One of the more unsettling aspects of theatre is when you are watching a play, and it appears to be set in one time period and yet there are references that undermine that setting. It is one thing if the director intentionally uses costumes and sets from a period that doesn't match the text. I think this is often a bad idea, but it can work. It certainly happens a lot in Shakespeare productions. I suppose it is to illuminate how some kinds of behaviour transcend a particular era. And with the exception of the history plays, Shakespeare is usually writing plays that are not grounded in any particular era, though certainly some of the action and reactions he puts on stage make more sense in Elizabethan times than our own.
The critic Chris Jones points out that good drama must set up its own internal rules early on and then not violate them. (He's said this explicitly a few times including the fourth paragraph here, but I can't find one of his more fleshed out versions of this maxim.) Of course, in a handful of cases, the rules themselves establish an absurd world, but in these plays the stakes tend to be low, even if there is a flurry of action (and even violence) on stage. I am sure there are some exceptions to this general precept (internal rules being violated but the play still "working"), but in general, I think it is a good rule and one I support.
This is not the same as saying that new information can't be revealed later on, or even that the tone can't shift (O'Neill often shifts tone dramatically in his later works). Though there are some limits to how much can be revealed very late in the play without at least some foreshadowing. Still, what Jones is arguing (and I concur) is basically that plays that start out with a realistic frame shouldn't shift into absurdism, or that if the playwright starts out by allowing dramatic monologues, then it can't be found out later that these can be overheard by the other characters. In such cases, it basically feels like the playwright is tricking and/or misleading the audience, which rarely goes over well. It is also the case that dream sequences (which honestly should be used very sparingly in my view) are clearly delimited from the rest of the action.
In general, I think it is important that authors not toy with the audience, but above and beyond that, audiences by and large only get one shot at seeing a work (one bite at the apple as it were), so that very subtle messages are nearly always lost -- and late arriving information that totally overturns or undermines the start of the play (a la The Sixth Sense) can't be grasped by most audiences because they don't rewind in real time. I really don't think many playwrights and directors get this, or they are really resistant to that message and end up aiming at a tiny elite group within the already elite group of play-goers.* In overhearing the comments of audience members, I find that many of them can't even grasp things that seem quite telegraphed, let alone complicated time shifts or places where the ground rules of the play have indeed shifted. It probably is hard to find a middle ground between doing truly artistically liberated free-form theatre and doing dumbed-down work, but I would certainly think trying to set up reasonable internal rules and living with them would be a good starting point.
A slightly different but related issue arises if the playwright is setting the play in a specific time period but then gets sloppy. This can be trickier than one thinks. Too many contemporary references definitely date a play quite badly, but some plays don't work that well in an undated "present." A number of plays that are intimately tied with the AIDS crisis (Angels in America and much of Larry Kramer's work) basically only makes sense in context of the late 80s and early 90s. This is largely true for Rivera's Marisol as well. I mean one can totally eliminate slang (which dates faster than anything) but it usually creeps in.
Tony Adams (of Halcyon) pointed out to my chagrin that my play Corporate Codes of Conduct seemed to slip around a bit from early to mid 1990s in terms of the web technology that was being discussed (like how widespread Google would have been). So I have been meaning for almost a year to simply pick a date and fix any evidence that would contradict that year. I tried to be a bit more careful with my second play (Dharma Donuts), though that play also needs revisions.
This is really an extension of my disappointment in Bogosian's revisions to subUrbia, which really do not fix the play in a specific year but confuse matters considerably from the original version of the play (which I found much more successful and an organic whole). I guess I've made my point clear by now...
* I consider myself pretty well versed in theatre, but I found one scene in Soul Samurai to make no chronological (or really internal) sense at all, and it really messed with my enjoyment of the overall play. It's just hard to justify, no matter how much fun the scene might have been to play.
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