ABSTRACT
If reception is the most under-theorized area of performance studies, then I am doubly at a loss when trying to explain refusal. How can we theorize audience resistance to a performance, or the audience that refuses to attend? That audience — the one that stays home — executes a different intervention, an intervention of denial that is itself perhaps an affirmation of the performative. Refusing to take in the performative is perhaps the only effective means for eluding transformation. Performance studies has no apparatus for dealing with an audience that closes its eyes and ears; indeed, it is shot through with progressive yet sadly romantic ideals of community. The Drama Review regularly carries work focused on community theater and the theater of resistance. How (or even whether) “the community” engages with the performative is another question. Such methodology presupposes a community of the oppressed — a community in such duress that it is willing to engage with the possibility of transforming itself.
