Peter Schumann's Fire(which I count among the finest plays I have seen), more than any play I have seen has the quality of prayer.

Prayer (for me) is a childhood memory, but I remember things like these: a peopling of death with human forms; a vague yet affecting sense of the scale of things; a notion of the preciousness of life, and of its vulnerability; a touch of fear, since fate is everywhere and has little to do with one's wishes.

I have tended to think of prayer under its aspects of supplication and faith. I am more impressed now by the rationality of prayer. To kneel, to bow one's head, and then to rise is to affirm, in a profoundly rational spirit, one's human place in a world only in small part human. If prayers are addressed to God or to gods they nevertheless signify to other men that we have arrived at some sort of outer limit.

Critics generally have considered Gombrowicz’ plays Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and The Marriage as purely oneiric, incoherent texts whose principal value lies in their grotesqueness and affectivity. Gombrowicz himself interpreted the plays as attempts to present the problem of youth. In contrast to these views, I will try to show that both plays are compelling satires of society.

The two plays deal with two different societies. In Ivona, Princess of Burgundia it is pre-World War II European society (the play was written in 1935) or, more precisely, the ruling classes of that society. The Marriage (1946) is about the new society which resulted from the war and from the seizure of power by the communist parties, with emphasis on the events leading up to that seizure.

I have associated Gombrowicz’ theatre with that of Genet, as the only important work in contemporary avant-garde literature dealing—though from two different perspectives—with history and the conflict of historical forces.

A close relationship had in fact become apparent between The Maids and Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, and especially The Balconyand The Marriage. But then it seemed to me that Genet subsequently separated himself from Gombrowicz in his interpretation of the historic process, in its transposition to the imaginary.

Orlando Furioso is an environmental spectacle developed by director Luca Ronconi and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, based on the poem by Lodovico Ariosto. It was first performed last summer in Milan and toured throughout Italy and the continent. It most recently appeared at the Odin Teatret's spring seminar in Denmark. Performances in New York and a U.S. tour are tentatively scheduled for the fall. The photos which accompany this article are from a performance in Milan.

What was most striking (from the New York perspective) about the Maydays of 1970 was that students were organizing themselves to use facilities and resources, not to destroy them. The nihilism so powerfully present in the Columbia uprising of 1968, and always prominent in “revolutionary” rhetoric within the student movement, was transformed into something more fundamentally revolutionary. “Burn it down,” “trash it,” “shut it down” were not heard so often as “take it,” “use it,” “open it up,” “liberate it.” In either case the work is somewhat symbolic—that is, burnt buildings can be and usually are rebuilt and liberated buildings can be and usually are reoccupied. The establishment is not so weak that it will yield everything at once. But it is not so strong that it will last out the decade.