In a certain sense, politics—the organization of people's living together—is always implicit in the theatre performance, whose one defining trait is the presence of figures showing forth human relations in the “holy circle” of the stage. The only matter of special interest here is to find out when, why, and how the normative framework of human relations on the stage begins to differ so radically from a code acceptable to the audience that the performance has to explicate, thematize, and make programmatic its new and strange ethics and politics.

This sure is fun. You know, the city news bureau here in Chicago, where you can always call and get their version of what's happening, is ST2-8100. You might want to take care of a cat named Jack Lawrence from CBS who threw me out while I was fuckin’ with their teletype machine last night. That was very unfair. I had some good news items. Now, let's see who else is here. The police, there's some good numbers. OK. Now this is a top secret number that like only a few of the top police have. It's the central number for the police station up here in the zoo. They're very fucked up in there. I've been up there, and you think they're organized, well you're full of shit ‘cause their walkie-talkies don't work. I mean they're all stoned up there, tripping over each other, you know, they're rapping, all they want to do is fight and they don't care about all the walkie-talkie shit, they just want to fight, you know.

Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, encircle nascent ideas with stolid values, and annihilate experiments by marketing distorted replicas. The “news” is a deadly enemy of what is new, and premature identification may ruin for a lifetime authentic identity.

My first thoughts revealed that I was not very precise or concrete about politics. I turned up some hard prejudices against student radicals. I believed student leaders to be deeper into revolutionary rhetoric than radical action. I dismissed many actions on American campuses as either “escalated panty raids” or “senseless disruption.”

From the early twenties, when the Paris Dadaists enacted the Trial of Maurice Barrès in the St. Julien le Pauvre Park, to the recent theatrical events of a political nature performed in the streets, there is a long story of militant outsiders and antiartists for whom the cultural industry is just another aspect of capitalism and, as such, must be destroyed. On the other hand there are non-political Fluxus-type events, arty-farty happenings, and street shows such as those organized by the Groupe de Recherche de l'Art Visuel which claim to be “unintentional” and not aimed at the destruction of the existing social structure. These events are still concerned with the history of art, of theatre, or of culture in general and tend to be quickly absorbed into the art market, the “avant-garde” department of Madison Avenue, and wind up as the latest form of entertainment for Jackie Onassis. It is important not to confuse the art of revolution with its commercial and bourgeois imitation.

Today, all over the United States, American young people are being spoken to by revolutionists in words they understand, in a style that makes those words acceptable, and through an invisible medium that old professional politicos have not yet picked up on.

This medium is the phonograph record, purveyor of bubble gum music and symbol of Elvis Presley's “Houn’ Dog” and the celebrated “Get off of my Blue Suede Shoes” (which John Lennon once called a protest song). One of the leading manufacturers, Columbia Records, runs a series of advertisements in the underground press the theme of which is “The man can't bust our music” and “Know your friends.” The implication aligns “us” against “them,” and the context of the advertising design and illustration is interracial, hippie, pot-smoking youth.

Is Columbia for legalization of marijuana? No. Columbia is for making money. Thus the investment in music aimed at long-haired youth.

“Peking drama with contemporary themes” is an English translation of Ching-ch hsien-tai bsi—a new phenomenon in Communist Chinese theatre which began in 1958 and was fully developed by 1964. In the Western world it has also been called “modern Peking opera” or “new-style Peking drama.” It is difficult to place this form in any of the theatrical genres of China, for it combines the qualities of a number of Chinese dramatic styles, most notably those of the traditional Peking opera and the “spoken drama”—that is, the Western-style drama which appeared in China in the late 1900's; the word “spoken” emphasizes the fact that the new form is essentially conversational while the traditional drama is mainly sung. Many old conventions of the Peking theatre have been kept; for instance, singing and movement patterns are still largely based on traditional Peking drama. As a general principle, however, the conventions are manipulated to achieve something new.