Unmarked: The Politics of Performance by Peggy Phelan

My second post and I've already posted something that is more than just one sentence.

Corporeal bodies amid real objects: realistic theatre employs properties which reproduce the effects of the real. These props index the failure of representation to reproduce the real. The real inhabits the space that representation cannot reproduce— and in this failure theatre relies on repetition and mimesis to produce substitutes for the real. Behind the effects of the real is a desire to experience a first cause, an origin, an authentic beginning which can only fail because the desire is experienced and understood from and through repetition. (Phelan 1993, 125)