American Millennials: Angst, Apathy, Irony, and Generation Validation
American Millennials are being reared in a culture that stresses an aversion to things that are seen as harmful or counterproductive, where mistakes are to be avoided at all cost. They are a generation that, almost out of necessity, has embraced irony to an excruciating degree. Irony is now fashionable and a widely embraced default setting for social interaction, writing, and the visual arts. Today, pop characters directly address the television-watching audience with a wink and nudge. For example, a show like “30 Rock” delivered a kind of meta-television-irony irony; the protagonist was a writer for a show that satirizes television, and the character was played by a woman who actually used to write for a show that satirized television. Each scene comes with an all-inclusive tongue-in-cheek sensibility.And when it comes to a need for outside validation, A University of Michigan study published in the Journal of Social Issues found that college students who base their own self-worth on external sources, like approval from others, reported more stress, anger, academic problems, relationship conflicts, drug and alcohol use, and symptoms of eating disorders.
The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
A group of friends and relations gather at a country estate to see the first performance of an experimental play written and staged by the young man of the house (Konstantin), as aspiring writer who dreams of bringing new forms to the theatre.Metatheatre
Stuart Davis of Cornell University suggests that "metatheatricality" should be defined by its fundamental effect of destabilizing any sense of realism: "Metatheatre is a convenient name for the quality or force in a play which challenges theatre's claim to be simply realistic — to be nothing but a mirror in which we view the actions and sufferings of characters like ourselves, suspending our disbelief in their reality. Metatheatre begins by sharpening awareness of the unlikeness of life to dramatic art; it may end by making us aware of life's uncanny likeness to art or illusion. By calling attention to the strangeness, artificiality, illusoriness, or arbitrariness — in short, the theatricality -- of the life we live, it marks those frames and boundaries that conventional dramatic realism would hide."
