Word: postmodernism
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...play opens as Gordon, a shy bartender played with candor and sensitivity by Andrew Barth, is writing a personals ad. He is, in the playwright's own words, a "narrator left in the dark." Like Will Self's hermaphroditic Oxford don, Gordon is a postmodern creation. Recently, it has become deceptively easy to label anything vaguely eccentric as postmodern. But The Wombs of Angel Street, with its rejection of cause-effect linearity and its characters' use of subjective imagination to recreate reality, clearly embraces some of the genre's conventions...
...keeping with a fairly recent trend, Zayas has written, in the boradest sense, a mystery play of the postmodern variety. There is no weapon, no body, no discernable motive. But his characters wait for the deus ex machina to intervene and bring salvation in one form or another...
...careless. They lose jobs, take on lovers, futz around with guru-driven spirituality and dress to the nines. You could argue, as writer-director Michael Tolkin doubtless did when he was pitching The New Age, that they are perfect exemplars of chic anomie as it manifests itself in postmodern -- or postrational -- Los Angeles. You could also argue, as people whose malls don't yet contain an Issey Miyake boutique might, that they are hopeless twits...
...real underground has taken the very un-Postmodern step of depending on paper and the Postal Service: this is the low-tech, unwired world of photocopied "fanzines" (from fan magazines), the vanity projects of a new generation of publishers who are making fat, unglossy magazines radical again. Many of these "zines," as they are more generally called, are produced with desktop computers, but that is as sophisticated as they get. The majority make a point of their crude appearance and unhurried voyage to the reader; most are collated by hand, distributed by the mailman and cost...
Havel reads extremely well in translation, and neither Tom Stoddard's English version nor Rouse's production lose the author's nascent sarcasm. Fraught with cliche, the play seems to make fun of the postmodern genre it places itself in; in Rouse's interpretation, the language surfaces with such hollow force that we can easily imagine that Leopold's books must read like the non sensical phrases of the artist/critic Mark Tansey's "Wheel...