Two opposing concepts of the theatrical work turned out to be the most durable achievements of the search for the New Theater from the 1890s to 1939. One of them treated the performance as a message, and the art of the theater as a platform that brings about a dynamic feedback loop in the relation between stage and audience. The second called for seeing the spectacle as an autonomous aesthetic subject, an equally entitled product of other forms of art, arising from the synthesis (or harmony) of ingredients that are named and conceived of in a variety of ways.

The proponents of the first concept (Stanisławski, Copeau, Meyerhold, and Brecht) generally placed literature and the art of acting at the center of attention. Improving and transforming acting techniques, while attempting to reconcile the truth of the actor with the truth of the role—and the audience (which played the role of arbiter, acquiring increasingly greater significance over time)—they accented the conventionality of theatrical art as a “language of signs,” which either reflected the real world, or expressed a non-mimetic game with conventions.

Those who inclined toward the second concept (Craig, Appia, Schlemmer, and Artaud)—accorded pride of place in the theater of the future to a single artist, the stage manager, poet/musician, and priest. And they more or less openly sought exemplars of ideal structure in music, dreaming of something along the lines of visual musicality that would triumph over the temporal impermanence of theater.

New Theater utopia arose out of a conviction about the ineluctable destruction of the traditional box, but it was incapable—apart from utopian constructions recorded in manifestos—of erecting a homogeneous spectacle, universally accepted and corresponding to contemporary aesthetics, on the ruins left behind. The competing models cause difficulties in defining both the essence and the form of the spectacle in our time, and the very limits of theatricality, or the specifics and hierarchy of theatrical materials. Thus it is that the fundamental impulses (essential, aesthetic, and autonomous) that marked the beginnings of this process turned, after a century of trial and error, into their own contraries. Today, the essence of the theater seems more impenetrable, the aesthetics more impermanent, and the autonomy more doubtful than ever before.