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This paper examines how David Greig’s The Events transforms theatre into a participatory ritual that draws the audience into a performative community. While terrorism enacts rupture and division, the play seeks to respond by staging processes of healing through ritual performance. Greig’s dramaturgy unfolds across three interwoven layers: the shamanic ritual of the Boy, the healing ritual led by Claire and the choir, and the play itself as a choral ritual. Each layer, composed of strips of “restored behaviour,” recursively echoes and mirrors the others. By dramatizing ritual and theatre as performative practices that can be re-imagined and re-enacted, the play opens up the possibility of alternatives to violence. At the heart of this dramaturgy lies the community chorus, which acts as a liminal hinge between stage and auditorium, inviting audience participation. Through its interactive dramaturgy, the play creates a shared space of affective and synaesthetic exchange between performers and spectators, thereby envisioning a form of communitas grounded in a cosmopolitan ethic—one in which cultural and ideological boundaries temporarily dissolve. In this sense, The Events is not merely a representation but an event in itself: a collective rehearsal of connection, healing, and transformation.

American playwright Neil Simon‘s autobiographical family drama Lost in Yonkers (1991) portrays the maturation of two adolescent brothers who are left at their grandmother’s house in Yonkers, New York, duing the summer of 1942, amidst World War II. The play explores the daily conflicts, understanding, and love experienced by family members. In the play, Neil Simon demonstrates his craft by skillfully blending humor and pathos in the unfolding and resolution of familial conflicts. An irony comes from the blending of humor and pathos, and the dramatic situation where the sad stories and realities of the characters in the play act as devices to induce laughter in the readers and the audience, well represents the mature charm unique to Neil Simon’s comedy in the latter half of his life. This study focuses on the irony and aesthetics unique to Neil Simon’s comedy, which are created by the blending of conflicting effects—humor and pathos, laughter and tears, cheerfulness and poignancy—and the dynamics through which these are conveyed to the readers and the audience as the aesthetics of contemplation and optimism. Ultimately, this study aims to explore the aspects and implications of how the themes of ‘family love’ and ‘communication and healing’ that run through the play are realized through Neil Simon’s unique comedic aesthetics, which can be summarized as the blending of humor and pathos, contemplative optimism and the consequent ‘new laughter.’

This paper aims to overcome the fear of ‘a dirty death’ manifested in Margaret Edson’s W;t and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through Heidegger’s view of death. Philippe Aries describes postmodern death as the dirty death: all the tubes and medical devices in hospital intensive care units save the lives of patients in a comatose state, but they also threaten modern man with a new horror of death. As part of the dirty death, the dying person experiences hypocritical behavior and indifference from family and doctors. Likewise, protagonists in Edson’s W;t and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis experience the dirty death amidst the hypocritical words and indifference by their family and doctors due to the sudden appearance of death. However the fear of the dirty death in the contemporary society can be overcome by Heidegger’s view of death. Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Being and Time. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue. In the anticipation of death (Vorlaufen zum Tode), Dasein is freed from the immersion of temporal values and recover the possibility of its authentic self that had been concealed. As the anticipation of death, protagonists are confronted with their ownmost, non-relational, and unsurpassable possibilities as the temporal values they clung to became meaningless. Therefore this paper will take note of the dirty death which dying Vivian and Gregor experience by family members and medical doctors in the hospital. Then this paper will examine how the protagonists overcome the dirty death through Heidegger’s view of death.