Both the naturalists and the symbolists wanted a theater that expressed “the truth,” as opposed to the received stage conventions. They had, however, different conceptions of both truth and convention. The former dreamed of the truth of objective knowledge, turning to the reality of the milieu and the characters it defined (consenting to the mediation of literature and the living actor). The latter opted for the truth of the experience of non-mimetic art. Aiming for the absolute, the expression of the inexpressible, they chose evocation instead of showing (they saw in naturalism, after all, just another illusionistic convention) and dreamed at times of removing the actor (and literature) from the theater.

The whole search for the New Theater began at the end of the nineteenth century with the questioning of the actor's domination of the theater. This beginning is sometimes forgotten, with the accent often being placed instead on the tendency—derived from the ideas and practices of Wagner (Gesamtkunstwerk)—toward synthesizing the theatrical art and making it autonomous, while at the same time transforming the theatrical space (where, after the electricity revolution and the spread of Adolphe Appia's ideas, came the “death of the praktikabel conquered by the platform,” and after that the wide acceptance of the idea of “empty space”). After all, the search for the New Theater gave birth to the revolt against the nineteenth-century star system that was based on the rhetoric of declamation and the “semiotics” of gesture.

New Theater theorists decided to downgrade actors and subordinate them to the overriding idea of the spectacle. In their opinion, star actors—using their skills at making an immediate impact—made it impossible for the performance/spectacle to achieve its most important aesthetic aims by transforming the play into a separate, autonomous, and synthetic (based on the synthesis of the arts) work of art. This overriding idea—guaranteeing the unity of the work of theatrical art—was first sought in literature (the search for the New Theater was, after all, kicked off by two revolutions in dramaturgy: naturalism and symbolism) or in the function of the Theater Artist, who assumed responsibility for the entirety of the work—this is what Craig, Appia, and Wyspiański thought.