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

experience in the liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity. In this middle space, the audience is neither expected solely to identify with characters and situations as in realism nor to look down with detachment as in absurdism and expressionism, but rather they are to alternate back and forth between the two perspectives.

Dramatic realism itself is notoriously difficult to define. One reason is that the discussion has been traditionally couched in Platonic terms as an issue of mimesis: the literary work as modeled, in some sense, on reality. Initially, imitation was viewed in terms of physical duplication of a real-world setting, characters as imitations of real-world people, and then the discussions moved to psychology, so that characters were designed to embody the inner workings of human beings. And later, imitations were based on social interactions and invisible forces of society as they formed and informed human action.

In each case, the discussions focus on issues of relation to reality, issues therefore of art and nature, as well, with the emphasis on the external, of “appearance and reality.” And, because this art form arose with the emergence of middle-class control of western societies, the plays were usually in some way critical of middle-class values and their limitations, either as controlled by external environment, internal psychological limitations, or social limitations, all of which restricted the free choices that the values extolled.

In the past thirty years, however, following upon the work of Louis Althusser, a new approach to realism has emerged which removes the focus from imitation theory and instead sees all cultural work as formed from, and at the same time forming, ideologies. This new approach does not view the literary work as just imitating some pre-existent forms or ideas, but as simultaneously creating the culture’s mirror in which it sees itself.

Dramaturgically, this shift occurs in America in the wake of the Vietnam War, and the reasons for the change become evident as a result. In the earlier realisms, the function of plays was to reinforce an ideology of objectivity for its audience, giving the audience a view through the fourth wall, or beneath the surface of the psyche, to see the inner