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

Chapter 1:  Theorizing Contemporary American Drama
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Worthen amplifies this point by distinguishing between the seeming aim of realism to duplicate external reality, and the true aim, which is to give the audience the illusion that it is viewing reality:

Theatrical realism claims to stage an objective representation by integrating dramatic and performance style into the pictorial consistency of the material scene onstage. The purpose of this consistency is not, in the end, simply mimetic: the aim of realism is to produce an audience, to legitimate its private acts of interpretation as objective. (17)

In this way, Worthen shifts the definition of realism away from theatrical style, which Demastes notes is so confused, and from the object of imitation that Cohn proposes. Instead he examines the audience and the theatrical means of controlling the audience’s “acts of interpretation.”

This shift of focus is vital, but it results in Worthen seeing no difference between realistic plays with fragmentary scenery and a production with a fully realistic setting:

The bizarre and unexpected turn of plot, unusual mises-en-scene, or oblique and refractory language of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and other playwrights like them often seem to signal an effort to reshape the project of realistic theatricality. In many respects, though, this drama capitulates to the categories of meaning and interpretation found in earlier realistic modes, especially the classic dialectic between character and environment, still visible in the drama, in production practice, and in the figuration of an audience. In the contemporary theatre, a determining offstage order no longer needs to saturate the visible space of the stage with objects in order to be realized. (82–83)

Worthen’s fusion of fragmentary realism and that which saturates “the visible space of the stage” is too reductive. Semiotically the audience is directly informed by such productions that it is not seeing all of reality—its cooperation in filling in the gaps is itself part of the project of these contemporary plays. Such gaps are completely filled in by older forms of realism.