Postdramatic Characterization in the Liminal Space of the Contemporary Theatre

Drama has staged, presented, represented, and performed different concepts of subjectivity, throughout history. Many theoreticians believe in the mutual interdependence between modern drama’s structural and stylistic innovations and the major changes in the conceptual understanding of identity and subjectivity particularly from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. Acknowledging the importance of theatre’s endeavour to imitate, negotiate and construct human identity; no one disputes their fundamental premise about the basic correlativity between the two. Critical analysis regarding the reciprocal relationship between the conceptual fluctuations of subjectivity and the structural and stylistic theatrical and dramatic innovations of our time is yet far from exhausted. The present article specifically will focus on the definition of postdramaticality form Lehman’s perspective and endeavors to investigate and identify the possible underlying causes for postdramatic innovative methods of characterizations in theatre after 1980. It also tries to explicate the necessity of stylistic and structural changes in theatre, due to the new conceptualization of subject in postmodern theories of subjectivity, and also the changed status of the subject in the mediatized environs of today’s world. The essay introduces five different postdramatic methods of characterization in theatre that are practiced by different playwrights to perform/represent postmodern subjectivity.