Science Fiction Theatre and Performance

by 

Liz Fairchild 

A dissertation accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the  

requirements for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy

in Theater Arts

Dissertation Committee: 

Dorothee Ostmeier, Chair 

Joy Fairfield, Core Member 

Janet Rose, Core Member 

Ben Saunders, Institutional Representative 

University of Oregon 

Spring 2025



2 

© Liz Fairchild 



DISSERTATION ABSTRACT 

Liz Fairchild 

Doctor of Philosophy in Theater Arts

Title: Science Fiction Theatre and Performance 

This work explores the history, legacy, future, and futurity of science fiction theatre and 

performance. Science fiction on stage can be traced as far back as Aristophanes’ The Birds, 

written in 414 BCE. While a history and indeed a justification of science fiction in theatre and 

performance is presented in the beginning of this work, this project is ultimately invested in the 

notion that theatre brings a dimensionality to science fiction that no other medium can provide. 

This is substantiated through the mutable and transmutable concept of “liveness,” as well as the 

theatre’s ability to create new medium-specific beings, places, and spaces using metatheatrics, 

embodiment, and the manipulation and reformulation of boundaries between the audience and 

the actor.  

Science fiction on stage is not simply rendered through genre-specific works like Manjula 

Padmanabhan’s Harvest, but also through quantum theatre and posthuman performance. 

Utilizing physics’ uncertainty principle, quantum theatre replicates the Schrödinger’s Cat 

thought experiment by performing macro instances of quantum superpositions. This is to say, 

like Schrödinger’s Cat, who exists as both alive and dead until observed, theatre performances 

can also be in multiple subject positions and superpositions at the same time. The audience can 

simultaneously be actor (willingly or unwillingly) and an actor can become an audience member 

that is also still observed by another audience outside of a play-within-the-play. Quantum theatre 

is especially legible in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which the titular characters 

3 



 

4 

 

 

are seemingly dead and alive, inside of Hamlet and outside of it, and who also become the 

audience of a play-within-a-play. 

Posthuman theatre and performance also creates quantum theatre through immersive 

digital experiences that are co-performed by people and AI. The theatre, as such, is expanding 

beyond performing science fiction motifs and AI characters and is instead embracing AI as a part 

of human performance and live performance. Utilizing Darko Suvin’s Metamorphosis of Science 

Fiction as well as Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, this work explores liberative and revolutionary 

conceptions of the future presented on stage, as well as considering what the future of theatre and 

performance may embrace.  

This dissertation includes previously published materials. 

 

 

 

 

 

  



 

5 

 

 

CURRICULUM VITAE 

 

 

NAME OF AUTHOR:  Liz Fairchild 

 

 

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 

 

 University of Oregon, Eugene 

 University of East Anglia, Norwich, England 

 Humboldt State University, Arcata 

 San Francisco State University, San Francisco 

 

 

DEGREES AWARDED: 

 

 Doctor of Philosophy in Theater Arts, 2025, University of Oregon 

 Master’s of Arts in Creative Writing, 2008, University of East Anglia 

 Bachelor’s of Arts in Theatre Arts, 2007, Humboldt State University 

  

 

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 

 

 Science Fiction 

 Feminism 

 Queer Theory 

 Posthumanism 

 Decolonial Studies 

 

 

GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: 

 

Research Grant Recipient for the University of California Speculative Futures  

Symposiym, 2019, 2022 

 

 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Meritorious 

Achievement in Directing for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged, 

2021 

 

 Recipient of The Arnold, Isabel, and Rupert Marks Scholarship, 2018, 2019, 2020 

 

PUBLICATIONS: 

 

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Birds at University of British Columbia."   

Ecumenica, Pennsylvania University Press, 2024, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 107-10. 

 



 

6 

 

 

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Thin Place at ACT Seattle." Ecumenica,  

Pennsylvania University Press, 2022, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 200-204. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. “Nuclear Normativity, Monstrous Masculinity, and Matter in Burning Vision,”  

Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification, edited by 

Michael Chemers and Analola Santana, Routledge, 2022. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. "Review of Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan." Journal of Dramatic  

Theory and Criticism, University of Kansas Press, Winter 2021, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 236-9. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. "Review of Theatre of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology," New  

England Theatre Journal, edited by Robert Knof, Northeastern University Press, Summer 

2020. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. “Toward Utopia: Queer Readings of Nonhuman Bodies.” Exploring the Orville, 

edited by David Johnson, MacFarland Publishing, 2020. 

  

Fairchild, Liz. “A Heavy Breath.” The Missouri Review, July 2011.   

 



 

7 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

 

 

I would like to thank my committee for their thoughtful support and belief in my project. 

I would also like to thank my partner Patrick Kelley, my daughter Fiona, and my aunt Nansea 

Metts, who all gave me unending love and support even when this project took over our entire 

lives. Ryan Sayegh, Ellen Kress, Stevo Steinfeld, Anna Dulba Barnett, and Andrea Herrera 

supported me in too many ways to name. Words can not express my gratitude. 

  



 

8 

 

 

 

DEDICATION 

 

This work is dedicated to my mother, Kathleen Sullivan-Fairchild (1956-2015) who 

always encouraged my writing and thinking, and who helped me to see the world as a place ripe 

for change through art. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

9 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

 

 

I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 11 

 I.1 Defining Science Fiction in the Theatre and the Theatrical Text ..................... 11 

 

II. SCIENCE FICTION THEATRE: A HISTORY AND A NEXUS POINT ............ 27 

 II.1 Aristotle, Science, and Science Fiction ........................................................... 27 

 II.2 Antiquity and Early Science Fiction On Stage................................................ 31 

 II.3 The Birds as an Indigenous Future .................................................................. 41 

 II.4 The Tempest as Science Fiction ...................................................................... 45 

III. QUANTUM THEATRE ........................................................................................ 53 

 III.1Quantum Theatre Explained ........................................................................... 53 

 III.2 Schrödinger’s Cat, Superpositions, and the Many Worlds Interpreation ...... 55 

 III.3 Uncertainty and Liminal Spaces in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen ............... 64 

 III.4 Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Apparitions from Beyond ............. 69 

 III.5 Hamlet’s Many Futurities .............................................................................. 74 

 III.6 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? ...................................................... 78 

 III.7 Extra-Dimensional Space in Wooster Group’s Hamlet ................................. 86 

 III.8 Hamlet in the Apocalypse of Station Eleven ................................................. 89 

IV. POSTHUMANS IN THE THEATRICAL SPACE ............................................... 96 

 IV.1 Humans and Posthumanism ........................................................................... 96 

 IV.2 Robots and the “Robotic Imaginary” ............................................................. 102 

 IV.3 Robots, Human Labor, and Dehumanization ................................................ 103 



 

10 

 

 

 IV.4 Postcolonialism, Decolonialism and Liquid Modernity in Harvest ..............  111 

 IV.5 Posthuman Performance in Opposition and Adaptation of “Human” ........... 118 

 IV.6 Human-Digital Co-Creation in PerplexiPlex ................................................. 121 

 IV.7 Posthuman Embodied Performance in Continuum Movement ..................... 125 

V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 134 

 V.1 The Future of Theatre ..................................................................................... 134 

 V.2 Liveness and Realness Considering Simulacrum in Performance Futures ..... 137 

 V.3 The Myth of AI Intelligence and Art Creation ............................................... 145 

 V.4 ChatGPT and Playwrighting ........................................................................... 149 

 V.5 AI Performers of the Future ............................................................................ 151 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

11 

 

 

Chapter I 

1. Defining Science Fiction in the Theatre and the Theatrical Text 

 As technological and scientific advancements increasingly push the boundaries of what is 

and what can be, science fiction has become an increasingly popular means of expressing and 

exploring the limitations of human knowledge, while also positing ways to think in multi-­‐

dimensional, liberative, and queer ways. This queering of the future takes its inspiration largely 

from the bending and stretching of science fact into science fiction. As José Esteban Muñoz 

notes in Cruising Utopia (2009), “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for 

queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative 

tastes, and “rational” expectations” (27). In considering utopia, he leverages both performance 

and performativity (on stages and off) to posit a generative queer futurity, “utopia is not 

prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quiet here, a horizon of possibility, not 

a fixed schema” (97, my italics). Horizons of possibility are one of the main promises of science 

fiction, as a new horizon does not simply offer a way of thinking beyond normative expectations, 

it also creates a new plane of existence and allows for future-forward knowledge and speculative 

reality production. Ultimately, science fiction demonstrates the need for change through the 

dystopian or utopian potentialities of the choices humanity makes in the present.  

The theatre has long been an agent of change. Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, 

for example, focused on radical social and political change in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s. His 

work was so influential and questioned the status quo so fervently that he was exiled from Brazil 

in 1971 by the Brazilian military regime, as a potential threat to their agenda. An important 

influence of Boal’s, Bertolt Brecht strove to reject cathartic storytelling as well as the Aristotelian 

dramatic structure as a means of activating the audience’s desire to effect change. Brecht’s well-



 

12 

 

 

utilized and articulated concept of verfremdungseffekt (often called the distancing effect) rejects 

catharsis which is used as a tool to ameliorate an audience, giving them a sense of finality and 

wholeness at the end of a play. Rather, verfrendungseffekt, utilized both in Brecht’s text and his 

theatrical renderings on stage, removed an emotional component of the play as well as the 

element of surprise, pulling the audience out of an emotional connection so that they could 

observe the horrors of war and injustice, and take action. This is perhaps most well observed in 

Mother Courage and Her Children, where Mother Courage herself is an absurdist character, 

although she is also tragic, leading the audience to observe her plight rather than become 

emotionally invested in her situation. Further, each scene’s actions are described before the scene 

takes place, removing the element of surprise. Brecht himself also invested, at the very least, in 

the science play, with the Life of Galileo, which performs Galileo’s life as a radical and 

revolutionary scientist.  

It is my intention to demonstrate that, put together, theatre and science fiction become a 

unique, anti-Aristotelian type of theatre for change. When science fiction is put into performance, 

on stage or elsewhere, the story goes beyond narrative form to create tangible new beings, new 

spaces, and new ways of embodying the human and the posthuman. This is a result of theatre’s 

unique ability to embrace, enfold, and indeed manipulate the audience, as well as the theatre’s 

ability to change space and time through the transmogrification of a live, three-dimensional space.   

With an eye for meaningful change and action, science fiction theatre and performance 

has also always been deeply invested in decolonial utopias and dystopias. While Shakespeare’s  

The Tempest certainly offers a colonial critique, Indigenous Futurisms such as Between Two 

Knees by the 1491s decouple from linear time in an outrageously raunchy and hilarious play that 

culminates with the removal of all White people on Earth. In a review of the Perelman Performing 



 

13 

 

 

Arts production in February of 2024, Paola Bellu notes that "In the epilogue, white people have 

evaporated. The Ensemble, wearing future props, encouraged the public to join them in the chorus 

‘Goodbye white people, some of you were cool, most of you were not,’ and everybody got up to 

clap and sing" (Bellu). A tongue-and-cheek devised play, Between Two Knees locates an equitable 

future for Native Americans through the removal of White people all together. This speculative 

act demonstrates how difficult the removal of colonialism will be as long as White people in 

America (and globally) still have power over land, resources, and legislation that is deeply 

imbedded in colonial ideology.  The play spans multiple generations and locations, demonstrating 

Indigenous ways of knowing time (non-linear), culminating in a future where Native peoples’ 

oppressors no longer exist. These types of narratives do not need traditional science fiction motifs 

(space ships, artificial intelligence etc.) to create horizons of possibility. 

Chapter Two of this work will trace the early history of science fiction and its co-

evolution/co-creation in the theatre, beginning in ancient Greece. While science fiction on stage 

does not always call itself such, it has been extant on stage since antiquity, as seen in 

Aristophanes’ The Birds. In The Birds, first performed in 414 BCE, ancient and contemporary 

audiences are confronted with both speculative utopian motifs and a robust political satire, 

demonstrating a synthesis between the political problems present in Athens during Aristophanes’ 

life, as well as speculative solutions to Aristophanes’ and his contemporary’s ills. These 

solutions are presented in the sky/in space beyond Earth’s horizon and beyond the human realm, 

in the creation of a city and a wall in the sky. In addition to the wall in the sky, the play includes 

sentient bird people who perform the posthuman/extraterrestrial and posit post-scarcity realities. 

As a further exploration of early science fiction theatre, Chapter Three considers The Tempest, 



 

14 

 

 

not only because of Caliban’s and Ariel’s supernatural abilities, but because of the world 

building Shakespeare develops to create an alternative island.  

For Slavic scholar Darko Suvin, texts that might not fit into the mainstream, 

contemporary notions of science fiction –  such as The Tempest – do fit into his understanding of 

the genre because of alternative world building – the creation of a place paradigmatically 

different from our present reality, an alternative island. 

Looking at the Hellenic tradition, Darko Suvin describes many fictions that embrace, 

specifically, “alternative islands” (90) – the creation of a world wholly different than ours. These 

alternative islands, in addition to Muñoz’s horizon of possibility comprise a critical framework 

for my engagement with science fiction on stage. Both terms connect us to places and planes of 

existence that are different than our earthly reality and that offer new solutions and possibilities 

for contemporary problems. Both concepts are expansive, allowing for many different texts to fit 

within their bounds, including not just the early science fictions we have begun to discuss, but 

more contemporary examples like the subgenre of Cli Fi (Climate Fictions) and Indigenous 

Futurisms.  

Nesting the alternative island into a broader framework, Suvin sees science fiction on the 

whole as requiring cognitive estrangement which in turn requires a novum – some device that is 

so unique that the reader must imagine the world in an entirely new way. A great example of 

such a device is Ursula K LeGuin’s creation of the ansible which spans a number of her different 

novels and worlds to allow faster-than-light (FTL) communication instantaneously across vast 

distances, despite the fact that beings can only travel at relativistic speeds. As such, character can 

talk to their family on planets that are light years away with no passage of time, even though 

traveling back to their family would take perhaps, an entire lifetime. This novum questions the 



 

15 

 

 

nature of space and time as necessarily connected, requiring a new conception of reality that 

relies heavily on theoretical physics as well as quantum mechanics. However, the concept of a 

novum also allows for the inclusion of many early texts into the genre of science fiction, because 

modern science isn’t necessitated – only a novel concept that revises/rethinks what is possible.  

Blending the past, present, and future with the metatheatrical, Chapter Three will explore 

quantum theatre, a largely performative but sometimes textual creation of spaces beyond our 

reality. While this term was initially coined by David George in “Quantum Theatre – Potential 

Theatre: a New Paradigm?” in 2009, George’s work does not acknowledge any science, quantum 

or otherwise, but rather relies on vague articulations of liminal spaces, without connecting these 

spaces to quantum physics whatsoever. Further, George leverages no case studies to bolster his 

vague conception of the liminal. While quantum theatrical spaces are sometimes liminal in the 

sense that they are hard to define as one space – quantum theatrical spaces go further to include 

the audience as performer, the performer as the audience, the play can be inside of another play, 

and the play-within-the-play can also be in the future, as is seen in HBO Max’s limited series 

Station Eleven, which performs Hamlet in the apocalypse. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are 

Dead is another strong example of quantum theatrical renderings, where there is not only a play-

within-a-play, within a third play, but the very real question as to whether Rosencrantz and 

Guildenstern are dead at the plays beginning, rather than its end. This question of alive or dead is 

evocative of the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, in which the cat is placed in a 

box and is neither alive or dead until observed, and is thus, in a quantum superposition. In 

essence, the cat exists in two states at the same time. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also in a 

quantum superposition because they are both inside the play of Hamlet and in their own play at 

the same time. Quantum theatre renders the stage a place where other universes can be literally 



 

16 

 

 

and tangibly accessed. In this capacity, there is a break between the fictional space and the three-

dimensional space it exists within, with the possibility of breaking through to/conjuring other 

universes. As such, I am attempting to show that science fiction is enhanced as a genre by live 

theatre and its traditions, conceits, and conventions. I extensively consider quantum theatre 

within the constant remaking/revisioning/revising of Hamlet, not only through “faithful” 

productions of Hamlet inside Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Station Eleven, but in 

productions like the Wooster Group’s Hamlet.  The Wooster Group mirrors a projected, old, and 

degraded recording of Hamlet performed by Richard Burton in 1964, embracing the recording’s 

glitches on stage. Not only are they creating a quantum superposition by creating a live recorded 

performance that is then live again on the stage, they are also creating a quantum space – one 

outside of our own reality – in the space between the performers and the recording, on the stage.  

In Chapter Four I will explore the posthuman in performance, highlighting not just robots 

and cyborgs on stage played by humans, but performances between humans and digital 

experiences, and performances where only artificial intelligences perform, such as the 2012 

Guggenheim art installation (that I argue is actually a live performance) “Can’t Help Myself.”  

Posthumanism is a vast area of study that encompasses many diverse and at times 

conflicting ideas, much like science fiction itself. Literally defined, posthumanism encompasses  

augmented humans (cyborgs) or artificial intelligences (AI), such as robots or holograms. 

Theoretically, posthumanism explores how humanness can be rejected/redefined/revised as a 

concept through technological and biological rendering of other beings. These beings may be 

machines, or in some cases extraterrestrials or future humans that have evolved beyond the 

present.  Posthumanism is not always considered through a fictional lens, but as it pertains to my 

work, science fiction creates a posthuman in dystopian and utopian futures as a means of 



 

17 

 

 

rendering liberative and oppressive futures. These futures are based on how we identify, embody, 

and behave as humans, in contrast to our likenesses in humanoid robots, holograms, and other 

posthuman renderings. Posthuman theorists like N. Katherine Hayles also consider the 

interactivity between technology and humans, and how these interactions change the definitions 

of self and individualism. 

All chapters will also explore different components of liveness and how it may or may 

not be integral to the theatre. In Liveness on Stage : Intermedial Challenges in Contemporary 

British Theatre and Performance, Claudia Georgie defines the liveness of theatre as, “the co-

presence of performers and spectators, the ephemerality of the live event, the unpredictability 

or risk of imperfection, the possibility of interaction and, finally, a specific quality of the 

representation of reality” (5 author’s bold). This definition of liveness affords the ability to 

critically reassess what is live and who is allowed to be live. Although a programmed robot 

onstage might not be “live” because it may not be unpredictable and is not alive, interactivity 

with a human onstage troubles this notion.  

While The Birds as science fiction has been identified, if only briefly, by science fiction 

scholars like Darko Suvin and James Gunn, theatre scholarship and indeed theatre history 

scholars lack engagement with science fiction in general as a vital part of theatre’s past, present, 

and future. Despite this, theatre is uniquely suited to investigate science fiction through an 

attention to the psychological, social, and moral ramifications of speculative futures. The theatre 

does this by leveraging metatheatrics, embodied metaphor, and a concentration on the theatrical 

space, rather than focusing on the fidelity of the world that computer generated imagery (CGI) 

creates. In this capacity, the theatre asks the audience to engage closely and with a closeness to 



 

18 

 

 

the human condition and human futurity, rather than paying attention to the immersive potentials 

brought into focus by CGI.   

In 1977, Darko Suvin traced one of the first of many legitimate critical paths for science 

fiction in his now classic Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: on the Poetics and History of a 

Literary Genre. Previous to his intervention and the interventions of Kingsley Amis in New 

Maps of Hell, science fiction was widely considered to be a low-brow artform, best encapsulated 

and defined by and in comic strips, graphic novels, (which have also subsequently become 

highly respected and literary) and pulp magazines. In Suvin’s case, his defense of science fiction 

as worthy of critical study also relies heavily upon a reification of these “low-brow” forms of 

science fiction. This is to say, he delineates the genre between the “good” (novels by Ursual K. 

LeGuin, H.G. Wells, and others) and the “bad” (Amazing Stories) as a means of providing 

credibility for the genre writ large.  

While many have pointed out the problematics of Suvin’s vitriolic and hierarchical 

bifurcation of the genre, his attempt at a history and pre-history of SF, in addition to his clear and 

thorough work to define the genre poetically, is largely responsible for creating a legitimacy for 

SF, making way for more generative scholarship like the work of Ursula LeGuin and Samuel 

Delany, as well as a broader acceptance of the genre. Interestingly, Suvin also talks extensively 

about Greek drama as nascent science fiction. This creates an earlier-than-expected convergence 

point for SF and theatre, and implies, frankly, a co-evolution. This co-evolution is expressed in 

theatre’s ancient dedication to the magical, the mythical, and the fantastic more so than its 

dedication to science fiction as we currently define it (aka with emphasis on the science). This is 

to say, storytelling that asks questions capable of creating paradigmatic shifts in 

space/time/action represents a line of inquiry equivalent to a proto-scientific method that existed 



 

19 

 

 

pre-Galileo. After all, the ancient Greeks began the process of creating the scientific method – 

particularly through Aristotle – who also set forth his own dramaturgical structures. These 

Aristotelian unities, as they are called, still hold substantial (and arguably oppressive) sway over 

theatre today. This creates a nexus point between scientific thought and the theatre, in addition to 

the aforementioned co-evolution between the theatre and science fictional narratives.  

For my purposes, Suvin’s work is an important proving ground and a foundational work 

for exploring science fiction as a thematic rather than inherently scientific genre. Science fiction, 

thus, accepts pre-modern science tales as science fictional because, as Suvin articulates in 

Metamorphosis of Science Fiction,  

SF should not be seen…in terms of science, the future, or any other element of its 

potentially unlimited thematic field. Rather, it should be defined as a fictional tale 

determined by the hegemonic literary device of a locus and/or dramatis personae that (1) 

are radically or at least significantly different from the empirical times, places, and 

characters of “mimetic” or “naturalist” fiction, but (2) are nonetheless—to the extent that 

SF differs from other “fantastic” genres, that is, ensembles of fictional tales without 

empirical validation—simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive 

(cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author’s epoch. Basically, SF is a 

developed oxymoron, a realistic irreality, with humanized nonhumans, this-worldly Other 

Worlds, and so forth. (viii) 

The fantastic, in this respect, is always already known to be unreal, whereas science 

fiction posits something that could be real under the right circumstances. Bulgarian-French 

philosopher and historian Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as an event or series of events 

that require the persons living within the narrative world to recognize the seemingly miraculous 



 

20 

 

 

or supernatural event as in direct contradiction to the laws they know to be true, creating a sense 

that they are either dreaming, or they are experiencing a real event that defies explanation. As 

such, the fantastic is found in the interplay between reality, the imagination, and the hesitation 

that is created in contemplating whether the event is possible or highly improbable, but real. 

Because this hesitation requires a suspension of belief related to the event as possibly real, the 

fantastic can be neither “allegorical” nor “poetic” (Todorov 32). The possible “realness” of 

science fiction, however, is not found in wondering whether it is real or imaginary, but rather in 

its potentiality to be a real future or already extant somewhere else in the universe. Science 

fiction must always begin with and premise that it could be, fantasy begins with the premise, 

rather, that it certainly cannot be. 

 Suvin is also critical to my investment of science fiction on stage because of his stance 

that, at its finest, science fiction is so revolutionary that its past (especially in antiquity) has been 

obscured by normative society because of its dangerous subversiveness, it “has been a 

suppressed and neglected, often materially and most always ideologically persecuted tradition: it 

is hardly an accident that… its first two clusters survive only in fragments and references” (87-

88). Suvin is speaking predominantly about marginalized ancient Greek texts, and the vast 

number of ancient Greek writings that were “lost” or did not survive the test of time. Suvin is 

noting that the obfuscation of the genre is part of its definition – by creating narratives that defy 

the status quo, decouple from reality, and engage in speculative scientific, technological, and 

human/posthuman futures, the genre practically begs for censorship and dismissal, especially in 

its ancient and early modern renderings.   

 Suvin’s stance on the marginalized-as-definition of the genre is supported also by Mark 

Bould and Sherryl Vint in The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction,  



 

21 

 

 

There is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ definition of the genre because the 

very features of what is named as SF emerge in the process of pointing and naming. 

Various actants have competing investments in what they want the genre to be, aimed at 

different ends, and all histories of the genre inevitably privilege some texts and 

marginalize or exclude others. (5)  

This marginalization often looks more like an erasure, particularly of women scholars of 

antiquity and men in the ancient Hellenic and Roman eras whose works didn’t substantiate 

primitive accumulation and capitalist traditions. While I would love to give specific examples of 

said authors, their works haven’t survived for this very reason (Suvin). Aristotle – and more 

precisely the Renaissance scholars who narrowly interpreted his work – has been valorized, 

reiterated, and reinforced for his realist and rationalistic understandings of art and science that 

uphold Western, patriarchal ideology to this day. This manifests on stage as “realism” and does 

not consider forms that break or queer time. Queer time breaks with linear, normative, ways of 

understanding the passage of time. As Juan Francisco Belmonte Ávila and Estíbaliz 

Encarnación-Pinedo note in “Queer Time Unbound,”  

Time is an ever-present and inevitable component of any representation of what is, was, 

and will be thought to be possible. Yet, just like time binds us, it can be unbound and 

untangled in return, bringing forth free critical thinking and facilitating other processes of 

becoming ungoverned by the strictures of normativity. (4) 

From this perspective, most science fictional time is queer time, as it has no investment in 

upholding calcified and oppressive understandings of our past, present, and future. 

 Many science fiction scholars go back considerably further than The Birds to locate the 

beginnings of SF. Gilgamesh, written in the 2nd millennium BCE, has frequently been 



 

22 

 

 

substantiated as, at the very least, a proto-science fictional work, and then later Lucian of 

Samosata’s A True Story, written in the second century AD, brought science fiction into sharp 

focus with the first known use of extraterrestrials and outer space. Gilgamesh is particularly 

poignant in that it is the oldest written narrative we have, and therefore it can be claimed that 

science fiction is as old as the written word, and likely much older. For James Gunn in his 

introduction to his 2002 anthology The Road to Science Fiction Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to 

Wells, “Gilgamesh’s concerns are those of science fiction: social (people need a heroic king, but 

what do people do when a king rules too heavily?) and personal (can man live forever, or, if not, 

how does he live with the fact of death?)” (23). This demonstrates how, at its core, science 

fiction is about stories that question our reality’s objectivity but also ask whether our reality is 

meaningful, and how the human role plays a part in meaning making. If we travel back even 

further to the ancient petroglyphs of North America, we see extremely early depictions of 

science fictional motifs. In Nevada, petroglyphs of strange figures that appear to wear space suits 

can be dated back to between 10,000-14,000 years ago. These petroglyphs also often appear with 

spirals, which could potentially indicate portals into other dimensions, or anomalies in outer 

space.  As ancient astronaut theorists like Giorgio Tsoukalos propose, these petroglyphs are 

actual depictions of historical events. In other words, ancient astronaut theorists believe that the 

petroglyphs record factual visitations from extraterrestrials. However, it is also possible that 

these petroglyphs depict stories – conjured up by ancient artists, of science fictional realms. 

While both claims are highly contentious, theorists like Tsoukalos excel at creating a science 

fictional past for the earth that forces us to question long-held colonialist constructions of our 

ancient history as a species. At the core, this is what science fiction does best – it revises the 



 

23 

 

 

future, but also the past, becoming, as Suvin would suggest, a cognitively estranging event, 

capable of presenting entirely new worlds and new ways of living. 

 Gunn, however, provides for his readers many criteria and definitive characteristics for 

locating the beginnings of SF in much more recent times, he claims that “traditional literature is 

the literature of continuity, and thus of the past, science fiction is the literature of change, and 

thus of the present and the future” (10-11). For Gunn, science fiction began in earnest when 

“people began to think in unaccustomed ways” (14) and “discover[ed] the future” (15). These 

locations are shared with Suvin’s assertion that the science component of science fiction is more 

of a way of thinking – a method – than it is based in the advent of critical scientific 

advancements. This proves to be, as I suggested above, a colonial and Western conception of the 

history of science fiction, as “unaccustomed ways” is highly subjective and most certainly refers 

to European and American ideology over Indigenous ways of knowing. This said, Gunn does 

demystify the requirement that technology is embrocated into SF, for what is technology outside 

of our own references of “advancement”? The discovery of fire, the making of simple tools, he 

notes, is science and technology. In other words, the impetus was the same – and the 

technological/science awarenesses simply didn’t exist, especially in relation to astronomy and 

later astrophysics. Both of these science fiction disciplines expanded human understanding – and 

perhaps more importantly to the human imaginary – expanded to include extra-planetary and 

extraterrestrial narratives, ideologies, and realities.  

Suvin argues that science fiction does not, in fact, rely on science product or even the 

exploration of modern scientific concepts, but rather the scientific thirst for knowledge and an 

interrogation of our existence, “[a] alternative history: however its author, however he twists 

utopian cognition, it always flows from their longing for a different but this-worldly other world” 



 

24 

 

 

(95). Suvin goes on to clarify this link to utopias by classifying them as “social-science fiction” 

(95). These various levels of alternatives, but particularly the alternative island, indict The 

Tempest as a science fiction text,  

The ‘science’ that enables many colonial adventure fictions to be enrolled into SF often 

derives from disciplines such as archaeology, philology, Egyptology and anthropology, 

and a framing which valorises notions of evolutionary and technological progress from a 

primitive, non-white past into a eutopian, white future.” (24 Bould and Vint)  

Thus laid bare, the genre and its inception seem infinitely open-ended, yet the intention of 

Suvin and Gunn is to demonstrate that SF is a type of storytelling that seeks answers, explores 

human potentiality, and engages with utopian or dystopian ideas as a means of considering 

alternatives to our present difficulties.  

  In other words, one can argue and indeed Suvin does to a certain degree, that utopian and 

magical renderings of alternative islands (Aristophanes’ The Birds is one example I will use in 

the following chapter) still embody all of the ideals of the science fiction genre. As such, science 

fiction can seemingly be traced to alternative islands, regardless of their codifications as fantasy. 

To reiterate Todorov’s work on fantasy, the outcome of what he considers to be the fantastic is 

not the provocation to change, but rather to provide a tale that could never be and that 

necessitates a certain level of disbelief in fictional reality. It is for this reason that I have not 

included A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my analysis of early science fiction but have included 

The Tempest. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not only a dream but occurs in our/a familiar 

reality that is amended by supernatural events. The Tempest, on the other hand, occurs on the 

alternative island and asks us to contemplate the nature of reality, the perpetuation of inequities, 

and human knowledge production. The Tempest as a mad scientist/deserted island narrative is a 



 

25 

 

 

familiar trope for SF. However, Suvin points out that the wholly different world is not enough to 

substantiate a story as SF, demonstrating that myth and fantasy attempt to “explain once and for 

all the essence of phenomena” while SF “does not ask about the Man or the World, but which 

man? In which kind of world? And why such a man in such a kind of world?” (7) In other words, 

through cognitive estrangement, the nature of living beings and the reality of the world within a 

given science fiction cannot be easily categorized and do not offer definitive answers – SF texts 

are decidedly anti-essentialist and do not demand binary solutions or interpretations. This notion 

can be supported by looking, for example, at The Tempest and at A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

as diametric – The Tempest asks questions, in particular in terms of the nature of knowledge and 

the danger of knowing too much, whereas A Midsummer Night’s Dream “explains the essence of 

phenomena” in that the fantasy of the play is largely located within dream, negating any need on 

the part of the audience to substantiate the plot through logic, reason, or rational thought. The 

audience does not question because they know the dream to be impossible, and the story is 

resolved neatly and concisely with a happy ending.    

Throughout my work, I will consider both Muñoz’s horizons of possibility and the 

alternative island as core to understanding science fiction on stage. Not only are these islands and 

horizons aspirational, innovative, and speculative spaces, they are literal spaces on stage. The 

stage itself is often an island, the edge of the proscenium, a horizon. With this additional context, 

science fiction in theatre is not just thematic, it is embodied and expressed. Incorporating New 

Media Dramaturgy (NMD), I will demonstrate how breaks with traditional dramaturgy make 

additional space for horizons of possibility and the alternative island to live, not just in the 

traditional plays or plays-within-plays that are so familiar to us, but through the incorporation of 

digital, interactive programs, holograms, robots, cyborgs, and the transformation of the human 



 

26 

 

 

body on stage. Diverging from traditional definitions of what performance and what theatre are, I 

leverage NMD, which highlights performances that embrace digital performers and digital 

components as both still “live,” while somewhat rejecting the importance of liveness to define 

the theatre. As such, science fiction finds its richest ground in the performance and creation of 

new beings and new places. Science fiction has often become science fact (take tablet technology 

on Star Trek, as a clear example). I see a point in which science fiction and science fact become 

one in performance through a relationship between AI and the human. This is perhaps similar to 

the uncanny valley, not in the sense that we cannot tell the difference between AI and the human 

as the uncanny valley is defined, but rather that interaction with AI in performance becomes 

intuitive, generative, and natural, with no hierarchy or fear of sublimation or distrust. 

This work contains previously published material from: 

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Birds at University of British Columbia."   

Ecumenica, Pennsylvania University Press, 2024, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 107-10. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Thin Place at ACT Seattle." Ecumenica,  

Pennsylvania University Press, 2022, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 200-204. 

 

Fairchild, Liz. “Nuclear Normativity, Monstrous Masculinity, and Matter in Burning Vision,”  

Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification, edited by 

Michael Chemers and Analola Santana, Routledge, 2022. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

27 

 

 

Chapter II 

Science Fiction Theatre: A History and a Nexus Point 

 

Whoever thinks this valley is the world is blind. 

-Darko Suvin, Metamorphosis of Science Fiction, 

in reference to H.G. Wells’ “The Country of the Blind” 

 

The coercive system of tragedy can be used before or after the revolution . . . but never during it! 

– Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed 

 

This chapter contains previously published work:  

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Birds at University of British Columbia."   

Ecumenica, Pennsylvania University Press, 2024, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 107-10. 

 

1. Aristotle, Science, and Science Fiction 

No discussion of ancient Greek theatre – and indeed most Western theatre in general – 

would be complete without considering Aristotle’s contribution to theatrical conventions. Yet, it 

is also my assertion that Aristotelian dramaturgy is harmful to theatre that is invested in 

queerness and equitable change, and thus is also hostile to science fiction. As Augusto Boal and 

many other critics of Aristotle contend, part of the issue with Aristotelian dramaturgy is that it 

ultimately upholds the status quo,  

Aristotle's coercive system of tragedy survives to this day, thanks to its great efficacy. It 

is, in effect, a powerful system of intimidation. The structure of the system may vary in a 

thousand ways, making it difficult at times to find all the elements of its structure, but the 

system will nevertheless be there, working to carry out its basic task: the purgation of all 

antisocial elements… That is to say that the system, insofar as it structures certain 

elements which produce a determined effect, can be utilized by any society as long as it 



 

28 

 

 

possesses a definite social ethos; for it to function, technically whether the society is 

feudal, capitalist, or socialist does not matter: what matters is that it have a universe of 

definite, accepted values. (46) 

The Aristotelian dramaturgical model, considered through Boal’s framework, is decidedly 

against systemic change and is instead invested in maintaining traditional, Western values as the 

only solution to our societal ills. Because of this – even in plays with extensive conflict – the 

outcome is always the same: the good and moral win, the deviant are obliterated or punished, as 

Aristotle notes, “a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of 

parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain 

magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order” (14; pt. 7).  

Rather than offering new ways of seeing old problems, this type of theatre advocates for a 

“purge” via catharsis – but a purging of what, both Bertolt Brecht and Boal ask. Angela Curran 

articulates in “Brecht’s Criticism of Aristotle’s Aesthetics of Tragedy,” that,  

Brecht argues that Aristotelian dramatic practices lead the viewer to conclude that human 

suffering is an ‘inescapable’ part of the human condition. In contrast, [Brecht’s] ‘epic 

theatre’ presents suffering as something that can be changed through the social 

transformation of political institutions. (170)  

This is relevant to our discussion of science fiction because it demonstrates that theatre that is 

dedicated to change and revolution is disadvantaged when utilizing standard (Aristotelian) 

modalities of storytelling and theatre production. Aristotelian theatrical form appears in the 

majority of Western storytelling to this day: linear plots with normative moral compasses.  

Aristotle is also relevant to our discussion of science fiction considering his writings 

about space and time. While the majority of theatre still embraces notions of time as rational, 



 

29 

 

 

absolute, and fixed; time as linear and fixed has been scientifically disproven. In tracing the 

history and theory of time, Stephen Hawking lays bare the narrow focus that Aristotle and 

Newton set forward, “although our apparently commonsense notions work well when dealing 

with things like apples, or planets that travel comparatively slowly, they don’t work at all for 

things moving at or near the speed of light” (18). Here, Hawking is making a connection between 

space and time; the faster an object moves, the faster time passes, and, as is articulated by 

Einstein’s general relativity theory, the curvature of space and the pull of gravity also impact the 

passage of time. Aristotle, rather, saw time as extant only in the moment; fixed and linear, as he 

discusses in Physics, 

…if the 'now' which is not, but formerly was, must have ceased-to-be at some time, the 

'nows' too cannot be simultaneous with one another, but the prior 'now' must always have 

ceased-to-be. But the prior 'now' cannot have ceased-to-be in itself (since it then existed); 

yet it cannot have ceased-to-be in another 'now'. For we may lay it down that one 'now' 

cannot be next to another, any more than point to point. If then it did not cease-to-be in 

the next 'now' but in another, it would exist simultaneously with the innumerable 'nows' 

between the two-which is impossible. (Aristotle; bk. 4 pt 10)  

Here Aristotle is theorizing that the passage of time exists only in one direction – forward, 

presently, and without other timelines. This sense of linear and static time is reiterated in 

Aristotle’s Poetics, with his requirement that stories have a realist relationship to time,  

Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'epeisodic' in which the 

episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets 

compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they 



 

30 

 

 

write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often 

forced to break the natural continuity. (16; pt. 9)  

While his treatise on time was somewhat related to the knowledge available during his time, his 

dedication to rational time transcends scientific knowledge and takes up residence in the arts, as 

dictated by his own assertions on what good drama is. This gauntlet was picked up by 

Renaissance artists and philosophers, who lauded tidy, linear, and morally concrete storytelling 

in Aristotle’s name. If we consider Steven Hawking and imagine his understanding of physics as 

an inspiration for theatrical form, we arrive at many horizons of possibility that break traditional 

form and flow, as well as the direction of time. As an example of this science fictional form of 

theatre, Madeleine George’s The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, follows the 

characters of Eliza and Watson as they move through the metafictional time of Sherlock Holmes, 

the historic time of the invention of the telephone, and the fictional space of “the present” which 

includes IBM’s AI Watson and a regular human Watson. This creates a multiversal space on 

stage in which the connections between the timelines seem only to be Watson himself, disrupting 

conceptions of identity and “authenticity” as well as rejecting linear time. The alternative island, 

here, exists in the alteration of time, rather than place. 

In this way, The (curious case of) the Watson Intelligence, among many other science 

fiction plays, adamantly defies the unities of Greek tragedy. Aristotelian tragedy purges “anti-

social behaviors” and upholds virtue through realistic (at least insofar as time and space are 

concerned) depictions of the world, whereas science fiction questions the inequities of our 

contemporary system and explores alternate conceptions of time, space, and potentialities of 

humanity and posthumanity.  

 



 

31 

 

 

2. Antiquity and Early Science Fiction On Stage 

Looking forward from the myth of Gilgamesh, Suvin mentions, if only in passing, 

Aristophanes play The Birds as an early science fiction text. This is where I am locating “the 

beginning” of Western theatre’s connection with science fiction, tracing the legacy of science 

fiction on stage back to Ancient Greece. Performed in Athens in 414 BCE, before Aristotle had 

even been born, The Birds is a comedy that is also, by all accounts, fantastical. Yet, to once again 

leverage Suvin’s distinction between fantasy and science fiction, The Birds offers more than 

phenomenon, and asks questions on the nature of the gods, the nature of power, and the legacy 

and consequences of our existence. The Birds is, ultimately, a utopia that is created through 

nonhuman/posthuman bodies and agencies, off world habitats, and the separation of the gods 

from humankind. The Birds is also a critique of the Greek polis during Aristophanes’ lifetime.  

The play centers Pisthetaurus and his friend Euelpides who are both discontent with 

Athenian life. In the wilderness, they encounter godlike birds and convince these birds that they 

are the true gods, and that the birds should build a great city in the sky. With the building of the 

city Cloudcuckooland, as well as its walls in the sky, the Greek gods are cut off from Earth, and 

the offerings and sacrifices made by the Athenians below are prevented from reaching the gods. 

This alternative island in the sky greatly alters the entire trajectory of Athenian life. As a result of 

the Cloudcuckooland’s power, Pisthetaurus is proclaimed king after outsmarting Heracles, 

Poseidon, and Zeus himself. Pisthetaurus is then given wings by the birds. What makes 

Pisthetaerus a successful ruler is, perhaps, this augmentation, which renders him a multi-species 

being that is both human and not human, with tools (wings, feathers) that change his abilities, 

perceptions, and his endurance. By becoming a bird (despite the clear comedic value that 

Aristophanes derives from this transformation) he is able to shed mortal trappings and become 



 

32 

 

 

the leader that the new world of Cloudcuckooland demands. This demonstrates that even the 

ancient Greeks knew that flight is required to reach other realms beyond our planet. 

While the connection is not as overt as Aristophanes’ other plays, The Birds is critical of 

the Peloponnesian war, in that the world of The Birds and the results of the Peloponnesian war 

were both the advent of significant changes and reorganizations to Greek society. As Kenneth 

McLeish notes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama, 

To the original Athenian audiences, [drama and politics] would have had more than the 

abstract philosophical interest the same plays may kindle in us today. They arose directly 

out of the political situation of the city and its people… Its pungency in a city first 

basking in the glory of its triumphs in the Persian War and then gradually collapsing and 

losing hope in the generation-long Peloponnesian War against the Spartans is hard to 

recapture or imagine nowadays. (22)  

As such, any attempt at a literal or “authentic” rendering of The Birds and all other Greek drama 

for that matter, is impossible – there are still so many elements of ancient Greek society, 

especially in relation to theatre and how few theatrical texts survived – that current theatre 

scholars and historians such as Kenneth McLeish cannot possibly render as “accurate.” This is 

not a critique of McLeish’s scholarship but rather his own admission of how difficult it is to truly 

know the period with the number of writings that have been lost.  

While McLeish focuses on the importance of historical context even with the 

unknown/unknowable aspects of ancient Greek theatre, Mary-Kay Gamel notes in “Revising 

‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama” that,  

It is important to understand the historical and contingent nature of the concept of 

authenticity. As Wiles says, ‘Most directors who engage with Greek drama feel a) that 



 

33 

 

 

they have touched on something authentically Greek which is worth bringing to the 

present, and b) that there is something in the present which they would like to bring to the 

ancient text.’ However, ‘the element of authenticity keeps shifting – the circular 

auditorium, the use of the mask, uncensored Aristophanic obscenity, the message about 

war. What seems authentic to one generation seems stilted, ill-researched and irrelevant 

to the next.’ (208) 

If authenticity is always relational to shifting trends, exploring Greek drama as science fiction 

does not carry a burden of proof. Purity and authenticity should not exist in the theatre because 

these concepts reify Aristotelian models of art that stifle and defy change. Purity and authenticity 

cannot exist in the theatre because the theatre is always reformulating itself.  

In this spirit, scholars like Downing Cless, in his 2010 book Ecology and Environment in 

European Drama, have also made connections to climate change, claiming that Aristophanes 

was marking changes in the natural environment via birds (33). Cless “read Cloudcuckooland as 

an ironic dystopia, and argue[s] that Aristophanes was concerned about the increasing 

degradation of nature in his time and place” (30). This interpretation is no more far-fetched than 

my own treatise, but both perspectives need to be considered as a retrospective analysis that 

cannot possibly be decoupled from our contemporary ideologies. That is to say, there is no 

“accurate” read about the meaning and intentions of Ancient Greek theatre and there never will 

be.  

Widely considered to be a comedy, Aristophanes The Birds is also considered an early 

science fiction by Suvin, James Gunn, and myself, not in intent but in the scape of the human 

imaginary. This is to say, the city-in-the-sky is an alternative island – a space station floating, 

isolated, in a sea of stars. This is especially significant considering the limited understanding of 



 

34 

 

 

astronomy during Aristophanes’ lifetime. The Earth was the center of the universe in pre-

Galilean thought, so a potential utopia above earth is a revolutionary concept for the time. The 

creation of Cloudcuckooland dramatically decenters human supremacy, contests the gods as 

inherently linked to humanity, and rejects the gods as omnipotent. This certainly demonstrates 

the creation of a new horizon of possibility through alternatives to accepted ancient Greek 

understandings of the universe and humanity’s place within it. 

Thinking more closely about the science in science fiction, Cless also considers Socratic 

philosophy at large as involving “early scientists” (32).  While modern science  

excludes ancient Greek thought from the scientific method, rationality and intentionality around 

the acquisition of knowledge followed similar logic to the scientific method (Downing 31), 

which was arguably born of Socrates, a contemporary of Aristophanes.  

When the construction on the wall in the sky begins, Pisthetaerus and Meton engage with 

the technical requirements of building a wall in the sky: 

PISTHETAERUS. What are these things? 

METON. Tools for measuring the air. In truth, the spaces in the air have precisely 

the form of a furnace. With this bent ruler I draw a line from top to bottom; from 

one of its points I describe a circle with the compass. Do you understand? 

PISTHETAERUS. Not the very least. 

METON. With the straight ruler I set to work to inscribe a square within this circle;  

in its centre will be the market-place, into which all the straight streets will lead, 

converging to this centre like a star, which, although only orbicular, sends forth its 

rays in a straight line from all sides. (35) 



 

35 

 

 

Pisthetaerus’ inability to comprehend the technicalities of building the wall creates a cognitive 

estrangement– this knowledge is too foreign in conception to be comprehended by Pisthetaerus’ 

understanding of the universe. In utilizing obtuse geometry, Meton describes the structures 

appearance in the sky, though it has not yet been completed during this dialogue. The “bent 

ruler” could symbolize a breaking of the rules of physics as they were understood at the time, but 

also an attempt to demonstrate the curvature that the wall has in the sky. Since the earth would 

have been considered flat, this is a profound restructuring of the universe above the earth. The 

rendering in this description opens up the possibility that the structure can be seen hanging 

upside down or over earth, “a square within this circle; in its centre will be the market-place” like 

one might look into a dollhouse, and the wall is fully spherical in its enclosure of the city above.  

Asking questions in the dialogue also serves the important science fictional theme of knowledge 

production beyond what is presently possible. Pisthetaerus strives for understanding by inquiring 

about things which he has never seen before, which indeed no one has seen before. 

What I find the most striking and worthy of note about The Birds is the worlding, as 

Donna Haraway would call it, beyond Earth. If nothing else, this worlding proves human’s long-

standing obsession with the stars and realms beyond Earth. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna 

Haraway is highly committed to the creation of new possible worlds (what she calls worlding) as 

a critical way to change the future for the better, especially in regards to ecological crises. The 

Birds is very clearly engaged in worlding – Aristophanes sees no better alternative than to build a 

new society beyond Earth that also includes many nonhuman and posthuman subjects. This 

engagement with different renderings of “humans” demonstrates, to a modern audience, the 

power of augmentation and multispecies co-operation and involution, as Haraway might say. The 



 

36 

 

 

birds in The Birds offer horizons of possibility that create a utopia through their refusal to center 

the human. This utopia is articulated through dialogue, 

CHORUS. Who are they? From what country? 

EPOPS. Strangers, who have come from Greece, the land of the wise. 

CHORUS. And what fate has led them hither to the land of the birds? 

EPOPS. Their love for you and their wish to share your kind of life; to dwell and 

remain with you always. 

CHORUS. Indeed, and what are their plans? 

EPOPS. They are wonderful, incredible, unheard of. 

CHORUS. Why, do they think to see some advantage that determines them to  

settle here? Are they hoping with our help to triumph over their foes or to be 

useful to their friends? 

EPOPS. They speak of benefits so great it is impossible either to describe or  

conceive them; all shall be yours, all that we see here, there, above and below us; 

this they vouch for. 

CHORUS. Are they mad? 

EPOPS. They are the sanest people in the world. (19) 

 The desire for settlers of Cloudcuckooland to meet with a better reality, one that is not 

mitigated by the trappings of earthly desires, is at the core of many science fiction tales, 

demonstrating how our earthly realities fail to provide meaningful and equitable realities for all. 

While “they are the sanest people in the world” could certainly be interpreted as hefty sarcasm, it 

is also indicative of a desire to transcend the trappings of the human body and human-inhabited 



 

37 

 

 

space for something literally and figuratively above. The lofty goals of the inhabitants of 

CloudCuckooLand are so different than Greek society so as to seem “impossible” and “unheard 

of,” which both critiques the ills of the Athenian polis as well as offering open-ended descriptors 

of off-world utopias for the audience’s interpretation (in other words, not as a representation on 

stage but as a mental creation of the audience).     

On a more comical note (and considering The Birds is a comedy), the play is also 

evocative of Birdperson, a tragi-comic character in the adult cartoon science fiction sensation 

Rick and Morty. Birdperson is an alien from an unnamed alternate dimension who refers to 

himself in third person, and later is killed and reappears as Phoenixperson, a cyborg and evil 

resurrection of Birdperson. Powerful, mysterious, and thoroughly comical in his presentation, 

Birdperson, is a cyborg much like Pisthetaerus, blending bird and man to enable flight and create 

an alien being that is also familiar. The concept of a cyborg, in my own definition, does not 

require technology to exist. A cyborg merely refers to the augmentation of the human body for 

greater performance, rather than necessitating robotic elements imbedded within the human 

body, as many definitions of the cyborg would conclude. We have arguably been cyborgs since 

we first picked up a tool, and the consideration of the augmented human body has long been a 

vital part of the human imaginary, as is identified within The Birds.  

For Donna Haraway – moving away from her Cyborg Manifesto in her more 

contemporary works – science fiction or “speculative fabulation” (34) as she sometimes calls it, 

helps us conceive of the ways we are always co-created with the animals and organisms around 

us and that thinking new sympoetic (making with) (58) creations into existence is capable of 

solving for big human-created problems like climate change. As such, when Pisthetaerus 



 

38 

 

 

becomes half man, half bird he is biologically augmented; he has become a multi-species 

organism that has new power to effect change.  

In considering the wall in The Birds, I will take a further step away from Socratic 

scientific renderings to imagine space stations, habitat rings, and livable spaces beyond earth. 

Before Galileo and Copernicus, the earth was flat and the center of the universe. As such, the 

wall as it is described in The Birds would have been through a different lens than our current 

conception of astrophysics. It could be a wall that is either directly facing Earth, or has an axis on 

the horizon. Either way, it locates the space beyond earth (the sky, the heavens, space above) as a 

closed space – it does not engage with the infinite (or perhaps vastly huge donut shape of the 

universe, as some propose, that has no knowable boarders) that we now conceive of as the 

universe. However, building above the earth has extensive ramifications, how does it stay in 

place? What constructs must we create to make it a viable space? Aristophanes addressed this via 

the world of birds as always already above and outside of our earthly space. But the placement of 

the wall, while not relational to Newtonian physics, remains in place.  

In some translations of The Birds, the characters refer to the wall of the city as beyond the 

proscenium – perhaps above the audience or beyond the audience. This was “a feature of 

Aristophanes’ style that characters refuse to stay within the confines of their own stage ‘reality’” 

(McLeish 199). Regardless of Aristophanes’ intention with the wall, he was breaking through to 

spaces beyond the stage, changing space and time in a decidedly non-Aristotelian way. 

It is critical to ask (and receive no definitive answer) whether the wall in The Birds hangs 

in the air vertically or faces earth in objection to the heavens. A volumetrics perspective on how 

the wall in The Birds was conceived in the collective imaginary has the potential to decouple 

western (Aristotelian) understandings about the construction of space and time. As a science 



 

39 

 

 

fiction example of linear conceptions/limitations of fictional space, we can look at Star Trek – 

but in fact most science fictions that occur in outer space – to see that space is almost always 

conceived of in a very limited, two-directional way. The Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next 

Generation, for example, always moves forward or backward yet space is above, below, and 

beside the ship. A linear trajectory is presented, furthering limited conceptions of travel, time, 

and space as linear. 

What is most compelling, perhaps, about the realm above Earth in The Birds is its 

defiance of the gods rather than its insistence that heaven is the predominant (or only) realm 

beyond our earthly existence. Cloudcuckooland creates a space between the realm of the gods 

and the earth, creating an alternative island in a sea of stars that does not follow the rules of 

contemporary scientific thought. The Birds also “predicts” the scientifically sound concept of a 

Bishop Ring, often referred to as a habitat ring. Conceived of by the Institute of Atomic-scale 

Engineering’s Forrest Bishop, the Bishop Ring is a hypothetical but theoretically possible 

habitable space station that is shaped like a large ring, aiding in the creation of artificial gravity 

through rotations much like Earth. The science fiction of the Bishop Ring is considered possible 

by astrophysicist, demonstrating the link between science and science fiction. “Predict” from 

above, is perhaps self-evidently in quotations because of the clear problematics of putting this 

type of techno-babble onto an ancient fictional play. However, regardless of Aristophanes’ 

intentions, one could argue that the wall in The Birds was a vital and necessary preclusion to 

theoretical/science fictional habitats like the Bishop Ring, and other habitats to come.  

This is evocative of the adage “nothing is new under the sun” but can also be a prophetic 

rendering of objects, technologies, and identities yet to be invented or discovered. Perhaps the 

human imaginary has manifested real technological and scientific discoveries through 



 

40 

 

 

storytelling, long before these inventions and discoveries were made real/realized by the 

scientific community.  

NASA, for example, released a video in May of 2022 with a clip of what a blackhole 

sounds like to the human ear. As they explain the video on the nasa.gov website,  

One of the surprising features of black holes is that although light (such as radio, visible, 

and X-rays) cannot escape from them, surrounding material can produce intense bursts 

of electromagnetic radiation. As they travel outward, these blasts of light can bounce off 

clouds of gas and dust in space, similar to how light beams from a car’s headlight will 

scatter off fog. A new sonification turns these “light echoes” from the black hole called 

V404 Cygni into sound. (Watzke) 

While the sound produced by the blackhole is both haunting and eerie, the sound is also 

somehow familiar. When I listened to the clip, I was sure I had heard the sound before, despite 

the fact that it also sounded completely new. This constitutes a knowable unknown, similarly to 

many science fiction productions that have predicted aspects of the future, such as George 

Orwell’s surveillance state in 1984, or Octavia Butler’s out-of-control wildfires in Parable of the 

Sower. 

While we will never know Aristophanes’ intentions or visions of the wall, science fiction 

relies on revision and new visions, just as the theatre does. As theatre scholar Marvin Carlson 

notes, the very nature of the theatrical space is one of “ghosting” – borrowing, recycling, 

revising, always with some semblance of the past in mind. Extrapolating from this, and 

considering the ways in which science fiction often defies linear time and space, what is most 

valuable in considering The Birds is how we might produce it today. Purest interpretations of 

theatre and art writ large are the enemy of science fiction. 



 

41 

 

 

3. The Birds as an Indigenous Future  

The March 2023 production of Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan’s adaption of The 

Birds, presented at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, British Columbia, 

reframes Aristophanes’ work to consider both an Indigenous utopia and a serious rejection of 

utopia altogether, as utopia is most frequently contextualized through a White, heteropatriarchal 

lens. Directed by Michelle Olson, a First Nations MFA student in directing at UBC, The Birds 

begs the question as to whether utopia is something that can or should be strived for by 

Indigenous communities, given its historic location within Western and White notions of the 

perfect future. Within Nolan’s adaptation, not only do the entirely-women cast of birds reject the 

notion that the gods are worth quarreling with or over, but they also reject the idea, in the end, 

that a city built in the sky will create an equitable future for birds. This rejection is based largely 

on the fact that the city in the sky is still a replicant of the city of men on earth – the idea for 

Cloudcuckooland is, after all, developed by Jack and Gulliver (Pisthetaerus and Euelpides from 

Aristophanes’ original) – who travel to the land of the birds from the city – and is not invented 

by the birds themselves.  

Nolan’s The Birds is very clearly positioned in the future – Jack, played by Christian 

Billet, and Gulliver, portrayed by Simon Auclair-Troughton intimate that the cities are not only 

hot and polluted, but that no birds reside there any longer, creating an entirely different space, 

place, and time than our contemporary climate and environmental crisis. The astonishing 

removal of birds from urban society, as well as the changes in the environment that Jack and 

Gulliver highlight, position the play as a science fiction – the world of Nolan’s The Birds occurs 

on an alternative island that does not exist within our timeline, but instead a yet-to-be manifested 



 

42 

 

 

future that demonstrates the disintegration of the society of (White) men, who render an urban 

dystopia through carelessness and greed.  

 In Nolan’s adaptation, Jack and Gulliver escape the city in search of a better life. Having 

heard of the supposed paradise that the birds live in in the wilderness, they venture forth, and 

encounter first the Hoopoe who leads them in turn to Raven. Significantly, Raven is also the 

creator of the world in many Pacific Northwest tribal stories, which the play highlights. Raven is 

angered by the appearance of two men, but ultimately gathers all of the birds together to discuss 

Jack and Gulliver’s presence, and whether they will be allowed to become birds themselves, like 

the Hoopoe. When Jack proposes the creation of the city in the sky, all of the birds discuss the 

possibility through song and story, retelling the Indigenous creation story of Muskrat and Turtle 

Island. In this enactment, the Nightingale becomes Muskrat, raising a handful of earth from the 

ocean beneath to create land. When the birds finish their retelling of creation, they determine to 

undertake the construction of the wall and the city in the sky. However, the construction draws 

capitalist possession and business ideology out of the birds, demonstrating how “civilization” as 

it is currently rendered replicates colonial ideology. As Cloudcuckooland is being built; 

surveyors, lawyers, and agents show up to claim parts of Cloudcuckooland for themselves, 

highlighting the constructed and indeed fictional nature of land ownership, in particular. 

In Olson’s production, the wall that surrounds Cloudcuckooland is the first image and 

first moment of the play. Sandpiper, played by Peihwen J Tai, enters the thrust theatre space and 

sits in the audience while the house lights are still at half, disrupting the fourth wall and the 

insistence on the production’s beginning occurring with an audience in anonymity. As the lights 

are taken to a quarter, Tai pulls two ropes, each attached to a bird on her wrists, across the stage, 

making a linear, proscribed space that is then hoisted vertically as she disappears beyond the 



 

43 

 

 

black curtains offstage. This appearance of a wall constructed by the two ropes hung a loft at a 

wingspan’s distance apart is a striking image that signifies a break in linear time because the wall 

around Cloudcuckooland has not been built yet within the narrative of the play. These two ropes 

are also the only visual representation of Cloudcuckooland that the production creates. The birds 

themselves do not appear as much like extraterrestrials as they do in Aristophanes’ original, but 

they are depicted in somewhat of an abstract fashion – capes are used as wings, and a great deal 

of care and commitment is demonstrated by the actor’s bird-like mannerisms, without masks or, 

in general, prosthetics. Their costumes are constructed from many different patches of materials, 

giving some a quilt-like appearance, while other’s patched materials are fastened loosely, 

providing the movement of feathers. This abstract quality furthers a sense of the alternative 

island, as does the set, which leaves the wires, pipes, and electrical boxes of the backstage 

exposed, modified in places by twigs and branches. This set choice gives the impression that the 

birds too, live with the workings of machines and technology, that there is no wilderness that has 

not been touched by human hands, no matter how remote and unique it may be.  

 Nolan’s adaptation of The Birds demonstrates a complex and metaphorical examination 

of colonialism and the survival of First Nations and Native American peoples despite genocide 

and oppression. The work also discusses the epidemic of missing, murdered, and raped 

Indigenous women throughout the United States and Canada. Through the song and dance of the 

Nightingale, played by Rachel Angco, the audience hears of how Nightingale was once a human, 

and because of the rape of her sister, she had her own tongue cut out and was banished, but 

found the birds and became a bird herself. While the subject matter is heavy at times, Nolan’s 

work strives to uplift and empower through Indigenous Futurisms that do not reject Western 

society, but refuse to conform to it or recreate it within their own communities. Indigenous 



 

44 

 

 

futurisms create spaces for Native people in the future that are not defined by colonialism or 

Western thought. As computational media and Indigenous futurisms scholar Jason Edward Lewis 

notes,  

Indigenous people also face pressures to conform to stereotypes of Indigenous ontology 

that withhold ‘authenticity’ from those actively engaged with many aspects of 

contemporary life (Crosby). Both kinds of settler strategies of elimination (Wolfe) 

interfere with the narratives we have within our communities about continuity between 

the past, the present, and the future. The imaginary imperative counters such strategies in 

its insistence on understanding Indigenous histories, current lives, and visions of the 

future as a persistent unfolding of an unbroken line of epistemological and cosmological 

frameworks that continuously evolve and adapt to support the lived experiences of 

Indigenous people. (14) 

Lewis is noting that systemic colonial pressures and ideologies expect Indigenous people to 

embrace a stereotyped, White, often romanticized idea of Indigeneity. Meanwhile, these same 

systems attempt to erase Native peoples, and have been doing so since settlers reached the 

Americas. With the arrival of settlers, Indigenous erasure began with genocide and 

contemporarily continues to override Indigenous autonomy and culture through the enforcement 

of Western cultural norms. This enforcement denies Indigenous ways of knowing time, space, 

and history. Indigenous futurisms counter these oppressions by envisioning spaces for Native 

people in a future where structural oppression does not exist, but more importantly, these futures 

utilize Indigenous knowledge and knowing to reshape and reclaim their cultural past, present, 

and future. Such futurisms posit new horizons of possibility that focus on equitable and 

expansive storytelling, creating a future free from cultural regulation and systemic oppression. 



 

45 

 

 

 Overall, Nolan and Olson’s work explores the act of becoming a bird in a much richer 

and deeper way than Aristophanes’ original. For Aristophanes’, while the birds are magnificent 

and cognitively estranging, they are also largely the means to make Pisthetaerus and Euelpides 

more powerful, and to make a utopia not only for birds but for the men of Athens. In Nolan’s 

work, the birds ultimately reject the wall and the city, as its construction brings greed, 

corruption, and issues of ownership and capitalism into the world of the birds. At the play’s end, 

Nightingale – who also plays Muskrat in the retelling of the creation of turtle island – takes the 

very same handful of dirt that Muskrat brought from the bottom of the ocean and blows it out 

across the stage. As Olson states in her director’s note in the program, “Awakening to the 

violence in the making of [Canada], we must challenge the perpetual remaking of it in its own 

image” (Olson). In this respect, the act of blowing the dirt to create the world symbolizes a 

recreation, a starting of their world anew, without the need to conform to the expectations of 

Western Civilization.  

4. The Tempest as Science Fiction 

The Tempest, first performed in November of 1611, offers an alternative island that is 

also a colonial island. Around the time The Tempest was written and first performed in London 

and throughout Europe, the witch trials had reached a fever pitch, with the infamous Pendle 

Witch trials only a year after The Tempest’s debut. This witch trial resulted in the hanging of 10 

out of the 11 women tried as witches. Simultaneously, English colonialism was escalating. In 

1607 the Virginia Company founded settlements in Jamestown Bermuda, as many other ships 

sought “new” lands. Colonialism and the fear of witches are both legible themes within The 

Tempest. The unnamed island itself is foreign to the English and so represents a fear of the 

unknown. Further, Caliban’s mother –  the witch Sycorax – is both feared and loathed, and 



 

46 

 

 

Caliban, also loathed but perhaps not feared is himself a colonized Indigenous person. In Silvia 

Federichi’s book Caliban and the Witch, she connects labor, the societal and bodily control of 

women to the perceived monstrosity that takes the form of a witch. Federichi notes, “the ‘occult 

virtues’ attributed to [the body] by both Natural Magic and the popular superstitions of the time – 

was to make intelligible the possibility of subordinating it to a work process that increasingly 

relied on uniform and predictable forms of behavior” (139). In other words, the nonconforming 

woman was ascribed to the occult and her failure to conform and perform acceptable labor was a 

possible death sentence. In this way, The Tempest greatly described the anxieties of the time 

through Caliban as an exploited worker, a witch, a monster, an abhorrent who must be 

controlled. 

 The dominant interpretation of The Tempest’s magical elements is twofold. First, scholars 

like Peter G. Platt who in “Wonder Personified, Wonder Anatomized: The Tempest” claims that 

the magic of The Tempest is created as a proof point for the power of reason. That is to say, 

reason and rationality eventually win, returning Prospero to his former life governed by the laws 

of man. For Platt, rationality is defined not simply as the opposite of magic, but in the humanist, 

Cartesian sense that we have all come to expect from historical patriarchal interpretations of 

literary texts. But his analysis fails to contend with magic and witchcraft as literal for 

Elizabethan audiences, or the fear that the occult produced in Europe at the time.  

The second main line of interpretation and interest in The Tempest is an obsession with 

Caliban’s nonhuman/othered form as a signifier for the colonized body. The uncertainty of the 

scholar/audience/reader as to what Caliban is transcends the fictional/fantastical narrative and 

becomes part of a historical debate regarding his intended signification. As Hortense Spillers 

articulates, Caliban is “the dream as visual transliteration of the day’s grammar events – “Carib” 



 

47 

 

 

is translated as a “deformation” and “defamation” “into cannibal” (322). Silvia Federichi echoes 

some of these sentiments, but is more concerned with primitive accumulation than colonial 

ideology. 

Suvin, however, includes The Tempest in The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction to 

demonstrate how thematic utopianism and idealization through difference create a science 

fictional ethos,  

…the Shakespearean tension of Christian humanism-and beyond that, of the poet in class 

society produced also, in Miranda, a naively pure glance at the (if only potentially) ‘beauteous 

mankind’ and ‘brave new world,’ and in Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech a melancholy adicu to even 

the grandest verticals of human society and life as ‘insubstantial,’ transient stuff of space and 

time. True, the official ideology of Elizabethan morals and politics-indeed of politics as personal 

morals-colors all the supple and masterly estrangements occurring within the ‘sea-change’ that 

affects in different ways all the dramatis personae on this new island with the only too familiar 

absolutist relationships. (99)  

While Suvin acknowledges the historical events of the early 1600s that would have 

inspired such a story, he also notes that the major political themes of the era are estranged from 

reality inside the world of The Tempest. The rules of the island are different than those of the rest 

of the world, creating a space outside of typical human reality that allows for an exploration of 

magical and fantastical themes. These themes are articulated variably through Ariel’s magic, 

Prospero’s magic, and whispers of Sycorax’s power as a witch. Additionally, Caliban’s body, 

comportment, and subject position transport the island further into the realm of the speculative as 

he may be a posthuman/nonhuman/colonized and therefore a dehumanized figure who is tangibly 

different.  



 

48 

 

 

In The Tempest, we are confronted with a number of marvelous creatures and events, 

following the plays initial magical storm that Prospero creates to shipwreck his brother Antonio, 

as well as the King of Naples. To the audience and to the shipwrecked, the creatures and events 

of the alternative island are marvelous and magical, conveying the sense that the rules of reality 

have changed. We hear first of the uncertainty and tumult created by the storm from Ariel, 

describing the shipwreck to Prospero, “the first man that leaped; cried ‘Hell is empty/And all the 

devils are here’” (1.2.252-253). These words were overheard by Ferdinand, who was incredulous 

at the events, indicating a storm of extreme proportions. This general incredulity follows the 

crew throughout the play, allowing Ferdinand and the audience to question the nature of the 

island’s life and physical properties. While this speaks to the Christian fear of the supernatural 

and the devil that was prevalent in the 1620s in Europe, it is also clear here that many other 

elements of the island were baffling to the shipwrecked crew. 

The worlding of The Tempest is mostly remarkable for its characters rather than the 

environment of the island itself. Ariel, Caliban, and Sycorax all represent deviant characters – 

that is to say, they are characters who do not embody normative, expected behaviors. Through a 

contemporary lens, Ariel is evocative of Alexa or other AI personal assistants of today such as 

Siri. He is present and yet, not present, visible and not visible, his main purpose within the play 

is to help Prospero, but his freedom is his only motivation to do so. Further, Ariel does not 

adhere to the laws of physics – he is a nonhuman being estranged from human reality. This 

ephemerality can certainly be considered what Haraway calls a speculative fabulation, especially 

in productions that choose to make him appear only as light effects, like the 2001 production of 

The Tempest at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Penny Metropulos. Ariel is 



 

49 

 

 

presented as a ball of light, with movements that cannot be predicted by audience or actor. He is 

a glowing orb, a being of another realm entirely. 

Caliban’s comportment is also estranged from the reality of the island, and is described in 

various ways that defy categorization and defy familiarity. In Act II, Stephano notes that Caliban 

is “some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague” (2.2.66-7), 

whereas Miranda describes him as being from a “vile race”(1.2.430-1), highlighting perhaps, that 

he has a place in the human race, but is a member of what she sees to be a deviant and devious 

subset of humans (no doubt reflective of colonial ideology). The confusion around what Caliban 

is pervades the play, he is also described as “an islander that lately suffered a thunderbolt” 

(2.2.36) which questions his sanity but implies humanness with “islander,” and as a creature who 

is “not honored with a human shape”(1.2.337), despite his mother’s apparent human shape and 

his native birth to the island. This is evocative of Suvin’s assertions that science fiction does not 

provide definitive answers but instead asks questions. Science fiction “does not ask about the 

Man or the world, but which man? In which kind of world? And why such a man in such a kind 

of world?” (7). When considering Caliban, “why such a man in such a kind of world?” seems 

critical to understanding his subject position as deviant. He defies categorization so adeptly as to 

leave a great deal of his character in flux, and he leaves the characters within the play constantly 

questioning how his comportment relates to his honesty and morality as a being. 

With The Tempest, the uncertainty as to whether Caliban is a human or magical creature 

is left ultimately to the director, as the ambiguity of the text lends itself to multifaceted 

interpretations and approaches. In Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of The Tempest Caliban, played by 

Beninese-American actor Djimon Hounsu, is portrayed with stylized disfiguration. Tattooed with 

a large white circle around his left eye, this depiction of Caliban is potentially dehumanizing as it 



 

50 

 

 

muddles the symbolic with the socio-historical oppression of Black people. In The Oregon 

Shakespeare Festival’s 2022 production of The Tempest, Prospero is played by Black actor 

Tyrone Wilson while Caliban is played by German and Korean actor James Ryen, obliterating 

typical colonial narratives from the production by removing whiteness. Further, Caliban is 

presented as a man with a physical disability, which fosters more of a literal interpretation of 

Caliban’s subject position and his “ague.”  

While the language may indicate a hybrid of man/monster, it is much more productive to 

explore the colonial implications of calling a man a disfigured monster simply for their alterity. 

That is to say, when on the alternative island, his alterity is estranged from historical colonialism 

and becomes speculative. By creating an estranged resemblance to colonial oppression, The 

Tempest asks us to look at historical issues of inequity through the creation of a place that does 

not yet exist, changing the rules and speculating on new means of achieving freedom.  

The science fictional elements of The Tempest are extended and clarified by the 1956 

movie Forbidden Planet, which is based off of The Tempest but transports its themes and 

characters into space. In Forbidden Planet, the basic tenets of the story of The Tempest remain 

the same. Ariel is never named but represents a “dark, incomprehensible force” (Forbidden 

Planet) that proves itself to be a monster of Dr. Morbius’ (Prospero’s) subconscious. In place of 

Caliban, Robby the Robot serves as the slave of Dr. Morbius. Robby the Robot represents a 

posthuman embodiment as his subject position, gender, and appearance are questioned and 

marked by aberrance, much like Caliban. In place of Miranda is the beautiful and naïve Altaira, 

who, similar to Miranda, falls in love and spends the entire movie in a love trance. These 

connections between the film and the play are echoed in “Shakespeare and Science Fiction,” a 



 

51 

 

 

short but pithy comparison between the two texts. Author Robert Morsberger notes that 

Forbidden Planet, 

…whether by conscious or unconscious influence…is almost identical with 

Shakespeare's old play. But a moment's thought brings the idea that The Tempest was 

science-fiction or at least fantasy-fiction for its seventeenth- century audience, to whom 

the far Bermoothes were the outer realms of space. And as some modern critics complain 

of motion picture monsters and marvels, so classicist Ben Jonson complained of 

Shakespeare's presentation of wonders and objected that with Caliban, Shakespeare 

graced the stage with monsters. (2) 

Here, Morsberger recognizes the modern inability to see The Tempest as it’s contemporaries may 

have, highlighting a critical difference between belief and science, but also conceptions around 

science fiction needing science. If the story is still, in many ways, intact when transposed from 

the Elizabethan stage to the vision of the future as rendered in 1956, the text is not only universal 

but evokes a cognitive estrangement necessary to the core nature of the tale.  

 I have been reticent to engage with Shakespeare due to its over-researched and over-

indexed place in the academy. While there is an abundance of progressive Shakespearean 

scholarship, such as Goran Stanivukovic’s Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, the 

incessant and often redundant Shakespearean fixation wrongfully places him at the center of the 

theatrical world, and in some ways the literary world as well. And yet, several of Shakespeare’s 

texts are compelling from a science fiction perspective. The Tempest offers an alternative island 

that questions Western conceptions of morality, politics, and ways of being. Hamlet, as Chapter 

Three will demonstrate, has consistently been revised, reenvisaged, and brought into the future 

because of its universal themes. In other words, Shakespeare’s plays are living documents, and 



 

52 

 

 

his themes are seemingly timeless and ripe for reconsideration as evocative – always – of other 

times, places, and spaces.  

While ultimately The Tempest upholds the notion that reason is paramount to Prospero’s 

return to Western “civilization,” it also demonstrates that alterity and alternative  ways of 

thinking produce spaces that are often inaccessible to traditional human understandings of the 

mind and the five (six?) senses.  

Our contemporary position as of 2025 allows us to see elements of Shakespeare’s works 

that may not have been consciously present in the eyes of the playwright or an Elizabethan 

audience, but are nevertheless critical visions and revisions of texts that still captivate audiences.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

53 

 

 

Chapter III  

Quantum Theatre 

 

To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 

But that the dread of something after death, 

The undiscovered country from whose bourn 

No traveler returns, puzzles the will, 

And makes us rather bear those ills we have, 

Than fly to others that we know not of? 

- Shakespeare, Hamlet,  

 

This chapter contains previously published work:  

Fairchild, Liz. "Performance Review of The Thin Place at ACT Seattle." Ecumenica,  

Pennsylvania University Press, 2022, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 200-204. 

 

1. Quantum Theatre Explained 

During a meeting of the British Royal Astronomical Society in 1919, confirming the 

validity of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Alfred North Whitehead described the 

scientific process and the growing body of the uncanny in physics in comparison to ancient 

Athenian theatre. “Fate in Greek Tragedy,” he states, “becomes the order of nature in modern 

thought. The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as an example and verification 

of the working of fate, reappears in our epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial 

experiments” (53-69). Whitehead here is noting how what was once attributed to the gods is now 

attributed to science, but further he notes the epic and grandiose nature of science as high drama 

and highly dramatic. Whitehead goes on to discuss how the meeting itself was theatre – placing 

scientific discovery into the realm of performance on the scale of the Greek tragedians, “The 

whole atmosphere was exactly that of the Greek Drama: we were the chorus commenting on the 

decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was a dramatic 



 

54 

 

 

quality in the very staging” (53-69). While Whitehead is noting the magnanimousness of this 

occasion, he is also drawing an interesting correlative between theatre, science, and religion – the 

religion of the Greek’s has been reformulated from a stance of spiritual awe mingled with moral 

code, into a rational, natural phenomena. The shared drama therefore lies inside the production 

of awe that can be experienced in both the theatre and new scientific thought and discovery.  

This chapter aims to explore how science fiction and science fact, with elements of the 

occult, the spiritual, and the fantastic – create quantum states on stage. Originally coined by 

theatre scholar David George but very scantly and poorly used, I am using the term quantum 

theatre to describe theatrical states that represent or actualize dimensions beyond our typical 

reality’s comprehension – spiritual, scientific, or as a fusion of both.   

In quantum theatre, the creation of other universes does not require the play or 

performance itself to be thematically science fiction. As such, I will examine the 2014 Almeida 

Theatre production of 1984, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Michael 

Frayn’s Copenhagen, the HBO Max limited series Station Eleven, as well as Star Trek, Wooster 

Group’s Hamlet and the original Hamlet. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, published in 1604, 

is where I locate the beginning of quantum theatre, materializing “one devil too many” on stage.  

These works/productions create quantum spaces that appear beyond/beside the fourth 

wall by using iteration, reinvention, metatheatricality, and manipulation of space (and indeed 

time) on stage. By exploring these themes, devices, and concepts as they are contextualized 

within the above texts, I will demonstrate how quantum theatre behaves like both waves and 

particles – as is demonstrated through physics’ Uncertainty Principle – and how quantum theatre 

creates new universes on stage and in the audience. Unlike the previous chapter where science 

fiction is narrative and plot-based, quantum theatre manifests theoretical physics on and beyond 



 

55 

 

 

the stage through the embodiment of speculative locations and beings. I will also connect 

quantum theatre to the Copenhagen Interpretation in relation to quantum superpositions which I 

will explain shortly. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen discusses the Copenhagen Interpretation 

and the uncertainty principle through conceptual physics, actualizing quantum superpositions 

and liminal spaces on stage.   

2. Schrödinger’s Cat, Superpositions, and the Many Worlds Interpretation 

 While physics often seems inaccessible to general audiences, conceptual physics offers a 

philosophical access to the subject by presenting a high-level summary of how physics impacts 

our understanding of the universe. Additionally, conceptual physics lends itself to science fiction 

narratives through its digestibility. One good example of this is the Dyson sphere, which uses 

theoretical physics to posit how advanced spacefaring beings might harness extreme amounts of 

power. Inspired by the 1937 science fiction novel Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon, physicist 

Freeman Dyson formulated the theory that advanced civilizations in outer space could harness 

the energy from stars by building a structure around it. Commonly known as the Dyson sphere, 

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has looked for such structures, and the concept has 

been used in Star Trek, among other science fiction properties.  

 Often, conceptual physics are articulated through thought experiments that transpose 

micro or quantum structures for macro structures. The Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment 

does exactly this in its explanation of quantum superpositions. Quantum physics – while not a 

unified field – studies, in essence, the construction of everything in the universe, down to its 

smallest components. But deciphering how things work becomes immediately fraught due to the 

nature of physicis