The landscape of American theater changed after World War II: playwrights felt the need to experiment with both content and style to best express their dissatisfaction with society contemporary. Unlike their modernist forebears, post-World War II American playwrights sought to enliven the theater with experimental styles and character types that had not previously been performed on stage. August Wilson, for example, wrote exclusively about the African-American experience and made sure that many of his plays had entirely African-American casts. Similarly, Mart Crowley explored themes of identity and self-hatred in the gay community in his 1968 play The Boys in the Band. Edward Albee, meanwhile, ends The Zoo Story (1959) with a shocking and surprisingly bloody stabbing. Although these playwrights were characterized by originality and innovation, there are common and unifying themes that run through the works of this era. In particular, Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky, David Rabe's Streamers, and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls convey a sense of alienation and disillusionment through separate, though equally revolutionary, methods. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Postmodernism, that artistic movement that is difficult to define and often more difficult to understand, became popular around the same time. The word “postmodern” may be the most concise aspect of the movement: at least thematically, postmodernists built directly on modernism, which was primarily concerned with alienation from the contemporary world (Saleem, 2014). The main distinction between the two groups, then, is that postmodernists were more willing to play with form and execution. While modernist playwrights – such as Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams – wrote linear narratives about straight white men, postmodernists more obviously broke traditional theatrical conventions. They achieved this through the use of, among other things, "irony, parody, sampling, mixing 'high' and 'low' (popular) cultural sources, horizontal and vertical analysis, and mixing historical and cultural sources and styles" ( Irving, 2013). Notoriously difficult to define, postmodernism is “associated with awareness of social and cultural transitions after World War II and the rise of mass-mediated consumerist popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s,” and all three of these plays – Lemon Sky, Streamers, and Top Girls—fall into this category (Irving, 2013). These three works, in fact, demonstrate the versatility of postmodernism. Lemon Sky rejects traditional Aristotelian plot structure, which “assumes that the action takes place entirely in linear time within a particular time segment that has a beginning and an end” (Krijanskaia, 2008). The play's characters, some of whom are alive, some of whom are dead, exist in an ambiguous purgatory, recalling events from ten years earlier. This unreal world offered by Wilson is perfectly in line with Jean-Francois Lyotard's definition of postmodernism: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, proposes the unpresentable in the presentation of the self; that which denies itself the comfort of good forms, the consensus of a taste that would allow us to collectively share the nostalgia of the unattainable; that which seeks new presentations, not to enjoy them but to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable (Lyotard, 1979). Streamers, meanwhile, takes a more corporeal vision of the unpresentable: blood. Rabe uses extreme and explicit violence – somethingrare in the theater when he began writing – for the same reason Wilson uses non-linearity: to present the unpresentable, thus stimulating the audience to analysis. Rabe conveys his sense of disillusionment and frustration with contemporary social structures by ending his traditionally constructed approach to play with a completely unconventional bloodbath that lasts an uncomfortably long period of time. According to Rabe, “I was actually taking the form and making it bigger. Two people are about to collide […] and when they actually collide, violence breaks out between them. A well-made play would end there. But in Streamers this sergeant who has no idea what is happening [...] passes by and the violence engulfs him too [...] Violence has a life of its own once it is unleashed” (Morphos, 2005). Finally, Top Girls may be the most overtly postmodern of the three. Sanja Bahun-Radunovic writes that “postmodern theater approaches the revision of the concept of history through the questioning of teleological histories and linear schemes” (Bahun-Radunovic, 2008). The entire first scene of Top Girls is a historical revision: Marlene, the protagonist, hosts a dinner for real and fictional women who over the centuries have failed to attract mass recognition - such as Pope Joan, Lady Nijo and Isabella Bird - telling the audience that his assessment of historical figures differs from the norm. The postmodern construction of Lemon Sky, a work in which characters recreate events twelve years in the past, is as important as its content. In fact, they go hand in hand, and Lemon Sky is not experimentalism as an end in itself. Wilson's fourth-wall-breaking narrative style mirrors the fractured nature of memory. It's almost as if his characters are still processing events, understanding what happened in real time. Significantly, Alan's first lines are directed at the audience and suggest that he has not yet come to terms with the way his father treated him: "I've been trying to tell this story, to put it down, for a long time, for a number of years, at least seven years, closer to ten” (Wilson, 1970). These lines also set the tone for the rest of the play, which is more concerned with emotional truth than factual accuracy asks if Doug denied flirting with Penny, Alan replies, “As far as I remember” (Wilson, 1970) Because of the style of Lemon Sky, the characters, not the plot, become the main focus of the work it means that the plot is not important or standard. In contrast, the postmodern aspects of Lemon Sky reinforce the themes of the plot and give even more weight to the action Carol's desperate struggle for her pills in the third act, for example. is made even more dramatic because the audience already knows that he dies of an overdose. Going further, Alan's observations about identity and abandonment – ​​"There is no such thing as a native Californian," he says in the third act – take on extra meaning, because they have been in supposition for twelve years (Wilson, 1970). At the heart of Lemon Sky, however, is an acute sense of disillusionment: when he arrives at his father's house at seventeen, Alan believes the cliché that California represents a new beginning; At the age of twenty-nine, Alan recognizes the fact that real life is messy and ultimately disappointing. Part of this disillusionment stems from a misconception about the nature of the real world: He thought his father would offer him a welcoming welcome. family, but instead Alan ends the play alienated and isolated, ostracized by his family because of his homosexuality. Once again, form meets content: homosexuality – still a controversial issue in 1960s America that was just beginning to be explored explicitly inarts – is another example of presenting the unpresentable. This same sense of alienation and isolation is present in all Streamers. Rabe's characters are mentally and geographically distant from their families and friends, training for the Vietnam War at a Virginia military base. As a result, Carlyle, for example, is always tense, stressed and angry in defending a country that sees him – an African-American man – as a second-class citizen. This disconnect manifests itself most saliently, however, across generational gaps: Cokes and Rooney, the older soldiers, romanticize the war, rhapsodizing about the former's conquests in Korea; the younger soldiers, however, are worried about Vietnam and would prefer to stay home. In this regard, Rabe shows how the younger generation feels disconnected – and alienated – from the views of the older generation. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Rabe stated that Streamers is about the "moral crises that individuals encounter when faced with power struggles that are beyond their control and often beyond their understanding" (Morphos, 2005). Younger soldiers feel as if they have been thrust into war without consent or protection. On a metaphorical level, they resemble O'Flannigan, the parachutist who “fell into the ground like a knife” after “reaching up to two handfuls of air, the chute twenty feet above him” (Rabe, 1979). Young soldiers became disillusioned with the well-publicized idea that war is a heroic and patriotic act. Rabe also uses Streamers to address issues of race and sexuality, sometimes with just one singular action. In the second act, Richie, a white man, raises “his foot on the bed; touches, presses, Carlyle's foot” (Rabe, 1979). This interracial and homosexually charged action was revolutionary in the contemporary theater landscape. Carlyle and Richie are frustrated by restrictive and often restrictive social expectations. This frustration manifests itself with extreme violence: Carlyle stabs both Billy and Rooney, leaving their blood to drip onto the stage. This intense explosion of violence would have shocked the audience and provoked a visceral reaction. Rabe uses violence to show how alienation – and, more specifically, the social structures that cause this alienation – can have tangible and real consequences in the world, pushing a person to revert to an animalistic state. He writes: “violence is never conceptually or formally contained and limited to its appropriate and designated goals. In other words it is not rational. It is not mechanical” (Rabe, 1979). Top Girls, meanwhile, looks at the feminist movement through a postmodern lens, showing audiences why they should be skeptical of the effectiveness of a brand of feminism that encourages women to imitate men in everyday life. workforce. Furthermore, Top Girls is a testament to how the condition of being a woman can still be isolating and alienating even in a seemingly progressive society. According to Bahun-Radunović, “The experimental strategies most often employed for [postmodern] purposes include the intertextual inclusion of archival and quasi-archival material; the introduction of long-term suprahistorical models that underlie and subvert the plot; the presentation of historical events as fragmented, compressed and disjunctive units” (Bahun-Radunovic, 2008). The surreal dinner, featuring women seemingly empowered by history who were able to succeed in an oppressively patriarchal society, sets the tone for the entire work. Marlene sees these women as role models, but they could also easily be seen as cautionary tales, since each of them has suffered violent tragedies. The dinner guests were all hugely successful in theirs.