While one the one hand, I agree it is really important to get the date settled and to do at least some research, if you do too much or plug too much history into a play, then it probably will not be produced much after its time is over. On the other hand, if you consciously set the play in a different era, and don't overdo it, perhaps it will have a slightly broader appeal. Hard to say. I think in that case, it is just as important to focus on the characters and their interactions and not endless call outs to the time period you are using.
So for example, I've basically settled on using approximately March 1986 as the date for this play The Study Group. That actually is before the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987 (technically the affair was revealed in late 1986 and the Tower Commission Report came out at the very end of 1986) but the C-SPAN hearings that made this such a pop-cultural thing were in early 1987. I think it is better to go right before the veil of innocence was lifted and the only people strongly against Reagan were viewed as bitter hold-out Democrats. So 1986 is better than 1987 in many respects. I can also avoid the obligatory call-out to Alf (never a show I cared much for). It looks like Max Headroom just misses the cut, as it was a TV show in the UK in 1985-86 but wouldn't really make it into the States until 1987. The Art of Noise video with Max Headroom (Paranormia) probably still would have been too new (and maybe not even released on MTV in March anyway). For those who were there and want to relive it, Shout Factory has the US episodes of Max Headroom for sale.
I think I might have somebody refer to The Day After but probably not V, which would have been 3 years old at that point. (Actually The Day After would also have been 3 years old, but had a bit more staying power in my mind.) Both Remington Steele and Magnum P.I. would have been on for quite a while and getting long in the tooth, and maybe I can refer to one (but not both of them). Miami Vice would have been definitely the hotter show, though even there I think we are looking at the tail end of Season 2. Actually, according to Wiki, Frank Zappa appears as a drug dealer in an episode in March 1986. It's a bit too inside baseball, but that might be the kind of reference that goes a long way towards explaining the 80s but not quite too far.
As I said, I think the important thing is that the 80s stuff is important to the play, but can't be the only reason for its existence. Now I basically passed up an opportunity in Chicago to see Frances Cowhig's The World of Extreme Happiness, and I just read the play, and I have to say I think it was the right choice. The play really does feel ripped from the headlines and just doesn't seem like the characters are much more than cardboard characters expressing things that we think we know about China (girl babies are scorned, political dissent is extremely risky, rural peasants have a crappy time in the city, etc.). I generally thought David Henry Hwang's Chinglish managed this better, though of course he wasn't exploring the rural-urban divide in any detail. To be honest, I felt the last scene of Extreme Happiness was ripped off from the film version of Cloud Atlas with just a dash of Brazil mixed in.
Perhaps contradicting myself, the one thing that I did like is extremely topical or rather political, namely the discussion of the hukou system which is where rural peasants come to the city to work but, being without the proper hukou permit, they aren't able to rent in certain areas (one reason they end up stacked up in terrible dormitories) and more critically their children do not have the right to free education in the cities. This is actually something I studied a bit, and it is kind of thrilling to see it in a play, though I think it still wasn't quite hammered home hard enough for the average theatre-goer. I think a bit more foreshadowing of the fact that the girl Sunny is really taking a huge risk might have helped. (Or not, I just didn't think the play was really well constructed.) Now there are some rumblings that China will eventually have to reform the hukou system, and if it is liberalized, then almost the whole last third of the play no longer makes sense, except to history scholars. (That's much like the dilemma I am having with regards to the format of the ACT which changed so dramatically, so that if I refer to it as it actually was in 1986 it will seem dated.)
Well, it's certainly not easy. I mentioned already that Bogosian's edits to subUrbia actually weakened the play in my mind. I'm interested in Eastern Standard, by Richard Greenberg, which seems to be very much a play about the 80s because it was written to reflect the trend of yuppies taking over parts of Manhattan and was sort of up-to-the-minute theatre, whereas a play written about the 1990s but from a later era (here I am thinking of Philip Dawkins' The Homosexuals) has a totally different, outsider vibe. Both have their place, but I think the "retrospective" approach is trickier, simply because it is inevitably more self-conscious. I know the risks, but I'll give it a shot anyway, but now I really need to get at least a few pages down tonight to see if the characters are ready to be born yet.
Edit (3/19/2017) It looks like I will generally need to save images to host them, rather than cross-linking, unless it is a website that will likely stick around for a while like Goodreads. I assume there were more stills from Cloud Atlas and Brazil, which I may try to replace later.
I tried to come back to this old post since I just saw The Orange Dot, which is very much an au courant production that will date very badly. I would be surprised if it is produced more than 2 or 3 years from now. It seemed that the characters spent at least 15% of their time reading stuff off of their phones (which is just as annoying in the theatre as it is in real life) and most of the plot was driven by them talking about different apps or stuff that they found out about because of these apps, or just bitching about the phone's battery life. It felt a bit trite and completely disposable.
Perhaps I am hypocritical, since I expect to set one play in the early 90s and one in the mid 80s, but I do think when you write a play set in a different time, 1) you think a bit more about what really represented that era and 2) you have a reason for doing so and thus there should be more of a message than simply "hey, this is a play about our times," a crutch upon which many productions do lean.
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