The theatrical event includes audience, performers, text (in most cases), sensory stimuli, architectural enclosure (or lack of it), production equipment, technicians, and house personnel (when used). It ranges from nonmatrixed performance to highly formalized traditional theatre: from chance events and intermedia to “the production of plays.” A continuum of theatrical events blends one form into the next:

It is because I wish to include this entire range in my definition of theatre that traditional distinctions between art and life no longer function at the root of aesthetics. All along the continuum there are overlaps; and within it—say between a traditional production of Hamlet and the March on the Pentagon or Allan Kaprow's Self-Service—there are contradictions.

Whoever coined the expression “cultural explosion” to describe America's flirtation with the arts must have taken a decibel count first. For whether we are experiencing a true artistic renaissance, or, as the recent Twentieth Century Fund study suggests, merely witnessing a modest expansion of arts activity, one thing is certain—whatever is happening is not happening quietly.

When a community, an organization, or even a small group of individuals decides to build a new theatre or arts center, the announcements stream forth, press conferences are called, and words flow endlessly from mayors, civic leaders, businessmen, and occasionally from arts professionals. On December 11, 1966, for example, three lengthy articles about arts centers appeared in the New York Times.

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are prevailing conceptions of the human body—its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal proportions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way, in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's relationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives: moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic judgments about architecture.

Theatre, at mid-twentieth century, finds itself in a position of “change or die.” The rapid development of television and cinema have been to it what photography was to representational painting: they can do many of the same things better and more simply. The only means of survival clearly lies in making the very most of the unique quality of theatre—the relationship between a live audience and live performers.

Traditional theatre, with its reliance on “real” props and staging, contributes to audience-performer separation by constantly defining physical limits of size, scale, and distance. The theatre of the future will have to provide an environment which permits the spectator to do more than merely look. He should experience a direct and, as nearly as possible, total involvement, both individually and in relation to the actors.

People gather in two different basic ways. Fixed focus. Multiple focus. In the fixed focus relationship the audience and the performers are locked together within a clearly defined limit, like TV in a bar, the math professor at the blackboard, or a cock fight. The event is fixed between limits. The TV camera moves to keep the football “on camera.” The professor will not write on the floor. The cocks will not be let out of the pit. The Stratford, Ontario theatre, the San Francisco Opera House, the Washington Arena Stage, and your local Loew's are all fixed focus.

The title Room 106 refers to the large lecture hall on the seventh floor of Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, in which the piece was presented. Although the following description is intended partly as a guide for anyone wishing to recreate the work, the title and almost everything else in such a re-creation—the dialogue, the structure, possibly even the physical set-up —would change. As was indicated when such a re-creation was presented in Argentina, based only on a vocal description, the “integrity” of the piece lies not in the particular words and images used in the original performance, but in the concept and the manner in which the material is generated.

Simultaneity in Simultaneity, presented in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 24 October, 1966, by Marta Minujin was probably the first performance piece in history to make use of several coordinated mass media. In part of the work, each “spectator” was alone in his own home: relatively few perceived every dimension of the performance, but aspects of it were available to anyone with a radio or television set.

The piece which eventually became Simultaneity in Simultaneity was originally conceived as part of an intercontinental presentation. At the same time that Minujin's work was being done in Argentina, Allan Kaprow in the United States and Wolf Vostell in Germany were to do performances. The three had talked of making use of the telstar communications satellite to transmit video material from one part of the performance to another, of flying performers from one country to another so that they could appear in person in more than one “section,” etc. This original plan was not carried through when both Kaprow and Vostell failed to realize their segments, but it determined some of Minujin's imagery, and, eventually, provoked an interesting juxtapositioning of “truth” and “falsity” in art.

Self-Service, a piece without spectators, was performed in the summer of 1967 in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. It spanned four months, June through September. Thirty-one activities were selected from a much larger number. Their time and locality distribution were determined by chance methods. Participants selected events from those offered for their city; each had to pick at least one, although doing many or all was preferable. Details of time and place were flexible within each month; choices made from month to month overlapped, some actions recurring.

This script is essentially a description and text of three performances given as part of the “Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam Week” in New York City (January 29-February 5, 1961). The playing area was a former courtroom in the Old Courthouse on 2nd Street and Second Avenue. The piece can be done, however, in a conventional theatre as well as a created environment—and was done so, at the Gate Theatre on Second Avenue, a few days before the first performance at the Courthouse.

Mallarme attempted to write an absolute book, the quintessence of all literature and all reality—the Total Book. The world exists to arrive at a book, he said. This book would be proclaimed by a sacred ceremony of predetermined detail, a proof as well as a communion.

The form of The Book can be described briefly: four books, which can be ordered as two pairs, make up The Book. Each book is subdivided into five volumes (not only interchangeable within each book, but also from book to book). Thus, Mallarme envisions the mixing and exchange of the volumes of one book with those of another.

The Playhouse of the Ridiculous has been for a year or two now the first and only good theatre in New York since the Living Theatre was exiled by the Federal authorities. Assorted egomanias and mad squabbles explode such groups, which do not exist except by the cunning tyranny of egomaniacs and the ties of personal animosity. The great thing about the Playhouse of the Ridiculous is they don't go in for art.