Resurrecting Shadows and Light Theatre’s Ability to Communicate and Persuade Through Felt Absence

Abstract

Theatre is a rhetorical artform that has been haunting and calling audiences to action since the fourth century B.C. Yet research exploring the spectral, rhetorical power of theatre, providing communication scholars and theatre practitioners with better ways to explore and analyze the rhetoric of theatre and musical theatre, is sparse. Seth Pierce’s (2021) Rhetorrectional Situation of Spectral Rhetoric comprises four elements: the visor affect, double kairos, phantomime, and revenance. These elements help the rhetor/performer and audience members become aware of the ways theatre haunts and, in turn, persuades audiences through felt absences, ghosting, and dark matter. The purpose of this rhetorical critical dissertation was to expand Seth Pierce’s (2021) Rhetorrectional Situation of Spectral Rhetoric and to answer Andrew Sofer’s (2013) call to create a new form of theatrical spectral studies, spectral reading, leading to a new form of theatrical spectral criticism. Pierce’s (2021) Rhetorrectional Situation of Spectral Rhetoric serves as the theoretical framework to rhetorically/critically analyze three theatre artifacts, each in an individual, instrumental case study: (a) Tasca, Tierney, and Drachman’s (1985) Narnia: The Musical; (b) the straight play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Stephens, 2012); and (c) the film adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s musical, tick, tick...BOOM! (Miranda, 2021a). Expanding Pierce’s framework into the performing arts provides theatre practitioners with an understanding of why the art they produce is rhetorically powerful and provides communication scholars with a deeper understanding of why the arts have the ability to communicate and persuade rather than simply entertain.