Disturbance of Native/Existential Metanarratives in American Postmodern and British Absurd Drama

American culture carries a burdensome ideology, that of the American Dream, which seems to permeate almost all factions of American life. The American Dream is a learned concept, which is illustrated in many American dramatic pieces including those authored by two leading postmodern dramatists, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard. The America the two selected playwrights display on stage is not the ideal America forced upon citizens by ideology but the experiential America, where each person is only a character, interpellated into roles by submission to ideology, law, tradition, moral/cultural codes, and relationships to others. This article seeks to demonstrate 1) how, through their invocation of realistic situations and their employment of absurdist techniques and principles they have already acquired from such masters of absurd theater as Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard and also their use of postmodernist poetics/politics, the aforementioned American dramatists can elucidate the absurd situations each person encounters in what people consider reality; and 2) what differentiates the American postmodernist dramatists from their European absurdist associates is that while the Americans use absurdist methods to combat ideological structures of their native land, the Europeans mostly employ them to address ontological/existential questions.

Keywords:

American Dream , Postmodernism , Absurdist Drama , Ideology , Sam Shepard , Edward Albee , Samuel Beckett