ABSTRACT
Postmodernism, as modernism did before it, stresses the theatricality of the theatre; it has, in Janelle Reinelt’s (1998) words, ‘decentered the subject, fragmented narrative, refused closure, and foregrounded the instability of its own signifying process’ (285). But, for Erika Fischer-Lichte, it has gone even further: it has arrived at an acceptance of innovative work that takes for granted modernism’s goal to ‘make it new’ and so no longer aspires to shock an audience into a realization of the ‘incoherence and randomness’ (273) of our world, or, we may add, into a Brechtian active response. Fischer-Lichte, exploring the post modern theatre from a European perspective, concludes that ‘the interaction between text and spectator is realized quite differently’ (272) from that found in the work of the modernist playwright. She believes that the spectator will either impose meanings of his/her own on what is presented on the stage, or will simply accept what is seen for what it is, with no need to impose meaning. Suzan-Lori Parks would perhaps approve: she has said repeatedly that she is not interested in meanings. In ‘From Elements of Style’, one of the essays published in her collection The America Play and Other Works (1995), she mocks the very significance of ‘meaning’, taunting her reader with the equation:
bad math x + y = meaning. The ability to make simple substitutions is equated with clarity. We are taught that plays are merely staged essays and we begin to believe that characters in plays are symbols for some obscured ‘meaning’ rather than simply the thing itself. As Beckett sez: ‘No symbols where none intended’. Don’t ask playwrights what their plays mean; rather, tell them what you think and have an exchange of ideas. (14-15)
And, more recently, Don Shewey, in his review of Topdog/Underdog (1999), quotes Parks as saying, ‘I’m less interested in meaning – whatever that word means, I’m not quite sure, I keep meaning to look up meaning – than in doing’.
