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McNulty’s essay is notable, moreover, for recognizing how essential the realist mode of Synge is to the antirealism of postmodern self-consciousness playwrights, such a MacNamara and Johnston, who used the theatre to comment on the very constructed nature of the original. In stark contrast to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World,
McNulty further notes how at times the tip from one mode to another was as much sociocultural as it was performative-textual. Upon having his play Shadowdance rejected by the Abbey theatre with the note “The Old Lady Says No,” (the old lady being Lady Gregory), Johnston changed the title of his play to “The Old Lady Says No,” which, by the time it was produced instead at The Gate, “was now a strident record of the developing challenge posed by Johnston’s generation to the outmoded orthodoxies of the Abbey” (67 in this volume), which only goes to show how, just as focusing on “the footlights, the edge of the stage,” the very title of a work might play a part in explicating its constructed qualities, as well as the artificiality of a tradition that had built its reputation on authenticity (i.e., the Abbey Theatre).
Lance Norman’s essay on Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (herein) makes the case that even when a realist playscript itself doesn’t exactly go out of its way to reference its constructed nature, it might tip over into a self-conscious postmodernism all the same in performance. Norman argues, for instance, that “[Charles S.] Gilpin’s [the actor who made the role famous] creation of Jones in a perfomative present supersedes O’Neill’s creation of Jones in a historical text and offers a productive link between Gilpin’s performance of Jones and Jones’ performance of self within the narrative of the play” (91 in this volume). The argument here is that even as the Brutus Jones of O’Neill’s play attempted to fashion