"I don't go into the studio with the idea of "saying" something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue."--Richard Diebenkorn

Click here to read more about Richard Diebenkorn and his paintings. Diebenkorn Cityscape

What Comes After Postmodernism?

WARNING! This lecture will reveal plot points about Angels in America. If you don't want to know what happens, wait until you have finished the play to read this lecture.

Not all literary critics agree on a definition of the term "postmodern." "Postmodern" literature is defined by some as any literature written after World War II. Other critics argue that, in order to be called "postmodern," literature must be experimental in its style and structure. Still others use as their criteria a set of themes or assumptions about the world. While these arguments can be interesting and productive, we don't have time to go into all of them in this class. For the purposes of this class, "postmodern" will refer to literature which

As you may imagine, happy endings do not abound in postmodern literature, and neither do hopeful endings; there's also not a lot of redemption.

But something odd began to happen in literature on its way to the end of the 20th century, and it has continued into the first few years of the 21st. The most explicit sign of this change appeared at the end of the play Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, in 1992, when God reappears after having been missing for the better part of a century. Certainly, it's not the omnipotent God of the Old Testament; it's a considerably weakened God, who is reduced to accepting help from the despicable Roy Cohn. But the fact remains: God is back. And Prior's last speech ends on a very hopeful note: "The Great Work Begins." This is not the cynical, disillusioned, meaningless message we've seen in other postmodern works. The play implies that we've descended into the depths, and now it's time to climb back out of the pit and rebuild a better world. In fact, the main character, Prior, follows a trajectory that is the opposite of that followed by many other postmodern characters. They begin hopeful and end disillusioned; he begins disillusioned, hopeless, convinced of the meaninglessness of life, and ends up with energy, hope, and optimism. Many of the characters around him have redeemed themselves in some way.

Certainly the ending of the play is not entirely happy; but it is very different from the endings of most postmodern works. The ending of Angels in America is a call to action, beginning with the assumption that all life is not meaningless and hopeless.

More and more, this change of attitude is beginning to appear in contemporary novels. Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and many others leave open the possibility that life has meaning; that innocence can be good; that disillusionment can be overcome; that redemption is possible. Of course, this is still the 21st century: we all know that life is fragmented and often beyond our control; that truth is a matter of perspective; and that "facts" can change from moment to moment. The world is a violent place and human beings are capable of astonishing cruelty. The ground under our feet is quicksand. But many contemporary novelists seem to be saying that, despite all of this, there is room left for just a bit of optimism.

A new generation of writers seems to be in the process of shaping a new literary movement. How that movement will mature and what it will be called remains to be seen. Read Michael Chabon. Read Dave Eggers. Read Jonathan Lethem. Read Jim Crace. Read Nathan Englander. Read Nuruddin Farah. Read Marisha Pessl. Read Simon Van Booy. Read...well, the list is endless. Just keep reading!

Background on Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner was born July 16, 1956, in New York City, New York. His father, a musician, and his mother, a musician and actress, moved the family to Lake Charles, Louisiana, shortly after his birth. They encouraged their children to love literature and the arts; in fact, Kushner recalls that they would give him and his siblings a dollar whenever they memorized a poem to recite. His father taught him about opera and drama, and he was inspired to go into the theatre by his mother, whom he saw act on stage.

He knew that he was gay from the age of 6. In an interview with Contemporary Authors, he says, "I knew that I felt slightly different than most of the boys I was growing up with. By the time I was 11 there was no doubt. But I was completely in the closet."

He went to college at Columbia University, where he kept his sexuality a secret. He even went to a psychotherapist to try to become heterosexual. Eventually, he accepted his sexuality and "came out" to his family and friends.

He graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in 1978, and went on to graduate school at New York University, receiving an M.F.A. in 1984.

His early plays don't focus on gay themes, but they do introduce his interest in history's connection with the present. A Bright Room Called Day focusses on a group of friends in the Weimar Republic, just before the rise of Hitler's Nazi regime. This circle of friends disintegrates as Hitler rises, leaving only one woman, Agnes, cowering in her apartment. Her story is entwined with the commentary of a contemporary young woman, Zillah, who draws parallels between Hitler's regime and the administrations of Reagan and Bush.

Angels in America began as a poem Kushner wrote shortly after finishing graduate school, but later expanded into a two-part play. It is meant to be performed by 8 actors who each play several roles. Of this play, Kushner says,

Do you cry for Roy Cohn? Part of the impulse to write Angels in America came from the way this man who I hated got an obituary in The Nation by Robert Sherrill that was completely homophobic. The question of forgiveness may be the hardest political question people face. If there isn't something called forgiveness, if there isn't a statute of limitations on crimes, if political movements proceed driven primarily by revenge, there will never be peace and progress. But forgiveness, if it means anything, has to be incredibly hard to come by. These plays are about, among other things, love, justice, and ambivalence. Ambivalence is a very big issue. Forgiveness can never be ambivalent. But how else do we set ourselves free from the nightmare of history?

The other question is community and collectivity. How do you define community? I don't think community can simply be defined as like-minded individuals banded together for a common cause. That's a political movement...

I don't believe we have a mystical function. I do believe the oppressed hold the truth in the society. The slave knows what the master can't know...The people who are really making history are those tilling the soil of time and who understand how it works from a molecular, chemical point of view. That's the people at the bottom. That's what was deeply evil about Reaganism--there's no such thing as trickle-down...

(Interview with Don Shewey, "Tony Kushner's Sexy Ethics," in The Village Voice, April 20, 1993).

Following is a list of some of Kushner's plays:

Background on Contemporary American Theatre

Until the 1960s, "American theatre" meant Broadway. But as costs began to rise, and producers and backers became less willing to risk millions on play that weren't sure winners, newer writers, whose work was more experimental, began to shift to off-Broadway, then off-off-Broadway, and eventually to regional theatres. While the careers of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller took place almost entirely on Broadway, most contemporary playwrights began (and continue) their careers elsewhere. Broadway, today, is no longer the center of new theatre.

Beginning in the 1960s, non-Broadway productions were undertaken less for money than for art's sake. Those who ran off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, or regional theatres were independent; they answered to no investors or unions; and they could take greater risks. During the 1960s, such major talents as Sam Shepard, John Guare, Terence McNally, Arthur Kopit, Ronald Ribman, Amiri Baraka, Megan Terry, and Maria Irene Fornes got their starts off-Broadway. There was also increasing participation in the theatre by minority writers and directors.

During the 1970s, this shift became more obvious. For example, of the six plays awarded Pulitzers during the 1960s, only one (Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope) originated off-Broadway; but during the 1970s, only one (Albee's Seascape) had its first professional production on Broadway. Three began at Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival (Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, Jason Miller's That Championship Season, and A Chorus Line); others were produced at regional theatres in Houston (Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds), Los Angeles (Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box and D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game), and San Francisco (Sam Shepard's The Buried Child). All except for The Buried Child eventually reached Broadway, but the trend was now clear: truly original work was mostly being done elsewhere.

By the 1980s and 1990s, most new work was being done away from Broadway; for example, the careers of Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles) and Christopher Durang (Beyond Therapy) began in regional theatre; Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf) began off-Broadway in Joe Papp's Public Theatre. Three of the 1980s Pulitzer Prize winners began in regional theatres: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George (1985), Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy (1988), and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles (1989). By now, Broadway was being dominated by revivals and blockbuster musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber. In theatre critic Robert Brustein's opinion,

Largely for money reasons, Broadway has degenerated into an arena for the tried and true: huge, numbing musicals; Neil Simonized comedies; or, at best, imports from Britain and transfers from American resident theatres. The new American play--once the proud staple of the commercial theatre in the thirties, forties, and fifties--has virtually disappeared from producers' agendas, unless it can be marketed as a variant of affirmative action, alleviating liberal guilt toward minorities or the handicapped. And the day of the genuinely original American musical is over, too, eclipsed by such grinding British juggernauts as The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables.

Regional theatre also has provided a place for minority writers and directors; some theatres, such as El Teatro Campesino, Asian American Theatre Company, Jewish Repertory Theatre, St. Louis Black Repertory Company, and Mixed Blood Theatre Company, specialize in minority drama. Many theatre companies have begun a practice of "color-blind casting," as well.

Themes in Contemporary Drama

The most prominent post-World War II playwrights, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, focussed on such themes as the frailty of the human spirit, the strength of the subconscious, the destruction of the outsider, the crushing weight of civilization, guilt, illusion, questions of committment and responsibility, memory, materialism and pretension, and self-destructiveness.

Many of those themes, certainly, are still prominent in contemporary drama. But others have emerged to join them or alter their shape. Many contemporary playwrights explore the random, mysterious, contradictory quality of existence in a world which is noncausal and nonlinear. Art, history, politics, metaphysics, even language itself, are called into doubt. Other recurring themes are cultural change; social, political, and personal flexibility; desire for community; immortality vs. anonymity; loss of dreams; issues of power; the banality of evil; and the urge toward self-destruction.

Following is a very incomplete list of some important contemporary playwrights and plays: