[In the following essay, Demastes and Vanden Heuvel contend that the works of Rabe and Sam Shepard embody a new direction in American theater, one that incorporates realism and absurdism to subvert “the bastion of traditional, strictly linear and causal realist theatre in an attempt to reveal the indeterminate and chaotic nature of the world.”]

In his essay “Naturalism in Context” (1968), Martin Esslin announced that though the early, turn-of-the-century interest in naturalism in the theatre may since have been replaced by other dramatic forms, naturalism's legacy to those new forms—the key surviving element of naturalism in the theatre today—is “an experimental exploration of reality in its widest possible sense.”¹ In “The Experimental Novel” (1893), Emile Zola observed that the naturalist author “gives the facts as he observes them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread and the phenomena to develop.”² What develops from Zola's agenda is a process in which the author “sets his characters going so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for” (p. 5).

Zola's determinist requirements were informed by the dominant episteme of his age, of which Newtonian causation was a primary discourse. Naturalism has thus become a term associated with linear causality, which proceeds from a classical scientific assumption that small and large causes beget effects of value equal to their causes. For the naturalist, where one begins on this solid earth virtually foreordains where and how one will tread upon it.

In the 1950s, following the turmoil of two world wars and under the impact of important new developments in philosophy and the sciences, Europe firmly reassessed the “determinist requirements” of its age. Consequently, a strong anti-realist theatrical movement—the theatre of the absurd—emerged that reflected a growing awareness that neither history nor physics offered adequate proof that determinist elements governed material or human existence. In his The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), Esslin argued that, predicated on existentialist philosophy, there arose a uniquely European movement in the theatre, in which a “sense of the senselessness of life, of the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose”³ replaced the orderly, Newtonian fiction of life adhered to by the period's predecessors. The theatre of the absurd, as Esslin would later argue in “Naturalism in Context,” is nonetheless indebted to naturalism in retaining its spirit of inquiry, its use of a closely scrutinizing eye for detail in human events, though with different results. Though the methodology for deriving their conclusions remained intact, the absurdists' conclusions regarding deterministic existence ran in diametric opposition to the agenda of their naturalist predecessors.

These two strongly influential movements—naturalism and absurdism—have polarized western theatre, arguing respectively for a tidy global perspective of human behavior or for an idiosyncratic local vision, in which ultimately no human behavioral patterns can be abstracted. One is left to choose between existence represented as strict linear determinism or as utter randomness.

In 1978 Robert Brustein extended the naturalism-absurdism debate to American theatre in an article, “The Crack in the Chimney: Reflections on Contemporary American Playwriting,” in which he chastised twentieth-century American dramatists for their allegiance to tightly causal and linearly constructed works, the logical assumptions of which “belong to the eighteenth century, which is to say the age of Newton, rather than to the twentieth century, the age of Einstein.”⁴ Brustein agrees with Esslin's observation that absurdism never became a force in American thought or theatre because, as Esslin reports, “In the United States the belief in progress that characterized Europe in the nineteenth century has been maintained into the middle of the twentieth century.”⁵ American drama for the most part remained linear and progressive, refusing seriously to acknowledge the randomness and stagnation embodied in absurdist drama.

But while Brustein notes the adherence to causal progression of plot in the work of such playwrights as O'Neill and Miller, he also observes a relatively recent (in 1978) trend that seemed intent on overturning the standard methodology and its attendant naturalist philosophy. He cites David Rabe's Sticks and Bones and Christopher Durang's parody of Rabe, The Vietnamization of New Jersey, as revolutionary American attempts to develop an anti-causal form. Here Brustein cleverly anticipates a direction in American drama, not quite absurdist or naturalist, that has to this day met with critical confusion and audience resistance.

While Brustein does not discuss Rabe's 1976 play Streamers, his observation that American drama has taken a new turn nevertheless applies to this work. Though largely conforming to traditional realist assumptions, Streamers concludes with a sequence of unexpectedly violent, seemingly senseless and bloody events. Audiences were clearly repelled by the events before them, for reasons explained by reviewer Walter Kerr: “What the audience asks for is a pattern, a design, a shape that will embrace what they are now looking at and place it in significant relationship to what has gone on before and what may come after.”⁶ The apparent gratuitousness of the concluding events of the play shattered causal expectations and left the audience confused and grasping for unity and design. Whereas an audience may anticipate such randomness from an absurdist play by Ionesco or Genet—with a clearly nonrealist premise, acting style, and set—from a realist format such as the one utilized in Streamers (and most American drama), an audience invariably expects Ibsenesque causality. And this Rabe refuses to provide.

Despite violating strict naturalist philosophy in his play, Rabe is nevertheless subscribing to naturalism's legacy of experimentally exploring the realm of reality with a scrutinizing, “scientific” eye. In this particular case, however, Rabe confronts the linear science of Newton and suggests a nonlinear dynamic that is in many ways more closely allied to an absurdist vision. Yet Rabe's presentation is something more than an absurdist embodiment of inexplicable, unpatterned randomness. His theatre presents a hybrid form, something that gravitates between the strict causality of naturalism and the utter randomness of absurdism. The play scatters events that amount to unrelated causes of the play's final effects, but they arise in such a way as to suggest principles increasingly significant in contemporary scientific thought, which fall under the popular rubric of “chaos theory.”⁷

Testing laboratory conclusions against less controlled natural events, a recent group of scientific skeptics—not unlike their critical equivalents in the theatre—discovered that scientists often over-simplified the systems they studied, creating “true” results in the artificially closed environment of their laboratories and computer simulations; these results, however, did not incontrovertibly occur in “real” time and space. Like the naturalist playwright, traditional scientists created controlled, artificially closed environments that ultimately guaranteed the behavior they anticipated. What usually emerged in both cases were tidy results that seemed to produce objectively conclusions that were globally applicable. But while such conclusions abstractly argued for perfect consistency between the local and the global, in practice “inexplicable” deviations occurred between them. The chaos scientists discovered, quite simply and conclusively, showed that the kind of order envisioned by the Newtonians and naturalists was impossible. The human desire for such an order conflicted with natural evidence.

Perhaps the first expanded scientific evidence of the extent of this impossibility occurred when meteorologists during the 1960s and '70s concluded that they had amassed sufficient understanding of variable deterministic influences to develop a system of making long-term weather forecasts. But in the process of developing the determinist system, it was discovered that in complex and open systems like the earth's atmosphere, even the most minor and undetectable events thousands of miles away may affect the overall outcome of events. The idea that the movements of a butterfly flapping its wings in China can unpredictably rise to a level of significance and affect the weather in Arizona is the image that led to the popular labeling of the so-called “butterfly effect.” Not knowing which events would ripple up to a level of significance undermined any attempt at long-term weather forecasts, leading to an inevitable uncertainty and to imprecise conclusions even when data is precise to a reasonable, scientifically acceptable degree. It eventually became evident that the uncertain results of the butterfly effect impacted upon any number of dynamic systems, from the weather to population growth systems, heartbeat patterns, morbidity patterns among certain populations, even the stock market.

The conclusions to be drawn from these insights are significant. Elements of the absurdist message have been verified by the discovery that it is impossible to realize the scientific/naturalistic goal of discovering deterministic patterns of behavior in a system from which future events can be solidly predicted. This further implies that randomness seems to dominate reality; and so all our efforts at finding order have been mere illusion or delusion. But though chaos theory does conclude that a chaotic system's behavior cannot be strictly predicted, significantly, the theory does not conclude that the world is total randomness, as is often commonly assumed when the term chaos is summoned. Paradoxically, chaos theory identifies systems of “unpredictable determinism”: there are causes and effects (determinism), but we cannot always know all the causes or even the overall effect arising out of each cause (uncertainty). Because of the proportional uncertainties invested in how causes impact upon effects, predictability itself is uncertain, but because order is present, complete surrender to total randomness is equally untenable.

These scientific breakthroughs have been variously described as deriving from cultural inclinations to revision reality or as influencing cultural thought to reinvestigate its own positions.⁸ Whether science influenced culture or vice versa is less relevant, however, than the fact that a convergence of thought occurred, for ideas similar to the chaos paradigm clearly pertain to the kinds of alterations that Brustein identified in American drama. While straightforward naturalism may lead audiences to expect a single line of causality to determine ultimate outcomes, something akin to a butterfly effect intrudes into the events of plays like Streamers to produce determined, yet unpredictable, behavior. Hindsight will reveal that causes are indeed present, but attempts to anticipate which causes will have lesser or greater effects will only produce probable conclusions, which finally may or may not occur. This brand of realism in the theatre—a hybrid of naturalism and absurdism—would seem to embody a new vision of reality similar in some respects to that provided by chaos science. What Brustein has identified is the fact that unpredictable determinism, an inconceivable concept for an audience trained to expect causal linearity, has permeated the fabric of popular theatre.

Rabe articulates this concept of unpredictable order in his afterword to Hurlyburly (1985) when he describes the “‘realistic’ or ‘well-made’ play [as] … that form which thinks that cause and effect are proportionate and clearly apparent, that people know what they are doing as they do it, and that others react accordingly, that one thing leads to another in a rational, mechanical way, a kind of Newtonian clock of a play, a kind of Darwinian assemblage of detail which would then determine the details that must follow, the substitution of the devices of logic for the powerful sweeps of pattern and energy that is our lives.”⁹ Rabe's notion of causes fluctuating nonlinearly and leading to disproportionate effects echoes the concept of the butterfly effect. What may appear a minor source influence could rise up to unexpected levels of significance not anticipated by Newtonian rationalist expectations. Causal, mechanistic logic may predict linear transfers of force and energy in the material realm (as with one billiard ball striking another), but the quanta of “powerful sweeps of pattern and energy” that Rabe locates in the open system of human life argue against such a model. Note, too, that Rabe nonetheless argues for “pattern” rather than randomness or absurdism; but that pattern is, and will always remain, unpredictable and disorderly.

Despite Brustein's and Rabe's imprecision in articulating ideas which have become more exact in the wake of chaos science, it is clear that science and theatre are fast approaching agreement on new, more sophisticated and subtle ways of viewing and representing the world around them. A crucial aspect of this shift in how to model reality is the way information is conceived. Realism and naturalism have been both praised and damned for the techniques they use to manipulate the knowledge and information they provide. An objective, documentary rhetoric and an emphasis on recording the data of experience with acute detail and verisimilitude is, of course, the hallmark of all realistic art. The question of realism's ontological status as an object of knowledge, a source of information, thus has been crucial in critical assessments of the form. The information that early realist theatre amassed was judged complete and accurate, and the technologies that made the communicative task complete—from stage design to acting technique and appropriately realistic dramatic texts—were lauded for their ability to describe systems of reality exactly and completely, with Newtonian precision.

More recent critiques of realism, however, have emphasized the duplicity inherent in its claims to objective, complete representation and perfect information. As a recent example, we have William Worthen's insightful critique of realism's attempts to assign a “‘scientific’ transparency” to its practices by “attenuat[ing] the medium,” thereby positioning the audience as objective and unstaged so as to “legitimate its private acts of interpretation as objective.”¹⁰ From this perspective, concludes Worthen, the “realist theatre of disclosure is also a theatre of concealment” (p. 17). Information meant to demystify the world is conveyed, paradoxically, through a technology that dissimulates its own operations and dissembles its own decision procedures.

Realism, then, is a form that renders information as a measure of a system's order. Information about a system is understood to be a message as it is actually communicated, its specified order, and not a chaos of possibilities. Early realist theatre sought to produce complete descriptions of reality in order to eliminate uncertainty, disorder, and complexity. It qualitatively assessed what information was valuable and what information was extraneous “noise,” highlighting the former and suppressing the latter so that the data ultimately presented was taxonomic, linear, and transmitted with optimum clarity.

Developments in modern American drama since the advent and subsequent reevaluation of realism share the common notion that reality is not mechanical, simple, regular, predictable, and deterministic. Because the macroscopic world is by definition antimechanistic, one must construct an information technology based, paradoxically, upon the scientific principle that information is inevitably degraded in transmission, and that the receiver of the information will always be left with some degree of uncertainty as to the content of the original state of the message: a “system”—which is defined as an orderly structure—impossibly, in constant disequilibrium. To resolve the paradox, a technology must be created which constructs information not simply as an orderly message but rather out of the woof and warp of noise and message, disorder and order. This appears to be the model which Rabe and other recent American playwrights seek in response to contemporary life.

Lost in the new paradigms is any sense of inherent simplicity to the universe. Instead, emphasis is placed on how physical and cultural systems engage in processes of exchange with their environment, transforming one another and evolving in dynamic patterns similar to the “sweeps of pattern” that Rabe identifies. Chaos science shows that, when they are large enough, systems normally compliant to linear formalization can become highly unstable and begin to fluctuate nonlinearly as they engage in a torrent of information and become susceptible to the butterfly effect. Such systems are prone to erratic and random behavior and are highly sensitive to fluctuations in their initial conditions, a fact which can have system-shattering effects on the whole.

There is no proof that Rabe or any other American playwright is well versed in such recent trends in the scientific community;¹¹ however, his work suggests that Rabe has intimated the limitations of a dramatic form which carries the burden of reproducing reality in such a way that precedence is always given to clarity and order. His plays explore the possibility that higher levels of knowing are produced when information is unstable and uncertain, when messages degrade and consequently create noise or disorder. While the play's message lacks clarity, from the point of view of the audience, such turbulence creates an increased flow of actual information, because it includes both the original message and the new static or noise created by chaotic fluctuations. Hence audience members are obliged to construct their own responses out of the dynamic torrent of orderly messages and disorderly noise.

This is not to say that the interpretive strategies of new realism have been easily incorporated into the mainstream of American drama. Rabe's work has met with a measure of audience resistance, as evidenced by the reaction to Streamers described earlier. In Hurlyburly, Rabe even more rigorously assaults naturalist causality, seeing as a necessary substitution for the “devices of logic” the need to exhibit the “powerful sweeps of pattern and energy that is our lives” (p. 162). The words logic, logical, syllogism, deduction, and induction pervade the play's dialogue, set up only to be undermined by the disorderly sweeps and nonlinear effects that take over the lives of the characters. That the theatre establishment was not prepared for such an assault is evident in the original Broadway production of the play, where significant cuts were made to Rabe's text. Mike Nichols, the director, “cut everything about Phil [a central character] that could make him interesting or complex or vulnerable and tried to turn him into a total creep,” according to Rabe.¹² The production was essentially reduced to a linear narrative, more easily accessible to its audience, rather than fleshed out to incorporate the flood of uncertainties and ambiguities present in the text.

Phil is a character struggling to control or understand the chaos that engulfs his life. The other central character, Eddie, utilizes cool abstractions both to explain himself, when possible, and to discard untidy material when it fails to fit his self-conception. Mickey, on the other hand, sees randomness as an excuse to behave as an ethical egoist: what is right is that which provides him with greatest gains. Phil's self-doubts reach their peak in the following exchange, which additionally affects Eddie's own visions:

PHIL:
: I mean, we got these dark thoughts, I see 'em in you, you don't think you're thinkin' 'em, so we can't even nail that down, how we going to get beyond it? They are the results of your unnoticed inner goings-on or my gigantic paranoia, both of which exist, so the goddamn thing in its entirety is on the basis of what has got to be called a coin toss.
EDDIE:
I can figure it, I can—It's not a goddamn coin toss.
PHIL:
You think I'm being cynical when I say that? Nothing is necessary, Eddie. Not a fucking thing! We're in the hands of something, it could kill us now or later, it don't care. Who is this guy that makes us just—you know—WHAT? … THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. … IT'S LIKE A LAW. IT'S A LAW? WHAT THE FUCK IS A LAW?

(p. 70)

Eddie's desperate response notwithstanding, the two men are grappling with something that does appear to be an ethical coin toss. Like Einstein insisting to quantum scientists that God does not play dice with the universe, Phil recognizes that something exists besides randomness, that there is an order, even a law, governing existence. But tidy deterministic laws are insufficient. So what law is it? This “guy,” this thing that controls us, is a controlling order uncharacteristic of Newtonian expectations but perfectly comprehensible if Phil could learn to embrace a more flexible paradigm of random order. Not as precise as the Newtonian fictions, it nonetheless is capable of making “sense” of the apparent senselessness of existence.

This need to transcend strict linear causality informs the work of other playwrights, including Sam Shepard. Applications of chaos theory to Shepard's work reveal strong affinities between the playwright's expanding vision of the world and science's changing perspective. The titles to Shepard's recent plays (like Rabe's Hurlyburly)—A Lie of the Mind (1986) and States of Shock (1991)—suggest an explicit awareness of the turmoil attendant to this paradigm shift.

The very fact that Shepard has difficulty with closure in his dramas reflects his resistance to the tradition of strict realism: “Endings are so hard. Because the temptation always is a sense that you're supposed to wrap it up somehow. You're supposed to culminate it in something fruitful. And it always feels so phony, when you're trying to wrap it all up.”¹³ Shepard here seems at least intuitively aware of the scientific fact that information exists in an orderly state only when placed in laboratory-like closed systems, rarely existing in the natural world itself. The result is that Shepard's realism assaults the bastion of traditional, strictly linear and causal realist theatre in an attempt to reveal the indeterminate and chaotic nature of the world.

Shepard's 1986 play, A Lie of the Mind, documents the results of a particularly brutal case of domestic violence, in which the husband, Jake, has inflicted wounds on his wife, Beth, to such a degree that she suffers brain damage. Ironically, the damage Beth receives leads her to greater insights into life than her deterministic, linearly obsessed husband and both his and her families can ever achieve. Jake looks very determinedly for the actual cause of his violent eruption, seeking linear connections between his actions and their results. His mother, Lorraine, works as well to verify another linear link between cause and effect by establishing a traditional realist's/naturalist's genetic logic, recalling her husband's (Jake's father's) own violent nature. Jake's brother, Frankie, goes to Beth's family to find answers but falls prey to his own rationalist process and to Beth's family as well. Beth's father, Baylor, works in a business-as-usual manner to conclude that Beth's problems are typically “female”-induced and are evidence of a fundamental incompatibility between the sexes. Beth's brother, Mike, orders events by responding to a code of honor, applying conventional and vengeful responses to the event. Each is, to one degree or another, a deterministic causalist, and, as Shepard presents it, none of their approaches resolves the conflict. The overall result is either to succumb to a traditional interpretation, namely to see the play as filled with meaningless noise—since events do not linearly cohere—or to see the noise from a new perspective, arising from an order not grasped by anyone but, perhaps, the brain-damaged (reason-impaired) Beth.

While there are numerous ways to apply the title A Lie of the Mind to the play, one application seems often to be overlooked: that the rational application of deterministically causal patterns to human events is, itself, a lie of the mind, a categorical reduction of reality to fit convenient patterns and responses designed by human desire to explain and even anticipate existence. Causal determinism, in short, is a lie created by humanity in its efforts to delude itself into believing it is in control of its surroundings.

From this perspective, the play fits nicely into Brustein's observations about postmodern American drama. Shepard is clearly revolting against the tyranny of rationalist causal models of inevitability. But he is not merely concluding that existence randomly produces the results that it does. Randomness may have been all that Brustein (and postmodernism in general) could offer in place of causality, a randomness agonized over by many absurdist playwrights or celebrated in the works of many postabsurdists. But Shepard articulates a chaos-informed pattern similar to that created in Streamers.

The fact that much of Shepard's dramatic output seems nonlinear has often been ascribed to Shepard's own carelessness as a craftsman. It is more likely that his apparent carelessness is in fact highly crafted. The various dead ends he sets up in his landscape reflect the fact that “noise” is designed to force detours in what Shepard would consider our errant pursuit of linear comprehension.

Unpredictable determinism best describes what Shepard presents, which denies mere randomness as much as it denies the strict causal determinism of the many naturalist predecessors. In scene one, Jake asks, “Why didn't I see it coming?”¹⁴ The answer is simple: there is no exact way to predict future events. An audience may presume that Beth's decision to accept an acting job led to Jake's eruption, and to a large degree it was a cause. But there is no way to presume that Beth's decision predetermined Jake's reaction. In fact it could be a case of Shepard inserting superfluous noise, true static that ultimately has no causal bearing on the subject under scrutiny, despite possible clues to the contrary. Similarly, Lorraine says Jake's genes predetermined his actions; after all, Jake is like his father. But, again, there is no legitimate basis from which to presume that this genetic influence predetermined events. Finally, Mike assumes he has only one course of action, to follow a code of honor and to seek revenge. But the fact that he does subscribe to such conditions does not mean that he must inevitably subscribe to the conditions. Nothing, finally, is causally inevitable in the action of the play.

Because of writers like Shepard and Rabe, realism has been forced to confront the fact of its own discursive status, and to recognize that its technologies for communicating information are not objective and absolute but rather culturally determined. This is an important lesson, for as Worthen states, the politics of theatre “emerge not only in the themes of drama but more searchingly in the disclosure of the working of ideology in the making of theatre, in the formation of the audience's experience and so, in a manner of speaking, in the formation of the audience itself” (p. 146). Traditional realism, following ritual and classical theatre, maintains an ideology of mastery over nature which hypostatizes its laws and renders universal and atemporal its description of the systems it delineates. Chaos theory, and the emerging theatre of such writers as Shepard and Rabe, which isomorphically reflects the principles of chaotics, is playing another game, one which has important consequences for the working of ideology in the theatre and for the formation of the audience's experience. Even the acting style Shepard prefers in his work—“controlled anarchy” (p. 4)—argues for a revisioning of audience expectations.

Controlled anarchy, in fact, is a term applicable to most of Shepard's work, a characteristic that distinguishes his work from that of earlier American dramatists whose instincts tend toward visioning a world or culture that controls anarchy. That earlier American dramatic sense of a need for order reflects an American cultural desire for control in general, the need to maintain an order in its pursuit of its “manifest destiny,” a cultural imposition of a sort of determinism over the events with which it engages. The triumph of this position is evidenced by the triumph of America over its primary foe—nature. America has tamed “the West” and has thus apparently achieved its manifest destiny. That such a victory has borne anything but productive fruit is suggested in Buried Child (1978), a play that argues for a readmission of natural processes into the (re)creation of our cultural fabric. America, Shepard seems to be suggesting, must relinquish its grip on control, must allow the natural processes of disorder to reemerge and to revitalize a culture which has become “triumphant” over disorder but which has paid the price of stagnation and sterility. From the perspective of chaos science, however, the reemergence of chaos is inevitable, so America had best adapt and prepare for it by embracing its promise of a reconstituted order.

Shepard's implicit argument is profound and reverberates to the very foundations of our cultural edifice. Reversing American mythic history, Shepard intimates that we must release ourselves from an order that excludes the noise of real experience. The new “order” that Shepard posits is one that sees the necessity of welcoming a dynamic tension between disorder and order, a decentered vision of the notion of order as control. Such unpredictable interferences are inevitable and are therefore actually determinist. Hence the appropriateness for Shepard's turn to realism and an “apparent” naturalism. But, like Rabe's realism, Shepard's realism is not Zola's; it is a chaos-informed realism.

True West is an excellent case in point, the play's very title suggesting its cultural engagement with American myth. Austin and Lee are, respectively, paragons of culturally prescribed order and a “natural” disorder. Separately, the two brothers have stagnated into sterile, unproductive existences. Austin is a product of a culturally triumphant “real” West and Lee of a natural “untamed” West. It should be noted that while several critics have seen the play as a psychological study of two halves of one self, Shepard has rejected such an interpretation because in many ways Austin and Lee are not “selves” at all. Only insofar as Shepard argues for a dynamic interaction between the two can psychology even enlighten the subject. What Shepard argues, more precisely, is that the real West—developed, paved, orderly—must reengage with the untamed West—vital, wild, nonlinear. The fact that Austin and Lee reverse roles suggests that neither position can exist exclusively because the reversal ultimately reifies the oppositional difference and satisfies neither brother. Instead of an either/or choice, Shepard suggests a both/and proposition. The dynamic between order and disorder, culture and nature, provides the necessary vitality for continued cultural and natural health. The play's conclusion, with the two brothers embraced in a death grip, can be taken two ways. If the two men do not derive an understanding for their need to allow order and disorder to interact, they will destroy each other in an effort to eradicate the other. If, however, they accept their interactive differences and realize the mutual interest in necessary coexistence, a new vitality will rise up. As with the haunting, ambiguous ending of Buried Child, True West offers no single resolution, leaving open the possibility of a self-destructive decision to fight or a regenerating decision to embrace a new vision. The conclusion could lead to a triumph of the real West wherein the entire landscape turns into a Palm Springs development and the vitality of the wild is eradicated. Or it could lead to a triumph of the untamed West wherein the resistant real West is ultimately overrun by a patient but persistent natural cycle. Or—the hope of Shepard—the standoff could lead to the revelation that both opponents need to reengage in a dynamic interchange and an evolving pattern of order/disorder.

Culturally speaking, it is not entirely surprising that such reevaluations of American mythic suppositions occurred during and after the Vietnam War. That era saw America reassessing its linear assumptions regarding its historically unchallenged belief in its universal “rightness” within the world community. Rabe's plays, of course, comment directly on Vietnam. Even Hurlyburly has a tentative Vietnam connection, offering a threatening, jungle-like landscape just outside the apartment set: “The house is completely surrounded by wild vegetation” (p. 13). While all of Shepard's drama can be said to be a product of a Vietnam-era spirit of reassessment, in States of Shock (1992), Shepard, too, brings Vietnam—or a suggestive facsimile thereof—to the stage.

In States of Shock, Shepard argues that America can no longer adhere to its rationalist, Newtonian vision of reality and behavior, certainly not in a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War, post-Desert Storm world. The chaos, randomness, and uncertainty of the current world (dis)order is pervasively inserted into the play by way of an upstage scrim, from which we hear the efforts of two percussionists and through which the silhouettes of scenes of war invade the action taking place in Danny's family restaurant. In the restaurant sits a “West Palm Beach” couple, well-off, “civilized,” generally imperturbable, but subject to the poor service of the waitress and rude behavior of the other pair on the stage. This other pair consists of a wheelchair-ridden veteran of some unnamed war, Stubbs, who has had the middle third of his body blown away in battle by a shell which passed through him and apparently killed the son of the other member of the pair, the Colonel. The Colonel has taken Stubbs from his hospital to this restaurant on the first anniversary of his son's death, ostensibly to uncover the truth about the events that day.

Stubbs's mental capacities have been damaged as well as his body; the Colonel explains, “He's suffered a uh—kind of disruption. Temporary kind of thing, they say. Takes some time to unscramble.”¹⁵ A thorough American, the Colonel intends precisely to unscramble Stubbs's mind, by way of rational inquisition: “I want to reconstruct everything up to that moment. … What I'm trying to figure out is the exact configuration. The position of each element. A catastrophe has to be examined from every possible angle. It has to be studied coldly, from the outside, without investing a lot of stupid emotion. … What we're after is the hard facts” (pp. 13, 14, 15). Stubbs, of course, cannot review his catastrophe free from “stupid emotion,” and his conclusion is that on that day “America had disappeared” (p. 20). The Colonel immediately responds: “DON'T TALK FOOLISHLY! That's a blasphemous thing to say! It's a disgrace to the memory of my son!” (p. 20). Clearly for the Colonel, America could not have been in error, and the truth should verify his point. Blending nationalism with an apparently interchangeable rationalist fervor, the Colonel adds: “The principles are enduring. You know that. This country wasn't founded on spineless, spur-of-the-moment whimsy. The effects are international! UNIVERSAL!” (p. 20).

But this insistence on order, reason, manifest destiny is immediately undermined by the play's stage action: “Immediately the percussionists and war sounds join in full swing. The cyclorama explodes with bombs, missiles, and blown-up planes” (p. 20). Order, quite simply, finds no place in war; fear limits the possibility of reason to dominate. However, the Colonel wants exactly that kind of control over the events of the war. He wants coolly calculated explanations, although he can accept momentary chaos, “as long as we can always come back to our senses. That's the important thing.” Such equilibrium, he adds, is “a blessing. … It's a gift. An American virtue” (p. 20).

Shepard essentially gives us two characters who respectively see the events of that day, on the one hand, as reflecting the randomness of existence and, on the other, as demonstrating the potential for an eschatology of order and purpose. Stubbs is the living result of randomness, ironically observing throughout, “I was the lucky one,” while the Colonel strives to overlay meaning onto the thus far meaningless event. The Colonel insists on control, believing no action goes wasted in the grand design; what he seeks to uncover is how his son's life was invested in that grand design.

That the Colonel understands chaos only as an obstacle to be overcome is evidenced in a speech he gives to the waitress, Glory Bee, who is having trouble balancing water glasses while delivering food orders. He shows her how to balance the glasses, and then explains: “Always [remind] yourself that the human body is little more than a complex machine and, like all machines, can be trained and programmed to fulfill our every need. Through repetition and practice” (p. 32). To this mechanistic perspective of life, reminiscent of neo-Newtonian conclusions, the Colonel adds: “Repetition and practice. Slowly, a pattern begins to emerge. Slowly, through my own diligence and perseverence, this pattern takes on a beauty and form that would have otherwise been incomprehensible to my random, chaotic laziness. Now I become master of my own destiny. … I understand my purpose in the grand scheme of things. There's no longer any doubt. Fear takes a backseat to the certainty and confidence that now consumes my entire being. I am a God among men!” (pp. 32-33).

The Colonel understands chaos only to a limited degree. In his mechanistic understanding of human action, chaos is an undesired other, the enemy that he must destroy. Constantly set up in oppositions—friend or foe—the Colonel's worldview sees order as friend and chaos as foe. Once he “orders” his laziness, he can control the randomness apparent in the world out there. It is a simple concept and one that Shepard appears to ascribe to the American psyche throughout his work, whereby ordering the wilderness into civilization is conceived to have been our singular task and triumph. What is missing in the Colonel's view, however, is the idea that one must allow order to arise out of chaos—and allow the opposite to occur as well—rather than working to impose order upon chaos. The natural processes of a rising order have been superseded by an impulse to control, to be “gods” dictating order to nature. The result of this impulse is to place nature in the role of “enemy” and, ironically, to place ourselves in the path of self-destruction, destroying both nature and ourselves in our very attempts to redeem both.

In essence, claims Shepard, today we have become victims of “friendly fire.” Just as Stubbs concludes that his wounds came from friendly fire, so too does Shepard suggest that America's decline has been the result of friendly fire, namely a debilitating unwillingness to see the world in any way other than oppositionally. Even Glory Bee suggests that we've been hit by our own friendly fire: “The thing I can't get over is, it never occurred to me that ‘Danny's’ could be invaded. I always thought we were invulnerable to attack. The landscaping. The lighting. The parking lot. All the pretty bushes. Who could touch us? Who would dare?” (p. 40). This triumph over nature has instilled in Glory Bee a sense of invulnerability. But the invasion is internal, another instance of friendly fire, since the domestic assaults of which she speaks can only actually be metaphorical. She even muses, “I missed the Cold War with all my heart” (p. 41). References to clearly defined oppositions were instrumental in maintaining a rationalist control over all the ethnic, racial, and nationalist disorders lurking beneath the oppositional surface. With the thawing of the Cold War, however, a chaos pattern has resurfaced.

Before his accident, Stubbs, too, thought like Glory Bee and even the Colonel. On the assault beach, he worked to control both his fears and his growing sense of meaninglessness in ways the Colonel's eschatology would fully endorse. Says Stubbs of his recollections on the beach, rather ironically spiced: “Keep thinking of ‘home.’ That's the way to pull through this. … Think of what we've achieved! The ‘Trail of Tears’! The Mississippi! Samuel Clemens! Little Richard! The Dust Bowl! The Gold Rush! The Natchez Trace! It's endless! A River of Victory in all directions! Flooding the Plains! Hold to an image! Lock onto a picture of glorious, unending expansion! DON'T LET YOURSELF SLIP INTO DOUBT!! Don't let it happen! You'll be swallowed whole!” (p. 38). Stubbs saw himself as part of a greater purpose and perhaps would have continued to believe so except for the friendly fire that destroyed his body, along with his beliefs in the value of what he has just catalogued. He also has suggested the standard means of explaining failure, that his own will to succeed was insufficient and therefore that his failure was his own fault. However, through the course of the play he becomes remasculated literally (by recovering his ability to have an erection) as well as figuratively (by a growing realization that he did not fail the vision but that the vision failed him).

Similarly, the Colonel's control over his world crumbles. Shortly after his speech on laziness, the Colonel loses both Stubbs and the girl he dreams of marrying (Glory Bee). More significantly, he never recovers a satisfactory explanation of his son's death. He cannot accept the friendly fire explanation, and he will not accept any suggestion of cowardice. Responding to the possibility that Stubbs will leave him, the Colonel observes: “I can easily do without. It's a question of training. Repetition and practice. All those days. All those horrible long days without the enemy. Longing out the window. Staring at the stupid boredom of peacetime. The dullness of it” (p. 39). Wedded to an oppositional perspective on life, war is the only place the Colonel comes alive. The subtle complexities and nuances of peace are incomprehensible to him; in fact, it is apparent that through “repetition and practice” he has interpolated himself into a mechanistic existence void of any life-affirming qualities. He does not engage; he can only confront (“Aggression is the only answer” [p. 39]).

Stubbs, however, has begun to reenter life. He makes contact—yet again, literally and figuratively—with Glory Bee, and together they become a pair searching to fathom the mysteries of a world no longer fitting the mold of the old American, rationalist, pre-Cold War frame of thought. Stubbs cannot dismiss his own confrontation with randomness; his emotional attachment to those events forces him to comprehend a pattern that cannot be reformed, as the Colonel insists. Chaos, we learn through Stubbs, cannot be ignored or dismissed. And it can no longer be overpowered or subdued. Rather, its reality and inevitability must be accepted, and new strategies to cope with it must be developed. The Colonel is absolutely wrong in his last speech when he takes an aggressive posture and ascribes it to his own version of American isolationism, which even he appears no longer fully to accept: “We've got to keep our back to the mountain, Stubbs. At all costs. You can see our position. We've got a perfect vantage point from here. We're lucky in that respect. There are certain advantages to isolation. After all, we're not in exile. This is our domain. We've earned every inch of it. Surrounded by water. Engulfed by the prairies. Marooned. (Pause.) MAROOOOOOOOONED!!” (pp. 44-45).

He has perhaps a perfect vantage point from which to observe life, but he is indeed marooned, not only by geographical realities but by an overweening fear of embracing uncertainty. Stubbs and Glory Bee embrace that uncertainty; they appear willing to accept the patterns of nature, to look for an orderly disorder, and in the process, to live. When Stubbs blasts out his last “GOD BLESS THE ENEMY” (p. 46), he speaks it differently than on the other occasions, in that this final blast is an ironic speech of thanks for an enemy who has blasted him out of his incapacitating ignorance. Shepard's ultimate, unanswered question is whether or not America can follow Stubb's insight.

Thus, that Brustein missed the precise point of Rabe's work and that audiences often miss the point of both Rabe's and Shepard's works is not entirely surprising. When audiences do not see causal, determinist patterns, they often conclude that only one consequent can replace the pattern—randomness (or absurdism). So too, Brustein rightly observed the new allegiance to noncausality in recent American drama, but he concluded imprecisely that randomness or absurdism is the only alternative. What chaos theory has taught us is that the law of excluded middle does not apply to open systems. It is not the case that events are either deterministically causal or absurdly random. There is a third option, one explained by chaos theory as unpredictable determinism. The fact remains that contemporary theatre, science, and culture in general are undergoing profound paradigm shifts not yet fully digestible by the general community. And the “realism” debate—in theatre and science—seems to be central to the issues under scrutiny.

Realism is not obsolete by any means, but the definition of its task—to provide a scientific description of reality as it is experienced by human beings—has been altered by the dynamics of modern life and by what science now makes possible. In the wake of the new chaos science, even the understanding of “description” has been changed by the increased awareness of the benefits that accrue when certainty is mixed with uncertainty, when information is a function of both order and disorder, message and complexity. “History,” writes Michel Serres, “is the locus of full causes without effects … the river of circumstances and no longer the old orbit of the mechanists.”¹⁶ American new realist playwrights are discovering that to turn away from the linear causality of the mechanists and to wade into the “river of circumstances”—the dynamic, nonlinear, and evolving chaos of “the powerful sweeps of pattern and energy that is our lives”—may provide them with a more accurate depiction of life.

Notes

1. Martin Esslin, “Naturalism in Context,” Drama Review 13.2 (Winter 1968): 67-76, at 72.

2. “The Experimental Novel” (1893), trans. Belle M. Sherman, in The Naturalist Novel, ed. Maxwell Geismar (Montreal: Harvest House, 1964), p. 5.

3. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), p. 17.

4. Robert Brustein, “The Crack in the Chimney: Reflections on Contemporary American Playwriting,” Theater 9.2 (1978): 21-29; rpt. in Images and Ideas in American Culture, ed. Arthur Edelstein (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis UP, 1979), p. 148.

5. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 230.

6. Walter Kerr, “When Does Gore Get Gratuitous?” New York Times (Feb. 22, 1976), sec. 2, p. 7.

7. For a readable (though necessarily reductive) version of chaos theory breakthroughs, see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

8. N. Katherine Hayles, in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), argues that, as with artistic innovation, so too scientific discoveries are culturally motivated. As a culture's perspective changes, so does scientific motivation to pursue different perspectives and derive conclusions consistent with the cultural model. Well supported, Hayles's work does much to undermine common assumptions about the “objective” nature of scientific enquiry and places its efforts clearly in a cultural context, the two overlapping and mutually influencing one another.

9. David Rabe, Hurlyburly (New York: Grove, 1985), p. 162. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

10. William B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), p. 17. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

11. Interestingly, however, in the published text of Goose and Tomtom (New York: Grove, 1986), Rabe quotes from the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg—“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think”—suggesting that Rabe may be more aware of such trends than one suspected.

12. David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), pp. 200-1.

13. Carol Rosen, “‘Emotional Territory’: An Interview with Sam Shepard,” Modern Drama 36.1 (March 1993): 6. Subsequent references to Shepard are from this interview and are cited in the text.

14. Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind (New York: Plume, 1986), p. 2.

15. Sam Shepard, States of Shock, in States of Shock, Far North, Silent Tongue: A Play and Two Screenplays (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 6. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

16. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982), p. 20.