On Saturday morning, April 19, 1975, two skirmishes between American Colonials and British Regulars were reenacted at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the beginning of the nation's Bicentennial celebration.

The initial commemorative event was the confrontation between British troops and American Minutemen at, the Town Green in Lexington. Spectators began lining the Green at about 3:00 a.m. By 5:30 a.m. there were more than 30,000 people standing six to seven deep around the square. Hundreds watched from rooftops, porches, and trees. Shortly before dawn, three buses carried the 200 men who would portray the British troops to the east end of the town. The spectators met the troops with cheers and good nature d heckling.

At 5:40 the canon from nearby Buckman's Tavern fired, and the Lexington Militia ran onto the Green. The spectators responded with a loud cheer as the men emerged from their rallying point inside the tavern.

One of the forms of theatre to emerge after the October, 1917, revolution in Russia was monumental open air spectacles involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. These mass spectacles were characterized by collective authorship (script and raise en scène), military-like organization, and the participation of different segments of society: workers; soldiers of the Red Army; drama students and artists of different orientations, including those of the avant-garde.

Thematically, mass spectacles were connected with the events of the Revolution and the civil war. They were not isolated performances but were a part of a more complex event, such as the celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution, May First, the Third International, or any other holiday of the Red calendar. The mass spectacles were not only conscious attempts to create a new distinctly proletarian theatre but also an attempt to establish a new social ritual by collectively reenacting and celebrating the events of the revolution.

D.E. was a political review in three acts and fifteen episodes directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and first produced in Leningrad on June 15, 1924, for delegates to the Fifth Congress of Comintern. It re-opened on July 3, 1924, in Moscow at the Meyerhold Theatre. Based primarily on Ilya Ehrenburg's novel, Trust D.E., it also drew heavily on Bernard Kellermann's The Tunnels and touched upon novels by Pierre Hamp and Upton Sinclair.

A 1927 program offers a synopsis of the play, as well as the order of the episodes. Two world powers, the falling bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat, are juxtaposed in short theatrical sketches. Three American millionaires—Jubs, Twist, and Hardayle, who are in search of new markets—accept a proposal by Jens Boot, an international adventurer, to form “D.E.,” an organization whose aim is to destroy Europe, without boycotting American products or disseminating Socialistic ideas. Their ultimate goal is to claim Europe as an American colony.

The political character of Theatre Center 68/71, a Japanese troupe based in Tokyo, is best understood as part of the historical space within which it operates. This space may be delineated in terms of three coordinates: the murderous disunity of the Japanese New Left, the popular evasion of historical accountability facilitated by the “split-level” nature of Japanese historical consciousness, and the need to enunciate revolution as a redemption of history, as a plausible goal in the Japanese intellectual and linguistic context.

At approximately six o'clock on the morning of March 14, a male caller identifying himself only as a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League (Kakumaru) telephoned the Police Press Club in Tokyo. “This morning at 3:22 we torpedoed Chūkaku's Honda at an apartment in Higashi Kawaguchi. This is in repayment for an attack on our comrade Namba Tsuyoshi and is intended to show what happens to people like Chūkaku, who become the willing pawns of bourgeois power.”

The events of May, 1968, in France spurred a re-examination of the relationship between art and politics, of the function of the artist and the role of theatre in our society. After May, 1968, with its attacks on institutions for distributing a culture that is not a “culture in action sprung from life,” theatre artists sought a way to work outside the established structure, which they felt was separate from life and whose rigidity demanded a particular kind of production and hindered experimentation.

The desires to become more directly involved with life; to place the accent on the process of creation rather than on the final product; to establish a new kind of relationship with the spectators, considered on many different levels as“potential creators”; to insist on the actor's creativity; to rethink the role of the director as well as the role of the playwright resulted in new forms of political-popular theatre in France.

The Théâtre du Soleil, the gaudy and tumultuous star in a rising constellation of French leftist theatre troupes, emerged early this spring from eighteen months of work to offer a devoted public some contemporary reflections. The Golden Age, First Draft, staged by director Ariane Mnouchkine in three warehouses of an abandoned arsenal in the woods of Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris, has succeeded in moving the group in an entirely different direction from their previous work, such as the unanimously acclaimed 1789 (see T52). But the current production, unlike its predecessors, is not offered as a finished product or as a concept fully realized. It is rather a public beginning, a point of departure.

Mnouchkine's troupe began attracting wide attention in 1967 with a production of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. It has grown increasingly popular with an innovative, pre-Brook production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was performed in a circus hall; with its step into nonliterary, collective creation titled The Clowns; and with the satirically caricatured historical spectacles 1789 and 1793.

For the Shaliko Company, rehearsals for The Measures Taken, which began in January, 1974, became a way of “studying the paradoxes of radical commitment.” Leonard Shapiro, the director, commented that “Patty Hearst was kidnapped at about the same time we started to work on the play, and that certainly influenced the way we worked at it.” The Brechtian Lehrstück, he felt, was directly related to the problem of political terrorism. “In 1930,” Shapiro explained, “everything was falling apart in Germany. The need to pull together behind the Communist Party seemed like the only thing that could have saved the country from Hitler.” The problem illustrated by the play about the political necessity of killing a comrade was at that time related to the problem of obedience to the party.

There were other reasons, too, why The Performance Group elected to stage Brecht's Mother Courage, which opened in late February, 1975, at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York City after almost a year in rehearsal. The women in the group — Elizabeth Le Compte, Joan Macintosh, and Leeny Sack — had called for a play with large roles for women since the group's last production, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, had revolved around male rock ‘n’ roll recording artists. So, after Richard Schechner, a co-director of the group, brought the play by the garage and there was a reading in which members simultaneously used three translations — Manheim, Bentley, and Hays — because there were not enough copies of one version available, the group unaminously settled on Mother Courage and the Manheim translation, which they felt was the most “modern.”

Written in 1930-1931 after a Party directive to bring more women into the various German Communist organizations and first produced in January, 1932, Brecht's adaptation of the well-known Maxim Gorky novel, The Mother, was the subject of an intense esthetic and political debate among theatre critics and left-based theatre workers.

In Western Europe, where Brecht's plays have by now become standard fare for bourgeois audiences and where political theatre remains, by and large, the domain of students and middle-class intellectuals, the work of Dario Fo stands out as an anomaly. He is a gifted poet and playwright, as well as an actor, director, and full-time cultural activist; but, although his plays are known throughout Italy and numerous other European countries, they are usually discarded after a few months’ performance. His company does not consider itself avant-garde, and eschews formal experimentation for its own sake, yet it has incorporated many innovative techniques both in the dramatic structure of its productions and in its mode of organization. Although his group does not perform agit-prop or guerrilla street theatre, it is small, flexible, mobile, and militant. Fo has definitively renounced the commercial stage and dedicates his energies to serving the revolutionary movement in Italy; yet he continues to enjoy enormous popular support.

Rote Rübe is a theatre collective made up of three women and four men in their twenties, who live and work together in the Munich suburb of Grünwald They are dedicated, in their own words, to producing “political theatre that is fun and that makes identification possible.” These performers, who profess a Marxist orientation came together as acting students at the Otto Falckenberg Drama School in Munich They then grew disenchanted with the conservatory system, which they have described as “a factory for the delivery of material to subsidized theatres,” and gradually worked out their own methods, techniques, and principles.

They established their independent collective in December, 1971. The collective's chief performance space is the Munich Poplokal, or rock club, Crash, which has an audience of young apprentices, working class youths, students, and local residents. To further their aim of reaching “a public drawn from the maximum variety of social strata, and above all a public that doesn't go to the traditional theatre,” they have refined their theatrical means, reducing them to a flexible minimum, so that productions can be taken to community and youth centers, public squares, and cafes.

Stanislavsky once observed that “One theatrical production can tell you incomparably more about a foreign country than a whole series of lectures, libraries, books, or years of theoretical study.” This is particularly true in the Soviet Union today, where the theatre, in addition to its official role as a major tool of education and indoctrination, serves as an increasingly important outlet for the expression of ideas and the airing of dissatisfactions still largely excluded from the printed page.

And given the present social and political climate, it surely is no coincidence that one of the major unofficial themes in the Soviet theatre today is that of censorship and freedom of expression. As the chant goes in Yuri Lyubimov's production Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty (see T57), “If only three minutes of truth! If only three minutes of truth!” Although sung by a chorus of American students, the message's real target is hardly lost on those sitting in the audience at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow.

Is all theatre political? Some people claim that it is. To some extent, this view is based upon a misunderstanding of the word “political.” Webster defines “political” as:

1. 1. of or concerned with government, the state, or politics.

2. 2. having a definite governmental organization.

3. 3. engaged in or taking sides in politics; as political parties.

4. 4. of or characteristic of political parties or politicians: as political pressure.

These definitions may help us to understand the nature of political theatre, but they do not apply to all theatrical activity.

Some of the people who claim that all theatre is political seem to confuse “political,” “social,” and “economic.” Of course, all theatre exists in a certain socio-economic context. By definition, it involves an audience; it is not a solitary activity. But this does not mean that it necessarily is concerned with government or that it must take sides in politics. The psychological elements and interpersonal relationships of, say, A Streetcar Named Desire may be magnified into social statements.