Rhetorical disenchantment and the theatre of the American Dream

This paper examines how contemporary theatre reflects and reconfigures the rhetorical condition of disenchantment through the analysis of Leila Buck’s American Dreams and Panayiotis Mentis’s Foreigners. Drawing upon Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world and Michael McGee’s theory of the ideograph, the study explores how the American Dream has shifted from an aspirational ideology to a disillusioned cultural residue. Both plays dramatize the erosion of persuasion as a form of social cohesion, revealing how national myths lose their force under the weight of contradiction and exclusion. Buck’s interactive satire transforms the process of naturalization into a participatory spectacle that implicates audiences in the mechanisms of granting citizenship as a prize in a live game show, while Mentis’s domestic tragedy stages the ethical aftermath of disillusionment within the Greek immigrant family after they had been granted citizenship in the United States. The analysis proposes that theatre serves as a rhetorical laboratory where the collapse of ideological enchantment is made visible and emotionally intelligible. Disenchantment, far from being the negation of meaning, emerges as a mode of critical awareness that enables new forms of ethical reflection.