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One reasonable answer to these questions—and the answer driving much of the discussion in this collection—is that perhaps these postmodern attitudes had become so routine within drama by the time postmodernism came into its own as a literary and cultural category with which to describe important innovations in post WWII fiction and film that the term lacked both categorical utility and interpretive resonance when it came to contemporary drama; and having become postmodern so early, it is also possible that by this time, drama had simply tipped away from the postmodern, a possibility assumed within McHale’s own description of the postmodern’s relation with the modern:
This account of how fiction tips back and forth from the modern to the postmodern serves as a fair description of what most of these essays take notice of vis-à-vis drama, except that with theatre, the “literal, physical threshold, equally visible to the audience” causes this tipping to be intensified; in turn, those very same morphological features of theatre that allow that drama tip toward the postmodern in the first place might just as quickly allow that drama to tip away from the postmodern as well. For example, someone all too comfortable with a postmodern attitude toward knowledge and reality might suddenly shift for any one of a number of reasons (ideological, aesthetic, by sheer accident, or out of desire to parody either mode) into a more definitive attitude toward knowledge and reality. Indeed, a historical overview of nineteenth and twentieth century drama clearly suggest that the fourth wall is as easily ignored—think Realism—as it is made use of (again, the best example is Pirandello).
In general, the first half of the collection contains essays which consider the circumstances under which theatre tips toward the postmodern,