Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between 'home and homelessness, belonging and exile'—a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms 'geopathology.' By reading canonical works in conjunction with contemporary ones, Chaudhuri charts the evolution of a dramatic paradigm with profound theatrical and thematic implications.

Chaudhuri starts with a discussion of a 'poetics of exile' in early modern drama, where the figure of home is constructed as a locus of two conflicting impulses: the desire to find a stable site for individual identity and the desire to deterritorialize the self. By mid-century, she argues, a new discourse of 'failed homecoming' begins to displace this geopathic model and replace the poetics of exile with a grim anti-poetics of immigration. She then employs postmodern and postcolonial theories of place and culture to define the emerging multiculturalism as a creative reworking of the figures of home, homecoming, homelessness, immigration and exile.