"This study focuses on the extensive and multisided rapport contemporary American playwrights have established with popular culture in the course of the past four decades. Attention is given to individual cases that deal fruitfully with the most forceful cultural agent in postmodernity, the icon. The discussion addresses the task of theater images in a cultural field where the real is mistaken for its reflection, originality constantly played against seriality, at a moment when simulacra, clones, and emulations of selves and texts become firmly established as the norm. The accommodation of pop icons on stage and the results this framing yields constitute this work's primary interests and aims."--Jacket.