| Chapter 1: | Theorizing Contemporary American Drama |
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impossibility of the modernist quest for universal judgments based on fixed forms and objective stances. For me, there is a very simple criterion for this postmodern drama: instead of a realistic set there is a fragmentary one, announcing to the audience that what they see is not what is real but what characters assume to be real.
Death of the author: Setting the Stage
In the contemporary period, a revolution has occurred in poststructural theory at the same time that it has occurred in literature—the death of the author. This revolution appears in drama as playwrights suddenly have abdicated the role of total controllers played by dramatists from Ibsen and Shaw to Beckett—to Sam Shepard.4 Consider how Shepard plays that traditional role in the opening set description in True West (1980):
In each paragraph the playwright is instructing the reader, exactly as Ibsen and Shaw did, writing to have their plays produced as books because they often were censored off the stage. The playwright is also laying down the law for any potential director whose “stylistic ‘concept’ ” might be “grafted onto” his play. There is no recognition here that the director must necessarily interpret the play, with the actors, in order to produce it, and that such interpretations are never as neutral as Shepard seems to assume.5
But a counter perspective emerged among playwrights who envisioned their role as one of a team who works on a production, rather than