From a temporal perspective the rather paradoxical intersection of the thinking about the New Theater from 1890–1939 and the birth of structuralism is striking. The definition of the ingredients of the theatrical work and the specification of their mutual interdependence in the lyrical treatises of such visionaries as Appia or Wyspiański, as well as Schlemmer or Artaud, corresponds to one of the basic theses of structuralism, that “The true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.”

Another thesis of structuralism, regarding the audience as the “fourth creator” (Meyerhold) or the main arbiter (Brecht), corresponds to the analysis of the stage—audience relationship: “A wholly objective perception of individual entities is therefore not possible: any observer is bound to create something of what he observes.”

This might be why, in the late 1970s, Richard Hornby identified the structuralists Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Artaud (along with the one living person on the list, the American anthropologist and director Richard Schechner) as most important for the contemporary theater.

Yet in reality the most important theories of the theatrical work, from the 1930s, arose mostly outside the theater, and in all certainty the formulation of them was not exclusively the work of theatrical practitioners (even the “inhibited” ones). These latter continued to reach for poetical manifestos or personal commentary, but they gave up on creating ideal models of the theatrical work in words, leaving this task to the critics and theoreticians of the theater. From the 1930s until the waning of the 1960s, things happened totally differently from what had transpired in the times of the flourishing of the box stage, or its reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A new profession came into being: theoretician of the theater—rather loosely, or secondarily, connected with the practice of theater.

The limited scope of the influence of the postulates of the avant-gardists attempting to yoke the theater into the circle of permanent revolution that was obligatory in the visual arts of the 20th century, the unsuitability of “-isms” to the everyday world of the theater, and finally the utopian nature of the New Theater model—all of this together determined that the new discipline coming into being at the time—theatrology or theater studies—began by compiling a description of theatrical reality according to methodological directives carried straight over from other humanistic disciplines, and above all linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, and to a lesser degree musicology and art history.