Postmodern doesn’t have to mean flattened relativism. It can mean a continuing, engaged critique with what has come just before.

Reality TV gets a lot of crap (naturally, I think). But it exists and it has radically changed not only television but how we see the world. I think it is incumbent upon us as people to be aware of how the world is functioning and then engage it at whatever level we are capable of. For those of us who find an exclusive commitment to politics or direct social action a little too difficult or distasteful, there are always the arts. But being informed by reality tv does not necessarily mean imitating it. Can we concede that mimesis is not the be-all and end-all of theater?

Yes, Mr Treuer — choices and consequences. Which don’t stop when we’re makin’ a show.

Yes to your articulation. I came home from the show and talked with Kim for over an hour but not really about the show, really about the state of theater and live performance.

Reality TV and the acceptance of a powerfully fractured cultural experience is total relevance. In making post-modern art in this mode are artists reinforcing this isolationist lifestyle in which indirect consequences are mostly ignored? I mean, the work says everything has equal value. It doesn’t.

The show made me think about these issues of our American culture, but it didn’t make me think it was something I needed to deal with after I left the theater. It is my own personal experience, my values, and the values of the people I know that make me know the way other Americans live and act needs to be addressed.

As much as we live in a global world. I am an American and I am associated with all other Americans and they with me. We all make choices and those choices are aggregated into a definition of American that has very real consequences.