| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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as the controller of it. In MUSIC NOTES, a preface to A Lie of the Mind (1987), Shepard writes:
Shepard’s reversal is stunning, as he now concedes that a director develops “his own personal sense of the material,” and that actors are now free to find “emotional values discovered” in rehearsal. No longer is the imperative will of the playwright a patriarchal controller over the entire production, though the male pronouns do reveal a vestige of that view.
Shepard’s reversal reflects in microcosm the changed role of the postmodern playwright from author(ity) to collaborator. In the process of rehearsal, actors and directors work together to help the script come to life. In the decentered theatre, the playwright needs the actors, director, and designers to work in concert to help the text emerge into full production. Such collaboration might even extend to the audience, which must help the play reach full meaning. Its meaning is not restricted to authorial pronouncements, though a whole cottage industry has grown up in books of interviews with contemporary playwrights, as if to supply the missing information.
One reason for this revolution is that for the contemporary playwright the postmodern world is de-centered. In Frederic Jameson’s image, it is a mapless city with no central point from which to map or connect any other point. The central authority of a fixed perspective is lost in a recognition that language itself constructs reality. As a result, only arbitrary power enables one discourse to rule over others to impose a fixed center—but there is no essential fixity to the human condition.
For the dramatist, however, a play must begin with the place where the action occurs, with the setting, which seems anti-postmodern, implying a fixity or centeredness to the events of the play. How can the dramatist present an unmappable world when the setting that opens the play creates