Trends in playwriting, maybe: magical realism

Let's face it. I don't read enough new plays to feel confident that I am COMPLETELY ON TOP of trends in playwriting to the extent that I could make a fancy graph or anything, but I can certainly crank out a blog post on one thing I keep seeing. That thing is Magical Realism.

I love magical realism! I have written some of it myself. My third play, a one-act, is called Cleanup and is about the ghost of a 12-year-old haunting a middle school cafeteria. I decided that the way I would keep the Magic Parts from getting out of hand and making the play all about wizards, or whatever, was to only do magical stuff with completely mundane objects and people. So there's a magic briefcase, and a magic group of accountants and mechanics and other people, and there's a whole thing with an egg, which is one of the most mundane (though iiiinteresting) objects I could think of.

Having been reading several new plays and plays in progress recently, though, I've been noticing a lot of magical realism. Some ideas why:

1) Playwrights are nerds who love wizards. But we think Serious Playwriting is kitchen-sink dramas. So we made them have a baby.
2) Deus ex machinas for everyone! This seems to often be the case in not-good plays. Magical realism is GREAT for this. I like Cleanup, but what drives the plot? Glorious deus ex machinas. Thousands of them.
3) Similarly, metaphors that don't quite work! Mr. Mittering's Magic Machine goes on the fritz every time the writer needs to inject a sense of melancholy! What a brilliant idea! (NO.) If you have a layer of symbolism or imagery that doesn't work on both levels, that's not gonna cut it. It has to work both as a concrete thing that could exist in the real world (or the world of the play) and as an abstract symbol or idea. Otherwise you're just decorating -- you're not making us feel anything.
4) Magical realism, to me, fits interestingly with the natural limitations of live shows, which are already mixing the magic of performance (and of effects like lighting, stage madness, and other wonderful shit the audience doesn't fully understand) with the knowledge that all the components are real. You can't CGI theater. I think, often, there's already a thematic tie between the medium and the message in the mind of the playwright. And that's pretty cool.