But, for all the modern differences, these characters aren't so unlike Congreve's Londoners. And instead of Restoration beaux, we now have restaurant-hopping bros: including the frat boyish Reg. Rebeck introduces us to not only her witty lovers, Mae and Henry, but to Mae's flamboyant aunt Renee, Mae's shopaholic "frenemy'' Katrina, and Henry's sexually versatile best friend Charles. They can marry, flirt, and sleep with whomever they want.
On the surface, the characters in Rebeck's Hamptons-set Way of the World have quite a bit more personal freedom than those in formal Restoration London. This focus on manner creates a theatricalized language of morality and underlies the game structure of Restoration comedy. The wit resides in the very action of the play itself - each strategic plan registers a difference between what the characters really want and the rhetoric surrounding the way the action is committed.
Marriage vows mean nothing: sex/marriage becomes a game of wit and imagination that both can play. Later on, motives become a bit more subtle: sex becomes marriage, though marriage seen only in economic terms women are discussed in terms of their fortune. Representing both the pinnacle and the conclusion of Restoration drama, The Way of the World (1700) epitomizes the psychology of manner - the way people behave (hence the title.) Motive is assumed to be the same for all: to get sex, to get money, and to remain young. The female body became an object of intense interest in its own right, both onstage and off, and created a new climate of celebrity for female performers, whose abilities as actresses often took second place to their status as cultural curiosities. Now the interest was in seeing the actual legs of real women on stage, along with the many opportunities for revealing the disheveled décolletage of female performers during scenes of quite explicit sexual pursuit. The popularity of breeches roles in Restoration theater sprang from a very different impulse from that of the earlier all-male performance tradition.
The prime example of this new realism, the introduction of the female performer, changed the very essence of spectatorship. Shakespeare was too fanciful, too unreal. Audience tastes were changing during the Restoration, Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were the favorite revivals Shakespeare’s “fancy” was less popular because Restoration drama is extremely realistic - it’s a mirror image of society. On his return to the throne in 1660, Charles II brought back from France two radical developments for the English theater: French neoclassicism and female performers on the stage.
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