By analyzing eight plays taking place in urban no-man’s-lands, which we have grouped under the heading of what Jean-Pierre Sarrazac calls “no-man’s-land dramaturgy,” we attempt to show how modern and contemporary drama continues to reinvent itself through the adoption of other dramaturgic models. Our research is applied especially to one of these models – performance art. As Jacques Derrida says in regards to deconstruction, the authors of these plays, too, «think about this passage onward, about a limit, about an elsewhere-here-and-now»3 by the representation of an urban no-man’s-land. This heterotopian non-place allows them to reflect on the violence of the world even as they experiment with new forms of drama.By going out on that edge, that border, out to «an elsewhere of certitudes»4 these authors set in motion a drama which, coming as it does after the catastrophe of the second world war, after the fall of leftist utopias, on the heels of madly spiraling capital, seeks to pose questions rather than provide answers in a Brechtian sense. Through this deconstruction and by the now adoption of performative elements in the treatment of time, space and presence of the author and of the character, authors Harold Pinter, Botho Strauss, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Edward Bond, Rodrigo Garcia, Tim Etchells, Victor Viviescas and Carolina Vivas put the audience directly in touch with the cruelty foretold by Artaud, which isn’t limited to imitation but is also an experience of the present – that of the void.