摘要：Picture an empty truck stop at the dusty side of a highway in western Sydney, a picnic table, a magpie, two girls sitting on the table smoking, laughing, talking, trucks pulling in at the other end. Imagine how the affective force of this dramaturgical scene travels beyond the space and time of theatre and script to assemble with other bodies and places. This paper is an exploration of this scenario. It is an experiment with a different way of reading a text – a play titled Truck Stop by Lachlan Philpott that opened in June 2012 near where I work in western Sydney, and which is set in St Marys, the suburb next door to the university campus where I teach aspiring secondary English teachers. By the ‘text’ of Truck Stop , I mean both the script published by Currency Press, and the performance of the play [1] . It is important to note at the outset that I am writing not as an expert performance critic or theorist, nor as a theatre practitioner. Rather, I write from the subjective, necessarily partial, provisional and idiosyncratic perspective of one reader/ viewer/ English teacher/ teacher educator/ researcher with a longstanding interest in texts about western Sydney and the places and people of the region who are portrayed in them. My interest in the play arises in part from my desire to bring more texts about western Sydney to the attention of teachers and others in the region (Gannon). But the particular theoretical threads that I pull through the first part of my paper – Bennett, Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and others – suggest my interest in exploring ways that affective and material turns in social and cultural theory can be put to work in diverse ways and places. In the final part of the paper I also turn to performance scholarship to more carefully consider dramaturgical aspects of the text.
