characters, so too do we find the impetus for Churchill's plague/theatre unconfirmed and contradictory, and it's enactment onstage mysteriously detached and fraught. The revolution is relived by the narratives onstage; the language construction in these reports cleverly confuses tense, as in the stilted speech of "foreign" English students, allowing much of the language to be additionally performative: "On the 22 I go back to work. I am afraid I am in trouble with Securitate because I leave work the day before but nobody says nothing" (35). But despite the ways in which their speech reconstructs the quotidian events of the "revolution," the scene doesn't represent the social breakdown of a plague/theatre. The actors are posed, as if in a photograph, and speak their lines, physically frozen; this "revolution" becomes merely an impetus for a building onstage catharsis, the "true" theatre/plague moment.

The first scene of Act three is another of the fictional conversations, though even more improbable than the Angel/Priest, Flavia/Grandmother connections, concerning a Vampire (not dressed as a Vampire, the stage directions remind us) and a Dog (played by a naked, painfully thin actor). They discuss the revolution in a tangential, culinary way, the vampire arrived in expectation of blood, the dog is also starving, and when the vampire is pressed for a analysis of his lifestyle, it melds with the fever of revolution, "All that happens is you begin to want blood, you try to put it off, you're bored with killing, but you can't settle to anything, your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster, that eases the pain, seeking. And finding" (46). Like the intrusive reminders of the illness in The Danube, the revolution, even when not particularly referenced, surfaces as a referent in the most oblique bits of dialogue, if not specifically for the characters onstage, who must come to terms with what happened/is happening, then for the audience itself, putting the "facts" and "accounts" together, and attempting to make sense of the more anachronistic or fantastical scenes.

The aftermath of the revolution is equally as confusing for the characters onstage. The patient in the hospital with Gabriel asks all of the circulating questions and is repeatedly dismissed onstage as "a little bit crazy," (52) wounded in the head during the revolution. However, like an infection, the questions get taken up by Flavia, Gabriel, and Rodica, whose nightmares turn her into Ceauescu, and then the people of Romania, who chant from inside her. Unlike the aborted language-tape conversations in The Danube, however, the result of the larger, symbolic gulf created by the plague, which corrodes the little identity of place and character that infiltrated through evacuated language, the titles for each scene in Mad Forest are still read in Romanian and English, and as the plague/theatre begins to heat up, in the form of re-enactments, questions about the revolution, role-playing, dreams, and figment conversations, in short as the assertion to write oneself into the historical event becomes more and more fevered and performative, the Romanian language inserts itself even more persistently, and will ultimately be the only language, chaotic, overlapping, untranslated, left in the play.

This final move into unintelligible chaos, the essence of the plague/theatre, is brought on by the complete release of the plague, represented in Act three, scene six, by a reenactment of the trial and murder of the Ceauescus. Like the puppetry in The Danube, characters in the play take on surrogate identities, "Radu and Florina are the Ceauescus" (69), unlike the puppetry, this scene hasn't already happened on the stage; rather than evacuating and objectifying an already-played scene in stilted drama, this "re-enactment" is an attempt to throw oneself into fantasized events, to make narrative sense of the chaos of Act two, to fantasize an answer to lingering questions. At the same time, however, the place where the enactment begins and ends is difficult to mark; like the surveillance that will come to forcefully characterize the plague-theatre of Foucault, determining the unverifiable "start" and "finish" of the play-within-a-play is next to impossible. The re-enactment just seems to start; "Someone announces" (69) that the trial is to begin, and it "does." Characters assume their roles, calling each other by "new" names. Radu, in an act that both situates the re-enactment as something taking place within the historical "now," yet signifying a historical "then," "keeps looking at his watch and up at the sky" (69). He "is" Ceauescu at the time, but whether or not Ceauescu "really" looked at his watch is unknown; the scene isn't scripted by events, it is the only scene in the play where Churchill allows the addition of extra dialogue (9).

This explosion of instinctual acts, behaving "as" other characters, or "as" oneself in an enactment situation, extends, like the plague/theatre it has become, into a moment of pure drive, submission to necessity and instinct. Radu/Ceauescu is "shot" three times, and falls over, getting up once more to ask, "But am I dead?" (71) which is, of course, one of the lingering questions. "Yes," is the pat reply, a signal that their play has ended. But it's obviously insufficient for Gabriel, who suddenly strikes out at Ianos with his crutch as the rest are cheering and celebrating the re-enactment. "Get your filthy Hungarian hands off her," he says, moved by the uncontrolled "madness" of the "play." "What?" asks Ianos. "Just joking," he replies. And the scene ends.

For Artaud, the broader social effects of such physical and spiritual magnificence as the release of the plague/theatre are like the lancing of an abscess, redemption and healing or thorough destruction and death: "revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, [theatre/plague] invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it" (32). The effect of the bright "explosion" in Fornes's work is similarly evocative; the horror within (and of) the quotidian, the obvious references to germ and poison warfare as well as nuclear holocaust, and the progressive physical and emotional incarceration of those who try to escape it (the tension involved in watching visibly unshackled actors slowly and painfully fighting back), not to mention the stagnation of the language tapes and the frustration of the dialogue's banality, would pull an audience toward the kind of Artaudian drives that Fornes seems to be invoking through plague. Whether the white light closing the play is nuclear fallout or religious assumption, it is the play's first "assault" on the audience's senses to come from an "outside" source, a grand, agitating commentary representing the apex of the play's drives.

Similarly, the final scene of Mad Forest, Florina and Radu's wedding, illustrates the dynamic conflict between healing and death that the revolution and its various effects have thrust on the culture. The shift into untranslated collages of Hungarian is both a shift into language and action, rather than a decisive switch to one or the other (the tension between Artaudian valuations of theatre as gesture and Foucauldian analyses of theatre as language, and regulatory text). The fact that the setting has come round one full year, and that normative "party behaviors" still reign in the culture suggests stagnation, a return to the quotidian fetish; and yet, these bursts of language-language that, when translated, represent revelatory, personal and previously "prohibited" statements-suggest freedom, healing, a purge. Both plays refuse the dichotomies suggested by Foucault and Artaud in that what they become, after their transformation through plague, is not entirely a set of totemic, transcendental configurations of history; the characters are representative but particularized, and moments where language is evacuated are forever in tension with those touching personal emotion and sensibility. They are "of their time," and transcendental; their plagues empower both the cogs in the disciplinary machine and those who survey its progress. The final result isn't death or resurrection, freedom or prison, and the language at last isn't all gesture, or speech.

In the straddling of these theoretical camps, both plays offer a metacommentary on the "nature" of theatre and performance itself. As historically situated texts, each play attempts a reading of a particular place and time, and yet, in Fornes's words, "soon departs from chronological realism" (43). Both present characters faced with plagues that threaten to alter their lives; they are forced to interact with chaos. It could be argued that Fornes's Paul and Eve attempt to remove themselves from their historical moment through evacuated language, rote conversation, normalized, quotidian responses to macabre and disruptive forces; they abject themselves as puppets, moving their horror into a more manageable realm. Their re-enactments are thus a way of writing themselves out of their own dramas, and their final gesture, to leave their stage, an evasive way of erasing themselves from its contexts. The metacommentary for Paul and Eve is that theatre is a way of maintaining order (in a Foucauldian sense) in a moment of chaos, obstructing themselves like the guards in the Panopticon, erasing identity through the surveillance of other, more manipulatable casts of characters. Of course, for Fornes's audience, this play-within-a-play serves an opposite purpose, the reiteration of events and language, a replaying that, stripped of its "reality" and projected onto puppets, is all the more frightening for its manipulated lifelessness. Theatre brands on the brain the horrors of history, replaying in real time reverberations of events that go farther than the start of the play, and last longer than its instantaneous flash of light.

In Mad Forest, the play-within-a-play serves an opposite function; the characters themselves use the re-enactment to write themselves into a drama they haven't documented, they attempt to make sense of events through fantasy, engagement, and performance. Each enactment brings them both closer to an understanding and farther away, for the gap, in novelty, passion, and drive increases with each performance; the spontaneity of the enactment makes it most "real" and intuitive for them. For the audience, however, it's the gap that's noticed most. The exaggerated performativity of the scene, its subjectivities, its theatrical rendering of history feels far less "real" than the testimonies in Act two. While they took place from frozen positions, as if in a photograph, the "play" shooting and falling over that comprise the Act three performance heightens the sense that history is written by the actors. We are reminded of the Artaudian mutability of history, of the "real," and its reliance on spiritual instinct and necessitated drive:

[W]hereas the images of the plague, occurring in relation to a powerful state of physical disorganization, are like the last volleys of a spiritual force that is exhausting itself, the images of poetry in the theatre are a spiritual force that begins its trajectory in the senses and does without reality altogether. (25)

The final escapes from the reality of The Danube and Mad Forest in their nonsensical, unintelligible manifestations, engage implications that query the efficacy of language, "modern civilization," the position of "theatre" as a spiritual experience, as a historicizing exercise, and the mise-en-scène as symbol, becoming a complex network of metacommentaries on theatre itself. I believe that both enact a literalization of the tensions between Artaudian and Foucauldian discourses of the plague/theatre, creating a series of indeterminate conclusions that bring audiences to the cusp of chaos and back again. Neither work theorizes the necessary result of this near-rupture, choosing to let the audience succumb, as it will. In the broadest of senses, the plays become the plague and the audience its victims; such indeterminacy is, after all, crucial to the theoretical projects at work. Just as Paul and Eve, Flavia and Radu cannot guess how their lives will evolve, so we must be unable to discern theatre's immediate effects, implicating the whole of civilization in a "brilliant white flash of light" (64) that means everything and nothing to us, and will be translated by those who re-enact it.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove, 1958.

Churchill, Caryl. Mad Forest. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991.

Fornes, Maria Irene. Plays. New York: PAJ, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1977.