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the more profound. For what other genre allows its practitioners to wear their constructivist attitude so boldly, allowing their characters to break that fourth wall separating the stage from the audience in real time, with a live audience, even as the play’s producer makes modifications to the production in real time according to the needs of the moment (as can be seen, for instance, in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author).
In his foundational text on postmodernist trends in fiction (Postmodernist Fiction), McHale comments on how the unique features of theatre can be exploited to metaleptical effect:
Moreover, the fact that theatre is not only meant to be performed but also reperformed (both on successive nights by a single theatre company as well as throughout geographic space and time by a nearly limitless number of additional theatre companies) makes the dramatic text especially susceptible to reinterpretation (or reconstruction) at the hands of producers, directors, and actors.
Given these features of live theatre, it is reasonable to assume that the ontological and epistemological fragility of the theatrical environment would make it a particularly engaging forum within which to investigate a wide variety of postmodern crises, be they epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, or ideological. This observation, in turn, leads to the fundamental questions driving this collection: That is, “Why hasn’t dramatic experimentation of this sort become the norm?” and “Why hasn’t it at least become prevalent enough that “postmodern drama” is as publicly recognizable a literary type as are ‘postmodern fiction’ and ‘postmodern film’?”