This dissertation examines the ways in which the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg radically transformed the theatrical landscape through their emphasis on the sensory experience of the spectator. I argue that their plays signal a reorganization of the capacities of European and North American theater that finds a useful analog in the development of phenomenology and use phenomenology as a lens through which to consider their work and a subsequent tradition of plays that highlight the sensory experience of the spectator, including those of William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Foreman. In particular, I mobilize the discourse surrounding the concept of the uncanny that originates in Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" to consider both thematic elements and the way in which the spectator's sensory experience is emphasized and manipulated.

I contend that in conceptually unifying the spectacle onstage with the perceptual experience of the spectator, this "phenomenological" theatrical tradition attempts to overcome the divide between the stage and the audience by siting the performance in the mind of the spectator, thus converting the philosophical metaphor of consciousness-as-theater to a model in which theater is an extension of consciousness. Placing the work within a historical and cultural context, this dissertation employs the philosopher Jacques Ranciere's conceptualization of regimes of art to reconsider the role that Maeterlinck and Strindberg's groundbreaking drama played in establishing theater as a particular "distribution of the sensible" and interrogates the politics of the formal strategies that attempt to manipulate the sensory experience of the spectator.

In its conclusion, it examines the possibility that some of the ways in which the capacities and limits of theater as a discipline are currently defined in Europe and North America---derived largely from the innovations of playwrights like Maeterlinck and Strindberg---are historically contingent and open to reorganization, not only through contemporary practice that eschews the dramatic text, but also through a consideration of the possibilities that a radically revised and expanded textual practice might offer.