Does Realism Include Reality?

When I started again writing fiction I started wondering if realism actually represented my reality. This came from a disconnect between my fiction and my efforts at writing plays. All too often in my plays I strayed from realism - Dionysus and one of the Muses and Death appear in one play - because I see the stage as an abstraction, as being limited in representation unlike either film or fiction. So how to represent ideas? Skip realism and give them dialog (as well as including them into dialog).

I found in Dream While You Read: A Map for Venturing Beyond Theatrical Realism

So when I started writing my genderqueer coming-of-age play The White Dress, the piece was not about realism-based scenes; it was about a character trying to exorcise the demon of the voices in their head out of their body, human vs. society, how we become socialized into identities. Only then, like Jesus on the cross, could that person be free, when they exorcise those demons from their body. The dramaturgy was about me and my voices. That meant doing away with the fourth wall. That meant speaking to the people directly, engaging with the queer sublime. That language cannot be contained by realism-based writing, definitely not the stylized approximation of realistic speech as expressed through Stanislavski.

There is much to provoke thought besides the quoted portion (such as theater is a community event), but there is comfort in finding support for one's ideas in the words of better minds than my own. (For a cautionary essay  read Does Theatre Ever Go Too Far?.)

My own answer for my fiction was to use Captain Ahab and Edgar Allan Poe and others as characters in my novel. Not realistically as in the sense of biography but as representations of ideas about America. One person reading thinks the narrator is mad. What I want to do is to capture the ideas about America that I have in my head. Fiction as journalism does not contain all that makes up our daily lives - ideas, ideals, imagination, day dreams, the histories (yes, I mean the plural) with live in.

Now if I can just finish the story before life finishes me!

sch 7/31/22