Tom O'Horgan's first widespread public attention came in 1968, when he directed Hair on Broadway and won an Obie Award for directing Paul Foster's Tom Paine at La Mama. He had already been involved with the theatre most of his life: he began acting when he was four years old and he composed and staged a full-length opera, called The Doom of the Earth, when he was nine. Later, he studied music and supported himself for several years with a nightclub act—telling jokes, singing songs and accompanying himself on a harp. In the early Sixties, he performed in musical revues and began directing small productions at various lofts and theatres around New York City, including the Caffe Cino. In 1964, he directed Genet's The Maids in his own loft on Third Street, using men in the female roles as Genet had suggested.

I feel a lot of reluctance in attempting to describe any part of a process which, by its truest nature, holds an unending mystery. At the same time I'm hoping that by trying to formulate some of this territory I can make certain things clearer to myself.

I've always felt that the term “experimental” in regard to theatre forms has been twisted by the intellectual community surrounding the artist to the extent that now even the artist has lost track of its original essence. In other words, a search for “new forms” doesn't seem to be exactly where it's at.

There comes a point where the exterior gyrations are no longer the most interesting aspect of what you're practicing, and brand-new exploration starts to take root. For example: In the writing of a particular character where does the character take shape?

Every year during Easter Week, about 50,000 people gather in a tiny town in southern Poland to participate in an unusually realistic open-air reenactment of the major events in the last week of the life of Jesus Christ. These incidents are not portrayed on a single stage; instead, each takes place in front of one of a series of twenty-four chapels spread over a six-mile route that winds up and down gently sloped hills and weaves in and out of thick forests. Spectators and players walk together from chapel to chapel, singing appropriate songs that link scene to scene. As the crowds follow Jesus, they relive his experience with deep emotion, freely weeping, crying out against the Roman guards, and trying to touch Jesus’ robes as he walks the path to his death.

The Theatre Populaire Romand (Romand Popular Theatre) or TPR celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 1976. For a professional, completely autonomous troupe whose politics and administration are independent from any control by authorities, this is a record rarely equaled in Switzerland or even in Europe.

This remarkable endurance owes much to the will and determination of the troupe's director, Charles Joris, who has always established and maintained solid and homogeneous groups despite the internal crises and the periodic defections inherent in an enterprise of this sort. But strong will and a coherent theatrical project do not register in a void. The most eminent characteristic of the TPR is precisely its long-term political vision: the concrete insertion of its theatrical activity into the life of the region, of the territory where it has chosen to work.

In April-May 1972, in twelve different towns in Abruzzo, Giuliano Scabia carried out a series of “actions” with young people; each lasted three days. The project, Perhaps a Dragon Will Be Born, was supported by the Teatro Stabile of I'Aquila and by other local cultural organizations. Both in the planning stage and in the organizational stage, these actions showed many of the elements that characterized Scabia's subsequent work: an open laboratory, an empty scheme, puppets, daily newspapers, posters, meetings, great images, etc.

The Sagra della Croce is a three-day parade and celebration that takes place once a year, in May, in Casteltermini, a town of about 10,000 people in Sicily. The parade is performed in honor of a wooden cross that, according to an old legend, was miraculously found several centuries ago by a cow in the fields near the town. The cross is kept in a small church (the Chiesa di Santa Croce) on the hills about two miles from Casteltermini. Preparation for the Sagra takes the whole year and comprises a large part of the town's social life.

The Sagra has been performed for several hundred years. Originally it was prepared and performed by three “ceti” (guilds): the pecorai (shepherds), the borgesi (farmers)—who also included the burdunara (muleteers)—and the schetti (bachelors).

I was bused to the theatre at the age of seven. There was a program, sponsored by the Junior League, to bring children to live theatre. I lived in a small fishing village outside of Seattle; it was a long bus ride, but it changed my life. Professional actors, who had worked together for twenty years under the direction of Mrs. Florence Bean James (who had studied with Stanislavsky) were playing Rumplestiltskin. That was it. I fell in love.

As soon as I was allowed to go about on my own (fourteen), I went back to that theatre and hung around and begged to clean Johns and sort nuts and bolts until they took me into the company.

Mrs. James and her actor husband, Burton, inspired me to write for the theatre. They always hoped a playwright would emerge from their theatre.

The work of Peter Stein is so integrated with the work of the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer that an analysis of his individual style or method as a director is almost impossible. Even in speaking of “forms,” one must see how Stein has applied his creative energy at a very fundamental level—striving to create the proper conditions that would then, through the work process, give rise to new “forms,” as well as new content and style. However, a description of the development and results of the most recent project directed by Stein at the Schaubühne, together with an analysis of certain attributes that this project has in common with earlier work, may reveal a pattern definable as Peter Stein's own theatre practice.

Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga River from Varanasi (Benares or Kasi). Due to the patronage of the Maharaja of Benares who resides in Ramnagar this Ramlila is the most extensive, best performed, and draws the largest audiences of any. It developed its present shape during the early and mid 19th-century. The whole subject of Ramlila is vast, touching on themes of pilgrimage, bhakti (devotional worship), Hindu ideas of reincarnation, the nature of a mixed oral-literate culture of immense sophistication, relationship between government, Maharaja, and ordinary people.

In 1966, the Italian critics labeled Luca Ronconi a “producer of madness,” not only for the themes he chose but for the frenzied characterization typical of the acting. Later, after Orlando Furioso (1969), [see T47], they saw him as a conjurer of extraordinary medieval festivals, through a play of simultaneous scenes that bordered on the “extraordinary and magical.” But since the critical acclaim of Orlando eight years ago, Ronconi has never again wanted to take on a performance/production that could be performed all over the world, precisely in order to free himself from the label that each success brings. Even when he recreated Ariosto's poem for television, he drew on—as the medium itself demanded—an entirely new formula. It is time, then, to put aside easy definitions and to look without preconceptions at Ronconi and what he has done since Orlando Furioso.

When I write a play there's no single sure track to run on. It's different each time I start. Each time is starting from scratch, a reinvention of form. There may be easier ways to do it, but for me, that's how it is. There are no rules that always apply. If I teach a playwriting class, I set up exercises, so people can learn some possible different approaches. I would be loathe to prescribe one single approach.

As you catch me just about to start something—which is always a peculiar time fora writer—I find it even more difficult to tell you how I go about things.

The Living Newspapers are among the most famous productions of the Federal Theatre Project (1935-39). Across the nation, tens of thousands of citizens saw various “editions” of these topical dramas. They were exciting theatre and effective documentary. They experimented with such stage devices as levels, masks, lighting, projection, and a loudspeaker, and they enlivened the “reporting of actual truth” through episodic scenes that were sometimes realistic, sometimes expressionistic. Since the closing of the Federal Theatre and the virtual death of the Living Newspaper, documentaries have generally become less theatrical and more detached.

Though the stated intent of the Living Newspaper was merely to dramatize the news, most observers found a clear editorial viewpoint. The plays usually ended with the mention of a specific piece of legislation or a critical case currently in the courts that the audience should support.

I began writing I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating a few days after the final performance of Einstein on the Beach in November of 1976.

I wrote a few pages of dialog at a time in a large notebook with blank pages that I often write and draw in when working on a piece. The language I wrote was more a reflection of the way we think than of the way we normally speak. My head became like a TV, switching from thought to thought (and in writing from phrase to phrase) like flipping a dial from channel to channel.

I write when I am alone and work best when there are no interruptions. I sometimes keep a television on at low volume and incorporate phrases I hear into my text, which I write quickly, usually leaving it untouched and in its original order once the words are on the page. Every few days I had a few pages of writing typed up.

Come, come whoever you are,
An unbeliever, a fire-worshipper come.
Our convent is not of desperation.
Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times,
Come, come again.

On December 17, 1273 A.D., a universal genius, one of the greatest servants of humanity, the founder of the Mevlevi Sufi Brotherhood, the poet Mevlana Jalal al-din Rumi died at Konya. He was a philosopher and mystic of Islam, but not a Muslim of the orthodox type. His doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness and charity, awareness through love. To him and to his disciples all religions are more or less good, as all are roads leading to the truth. Looking with the same eye on Muslim, Jew and Christian alike, his peaceful and tolerant teaching has reached men of all sects and creeds.

The Greek resistance movement, supported and directed by EAM (Ethnikon Apeleftherotikon Metopon—the National Liberation Front) in the mountains of Greece under the German occupation of World War II, spawned a popular resistance theatre that schooled itself among the people and brought a measure of political enlightenment to peasants in the mountain villages, who had small exposure to theatre. Those who went to market saw some Karaghiozis—Greek shadow puppet theatre—and those who attended religious festivals occasionally saw Lenten plays. Secular theatre was sometimes performed in tents in provincial villages and refugee settlements.

Because, in the beginning, artists would not come into the mountains to write songs for the struggle or to dramatize events, the andartes, or mountain fighters, began to write and perform. Their intention initially was to familiarize the people with their work and to develop friendly territories in which they could operate freely.

Fydor Sologub (pronounced Sulagoup, with the stress on the last syllable) is best known as a poet and novelist, famous for his elegant; musical verse and for his grotesque fictional masterpiece, The Petty Demon. Born in 1863 and a member of the first generation of Russian symbolists, Sologub—a man of proletarian origins whose real name was Teternikov—was almost forty-five when he wrote his first play and had already been active in the literary world for over twenty years. Yet at this point the shy and withdrawn poet embarked upon a new career in the theatre and became a major symbolist dramatist and theoretician of a new stagecraft.

The expatriate Hungarian theatre company known as Squat has quite literally attempted to make their life their art. Because the two are seen as identical, art is not an activity that can be given up. They are totally committed. They did give up their theatre when authorities in Budapest prohibited their performances, and after performing in their apartment and other illegal places for four years and giving up their passports, they permanently gave up their country and moved to France, then Holland, and now New York. In the West they took the name Squat because it suggested new settlers—both geographical and spiritual.

Originally the group formed in 1969 as Kassák Theatre at the Kassák Culture House in Budapest. In 1972 when the company did its first completely new work, The Skanzen Killers, the group's license to perform was withdrawn on the grounds that it was “obscene” and “apt to be misinterpreted from a political point of view.”