Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain by Rodney Simard (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 495 RODNEY SIMARD Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1984. Pp. xv, 163. $21.75; $10.25 (PB). This interesting and ambitious study fills a deficit in current drama criticism: While the leading movements of modernist drama, Absurd and Epic Theater, have been widely discussed in their respective aesthetics and philosophies, more recent developments have not received the same degree of theoretical attention. In his book Rodney Simard sets himself a double task: to establish a "postmodern dramatic aesthetic" (p. x) which is clearly differentiated from the aesthetics of modernist drama, and to bring together contemporary British and American drama in an effort to construct, with this postmodern aesthetic, a common framework for the two national dramatic literatures . Simard defines postmodern drama as a "synthetic" form of drama which utilizes and combines the methods of modernist realism, experimentalism, and Epic Theater, without adopting the absolutist stance that each of these movements tended to assume. Defying conventional categorization, it is generically mixed and "essentially tragicomic " (p.xiii). As its emphasis is on the "individual mind" (p. 34), it is an open form of drama celebrating possibility and multiplicity rather than conveying the unalterable necessities and singleness of purpose of the closed forms of modernist drama. It is optimistic rather than pessimistic, transcending nihilism without relapsing into naive affirmation or one-dimensional ideology. This change in dramatic aesthetic entails a different mode of interaction between stage and audience in that it evokes and unifies opposing responses, combining intellectual distance with emotional identification, the Brechtian alienation effect with the sensual immediacy of Artaudian theater. After a useful, ifhighly condensed, survey ofmodem drama from Ibsen to the I 950s, Simard discusses Samuel Beckett as the one who represents the culmination of the experimental strand of modernist drama and, with his self-reflexive metadramas, simultaneously prepares the way for postmodernism (pp. 15-24). Harold Pinter and Edward Albee are the "First Postmoderns." The author dissociates both of these playwrights from the absurdist movement with which they have often been identified, pointing out the strong element ofrealism in their mutli-Iayered works (PP.25-47). As a demonstration of the relativist premises of the postmodern aesthetic, Torn Stoppard's plays also transcend absurdism by dramatizing "the multiplicity ofpossible action rather than the stasis of nonaction" (p. 52). Sam Shepard is viewed as the "American counterpoint to the British Stoppard" (p. 75), replacing Stoppard's theatrum logicophilosophicum by elements of popular culture and by the emotional, almost "visceral" (p. 77) intensity of surrealist dream-states. Peter Shaffer is an "Epic Psychoquester" who, from a radical subjectivism, writes "pluralistic dramas" (p. 102) in which he creates "alternatives . . . in a postmodern world wherein traditional systems of belief have decayed and collapsed" (p. 104). Along similar lines, David Rabe's apocalyptic scenarios are seen as dramatizing not sociopolitical issues but the "conflict of subjective Book Reviews perceptions" (p. 128) and the horrors of individual isolation. In his "Conclusion," Simard briefly summarizes his results, pointing out the international, but primarily Anglo-American, character of postmodern drama. The book leaves the reader with a strangely mixed feeling. On the one hand, the postmodern aesthetic it formulates has considerable hermeneutic value and describes something which is common to these authors and which distinguishes them from their predecessors. Simard correctly identifies the tendency of recent dramatists to dissociate themselves from clearly defined schools and styles and to integrate realist, absurdist, and epic techniques into the broader repertoire of a new dramatic productivity. And his assessment of the individual playwrights within the framework of this new aesthetic is,. for the most part, accurate, even if the book is really too short to be able to do justice to many of their works. On the other hand, however, there are problems with Simard's study. First, while he adequately describes a certain set of common dramatic forms and techniques, the theoretical and philosophical implications of this pattern remain rather vague. When he characterizes the philosophical position of the postmodern playwrights as some form of SUbjective existentialism, this is neither convincing nor consistent with his own argument. For then there would indeed be no need for a...