The landscape of American theater changed after World War II: playwrights felt the need to experiment with both content and style in order to express better their dissatisfaction with contemporary society. 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 depicted on stage. August Wilson, for example, wrote exclusively about the African American experience and ensured that many of his plays had an entirely African American cast. In a similar vein, Mart Crowley explored themes of identity and self-hatred in the gay community in his 1968 play, The Boys in the Band. Edward Albee, on the other hand, ends The Zoo Story (1959) with a shocking and incredibly bloody stab wound. Although these playwrights are characterized by their originality and innovation, there are common and unifying themes that run through the plays of this era. Most notably, Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky, David Rabe's Streamers, and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls convey a sense of alienation and disillusionment through distinct, if equally revolutionary, methods. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Postmodernism, the difficult-to-define and often harder-to-understand art movement, became popular around the same time. The word "postmodern" is perhaps the most succinct aspect of the movement: at least thematically, postmodernists built themselves directly on modernism, which was primarily concerned with the alienation of the contemporary world (Saleem, 2014). The main distinction between the two groups, then, is that the postmodernists were more willing to play with form and execution. While modernist playwrights—like Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, and Tennessee Williams—wrote linear narratives about heterosexual white people, postmodernists more obviously broke traditional theatrical conventions. They achieved this through the use of, among other things, "irony, parody, sampling, mixing of 'high' and 'low' (popular) cultural sources, horizontal analysis and vertical and the mixture of historical and cultural sources and styles” (Irving, 2013). Unfortunately difficult to define, postmodernism is “associated with an awareness of societal and cultural transitions after World War II and the rise of consumerist and media popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s,” and these three pieces—Lemon Sky, Streamers, and Top Girls – fall into this category (Irving, 2013). These three pieces actually demonstrate the versatility of postmodernism. Lemon Sky rejects traditional Aristotelian plot structure, which “presupposes that the action takes place entirely in linear time within a particular time segment with a beginning and an end” (Krijanskaia, 2008). The characters in the play, some of whom are alive, others dead, exist in an ambiguous purgatory, reenacting events that occurred ten years previously. This unreal world that Wilson proposes fits perfectly into Jean-François Lyotard's definition of postmodernism: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, highlights the unpresentable in the presentation of oneself; the one who refuses the comfort of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would allow us to collectively share the nostalgia of the inaccessible; one who seeks new presentations, not fortake advantage of it but to convey a stronger feeling of the unpresentable (Lyotard, 1979). Streamers, for their part, have a more bodily vision of the unpresentable: blood. Rabe uses extreme, graphic violence – something rare in theater when he began writing – for the same reason Wilson uses nonlinearity: to present the unpresentable, thus pushing the audience into analysis. Rabe expresses his sense of disillusionment and frustration with contemporary societal structures by ending his traditionally constructed play with a completely unconventional bloodbath that lasts an uncomfortably long duration. According to Rabe, “I actually took the form and blew it up. Two people are heading towards a collision […] and when they actually collide, violence breaks out between them. The well-made piece would end there. But in Streamers, this sergeant who has no idea what is happening […] arrives by chance and the violence engulfs him too […] Violence has its life once unleashed” (Morphos, 2005). Finally, Top Girls might be the most overtly postmodern of the three. Sanja Bahun-Radunovic writes that “postmodern theater addresses the revision of the concept of history through the questioning of teleological narratives and linear models” (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 across the centuries who have failed to attract mass recognition - like Pope Joan, Lady Nijo and Isabella Bird – telling the audience that its valuation of historical figures differs from the norm. The postmodern construction of Lemon Sky – a play in which the characters recreate events from twelve years in the past – is just as important as its content. Indeed, they go hand in hand, and Lemon Sky is not experimentation for experimentation's sake. Wilson's fourth-wall-breaking narrative style reflects the fractured nature of memory. It's almost as if his characters are still processing events and figuring out what happened in real time. Significantly, Alan's first lines address the audience and suggest that he still has not come to terms with the way his father treated him: "I tried to tell this story, to tell it, for a long time, for a certain number of years, seven years at least, or 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. For example, when Carol asks if Doug denied flirting with Penny, Alan responds, “As I recall” (Wilson, 1970). Due to the style of Lemon Sky, it is the characters, not the plot, that become the main focus of the play. This is not to say that the plot is unimportant or standard. If anything, the postmodern aspects of Lemon Sky reinforce the plot's themes and give even more weight to the action. Carol's desperate struggle for her pills in act three, for example, is all the more dramatic because the audience already knows that she is dying of a drug 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 particular importance, as they have been festering for twelve years (Wilson, 1970). At the center 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 twenty-nine, Alan recognizes that real life is messy and, ultimately, disappointing. Part of this disillusionment comesfrom a misconception about the nature of the real world: he thought his father would offer him a warm welcome. but Alan ends the play alienated and isolated, ostracized from his family because of his homosexuality. Once again, form meets content: homosexuality – still a controversial issue in 1960s America and one which was only beginning to be explored explicitly in the arts – is another example of presenting the unpresentable. This same feeling of alienation and isolation is present throughout Streamers. Rabe's characters are mentally and geographically removed from their families and friends, training for the Vietnam War at a Virginia military base. As a result, Carlyle, for example, is always nervous, stressed, and angry about defending a country that views him – an African-American man – as a second-class citizen. This disconnect, however, manifests itself most strikingly in a generational divide: Cokes and Rooney – older soldiers – romanticize the war, raving about the former's conquests in Korea; Younger soldiers, however, feared Vietnam and preferred to stay home. In this regard, Rabe shows how disconnected – and estranged – the younger generation feels from the views of the older generation. In an interview with BOMB Magazine, Rabe said that Streamers deals with the "moral crises that individuals encounter when confronted with power struggles that are beyond their control and often beyond their understanding" (Morphos, 2005). Young soldiers feel they have been thrust into war without consent or protection. On a metaphorical level, they resemble O'Flannigan, the parachutist who "sunk into the ground like a knife" after "reaching up to two handfuls of air, the parachute twenty feet above him" (Rabe, 1979). Young soldiers have become disillusioned with the widespread idea that war is a heroic and patriotic act. Rabe also uses Streamers to address issues of race and sexuality, sometimes with a single action. In the second act, Richie, a white man, lifts “his foot on the bed; he touches, presses on Carlyle’s foot” (Rabe, 1979). This interracial and homosexual action was revolutionary in the contemporary theatrical landscape. Carlyle and Richie are frustrated by restrictive – and often restrictive – societal expectations. This frustration manifests itself in extreme violence: Carlyle stabs Billy and Rooney, leaving their blood on stage. This intense outburst of violence would have shocked the public and provoked a visceral reaction. Rabe uses violence to show how alienation – and, more specifically, the societal structures that cause that alienation – can have tangible, real-world consequences, pushing a person to revert to an animal state. He writes: “Violence is never conceptually or formally contained and limited to its appropriate and designated targets. In other words, it's not rational. It is not mechanical” (Rabe, 1979). Top Girls, on the other hand, examines the feminist movement through a postmodern lens, showing audiences why they should be skeptical of the effectiveness of a feminism that encourages women to emulate men in the world. workforce. Additionally, Top Girls is a testament to how being a woman can still be isolating and alienating, even in a seemingly progressive society. According to Bahun-Radunovic, “experimental strategies most often deployed for [postmodern] purposes include the intertextual inclusion of archival and quasi-archival materials; the introduction of long-term supra-historical models that underpin and subvert the scenario; the presentation of.