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

As a result, most postmodern playwrights see work with the director and designers as collaboration. Wendy Wasserstein tells a story about The Heidi Chronicles, which illustrates the point:

It is impossible to imagine what conventional realists of the earlier age might think of this seeming abdication of responsibility for the set like that of Wasserstein, Mamet, McNally, and Guare. Even Beckett would be horrified; but the postmodern dramatist decenters even himself/herself, and sees work as collaborative, rather than dictated by the author.

Lost in Space: Fragmenting the Scenery

Spatially and in terms of theatrical sets, modern and postmodern plays could be visually imagined as identical—especially in the plays as read if one fills in realistic settings as Wasserstein indicates a reader will. Most often, however, sets in contemporary drama are mere fragments of realism. Now the slightly indicated settings of Weller and Wasserstein are common, necessitated by the quick changes in time through the decades. Weller’s Loose Ends (1979) was also directed by Alan Schneider at Circle in the Square where only a few pieces of low furniture could be used to define a scene so as not to block the sight lines of the audience seated in the round. In A Perfect Ganesh, McNally uses a single prop or piece of furniture to indicate short scenes: an airline ticket counter on wheels or two airplane seats. The play that might have been done realistically is Six Degrees of Separation, but the designer made it very abstract—one large red couch on a circular red rug, and a black scrim in a semicircle as background to the rounded thrust stage of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Breaking all illusion of the fourth wall, however, is the front row of