MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi have both had their heyday in the theatre, Tenderfoot TV’s Up and Vanished at first glance appears wholly dissimilar from the Early Modern realm of horror-filled revenge tragedy plays. As a true-crime podcast, 2017’s Up and Vanished tells the story of pageant queen turned high school teacher Tara Grinstead’s disappearance from Ocilla, Georgia in 2005, one of the largest cold cases in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s history presenting zero leads and zero arrests in the ten years leading up to the podcast’s investigation into the case.

While on the outside, this podcast does not immediately warrant a reading through the lens of revenge tragedy, the focus of my argument is the ways in which the podcast’s team tell the story. As the podcast works through the rumors surrounding Tara’s disappearance, the podcast team pieces together the story of a ghost. In other words, Tara is dead before Payne Lindsey even picks up a microphone, yet her disembodied voice appears in pivotal moments throughout the podcast. Sometimes it is recordings of her real voice singing in pageants or giving interviews after winning, and sometimes it is an actress hired to read some of the letters and emails left behind in the wake of her murder. Either way, both voices function in much of the same ways that the false ghosts of The Spanish Tragedy and the disembodiment of the Duchess in Act Five of The Duchess of Malfi do. The aesthetics of disembodiment prevalent in revenge tragedy seep their way into the storytelling choices made by Lindsey in 2017, helping to establish the tropes of moral narratives that is embraced by both revenge tragedy theater and the southern gothic.