ABSTRACT
Unlike their ‘modern’ European – and their increasingly global – theatrical kin, US playwrights (as distinct from even their magnificently mode-fusing, too often shrugged away, Canadian dramatist cousins) face an either/or approach to realism and style. While, for example, the ‘content’ and ‘form’ of a Samuel Beckett play meld such human concerns as ageing, memory loss, physical disability and poverty with such openly artistic tactics as wordplay, repetition, discontinuity, illogic, conspicuous pace shifts, metatheatrical self-awareness and comically disproportionate response, and are embraced accordingly in such fullness of mixtures by critics and audiences alike, ‘American’ writers for the stage routinely encounter and accommodate compartmentalization of foci that ideally would be entwined.
