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

As a result, Worthen blurs the difference between contemporary playwrights and those who wrote earlier in the century. They are all “realists” in Demastes’ sense of the term, because they all, according Worthen, have the same goal. I agree with Cohn that recent American drama, like the British drama she examines, is indeed a “retreat” from realism, and that this must have some significant impact and difference in effect from earlier, more consistently realistic works. The problem is to define both what “retreats”—or rather deviations—from realism have taken place, and what the effect of them might be in terms of Althusser’s concept of ideology.

Although I have learned a great deal from Worthen’s book, that one sentence I reject, and this book is an attempt to explain why. In my view, recent dramatists, instead of doing what earlier realists did, are doing something quite different. While seeming to employ all the tradition of earlier realists, contemporary dramatists in one way or another deliberately violate the old norms, and in doing so, undermine the audience’s position of objectivity. In these contemporary plays, it is not so much the reality the play seems to imitate that is the focus, but rather the audience’s own ideology which the play is designed to objectify. In this way dramatists seek to deprogram the audience from a particular ideological hang-up prevalent in the culture. Writing during a conservative period, mostly in the Reagan/Bush years, these plays take on a deceptive covering of realism as if they are not out to subvert the very culture they seem to extol. However, the plays examined here focus on sexism, racism, classicism, and homophobia as the primary targets—in the audience, though not necessarily in the characters on stage.

Like Cohn, I am interested in the problem of how the realistic space is opened up by contemporary dramatists, particularly in poststructural areas of interest which are not her focus: decentering the audience, death of the author, fragmenting the scenery, scrambling the chronology, and fracturing the plot. All of these have the effect of signaling to the audience that there is no controlling authorial interpretation it is supposed to grasp. Instead of being led directly toward an interpretation as in earlier realistic plays, the playwright leaves it for the audience to interpret the