Aaron Tokay is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences from Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He is pursuing degrees in English, Comparative Literature, and French & Francophone Studies. His academic concentration is literary theory through the lenses of psychoanalysis, queer studies, and phenomenology, with a focus on theatre and cinema as media. He is interested in the transnational/transhistorical cultural impact of art, especially in the resistance period surrounding the Second World War. At Penn, Aaron serves as the Technical Director for Penn Singers Light Opera Company and Quadramics Theatre Company. He is involved with theatre across Penn and will be directing his own stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray this fall season. Outside of theatre, he is a board member of Carriage Senior Society, writer for 34th Street Magazine, and founding member of a philosophy-aligned book club.
Aaron Tokay
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2026—2027 Forum on Practice
Aaron Tokay
Comparative Literature and English
Rehearsing Ruins: The Dramatic Grammar of Post-War France
This project will examine how the Theatre of the Absurd, as produced in postwar Paris largely by stateless and exiled playwrights, creatively represented the social aftermath of the Nazi occupation and Vichy Regime through the dramatic enactment of collectivity’s collapse. Where classical French theatre staged the ensemble as a site of shared civic life, absurdist drama cycled around the lack of physical, emotional, or linguistic connection. Drawing on Rancière’s theory of theatre as distribution of the sensible, alongside archival research into occupation-era and post-war performance culture, this project traces how historical rupture becomes artistic practice. Its culminating output is an original large-ensemble play that attempts to put collectivity back on the stage, using dramatic form both the object of study and subject of political restoration.