ABSTRACT
According to the medical opinion expressed by the doctors in the musical, Gabe is a delusion, a symptom of Diana's mental illness. Dramaturgically, he is an extension of her character, a critical introspective space in which she can reflect on her life. As Savran observes, a great number of canonized US playwrights have adhered to a formula that combines an admixture of avant-gardist and realist aesthetics with a “teasing use of enigmatic situations, characters, themes and so on from Rice and O'Neill to Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, and many, many others.” Next to Normal is part of this tradition. Next to Normal, for the most part, eschews clean-cut separations between its interior and exterior narratives—between that which happens only in Diana’s phantasy and that which happens on the level of “objective” reality shared by the other characters.
