New Realism: Mamet, Mann and Nelson

Abstract

After the height of the Cold War and the ordeal of McCarthyism, the modern American experimental theatre was born. Provoked by a presidential assassination, the political crises of the early 1960s (Cuba, Berlin, Vietnam), and the success of European absurdist drama and experimental cinema, it called into question the principles that had dominated American realism: the predominance of linear form and the congruence of character to environment. The experimental theatre challenged the formal and ideological constraints of the well-made play as handed down by Arthur Miller. It suspected that the closure of the fourth wall and the relationship between self-enclosed stage space and consistent and explicable character concealed, or naturalised, the very psychological and social disjunctions that Miller’s drama sought to address.

One has heard of double and triple agents who themselves in the end no longer exactly knew for whom they were really working and what they were seeking… in this double and triple role playing…. There was basically no longer any self that would have been able to ‘self’-seekingly obtain advantages from all sides. What is self-interest in someone who no longer knows where his ‘self’ is?

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason