2026, Vol.39, No.1

Digital Transition and the Crisis of Labor in Annie Baker’s The Flick

Kang, Hyeong-min | 2026, 39(1) | pp.7~32 | number of Cited : 0

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.

Facing the Nonhuman Other: The Ethics of Coexistence in Stef Smith’s Human Animals

Kim Mirae | 2026, 39(1) | pp.33~59 | number of Cited : 0

The Journey of Non-Identity and a Space for the Other in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice

김채현 | 2026, 39(1) | pp.61~84 | number of Cited : 0

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.

Theater Without Actors: Trends from the Early Cases to the New Millennium and Their Implications in the Current Context

Jungman Park | 2026, 39(1) | pp.85~106 | number of Cited : 0

Peter Brook, in The Empty Space (1968), defines theater as ‘someone stepping into a space while another watches.’ This is a brief but insightful observation regarding the three elements of theater: the stage, the audience, and the actor. Meanwhile, many theater artists subsequently challenged Brook’s definition of theater. In 1969, the year following the publication of The Empty Space, Samuel Beckett presented a play without ‘someone stepping onto the stage’ in his 35-second ultra-minimalist play Breath. It practiced the possibility of theater excluding actors. This signaled the beginning of so-called ‘theatre without actors,’ and similar experiments followed. A representative recent example of the new millennium era is German composer Heiner Goebbels’ installation work Stifter’s Things (2008) which stages five pianos without a pianist. More recently Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s installation work Rooms (2019)presents rooms filled only with recorded voices, devoid of any inhabitants. Furthermore, although somewhat different in nature, Eugène Ionesco already explored the concept of ‘theatre without actors’ as early as 1950 in his anti-play The Bald Soprano which features a title character/actor who did not appear on stage and was consequently irrelevant to the plot’s development. This study traces the early aspects of the concept and practice of ‘theater without actors’ experimented with by the aforementioned drama, theater, and performance artists, as well as trends in the new millennium era, through representative examples, and examines the implications of these developments within the context of the current theater environment. Furthermore, based on these results, it seeks to reconsider the insights into the definition of theater and its essential elements—defined as the stage, actors, and audience— reaffirmed by Peter Brook.

A Posthuman Reading of Jordan Tannahill’s Sunday in Sodom

Choi Seok Hun | 2026, 39(1) | pp.107~133 | number of Cited : 0

“Then Take off Your Mask”: The White Figure and the Work of Whiteness in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face

Soomin Kang | 2026, 39(1) | pp.135~164 | number of Cited : 0

Staging Consent: Performance and Visibility in Social Media

Kim, Dasan | 2026, 39(1) | pp.165~192 | number of Cited : 0

The essay examines the performativity of social media by understanding it as a theatrical space in which the self is curated, managed, and staged. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s ideas of “front region,” “backstage,” and “impression management,” this study considers how these notions re-work within digitally mediated environments. In particular, it explores the intersection of social media and performance by looking into the way Christine Quintana’s 2018 play, Selfie, deals with the matter of consent. The play dramatizes a case of non-consensual sex between two high school students and the subsequent circulation of the incident on social media. On the one hand, the play’s evasive depiction of the case makes the question of consent a matter of interpretation rather than verification, On the other hand, the viral spread of mediated narratives without consent troubles any stable distinction between private experience and public exposure through collective spectatorship and commentary. The characters’ online self-presentations are highly mediated performances targeted toward an audience. Characters communicate via posts, audience feedback loops, and subsequent self-responses. In doing so, the characters perceive the “real” or “authentic” as grounded in a real-fantasy binary that implicitly claims access to truth. Yet within the ontological conditions of social media, where mediation is constitutive, such a concept of “real” is almost impossible. The idea of the “unmediated” emphasizes the suspension of representational filtering. However, Selfie demonstrates that authenticity is inevitably compromised by the very processes that translate lived experience into images and narratives. Eventually, this study extends its inquiry beyond its immediate engagement with social media and addresses a broader ethical challenge in the AI era, where authenticity is no longer guaranteed and where algorithms influence individuals’ preferences, behaviors, and even the formation of identity.

Alienation, Grief, and the Absurd Search for Meaning: Revisiting James Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You

Heebon Park-Finch , Chris Megson | 2026, 39(1) | pp.193~217 | number of Cited : 0

Making Racial Myths Visible: Metatheatricality and Fictionalized Reality in Sung Rno’s wAve [sic]

Yoon Mi Sohn | 2026, 39(1) | pp.219~258 | number of Cited : 0

Creative Reimagining Victims of War and Social Change: Sarah Phelps’ The Witness for the Prosecution

Seunghyun Hwang | 2026, 39(1) | pp.259~280 | number of Cited : 0

KJCKorea
Journal Central

Journal of Modern English Drama 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.21

2026, Vol.39, No.1