Hyperrealism in Contemporary Drama: Retrogressive or Avant-Garde?

Hyperrealism in Contemporary Drama: Retrogressive or Avant-Garde? CAROL GELDERMAN Realism embraces all writing in which the natural world is candidly presented; it stands for the real against the unreal and, by extension, forthe true against the false. Realism in this sense is a moralizing art and, quintessentially, an art of opposition. It is Ibsen's assertion that a society which denies any creative outlets for upper-middle-class women is to blame for Hedda Gabler's tragedy; it is Shaw's concern with what man and the world could be and, for their salvation, must be, not with man and the world as they are at their present worst. Naturalism is a further development of realism, but it is still realism since it is certainly a faithful account of the world. Naturalist plays present a "slice of life" instead of a carefully constructed plot. Realism and its first cousin, naturalism, became the dominant modes ofdrama in the last third of the nineteenth century. But since realism first invaded the stage, antirealism has existed in conscious protest against it. For almost a hundred years, the avant-garde has been characterized by theatrical experiments which move away from the established norm, realism. So successful were these ventures that realism, once the mainstream, was relegated to the limbo of philistinism. Yet today there is a new dramatic sensibility afoot - and it is realism. Many critics call it sentimentally revisionist. It is not possible, they say, for realism to be new in the last third of the twentieth century. It will be the thesis of this article that the "newlt realism in the theater today, far from being an aberration or a throwback in contemporary drama, is a major innovating impulse. Its precise quality of novelty lies more in its connection with photography, with new directions in that most contemporary of aU media, the film, or even with the advanced novel, than in its relation to traditional realistic-naturalist drama. The term New Realism originated with the art world. New Realism, Realism Now, Sharp-Focus Realism, Photographic Realism, Hyperrealism, the Realist Revival, Radical Realism are but some of the labels that have been invented to refer to a style of painting and sculpture which has emerged since 1970. A CAROL GELDERMAN special issue of Arts Magazine devoted to the subject in February of 1974 was called Super Realism because this phrase aptly describes the hyperrealistic quality of so many of the artworks produced: for example, Ralph Going's renderings of McDonald's hamburger stands; Duane Hansen's real-life incarnations of prizefighters; and Janet Fish's paintings of transparent Tanqueray gin bottles. Chuck Close's superscaled oil close-ups of human faces look so much like photographs that museum guards must be posted near his paintings to prevent visitors from running their handsover the canvases to make certain that they are not just photographs.' The same hyperrealistic quality is present in contemporary drama. Englishman Edward Bond, American Terry Curtis Fox, Frenchmen Georges Michel and Jean-Paul Wenzel, Austrian WOlfgang Bauer and Germans Martin Sperr and Franz Xaver Kmetz are just some of the practitioners of "new" realism or hyperrealism. In the cases of Bauer, SperT and Kmetz, the debt is to the old and, for the most part, underground tradition ofthe folk play, which was not, as its name implies, the work of simple people, but a highly conscious artistic creation of sophisticated dramatists. The folk play concerned itself with the lives of ordinary people, and was always written in their dialect and not in the High German of the traditional theater. The folk-play genre was launched by an eighteenth-century Viennese playwright named Josef Anton Stranitzky; its most famous artisans were nineteenth-century AustriansJohann Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund.' Other ftrst-rate folk-play writers did not emerge until the 1920'S and 1930'S: the gifted German writers Odon von Horvath, who wrote plays whose characters were mainly clerks, shopkeepers, housemaids, drifters and the like, the losersofmodem urban life; and Marieluise Fleisser, who wrote about similarly oppressed characters. Both wrote plays that were more descriptive than dramatic, and both quickly passed into obscurity. At the end of the 1950'S, however...