A Neon Nostalgia Kaboom for the End of the World

AMERICAN THEATRE: The 1980s promised us two divergent fantasies. One insisted that everybody wanted to rule the world; the other quietly suggested that sweet dreams were made of desire, ambition, consumption, and the frenetic search for something—or someone—to exploit. Beneath the synthesizers and shoulder pads, the decade throbbed with paranoia: Cold War dread, runaway capitalism, media saturation, urban decline, moral panic, and the creeping suspicion that institutions no longer knew how to support and make provisions for the people living and working inside them.