ABSTRACT
A number of critics and theorists have expressed alarm over the supposed apoliticality of American experimental theatre of the 1980s, alarm which often seems to imply nostalgia for the impassioned engagement characteristic of the experimental theatre community of the previous decade. Some decry what they label the “formalist” bent of recent experimental theatre as ideologically regressive;1 some suggest that the deconstructive modality of much current experimental theatre is inherently antithetical to meaningful political praxis.2 Deconstruction and apoliticality are often linked in these writings with the concept of postmodernism: deconstruction is seen as a characteristically postmodern aesthetic strategy, apoliticality as either a cause or a symptom of the prevalence of the deconstructive aesthetic.3
