| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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Realism in Recent English Drama: “I understand realism as the mimetic representation of contemporary middle-class reality” (1). With obvious precision, Cohn avoids all of the trouble with “mimetic representation” which could allow for theatricality as well as conventional realism. Cohn emphasizes that what is represented is “middle-class reality”—though whether she sees this term as a concept in continual flux in society, or as a fixed entity, is not evident. But this “reality” is itself an ideologically controlled term that changes constantly within the culture and across cultures as the whole idea of a “middle class” changes as well.
William Worthen has gone further than others in trying to reconcile Althusser and theories of realistic/theatrical or expressionistic drama in Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater. By allowing the audience to sit in the dark, separated from the action of the play, both realism and expressionism give the illusion that audiences can perceive the forces that make and bind characters to think and act as they do. And because such judgments are made objectively, without personal interest, the illusion is created that they have been made independently. The very act of making such judgments constructs the audience as independent individuals, subjects.2 The key to this illusion is, as Althusser explains,
Thus the audience in the darkness is given the illusion that there is no audience, and that each person alone is able to see the hidden secrets of others. Because it is removed and objective, the illusion is that it can peer into others’ rooms and see beneath the surface. The audience is so empowered as to think it really knows what goes on inside middle-class homes, for example.3