The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama

Published June, 1989 – The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured. The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its origins as a metaphysical search to its current elaborations as a theatrical game.

If there is one theme that connects all Western drama, it is reality and illusion … The Vital Lie examines the complex dimensions of these polarities. The result, a modern historical survey of this persistent concern, offers the most comprehensive and systematic treatment of a theme at once stable and changing, a theme that brings us closer to a definition of the modern.
— Choice