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Postmodern theatre makes a presentation, not a representation.
MICK WALLIS, Drama/Theatre/Performance
Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.
PATRICE PAVIS, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other.
PHILIP AUSLANDER, From Acting to Performance
The urge to disrupt the theatrical illusion has led to a variety of dramatic means such as a provocative audience addressing, or, even more radically, the attempt to establish physical contact with the audience ... It is precisely in the moment of the breakdown in a performance, that is, when the illusion of the stage as a closed world is denied, that the audience participation can take place and the spectator moves into the center of theatrical attention. In postmodern drama, forms of meaning are created by the gaze of the spectator ... the spectator becomes the "master of semiosis."
KERSTIN SCHMIDT, Postmodernism in American Drama
Postmodern theatre raises theory to the rank of a playful activity; it suggests as the only inheritance the faculty of replaying the past, rather than pretending to recreate and absorb it.
PATRICE PAVIS, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
Postmodern drama remains a theater of theory ... with vital interest in the transformative processes of perception, that is, on how drama and theater are created and presented on stage.
KERSTIN SCHMIDT, Postmodernism in American Drama
Challenging the boundaries of what constitutes classical drama, as well as the space in which that drama occurs, much of postmodern drama might be called performances, or happenings, and overlaps with the performance in body art.
TIM WOODS, Beginning Postmodernism
New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
PATRICE PAVIS, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture
In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.
JEREMY BEGBIE, "Christ and the cultures: Christianity and the arts"
The more successful the intellectual paradigm of postmodern performance becomes, the tighter is the circuit of exchange between the self-acknowledging and unmistakable energies of performance and the exemplary or demonstrative function that such free energies perform for the paradigm.
STEVEN CONNOR, Postmodernist Culture
Postmodern dramatists approach performance art as a valuable resource for their dramatic endeavors. Among others, the influence takes shape most vividly in the attempt to make the theatrical audience reconsider the traditional boundaries between performance and reality, art and life, fiction and autobiography.
KERSTIN SCHMIDT, Postmodernism in American Drama
Given technological developments in virtual reality and communications, it is not clear what, if any, purpose will be served by live theatre in the not-too-distant future. Postmodern theory sees theatre as a quaint and marginalized activity in a wired world, and ... whether live theatre even really exists anymore. Some of you may dream of seeing your name up in lights on a theatre marquee, but if you are really looking for fame and fortune shouldn't you be studying film at least, or television arts, or computers? What is it about theatre that remains compelling for you? Is it just because it's there?
MARK FORTIER, Theory Theatre and Introduction
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