Talking to the Audience: Narrative Characters in Twentieth Century Drama

TALKING TO THE AUDIENCE is study of the use of chorus-like characters in modern plays who comment on the action, participate in the action, interact with the main characters and, in today''s theater, are one of the main characters. This study discusses such characters in plays by major American, and one major British, playwright: Eugene O''Neill''s Strange Interlude, Thornton Wilder''s Our Town, Tennessee Williams''s The Glass Menagerie, both versions of Arthur Miller''s A View from the Bridge, Wendy Wasserstein''s The Heide Chronicles, Peter Shaffer''s Equus and Margaret Edson''s Wit. The characters'' dilemmas are at once eternal and universal to the human condition, yet specific to the various protagonists and the challenges of life in the century just ended and the one in which we now live and strive.