Ethics of Play in Earpiece Performances by Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Gob Squad

In Rhapsody for the Theatre , Badiou propped the notion of the ethics of play against a theory of the subject that had yet to be fully deployed. His reflection remains tentative and he simply suggests ‘that the actor could very well show a subject without substance,’ that ‘always between-two,  [the ethics of play] operates in the pure present of the spectacle, and the public […] gains access to this present only in the aftermath of a thought,’ and ultimately that ‘the ethics of play is that of an escape’ (Badiou 2008, 216, 221). There is a delay at work in the ethics of play, an in-between. By looking at Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times and Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You never Had It So Good) , this article proposes to examine how an ethics of play could be materially deployed in these earpiece performances through the delay, albeit minimal, the in-between text or instruction and their actualisation on stage.