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carefully implements a description of the postmodern as outlined by Linda Hutcheon in order to recognize that a postmodern element exists in contemporary dramatic murder mysteries, Carlson’s focus is so decidedly narrow as to be of little use to describing a postmodern drama more generally.
The most notable study of the postmodern in drama is Stephen Watt’s Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (1998), which, upon recognizing the poor showing drama makes in various theorizations of the postmodern condition, suggests that the solution to this oversight is simply a matter of learning to read the postmodern in theatre; for Watt, postmodernity is in the eye of the beholder. However, while similarly concerned with querying the reasons why there is such a dearth of postmodern dramatic criticism, this collection tacks differently to Watt’s exploration in that many of the enclosed essays are most fundamentally concerned with how the various morphological features of theatre promote a cycle of tilting to and away from the postmodern.
Another useful account of the postmodern in drama comes in Austin Quigley’s essay “Pinter, Politics and Postmodernism.” Like Quigley, I too “find myself much persuaded by [Jean-Francois] Lyotard’s argument that we would benefit by thinking of postmodernism as one of the recurring phases of modernism rather than as something posterior to and opposed to modernism,” (12) so much so, in fact, that this attitude toward the postmodern lies behind the original conceptualization of this collection, which began with the observation that the postmodern in drama pre-existed the postmodern in fiction, and moreover, has followed a very different path.
Of equal importance to this discussion, however, is Lyotard’s account of the postmodern era’s rejection of grand metanarrative truths in favor of “the little narrative” (60) whose “rules…must be local…agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66). I would argue, moreover, that the theatre’s unique potential for examining the proliferation of locally agreed upon truths (i.e., its unique ability to question the boundary between the real and the artificial, the constructed and the extant) makes the dearth of criticism on the postmodern in drama all