The Living Theatre's four splendid spectacles were a great event. Like an astonishing portion of the country's popular music, they proved to be in content form outside the social system, not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory. The tribe of disdainers of the money-job-marriage game came to celebrate, greeted the Company with the frivolous cynicism of the stray salesmen present & made a closed party of it, perfuming the air of liberty that they polluted. But the word was Revolution, it was posed in fundamental terms & urgent tones—in the most radical sense possible. Even the attending communists, finding the affair objectively counter-revolutionary, could hardly deny the validity of the ultimate ideal: “eine Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung für die freie Entwicklung aller ist” (an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all).

This is a recording. A man comes out on stage, stands down-center and begins to breathe. He stands there for a long time. His head is tilted slightly up, his eyes seeming to fix on a point in the balcony. His shoulders are down and his chest is not blown up, but his elbows ride high to the rear as if to suggest a soldier at attention. He wears a white sleeveless undershirt and untapered dungarees. And he doesn't move. Once or twice he wobbles an inch. Perhaps he does this deliberately: homing, by approximation, on the dead center of his gravity. For the rest, the only movement you see on stage is the occasional rippling and stretching of his undershirt across the bellows of his breath. No one can say this man's presence is sympathetic; and no one can say it is hostile.

People become myths overnight these days. It is worth looking at the elements of myth and truth in the matter of Tom O'Horgan, not just to save a soul or two, but because the truth in this case is much more interesting. O'Horgan, newly discovered if not newly made director of Hair, Futz, and Tom Paine, and (with England's Brook and Poland's Grotowski) a director who has got something there. But while Brook seems stuck (at least momentarily) in mannerisms and overused-effects, and Grotowski is busy turning theatre into a perpetual wailing wall, O'Horgan manages to make theatre a consistently colorful and often unabashedly joyful experience, with a vitality that even when spurious (which happens), is as catching as the common cold. He is unique, not in method or message, but in his uses of methods and messages: Ohorganism seems the only apt term for what he is doing and being, as none of the common labels quite covers the phenomenon.

Peter Brook's “experiment,” as it became known, was originally launched by Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris in May, 1968, under the auspices of the Théâtre des Nations, and later performed in London. Barrault had invited Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company to organize a company of international artists—actors, directors, scenic designers (including Joe Chaikin, Victor Garcia, and Geoffrey Reeves)—to examine and experiment with some fundamental questions in form: what is theatre, what is a play, what is the relationship of the actor to audience, and what are the conditions which serve all of them best? As a frame of reference for this research, Brook decided to work on ideas from The Tempest. The play appealed to Brook because, according to him, it had always appeared on the stage as something sentimental and pallid.

The Performing Garage: a beautiful cube of space, sprinkled with high platforms & towers made of raw two by-fours which but for their air of negligence would announce an acrobatic show. Individual gymnastics, each gymnast sole, randomly distributed. Their relentless contortions get them into a sweat—physical translations of introspection. Here & there a little acrobatics, action.

From this laborious anarchy the play powerfully emerges on a natural free rhythm. Couples form, the chance proximities of gymnasts turn into the interaction of performers. The timing of several trigger actions cuing others. Progressively assembling the play has been left up to the individual performers. Barely audible, mumbled chanted lines from a translation of Euripides sound out here & there, are repeated, taken over by others. Though they belong to parts they are not the property of any individual actor. The lines are metric, their delivery is amateurish & affected—false speech.