| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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of the universe that its inhabitants envision. It is punctured by interventions from the rest of the city, just as the narrative of the play passes at moments away from the Kittredges to other narrators—Trent, Paul, Rick, Elizabeth.
Terrence McNally does something similar in Love! Valor! Compassion! “The Setting” is defined on the page with “The Players” and “The Time” as “A remote house and wooded grounds by a lake in Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City.” But in the opening of the play, a different description is given—this time of the stage, not the fictional setting: “Bare Stage. There are invisible doors and traps in the walls and floor”(11). Again, as with Guare, the action is extremely fluid. The opening scene presents the seven actors asleep, and one “turns out and addresses us” while seemingly both asleep and narrating—and the others interrupt his narration and act out his account. But there is no way to specify what time or space exactly is occupied because the audience is placed simultaneously in the heads of all the characters who take turns as narrators.
Once again, the playwright trustingly turns the creation of setting over to the production team. In “Some Thoughts,” however, McNally simply observes, “I know for certain, however, that the play was given a definitive production by Joe Mantello and seven remarkable actors. […] Loy Arcenas took an impossible design situation and made it seem as easy as it was inevitable” (6). In fact, it was the design team that created the physical environment for the whole play, evidenced by the lawsuit brought by the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers against Michael Hall to “cease and desist any further unauthorized use of Mr. Mantello’s work” (“On Stage, and Off ”).
Hall had duplicated the Broadway staging in his production: “In the script, Mr. Mantello says, Terrence McNally provides the barest of stage directions. At Caldwell [Theater Company in Boca Raton], he says, everything from the staging of the opening tableau to the deployment of props was identical to Mr. Mantello’s” (2). As this story indicates, one mark of the postmodern shift in playwriting is to leave the production