Religion and the Limits of Metatheatre in Our Town and Sunday in the Park with George
Religions March 2, 2020 Larry D. Bouchard
This essay argues that metatheatrical forms in drama can correlate with the religious dimensionality David Tracy describes through limit experience, limit language, and limit questions. It defines three overlapping types of metatheatre: self-referential plays, plays-within-plays, and dramatizations of performative everyday life. Analyzing Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George (1984), the essay contends that these works use metatheatrical techniques to evoke the eternal and explore ontological conditions of possibility. Both plays culminate in moments where past, present, and future converge, inviting audiences into ritualized spaces with archetypal characters, thereby linking theatre to religious thought and practice.