Playing House: Spatiality, Home, and Privacy in the Theatre of Jennifer Haley

Abstract

The most celebrated plays of the American dramatist Jennifer Haley are normally appraised in terms of the ethical questions they pose: collectively, how our digital selves   appear to offer a complicating impunity. This essay argues that considerations of space, and, more particularly, the compulsive search for privacy, are central to how we define ourselves in virtual realms and in our envisaged transition to a disembodied existence. Both Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2008) and The Nether (2013) illustrate how Una Chaudhuri’s theory of geopathology, the problem of place, continues to characterize modern drama, establishing patterns of victimage and exile, and how the promise of a more social and egalitarian future may dissolve in the face of ever greater fragmentation and isolation as the game of nationhood runs its course.