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This article examines Annie Baker’s The Flick as a dramatic exploration of the transformation of labor in the cultural industry during the transition from analog film to digital projection. Set in a small movie theater in Massachusetts in 2012, the play follows three low-wage employees whose daily routines consist of cleaning the auditorium and managing film screenings while confronting the imminent replacement of 35mm projection with digital technology. Although the technological change itself remains largely invisible to the audience, the play reveals its profound consequences for the workers who operate behind the screen. Drawing on discussions of deskilling and precarious labor, this article argues that the shift to digital projection undermines the technical knowledge and professional identity once associated with the projectionist. In the world of The Flick, the film projector functions not merely as a machine but as the material foundation of skill, hierarchy, and limited autonomy within the workplace. As digital technology reduces projection to a simplified operation, the workers’ specialized knowledge becomes obsolete and their positions increasingly insecure. At the same time, the play dramatizes how economic insecurity weakens the possibility of solidarity among workers. The employees’ informal practice of sharing “dinner money,” obtained through minor ticket fraud, initially appears as a form of mutual support within an exploitative workplace. Yet this fragile arrangement ultimately fails to develop into genuine collective resistance. Instead, mistrust and competition gradually replace cooperation. By focusing on the disappearance of film and the changing conditions of work behind the screen, The Flick suggests that the most significant impact of digital transition lies not in the visual experience of cinema but in the reorganization of labor and the erosion of fragile social bonds among workers.

This paper explores how Stef Smith’s Human Animals critiques the violence of anthropocentric classification and reimagines coexistence with the nonhuman other. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of “the Animal,” it demonstrates that categories such as “pest” and “animal” in the play are not natural, but socially constructed. In doing so, the paper shows how the exclusion and extermination of nonhuman animals are justified in the name of human safety, comfort, and normality. It also argues that the play does not reduce nonhuman beings to mere symbols or allegories, but presents them as irreducible others who demand an ethical response. Through the gaze and face of nonhuman animals, Smith unsettles the human-animal boundary and reveals them as vulnerable others who call for ethical responsibility. The paper further turns to the play’s distinctive dramaturgy, especially its “blink scenes.” Inserted between the duologues, these scenes dramatize the presence of the nonhuman through fragmented language and dispersed voices that cannot be fully contained within everyday human language and order. In this sense, they function as a dramatic embodiment of what Timothy Morton calls the “strange stranger,” extending the play’s theme of coexistence into a material and sensory dimension. Ultimately, this paper suggests that Human Animals presents theatre as a posthuman ecological space for thinking about the more-than-human world and sensing coexistence with the nonhuman other.

This paper argues that Eurydice’s incomplete return in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice should be understood not merely as an instance of subjective recovery, but as an ethical practice of non-identity. Rather than restoring a coherent self, Eurydice’s trajectory resists the homogenizing logic of instrumental reason and, in doing so, preserves a space for alterity that identity-thinking would otherwise efface. To articulate this claim, the paper draws on the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, particularly his critique of instrumental reason as a mode of thought that subsumes its object under conceptual totality, thereby erasing the irreducible remainder of otherness. Against this logic, Adorno’s notion of non-identity foregrounds the persistence of difference that exceeds conceptual capture. Within this framework, Eurydice’s death marks a decisive departure from the domain of instrumental reason. The relation she subsequently forms with her father in the underworld unfolds as a mode of being that does not seek to appropriate the Other, but remains open to difference as such. Her refusal to return with Orpheus further suspends the teleological movement toward restoration and completion, interrupting the Orphic desire to recover the lost object in its original form. Instead, Eurydice re-enters the space of non-identity—a space that resists forward-driven, goal-oriented temporality and retains what cannot be assimilated. This descent stands in contrast to the Odyssean paradigm of instrumental progression, offering instead a world freed from teleological closure and structured by remainder and discontinuity. Ruhl’s Ovidian dramaturgy, characterized by transformation without final stabilization, gives theatrical form to this condition: identity is never secured but remains in a state of ongoing alteration. Accordingly, this paper reads Ruhl’s Eurydice as staging an ethical imagination that departs from the violence of identity-thinking and sustains a space in which the Other can persist without reduction.