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

postmodern in its presentation: “The fundamental ontological boundary in theater is a literal, physical threshold, equally visible to the audience and (if they are permitted to recognize it) the characters: namely, the footlights, the edge of the stage” (121). Jernigan’s argument is that “live theatre” is almost by its nature therefore metatheatrical (3). Indeed, with the subtitle of Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre, the scope of Jernigan’s anthology reaches back to Shakespeare’s King Lear for its starting point. By contrast, Steven Price argues almost the opposite—that Oleanna lacks the essential marker of postmodernism: “self-reflexivity.” But my point, in accord with Jernigan and McHale (though without the anachronistic “footlights”) is that all the contemporary plays considered here instantly and directly announce they are plays—through their fragmentary stage settings which imply a kind of “self-reflexivity” in production, if not in the printed text. They do not try to duplicate an external reality on stage, and so the audience is aware of the play as play from the outset. Some are simply more obviously self-reflexive, addressing the audience directly, for example, than others.

Drama and the Postmodern does move forward the discussion by noting theatre “tips back and forth from the modern to the postmodern” (4). Indeed, Jernigan’s own essay on Tom Stoppard contends that the playwright’s work “moved gradually away from the postmodern treatment of theatrical space and philosophical concerns” exhibiting “Regressive Postmodernity” (10). Jernigan deepens the connection between postmodern and drama by revealing the key issues as philosophical: what can one know, and how can one know it. He cites McHale’s argument that postmodernism pushes “epistemological questions far enough and they ‘tip over’ into ontological questions” (4).

In Staging Place, Una Chaudhuri explains such postmodern shifting of identityin terms of space—with the rise of global capitalism, and the rise of the Internet, spatial location and specificity fade in significance, and with them the conventional determiners of action in realism and naturalism, the environment. Deborah Geis takes an alternate approach in Postmodern Theatric[k]s which demonstrates how extended monologues, significant markers of postmodern drama, break