American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Sta ...

With this concluding scene, which seems chronologically to precede the opening’s accusation of rape, the audience is given a very different construction of the action, with no certain place from which to stand and view it. Because the ending contradicts the beginning, what interpretation of the “Taking” is the audience to make? The racial stereotypes of black man and white woman that the opening scene invokes are discarded in the final scene where the accusation of rape was only part of a sexual game between them. But the audience had no way of knowing this, and so reads it through the ideology of black man, white woman, and rape—a stereotype that dates back at least as far as D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation.

Again, the playwright is fully conscious of what he is doing because the play is also filled with soliloquies in which one character steps out of the action in a spotlight to speak directly to the audience. The monologue that precedes the scene with Janie and Monty is given by the drug dealer, Mort Silberstein:

With this metatheatrical postmodern interruption of the play, Mort addresses the audience directly and warns not to “forgive the creator of this mess for the confusion.” But here the causality of the “confusion” is also clearly stated: ethnicity, gender, and drugs are all listed as places where boundaries that were once neatly divided are now merged, and where liminality of categories is destroyed. It is the ideological construction of these issues that is in question, not the issues themselves.

The unspoken referent here, as in so many plays of the period, is again the Vietnam War. Following on the heels of the civil rights movement