Erasing the Playwright

Abstract

Of course the continuing contest over realism is hardly limited to feminism. In the year 1990, “New Historicism and American Theater History: Toward an Interdisciplinary Paradigm for Scholarship,” one of Bruce A. McConachie’s suggested areas of study is “the ideological limitations of the major movements of theatrical realism in America”; he adds, “Do later realisms in the theater continue to mask the social construction of race, gender, class, and ethnicity in the same way [as Belasco and turn of the century realism]?” (268–270). Brian Richardson captures the flux as he introduces the Demastes book with “The Struggle for the Real: Interpretive Conflict, Dramatic Method, andthe Paradox of Realism,” noting that realism was a dominant tool for fem inists all through the twentieth century, as well as for African American playwrights and almost all plays dramatizing the AIDS epidemic, sug- gesting “that realism has an epistemological power and social efficacy far beyond that of the mere ‘fabrication’ that contemporary theory insists on calling it” (15).