Martin CRIMP's Attempts on Her Life (1996) abounds with experimentation that violates the conventional rules of modern dramas. In this paper, I analyse Attempts, focusing on the structure. The play consists of 17 fragmentary scenarios dealing with the concept of character, which is represented by ‘Anne’, who never appears. The purpose in this paper is to shed some light on the peculiarity of this play.

All 17 scenarios have the same form, where only the speakers talk about Anne. The content of the scenarios is discontinuous and inconsistent. Moreover, Anne is depicted quite differently by each of the speakers. The consistency of the form emphasises the arbitrariness of the content. This arbitrariness stimulates the imagination of both readers and audiences, and even urges them to imagine another Anne not depicted in the play.

This mechanism of stimulation is particularly clear in the first scenario, ‘All Messages Deleted’. In this scenario, the messages on an answering machine are deleted after a pause. Although CRIMP never says how and by whom the messages are deleted, the pause urges readers and audiences to surmise it is Anne who deletes the messages. The mechanism of stimulation in Attempts always encourages readers and audiences to create Anne using their imagination, even though Anne never appears as a physical character in the play.

Thus, based on the above, one of the peculiarities of Attempts is this mechanism of stimulation that encourages the creativity and imagination of readers and audiences.

Super Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in November 2013 and caused the largest damage in the country’s history. Previous studies on the disaster have mainly discussed the problematic nature of the neoliberalist reconstruction process, which transferred responsibility for crisis response from the state to markets and individuals. These studies, however, have limited their scope to condemning political economic injustice and have failed to shed light on the creativity of people who, presupposing a degree of social and ecological precarity, try to design alternative lives under crisis conditions. This paper, therefore, critiques the literary anthology Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, published by an environmental NGO in June 2014, and shows its significance in the social context of that time. While the idea of resilience gained the power to rigidly govern the victims’ lifestyle and their relationship with the natural environment in the aftermath of Yolanda, Agam utilizes media that do not fix meanings, such as photography and literature, to explore the uncertainty of nature, and presents an image of the Filipino nation that, in the midst of destruction, transforms itself and lives through the climate crisis by its own hands. This paper implies that a unique politics of climate is emerging in the contemporary Philippines that resists the biopolitics of resilience and stakes the very possibility of experiencing and responding to the climate crisis on its struggle.