Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

The Last Fire: Cormac McCarthy, Religion, and Embodied Performance

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Drawing from the work of William Robert (Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance), Cia Sautter (The Performance of Religion: Seeing the sacred in the Theatre), Mark C. Taylor (After God), Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular) and other scholars, this paper offers a firsthand record of the experience of adapting and directing the first staged adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's final novel Stella Maris. This adaptation that also includes roughly 20 minutes of original film (in part inspired by McCarthy's penultimate novel The Passenger, which overlaps with Stella Maris) shot on location by the director (who is also the author and presenter of this paper) and a small team in Montana, Arizona, the Yukon, and the Boundary Waters of nothern Minnesota. Those in attendance will learn about how the process of adapting, directing, and performing the play revealed powerful and subtle insights at the intersection of performance, philosophy and religion.