Staging the Boxing Ring as Heterotopia in Marco Ramirez's The Royale

This chapter draws upon Avery Gordon’s work on ghosts, specifically, Gordon’s argument that a haunting represents a moment when one’s bearing on the world loses direction and the concealed, and over-and-done-with comes back into view. A haunting represents a transformative recognition, affording an individual an opportunity to imagine alternate orderings and alternate ways of living. To this end, the staged haunting within the heterotopia of The Royale serves as a useful mechanism through which to examine the story-shaped world of boxing and the formation of alternate narrative resources and boxing identities. Marco Ramirez’s The Royale: A Play in Six Rounds, is the story of a boxing underdog. Within The Royale, heterotopia functions to demonstrate connection between boxing bodies inside a ring with the sociopolitical realities beyond the ropes. A methodology of theatrical heterotopia seeks to identify the potency of the reconfiguration of spatial ordering.