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

solitariness, innocence, and alienation.” Julius Novick also recognized the paradox: “By distancing the story […] Mamet and his director Steven Schachter actually bring it close to us, by disarming our skepticism.” Douglas Watt, too, recognized the “eerie magic” of the moments when the play stepped away from the microphones and took off on its own, “The total effect is startlingly original, uncanny and chilling”—the very devices Oliver found unrealistic.

This shimmering is an excellent example of the confusions I want to address in this book. The Water Engine had a John Lee Beatty set, the radio studio in 1935. The actors wore costumes of the period, but when they fictionally went outdoors, they put on topcoats. Dominic Chianese first wore an apron as a shopkeeper, then a knit cap and overcoat as a Russian emigré in Bug House Square. When Lang escapes from two heavies, he punches them both and leaves, acting out the fictional punches rather than simply saying the lines as would be done on radio. The play “shimmers,” as Eder terms it, between fiction and reality, between realistic radio drama and enacted action, without trying to be purely one or the other. What kind of form is this? “A third reality” emerged in this production, as Mamet says in a preface to the play, “many scenes were played on mike, as actors presenting a radio drama, and many scenes were played off mike as in a traditional, realistic play. The result was a third reality, a scenic truth, which dealt with radio not as an electronic convenience, but as an expression of our need to create and to communicate and explain.…”

To define this “third reality” is crucial because of the split in responses of Oliver (usually a sympathetic reviewer of Mamet’s early work) and Barnes who reacted so positively. Oliver’s response is interesting because it was based on her experience working in radio drama—she claimed expertise about that medium. But both she and Barnes missed the point of the play by misreading in different ways the new form that Mamet used. Both assumed that the physical duplication of reality that they saw meant realism; the only difference is that one thought the duplication faulty and the other thought it exact. But both ignored the deliberately unrealistic dimensions of the production, and so missed the shimmering