Postmodernism and the Theatre: a Culture & Process of Creating or an Aesthetic of Performance?

Theatre is not a discipline in which the word “postmodernism” has an especially precise or generally agreed upon definition, though its connotations are powerful, varied, and remarkably elastic. In 2010, performance artist and scholar, Richard
Schechner, lamented in “The Conservative Avant Garde” that the “current state of American theatre and performance art is of circulating stasis,” tracing the theatrical modernist and postmodernist avant garde in the U.S. from the nineteenth century revolutions that produced theatrical modernism to the late twentieth century work of the theatre company that emerged from his own Performance Group, “roughly,” he writes, from Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879) to the Wooster Group’s LSD (1985).* The shifts in experimental theatre in the U.S. during the postmodern era (deriving from the work of Merce Cunningham & John Cage, Allen Kaprow, Ellen Stewart, Barbara Dilley & Mary Overlie, Schechner’s Performance Group, and others) signal, however one understands their radical reorganization of theatrical space and method, a turn to what is often called postmodernist performance. But is that postmodernist theatre a style (or styles), which, in practice and production looks or operates in ways that at least seem to reject modernist and traditional forms? Or is postmodernist theatre practice a means of creating (often begun without a fixed text, often created in an ensemble, often performed in non-traditional performance spaces) in a way we might call more “horizontal” than “vertical” in terms of authority over the performance event? And how might this affect something as seemingly old-fashioned as “playwriting”?