A Psycho-Traumatic Analysis of Two Post-Modern Plays: Julie Myatt’s Welcome Home Jenny Stutter and Christopher Shinn’s Dying City

Abstract

Due to the intense and detrimental effects that war has not just traumatized military personnel who have served in the military of their home nation, particularly throughout wars, as well as on a whole warring society, the theme of trauma has become increasingly prevalent in the American scene over the past forty years. This has prompted many relevant playwrights to record and depict the negative out comes of war and its disastrous effects not only on the militants after coming back home but also on the civilian population. Playwrights have explored the terrible effects of war, the challenges that survivors confront after the war, and the origins of trauma in their plays in order to highlight the trauma's causes and develop treatments for the hazardous mental disorder of war trauma. The two American post-modern plays Welcome Home Jenny Stutter by Julie Myatt and Dying City by Christopher Shinn will be examined and their major characters' psyches will be analyzed. The research concludes that there are certain symptoms that appear on the main characters in the plays such as alienation, insomnia, fear, depression, insecurity, and flashback.

Keywords

• : traumatic theatre
• trauma
• traumatic theory
• flashback
• alienation