**4. Dead Ends: "You May Not Touch Him. You May Not Check His Health"**<sup>24</sup>

Showtime differentiates the porous temporal and spatial boundary between the event and the play's afterlife in conversation, worry, delight, confusion, and memory. The play concludes with an invitation for reflection in the presence of death's possibility. "Dead or alive, [the actor] will want to lie down on the stage for a time and think. About everything" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 60). So, too, will the many spect-actors who depart from the hall. The play stops with the death of the actor who gives life to words. Showtime ends, somewhere, between the seats and the shuffle to the exit. The end of Showtime symbolizes mystery or a transcendent sacred in thin analogy to the moment of death.

between play and performance. The phrase "a theatrical performance performed in a theater by theatrical performers" could just as easily be written as "a play played in a playhouse by players". "Play is distinct from 'ordinary' life both as to locality by and duration" (Huizinga [1944 ] 1950, p. 9). For Huizinga, playing *makes* and underlies representation in ritual and dramatic performance, culture, poetry, and art. Huizinga's theory informs Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of play as a clue to the ontology of the work of art. (See Gadamer 1989, p. 101ff.) For a more recent application of play to the analysis of religion and theatre, see (Mason 2019). For Mason, "Playing creates *being*, in any way that the word *being* makes sense" (Mason 2019, p. 118).

<sup>21</sup> The play highlights how time may be marked through differing religio-cultural calendars. Soleimanpour provides his birthdate both according to the Islamic-Solar Hijri calendar prominent in Iran ("Azar 19th, 1360") and Christian-Gregorian calendar used in most places where the play would be performed ("10 December 1981") (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 19).

<sup>22</sup> Questions remain as to when one's experience of a play begins: when does the show start for me? When I see advertisements and this production first appears to my consciousness? When I buy my tickets and begin to anticipate the event as a kind of business transaction? Perhaps when I physically enter the venue or pose for a photo under the marquee? Or is it when I sit down and silence my electronic devices so to limit my distractions from the outside world and enter into the time of the play? These questions ask nothing about the preparation of the actors! Instead, Showtime refers to the overlapping time of performance *shared* between actor and audience.

<sup>23</sup> For more on durational theatre in the context of theatrical temporalities, see the discussion of Karlheinz Stockhausen's *Mittwoch aus Licht* in (Wiles 2014, pp. 61–67).

<sup>24</sup> (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 60).

Soleimanpour makes this analogy explicit: the sending at the finale of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* concludes this performance's *unique* Showtime with the instruction for a member of the audience to take the script as gift for future use (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 62). The White Rabbit, played by a member of the audience and now the one leading collective obedience to the script, establishes the last law: "After hearing 'the end,' everyone must leave the theatre" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 60). There will be no time to confirm the impermanence of theatrical suicide. There will be no curtain call ritual to clap distance between Showtime and after, to give away numbers and responsibility. The symbolism of the possibly dying body on stage aligns with the departure of the audience, both "exits" in silence and doubt.

The Showtime of Soleimanpour's play stops in death. One line of interpretation, interested in the ethics of causality, follows the play's focus on the question of the "gun" mechanism: who is responsible for the actor's "death"? Soleimanpour? The actor? The producers? The audience volunteers? The audience witnesses? Industrial capitalism?<sup>25</sup> The script calls forth the conditions for a suicide or homicide or accidental interpersonal violence as entertainment. Soleimanpour highlights how the conditions of this theatrical experiment and its scripts—preset props, authoritative instructions, social expectations—are no different from ordinary social life. Given circumstances might always be turned over to some risk of life and death. Such is the meaning of the titular white and red rabbit parable: ordinary obedience quickly escalates to extraordinary cruelty.

But another line of interpretation goes down its own rabbit hole resonating with what Kevin Hart calls the "dark gaze" onto the sacred in Maurice Blanchot's mystical atheism. Like Soleimanpour, Blanchot enacts a "displaced mysticism of writing [where] to write is to transform the instant into an imaginary space, to pass from a time in which death could occur to an endless interval of dying" (Hart 2004, p. 10).<sup>26</sup> *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* opens towards the sacred in its attention to death's uncompromising mystery. "What MATTERS is **NOT**KNOWING" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 33).<sup>27</sup> The play *ritualizes* the mystical encounter with uncertainty and its "POSSIBILITY" (Soleimanpour 2017, pp. 32, 50). Drama proceeds in the subjunctive. The risk of death is both playful and existential; the performance of suicide requires *both* a theatrical choice and unrehearsed trust (perhaps even quasi-religious faith) in the harmlessness of the show's props. "This is a theatre, so its VERY probably FAKE . . . right?" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 30). The line's dramatic irony relies on an established theatrical tradition and faith in theatrical conventions and their moral code. But, like other avant-garde performance experiments, the play elides physical appearance with emotional reality.<sup>28</sup> The prop poison might well be placebo, but drinking the potion nonetheless *risks* a credible threat of suicide. The theatrical choice to drink in obedience to the script could bring about all too real consequences. Who knows?

This call for ritual action in the presence of mystery supports my claim to identify the play's structure as "religious" in a qualified and generalized sense. Rather than representation, David V. Mason locates the poetic and playful making of performativity—"*poesis,* not *mimesis*"—as theatre and

<sup>25</sup> "I take full responsibility for creating the machine. But I give YOU the responsibility for using it. After all, no one puts the inventor of the gun on trial" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 55).

<sup>26</sup> Hart further demonstrates that "Blanchot's thought of the neutral Outside contests the philosophy of neuter" tracks with how Hans Urs von Balthasar and other mid-century Catholic thinkers dismantled the reigning theological *duplex ordo* where 'pure nature apart from grace' proposes some "neutral, indeterminate being that is prior to the distinction between infinite and finite being, between God and creation" (10). Blanchot unequivocally rejects Christian revelation, but joins von Balthasar in resisting any urge to domesticate mystery. (See Hart 2004, pp. 48–49.)

<sup>27</sup> Claire Marie Chambers offers the term "performance apophatics" to "signify the performative operation that traffics through the denial of denial, which can be felt in the restless dynamic of the unknowable that structures performance itself" (Chambers 2017, p. 10). Soleimanpour's emphatic "**NOT** KNOWING" calls for "critical unknowing" where "By cultivating *learned* ignorance, we might unself ourselves at the same time that we might unworld the world" (Chambers 2017, p. 261). Both performance apophatics and theatricality "insist that what is 'real' is not *only* the real, or that every*thing* that is important or true is 'real'" (Chambers 2017, p. 259, emphasis original).

<sup>28</sup> Soleimanpour's play opens ethical questions about integrity like those treated by (Bouchard 2011). Consider, for example, the moment in *Dionysus in 69* where "the performance would pause until the actor playing Pentheus actually felt abused by the taunts of other cast members" (Bouchard 2011, p. 224). For a review of the religious underpinnings to American avant-garde theatre and connections to Gertrude Stein's influential views of theatrical time, see (Tanner-Kennedy 2020).

religion's common root (Mason 2019, p. 156).<sup>29</sup> A performance of *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* may very well appear structurally indistinguishable from other "religious" rituals where a sacred text (be it the Bible, Vedas, Qur'an, *Book of Common Prayer*, or L. Ron Hubbard's *Dianetics*) prompts ritual obedience. Here is even time for a monetary collection (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 9). The text features two invocations of "god" (Soleimanpour 2017, pp. 13, 24) and one reference to the writer's face while writing, "straight as the devil's" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 29).

I intend to put Soleimanpour in conversation with a Christian framework, and there is one phrase that might be interpreted as a moment of recognizable revelation: "the [red] rabbit's ears have been EXPOSED. Oh my god!" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 13). A theodramatic reading perhaps hears echoes of the Centurion who notices the Son of God exposed by crucifixion and earthquake (cf. Matt. 27:54) or "Doubting" Thomas' exclamation at the resurrected Christ's exposed wounds (cf. John 20:28). Further, the text invokes God's blessing—"MAY GOD SAVE YOU!" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 24) on the volunteer notetaker who, by freely volunteering, now "is a red rabbit" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 25). But Soleimanpour's most consequential use of something like Christian religious language happens only in the actor's speech just before handing the script to an audience volunteer and enacting their own theatrical-ritual death (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 55ff). The speech is the confession and pre-emptive absolution of the playwright, "Nassim Soleimanpour" whose full name appears twice (Soleimanpour 2017, pp. 55–56). The word "sin" appears twice as well to describe Soleimanpour's own guilty complicity in the actor's death (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56). Soleimanpour's writing creates the conditions for the possibility of the actor's death, but it is present *action* in obedience to his words that might kill. An indictment of the audience interlaces with Soleimanpour's confession. He further argues how any "PASSIVE viewer of this suicide" will be "more of a sinner than me" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56). So who is guilty? The confession turns the question of identity back on the writer, whose voice we hear in and through the actor.

Soleimanpour sounds similar to Blanchot by the end of the confession. The question of guilt and sin between author and actor asks about theatrical writing and about revelatory knowing. "In conclusion" the speech shifts into meta-reflection on the affective experience of writing as self-alienation.

I feel what I'm writing is not my writing [ . . . ] some OTHER 'ME', lives INSIDE me, and THAT 'me" talks on my behalf—almost as someone to whom I have lent my body. Or maybe I'm reading from someone else's writing, or someone else, some OTHER ME, is loudly speaking ME . . . for YOU.

(Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56)

Here, Soleimanpour inverts what Blanchot calls "the Outside" and erasure of ego approached through writing; instead, some "OTHER" writer emerges from "INSIDE" like inspiration.<sup>30</sup> But where Blanchot's emphasizes the spatial and temporal, the metaphors for writing Soleimanpour's in play are doubly theatrical.<sup>31</sup> Words come into being only through the "loan" of a body. The author loans a body to write; the actor loans a body to read. Soleimanpour's writing these words requires the same sort of kenotic self-surrender as the actor who speaks them. The moment can be depersonalized: the invisible author makes demands of the visible actor. The experience of writing *White Rabbit Red Rabbit* matches

<sup>29</sup> See also the discussion of ways to pursue a correlation between religion and theatre in (Mason 2019, p. 1ff). In another context, Mason explains "The manner in which the theatrical avant-garde necessarily resembles religious doing comes from the way that *performance* sharpens this paradox [glossing what he earlier calls 'yearning for presence that proves never possible'] of being in the world" (Mason 2019, p. 59).

<sup>30</sup> "If to write is to surrender to the interminable, the writer who consents to sustain writing's essence loses the power to say 'I.' And so he loses the power to make others say 'I'" in (Blanchot 1982, p. 27). "This is to say: one writes only if one reaches that instant which nevertheless one can only approach in the space opened by the movement of writing. To write, one has to write already. In this contradiction are situated the essence of writing, the snag in the experience, and inspiration's leap" (Blanchot 1982, p. 176).

<sup>31</sup> Hart explains how "interval" and "space" both may plausibly translate Blanchot's *espace* (Hart 2004, p. 8). I add that both terms also carry theatrical resonance, e.g., "intermission" can also be called an "interval".

its theatrical reading. The conclusion of the quasi-religious confession sees the identity of the invisible author ("ME") *given over* in the performance of the actor for the audience ("for YOU"). Soleimanpour seems to agree with Blanchot; "Perhaps it is sin" (Blanchot 1982, p. 175). The author and actor align: the written-loaned body offers itself as indifferent and obedient, gift and sacrifice. Both author and actor can now share "MY sin": "the secret of the red rabbit" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 56). The actor is the author's "dear red rabbit" (Soleimanpour 2017, p. 57) sent to perform death as a revelation.
