Abolition Dramaturgies: Reformance, Waywardness, and the End of the World.

This essay places the penal abolition movement in conversation with dramatic literature, in order to understand how dramatists engage issues of policing and systemic racism, and how abolition can be envisioned onstage. Abolition dramaturgies are divisions of space and time in which a world without policing and imprisonment can be envisioned, practiced, experimented, innovated, sounded, felt, spread, and collectivized. Despite this revolutionary potential, the end goals of much performance for racial justice profoundly misrepresents the problem with US policing—a misrepresentation that crystallizes a broader view of police and prison reform in the era of "post-racialism," as well as reflecting deeper insights into the foundation of theatre and performance studies. For example, the play American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown enacts reformance , a structure of repetition, in which change is proposed without transforming foundational carceral structures. In contrast, the plays Pass Over by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu and In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks explore dramatic engagements with abolitionist theories and practices. Further, these plays written by Black women envision how "waywardness" frames the possibility of political transformation after the end of the world. Such performances of ungovernability defy the seeming non-representability of abolition, staging images of violence in such a way that presents new opportunities for reparative relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]