Toward a Rhetoric of Sociospatial Theatre: José Rivera's Marisol

José Rivera's Marisol offers social and spatial criticism of Ed Koch's New York City, in particular the campaign against the homeless during the 1980s. In so doing, the play undertakes what functions as a Brechtian defamiliarization of space for audiences to demonstrate how the urban landscape of New York City was central to the battle for social justice; and, more generally, to demonstrate how the social and the spatial are thoroughly imbricated. This essay takes Marisol as a starting point for theorizing a discourse in theatre studies to consider sociospatial concerns in dramaturgy and performance, a discourse that makes fruitful connections among cultural and critical geography, urban theory, and semiotics.