Of the legacy of the quest for a New Theater at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there remains on the one hand an ideal model of the closed and repeatable authorial work that triumphs over its temporal nature. On the other hand, a competing model has been established of eternally incomplete communication and an open field of co-creation by many authors, including the audience. These opposed conventions have defined the boundaries of the contemporary theater, between creation and co-presence. Repeatedly destroyed in the cycle of “theatrical revolutions” but in fact indestructible, the box stage has immersed contemporary theater in insoluble spatial contradictions: open and closed, unity and diversity, secularity and the sacred, and above all, symmetry and asymmetry, the eternal order of the theatrical image and the living, thinking, feeling actor who shatters that order. The interplay between the sensual and illusory experience of limited, conventional space and the substantiality of the Other present in the here and now marks another theatrical boundary and has led over time to questions about the nature of the fleeting reality enclosed in the box, and also about the co-creative function of the audience, whose senses and experiences co-created the illusory—or disillusory—effect. Here, two model solutions have been possible: the truth of making-present or the convention of representation.

Post-Cartesian dualism imposed on modern drama the tension of the two theaters, the external and the internal. To grasp that tension it turned out to be necessary to relativize action understood in the Aristotelian sense, in favor of a subjective perspective, the introduction of epic commentary but also the allocation to the director of a privileged position as constructor of forms, marking out the frame and dynamics of changing situations, building the rhythm and tension. The coupling of “me—not me” finally objectivized the contemporary theater of alienation: in models of existential metaphor, in the limitation of the interpersonal to spontaneous speech acts, in attempts at the exploration of the human “primal substance” by the actors.