JoAnne Akalaitis’ vital statistics are representative of other Mabou Mines members. Change the sex and weight, and her profile could well be used by other company members: they are middle-aged; all but one are parents (there are eight children with the company); they are actors who live on Manhattan's lower east side. However typical this may be for membership within the company, it is atypical of other avant-garde theatre groups, who tend to be in their twenties or early thirties and childless.

Another unique fact is the stability and duration of their professional and personal relationships. Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, Lee Breuer and William Raymond first met and worked together in 1962, David Warrilow and Frederick Neumann joined them in 1965. When they, along with Philip Glass, officially formed Mabou Mines in 1969, they had an extensive shared history of friendship and work on which to base the professional and business association.

The eight-week run of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre in March and April saw his first major acting since his days with The Living Theatre.

In the ten years (1963-1973) that Chaikin served as director in The Open Theatre, the company he founded, he rarely acted. He had very little interest in performing, and yet “I still defined myself not as a director, but much more as an actor. I still do.”

Chaikin is still uncertain as to why he was drawn to acting, except perhaps as an escape, a way to “get out of this crummy Brooklyn context that was my life, whereas the theatre and the radio and the movies seemed like they were these other orbits of existence.” Determinism also played a role, since Chaikin did—and still does to a certain extent—view acting as a chosen lifestyle, a way to “pick the kind of life you'd want to work in.” Acting provided a tremendous sense of freedom.

During this past December and January, The Performance Group undertook a rather rigorous performing schedule, doing their four-hour Mother Courage [T66] at 7 PM followed by a midnight show of The MacIntost Project [T70] in the theatre's upstairs space. Joan MacIntosh played the lead role in both productions. (Marilyn actually used two casts playing simultaneously in a mirror image production; Elizabeth LeCompte also played the part of The Star.) At one point MacIntost told Richard Schechner, her husband and a director of the Group, that she had decided that Mother Courage dies and goes to heaven where she becomes Marilyn Monroe.

Since the members of the Group all participate in cleaning the theatre, setting props, and about an hour and a half of pre-show notes and warm-up exercises, this meant being at the theatre from 4:30 PM to 2:30 or 3 AM besides whatever other rehearsals, classes, and day-today chores were involved.

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”

It is as the creator and director of her own highly innovative works that Meredith Monk is perhaps best known. Since graduating in 1964 from Sarah Lawrence College, she has channeled her energies into deVising performance pieces that fuse, in varying balances, a “triangle” of dance, theatre, and music into a single unified whole. Monk has described her works in such terms as “a live movie,” “a theatre cantata,” an “opera epic.” She is interested in the way that the forms of dance, music, and theatre work against and with each other “and then the form that comes out of these crossings. That's why I have different names for different pieces. Because I'm always surprised at what the balance comes out to be myself. And then after it's finished, I sort of have to figure out what it is.”

Sue Sheehy was a waitress in a small restaurant when Robert Wilson created Deafman Glance at the University of Iowa in 1970. She had lived in Iowa all her life and had never seriously considered leaving it until she met Wilson. “Robert Wilson and John D'Arcangelo came into the restaurant where I was working,” she recalls, “and Bob said, ‘I want that girl to be in my play.’” Up to that time, she had never given much thought to becoming an actress. “Sure, they've got theatre groups in Iowa,” she says, “but you have to know somebody in order to do it, or have a background… It never really turned me on. I was always told I could never do it, there was no sense in trying.”

Being a part of Deafman Glance, therefore, was a new and fascinating experience. The play itself was unlike any she had seen before.

In 1971 Priscilla Smith, Andrei Serban, Elizabeth Swadosand the other members of what was then the La Mama Repertory Company (now the Great Jones Repertory Project) engaged in a series of workshops, the end-product of which was Medea rendered in the original Greek and Latin.

On opening night of The Threepenny Opera at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, director Richard Foreman sent Elizabeth Wilson a note:

The recent Lincoln Center production of The Threepenny Opera functioned not only as the meeting place of an avant-garde director and professionalactors, most of them strangers to the experimental theatre scene in New York; it also brought together two disparate theatre schools: one totally evolving around the actor's performance, the other regarding him as but another element of the production.

Between September 1922 and March 1924, Bertolt Brecht worked in Munich on the original productions of three of his four plays, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle (later called Jungle and finally, In the Jungle of Cities), and Edward II. During this brief span of a year and a half, Brecht also made a short film, Mysteries of a Barber Shop, with many of the same actors from the three play productions. Unlike Brecht's later theatre work, which is thoroughly documented with many photographs and extensive production notes, these earliest productions remain relatively obscure. In an attempt to add to the information we do have, interviews were conducted with the three surviving actors in those first productions of Brecht's work: Hans Schweikart, who played a significant supporting role in Edward II; Blandine Ebinger, who played the comic-romantic lead in Mysteries of a Barber Shop (as well as several leading roles in other Brecht productions outside of Munich), and Erwin Faber, whose portrayals of lead roles in each of the four productions forms a veritable through-line of Brecht's professional work in his Munich years.

Between November 1890 and March 1892. the Théâtre d'Arstaged seven productions. It was during these two years that it became associated with the symbolist poets and finally came to represent the symbolist poetic in theatre. The staging of pierr Quillard's play La Fille aux Mains Coupées (The Girl with Cut-off Hands), the first stage production of Maurice Maeterlinck's plays L'Intruse (The Intruder) and Les Aveugles (The Blind), the recitation of poetry from the stage, and the staging of Song of Songs-all at the Théâtre d'Art—represent four different aspects of symbolist performance.

The Girl with Cut-off Hands, a mystery in two scenes performed on March 19th and 20th, 1891, was the first distinctly symbolist production in regard to its mise-en-scene and design. To a great extent it influenced the staging practice of Théâtre d'Art. The play was performed on a stage separated from the audience by a gauze scrim immediately behind the footlights.