Appearances to the contrary, the search for a New Theater in the 1960s and 1970s was not such a radical aesthetic turning point as at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the later version, the theatrical revolution was more concerned with rebellion against the existing culture (in the framework of the social phenomenon of the counterculture) and with short-term political objectives than with creating an enduring design for a new aesthetics that would last for more than a few theatrical seasons. There was more of a demand for an influence on revolutionary changes in politics seen in the short term than for the perfection of a theatrical reflection of the life of society. This led to widespread disenchantment on the part of participants in the whole movement, formulated as early as the seventies, that resulted from the failure of the new theater to meet hopes for a new social utopia.

It is true that at the end of the twentieth century (as opposed to the situation a hundred years earlier) the pace was set by practitioners of the new theater who gave group and social characteristics to their productions under the banner of a change of generations. But in terms of the theory of the theater, as with social radicalism, there was a failure of endurance. Above all, there was no historic success in creating programs, postulates, and a vision.

When the utopian belief in the transformation of the world through theater, the creation of new social communities, and the transformation of audiences into revolutionary cultural or social formations weakened, it was noticed that there were many unexpected continuities, and sometimes surprising analogies, between the first and second editions of the quest for a New Theater. Once a summation of the theatrical experiments of the “counterculture” era began, it turned out that despite changes in language and acknowledged conventions and styles, the conceptual horizon had in fact altered very little since the days of the attempted reforming of the theater a hundred years earlier.