SOURCE: Demastes, William W., and Michael Vanden Heuvel. “The Hurlyburly Lies of the Causalist Mind: Chaos and the Realism of Rabe and Shepard.” In Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William W. Demastes, pp. 255-74. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996.

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Martin Esslin announced that though the early, turn-of-the-century interest in naturalism in the theatre may since have been replaced by other dramatic forms, naturalism's legacy to those new forms—the key surviving element of naturalism in the theatre today—is “an experimental exploration of...