Mapping the inland sea

Naomi Wallace's British epic drama

Art Borreca

pp. 117-125

in: Scott T. Cummings, Erica Stevens Abbitt (eds), The theatre of Naomi Wallace, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In the theatre of Naomi Wallace, separating the question "Who am I?" from the questions "What is the nature of the society I live in? And can it be changed?" is impossible. While these are hardly new questions in contemporary drama, Wallace has probed them with a remarkable combination of social commitment, theatricality, lyricism, gravity and humor, brutality and tenderness. Her plays dramatize how social forces and constraints—especially those having to do with race, gender, class, nationality, and sexuality—affect the life of the individual at every level of experience, from the personal to the social to the metaphysical. Her characters strive to stem or to transcend those constraints, and their efforts often reach a point at which sexual longing, one of the most inexplicable aspects of human experience, converges with the equally confounding realities of social power, its attainment, maintenance, and display. That collision of person and politics takes elaborate form in Wallace's The Inland Sea, a sprawling historical drama that premiered in London in 2002 and has been seldom produced since.¹