Jackie Sibblies Drury and the Violence of Repetition

Repetition is a motif in several of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s plays, especially in her Pulitzer Prize–winning Fairview (2018) and its follow-up, Marys Seacole (2019). But rather than relying on repetition as a framework for interrogating cultural representations of Blackness, Drury’s plays critique the paradigm of repetition itself as a strategy for staging Black subjectivity. Fairview’ s approach is head-on, explicitly mobilizing repetition before contemplating how to stage Black life beyond repetition’s containments. Marys Seacole proceeds from this imperative, shattering both linear history and conventional dramaturgy at the same time. Drury shows that to represent racialized subjecthood as strictly performative reiteration is to confine Blackness to a so-called past that isn’t actually behind us. Rather, by acknowledging how this past is still very much alive in the present – through the paradigm of afterlife (as theorized by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel) – Drury’s plays form a future-oriented project that gestures toward possibilities for productive intervention.