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

form of the play’s presentation—half realistic, half fragmentary, almost expressionistic. The combination is postmodern synthetic realism.

As a result of examining this division, I have come to realize that contemporary American drama in general creates a fusion into a unique form—not quite realism, not quite expressionism, but something sui generis, with its own form, and therefore its own message. And this duality, one that Mamet once described as a “third reality,” sends almost-conflicting messages. It is the purpose of this book to attempt to define this dramatic form across a range of contemporary plays and playwrights. To make the distinctness of this new kind of realism clear, however, these contemporary works will be paralleled and contrasted with works of more conventional realism from the 1920s and 1930s when that was the dominant form in American drama. With the revolution in post-structural criticism that eliminates the old view of the objectivity of the reviewer/scholar, there has been a consequent disruption or undermining of the audience’s position of objectivity under realism by subverting the closed room of the realistic set. Yet few scholars or critics have taken full cognizance of this subtle undermining of their position and continue to read plays as if with realism’s objectivity.

To explain why such a work is necessary, consider the dispute among critics over Mamet’s The Water Engine, the production that defined what he termed the “third reality,” in its New York debut in 1978. When negative, critics took the piece as a failure to be sufficiently realistic. Edith Oliver faulted the play entirely as not real radio because “actors pantomime stage business and play to one another; real radio actors play only to the microphone.” Clive Barnes, however, positively raved about “a precise evocation of old-time radio.” Most interesting was Harold Clurman because he grasped the unique features of the play and their satiric purpose—yet he felt too distanced, “desensitized” when what he wanted was to care about the characters. Richard Eder, however, recognized Mamet’s purpose was not to make us like the characters, but rather when the actors drop the radio scripts and become the characters, “Reality shimmers back and forth; we are moved, disoriented, and opened up to […] a kind of poetic static, he sets out a vision of American