ABSTRACT
The football-theatre system is the assemblage of performance practices, infrastructures, and relations where theatre and football meet, overlap, and interact. Attending to football and theatre together can reveal much about the function of racial capitalism today. While theatre has begun some of this exploration itself in the form of football plays, performance relations such as those structured in fantasy football and in theatre and football’s shared labor relations are also revealing. Within this assemblage, playwrights, actors, football fans, and football players reveal how racial capitalism’s competitive accumulation drives peaks of performance only achievable through the expense of bodily harm and injury, with disproportionately racial consequences. And both theatre and football performers reveal a feature of the contemporary social reproduction of racial capitalism, wherein laborers must bear the burden of producing and mining their own lives as the source from which surplus value is derived.
