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

covered Dodge’s body, whose “death should have come completely unnoticed by the audience.” Because Dewis never notices Dodge, one can only assume that Dodge’s death took place at a different time than Dewis’s departure. Yet at the end, all the audience hears is Halie’s voice, discovering the corn in the field, though Vince denies she is there, as Tilden enters with the dead body of a baby.

There is no explanation given to the audience, though there are seemingly a number of plot lines that overlap and connect in this final scene, but it seems impossible that they could all occur at the same time, in the same space. Shepard forces the audience, however, to live with that uncertainty, the myth of the (un)buried child restoring fertility being given deliberate precedence over rational clarity or explanation.

Once again Vietnam is an unspoken subtext invoked only when Vince crashes through the screened porch singing the Marine battle hymn and throwing beer bottles like grenades into the house. Vince himself is a problematic figure, because everyone denies knowing or recognizing him in the first act, and only knows him after his invasion and take-over of the farmhouse. The variety of critical interpretations of Vince and this play reflects Shepard’s deliberate move to write a play that has no clear single meaning. The audience is left to struggle its way through the play—to accept that recognition of belonging to a family, and lack thereof—alternate in the play, almost comically frustrating the audience’s desire and expectation. The playwright will not, as in conventional realism, fully reveal the buried secrets at the end to make clear the understanding and reassurance of the audience’s ability to know and interpret reality.

The Postmodern

All of these different strategies reflect the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Daniel K. Jernigan addresses the interesting paucity of studies of drama from this perspective in Drama and the Postmodern. He notes the same problems with defining the term as encountered before with “realism” (1–2). To rectify this he borrows heavily from Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction, which sees drama as intrinsically