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

play for itself. Thus in contrast to Worthen, I see the postmodern realists as subverting audience objectivity, and forcing the audience to recognize its own ideological constructions as being imposed on the play by themselves, not supplied by the playwright.

The Decentered Audience’s Loss of Objectivity

If ideology is the target and focus of postmodern realism, then the real is invoked not for its imitative connection to reality, but rather for its reflection of ideology. The gaps in seamless presentation of the real are all that reveal the shift in agenda. In contrast to Worthen, I argue that especially since 1970, as the postmodern perspective emerges in American drama, the objective position of the audience is created by fragments of realistic settings, but then systematically undermined until the play’s end completely problematizes objectivity. A brief history will demonstrate an obvious difference in approach to the audience from Worthen’s idea of objectivity in select American plays 1970–2000. Instead, all of these plays invoke realistic conventions yet undermine them, and so attack the audience’s illusion of its objectivity, and ability to sit outside the action and sit in judgment of it.

To illustrate the new viewpoint, consider some examples from the most accessible anthology, the Dell paperback Famous American Plays Of The 1970s. Like a Bakhtinian protest play, one of the first of the new genre was written by Michael Weller (1971). Moonchildren is an anti-war Vietnam play in which war protest is merely part of the background. The young playwright writes of a year in the life of six students, including a draft notice and an anti-war rally that all the students attend. But the war seems not to be the focus. Directed by Alan Schneider, director of the original American production of Waiting for Godot and a Weller enthusiast, the play seems realistic, set in the common room of an apartment shared by the students. But this comfortable old style of one-room realism is problematized by the opening scene’s stage direction: “The stage is dark. You can’t see anything.” The very notion of addressing the audience as “You” is startling—so is playing most of the scene in the dark (except when the refrigerator door is opened).