At least until the legitimate theater discovers where drama may be. Athough the twentieth century has revolutionized traditional drama with innovations from naturalistic to symbolist to avant garde, although it has generated a rich body of conceptual theater from Absurdist and experimental to performance art, and although Alternate theater has developed and flourished as far Off Off Broadway as BAM, the legitimate stage resolutely fails to take notice. Blame for this state of affairs usually falls on commercialism with all its woes, certainly grave enough. The parallel and more pernicious cause, I suspect, derives from the legitimate theater's helpless thralldom to yesterday's realism. Or rather, from its addiction to the idea that realism means something like simulating ordinary reality, a quite different project with no discernible relation to drama.
Realism is what made American theater great.
It gave us haunting masterworks by O'Neill, Odets, Miller, and Williams. For them, however, as for other writers, realism had less to do with the real than with the true. More accurately, since modernism had shrunk the grand, symbolic action of traditional drama to the size of an alienated consciousness, American masters chose a realistic style of speech and action to express the plight of an ordinary person lost in an exploding universe. But since there is no one American reality, and no one poet dreams for all the race, those playwrights chose regional settings to give form to their visions. Creating varying illusions of historical accuracy, O'Neill represented Connecticut, Odets set his indigent families in the Bronx, Williams used the South, Miller chose Salem or New York or Boston.