"Extremely well written, and exceedingly well informed, this is a work that opens a variety of important questions in sophisticated and theoretically nuanced ways. It is hard to imagine a better tour guide than Fuchs for a trip through the last thirty years of, as she puts it, what we used to call the 'avant-garde.'" -Essays in Theatre

IntroductionPart I: Modern Retrospect1. Character: Its Rise and Fall2. The Mysterium and the Re-Allegorization of Modern Drama3. Reading Against the GrainPart II: Theater After Modernism4. Signalling Through the Signs: Thinking Theater After Derrida5. Play as Landscape: Another Version of Pastoral6. Staging the Obscene Body7. Theater as Shopping8. Postmodernism and the "Scene" of TheaterReviews and Articles 1979-1993: Accounts of an Emerging Aesthetic 1979 Des McAnuff's Leave it to Beaver is Dead Richard Schechner's The Balcony 1982 Andrei Serban's The Marriage of Figaro 1983 The Death of Character 1985 Peter Sellars's The Count of Monte Cristo 1986 Robert Wilson's Alcestis 1988 Elizabeth LeCompte and The Wooster Group's Frank Dell's The Temptation of Saint Antony 1989 Misunderstanding Postmodernism: Joanne Akalaitis's Cymbeline 1993 The AIDS Quilt and The Performance of Mourning