ABSTRACT
Fredrick Jackson Turner had famously declared the closing of the American frontier in 1893, Richard Schechner, in 1981, declared the end of the American avant-garde. He argued that the demise of the avant-garde was largely precipitated by the rebellion of actors against the authority of the director and the shift of creative power from the director to the performer. The logical heir to the avant-garde tradition of the Wooster Group was director Reza Abdoh, whose biography could almost stand as a paradigm of late twentieth-century multicultural American society. The postmodern detachment of the Wooster Group and others was a logical, perhaps inevitable, response to the loss of a political center after the Vietnam War and the scandal of Watergate. In many respects, the Wooster Group was the last major exponent of the postwar American avant-garde movement. In fact, the Wooster Group's use of technology was one of its most significant contributions to the avant-garde.
