Digital Alchemy: The Posthuman Drama of Adam J. A. Cass's 'I Love You, Bro'

Abstract

The definition of a 'digital performance' remains contested. Steve Dixon has defined the field as 'performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms'. The inclusion of the word 'or' is crucial here. Under this definition, a theatre performance about computer technologies would still earn the definition of 'digital performance', whether those technologies were used on stage or not. Yet for Dixon and others, this has not proved to be the case. The trend in theatre scholarship exploring digital themes has overwhelmingly tended towards the final three categories of Dixon's definition: an emphasis on 'techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms' to evoke a digital mise-en-scene. Implicit here is a wider emphasis on 'liveness' over 'content' in contemporary theatre scholarship, which Hans-Thies Lehmann observed as rift between 'theatre' and 'drama'. While digital 'theatre' has been the main focus of scholarly inquiry to date, this article aims to redress this imbalance, by presenting a critique of the Australian one-man play I Love You, Bro by Adam J.A. Cass (2007) via the 'drama' of the performance text itself. In so doing, I make the case for an alternative method of classifying digital performance - one in which a digital mise-en-scene may be evoked via the playwright's construction of identity within a technoscientific narrative. To anchor this approach, I employ the theoretical construct of the 'posthuman' - a figure that represents a compelling nexus for contemporary anxieties about the digital age.