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Plays of Impasse probes the structure and significance of the numerous and highly visible plays set in contemporary society鈥檚 dead ends鈥攖he hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and military training camps so aptly described by Irving Goffman as 鈥渢otal institutions.鈥� Carol Rosen shows how the setting in these plays tends to engulf and then to exclude the audience, turning an encompassing stage structure鈥攁 closed, controlling, absolute system鈥攊nto a protagonist that overwhelms the characters. In discussions ranging from Harold Pinter鈥檚 The Hothouse to Samuel Beckett鈥檚 Endgame, she further maintains that the impasse of characters in reductive environments supplies a unifying image for post鈥揥orld War II drama in general.

This state of impasse pervades contemporary drama. Everyday activities and attempts to endure life in a parenthesis are vacated of traditional social or moral meaning onstage. The pain of this kind of survival, spatially fixed, is at the heart of Endgame, for example, an extreme instance of this mode of drama at the edge of existence.

In plays such as Peter Nichols鈥檚 The National Health, Peter Weiss鈥檚 Marat/Sade, Friedrich D眉rrenmatt鈥檚 The Physicists, David Storey鈥檚 Home, Brendan Behan鈥檚 The Quare Fellow, Jean Genet鈥檚 Deathwatch, and David Rabe鈥檚 The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the splintered self, like the divided society, strives to endure against enormous, codified odds. Even in plays not depicting the rigidity of institutions, the contemporary dramatic mode is finally characterized by sparse, introspective action in a closed system鈥攁n onstage model of a world gone awry, a world at an impasse.

Originally published in 1983.

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