Beyond the Fourth Wall of War
Theater and Therapy for Embodied Trauma
How contemporary theater represents and responds to war trauma
Description
Beyond the Fourth Wall of War sheds light on forms of embodied performance that emerge in the aftermath of structural violence—war, displacement, and militarism—as individual bodies and bodies politic are shaped by communal disorders. As Elise R. Morrison argues that theater that addresses audiences directly by breaking the so-called “fourth wall”—which allows spectators to see but not interact with the events onstage—can offer embodied frameworks for reckoning with war trauma that move beyond traditions of illusionism and spectatorial distance.
Grounded in performance studies, this interdisciplinary study also draws deeply from digital media studies, peace studies, neuroscientific research in embodied cognition and trauma, and drama therapy. Through a comparative analysis of somatic, interactive methodologies in contemporary trauma-informed therapies, Morrison reveals the capacity of theatrical performance to model “somatic witnessing” and kinesthetic empathy and to cultivate communal practices of repair in response to state-sanctioned violence. Underlying this work is a broader inquiry into war’s performative nature, as participatory theater uniquely reorients spectatorship toward rehearsing “performative ethics” in representational and militarized “theaters of war.” Beyond the Fourth Wall of War makes novel interventions into discourses of contemporary warfare by extending the lens of trauma beyond the battlefield to civilian publics who observe conflict from a distance, yet remain entangled in its machinery.
Elise R. Morrison is Assistant Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance.
Reviews
“For thousands of years, a powerful technology for communalizing trauma, reckoning with moral injury, debating foreign policy, and healing the invisible wounds of war has been hiding in plain sight. Elise Morrison’s Beyond the Fourth Wall of War pulls back the curtain to show us the many and varied ways theater practitioners today are employing the strategies of their craft to help audiences and communities disrupt intergenerational cycles of violence and confront the true cost of war by amplifying the embodied voices of those whose lives have been irrevocably changed by it.”
- Bryan Doerries, author of The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
“Beyond the Fourth Wall of War is a beautiful book that sits at the nexus of the disciplines of performance, war, and trauma studies, and it carves out new territory on the many overlaps between the two. The scholarship is sound and essential in this current climate, where militarized violence clashes with personal traumas. With her accessible and moving writing, Morrison is bound to impact wide audiences.”
- Lindsey Mantoan, author of War as Performance: Conflict in Iraq and Political Theatricality
“This book shows how theater and interactive, embodied therapies can help communities sense, process, and begin to heal collective war trauma, using the body as a site of ethical response. It calls readers to break our deep habituation to warfare by transforming how we witness, feel, and act together.”
- Nisha Sajnani, coauthor of Intercultural Dramatherapy: Imagination and Action at the Intersections of Difference