Just as the widely-heralded American Pageant Movement began to show a decline in both artistry and general interest, Percy MacKaye, the already well-known playwright and poet, staged the gigantic spectacle Caliban on May 25, 1916 at New York City's Lewisohn Stadium. Although not the largest production of the pre-World War I period—MacKaye's collaboration with Thomas Wood Stevens, St. Louis, a Civic Masque (1914) utilized the participation of more than 7,000 St. Louis citizen-actors and was seen by nearly 500,000 spectators during its five-day run—MacKaye's Caliban was thought to be the most lavish and grandiose, as well as best documented, pageant of its time.

My thinking about the medium of performance began in the late Sixties. In saying that, I am pointing to a particular conceptual context that was fully developed when I began to work—one that concerned itself with discovering new forms of movement and totally new ways of structuring the temporal shape of an event. Yet, when I survey the seven years of my work against that background of performances in the Sixties, I realize that those specific concerns with movement and temporality are not my concerns. My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space—ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it. I have returned again and again to a specific set of formal/material metaphors with which to shape this space.

I first saw Stanislavski’s work in 1922, when the Moscow Art Theatre presented in Paris The Lower Depths, The Brothers Kammazov, and The Cherry Orchard. I was carried away with admiration for The Cherry Orchard. The play is written in an impressionistic style that leaves room for silence and long pauses. Although it was bathed in a profusion of naturalistic detail, the production grew into a brilliant, comic, and moving spectacle. I felt that this was poetry—poetry without rhetoric, theatricality, or lyricism. Solely through the skill of the actors, everything became as true as life.

Black folks have grown weary of trying to educate white folks about racism. Aside from those black people who consider it a waste of time, others are suspicious that Whitey is seeking power, which, in the motto of the military, is “Know your enemy.”

As a member of that discredited class, the white liberals, I harbor the droll notion that a proper education may correct human error and, further, that it is the white man's burden to educate himself about himself. One of th,e best mirrors a white man can find is the glass of black-and-white theatre history. The misshapen images found in this cracked mirror makes it all the more valuable. White people can see themselves clearly awry, distorting the image of the black man into grotesqueries.

Late in Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno, Captain Amasa Delano interrupts a conversation with his bosun, Perkins, to say, “I seem to have been dreaming … I dreamed someone was trying to kill me.” Delano never leaves the stage, there is no time for him to actually fall asleep and dream, and yet the statement is certainly not descriptive of a daydream. During rehearsals of my production at Tulane we attempted to justify the moment as best we could. There was a long pause before the line while Perkins checked the approach of their own ship to the San Domingo. William Wolak, playing Delano, did the most he could with the moment, but was never really comfortable in it. I knew he was uncomfortable, but could not offer a satisfactory solution.

Has the avant-garde of drama in the Western world today reached a dead end? And where will the next development lead to? While it is clearly futile to try to predict the future, some speculation about likely trends might well help to put the present into perspective and, at the same time, clear our minds of some prevailing misconceptions.

Above all, where does today's vanguard stand? It has more than just one spearhead. In the Anglo-Saxon countries and in France one wing of the avant-garde represents a trend that goes back to the early nineteen thirties and Brecht's Epic Theatre, which could only make its full impact felt after the downfall of Hitler (whose accession to power thirty years ago put an end to any creative experiment in Germany). The other main wing of today's avant-garde has equally remote origins. The Theatre of the Absurd is the culmination of a movement which, in surrealist painting or in the writings of Kafka and Joyce, reaches back into the nineteen twenties.

Naturalism wasn't a label any of the early new-wave British dramatists would have chosen deliberately, but a shape for which they reached instinctively: it happened to meet many of the demands which they were beginning to make on the English theatre. It served as a convenient vehicle for direct social comment, as opposed—very much opposed—to that poeticism in symbolic drawing-rooms which delighted the cultural establishment, and which was being vaunted abroad by the British Council as a renaissance of verse drama. Eliot's high toryism was as much out-of-tune politically with the new dramatists as his sugar-coated cadences were stylistically ill-adapted to their themes. Conversely, naturalism was a time-honored form for the problem play, and well suited to the semi-autobiographical idiom in which the new-wavers tended to play with their problems.

Communist China now exercises probably the most rigid form of theatre censorship in the world. Today, five years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, the traditional Chinese drama is still forbidden on the stage, as are all Western works in dance, drama, and music. Since 1966 not a single nonrevolutionary play or song has been published, and the main Chinese theatre journal, Hsi chu pao, was discontinued after the February 1966 issue. At the end of 1970, only eight stage works had been approved for presentation—five “Peking dramas with contemporary themes” (modernized Peking Operas [see T44]), two ballets, and a symphony.

Chinese Communist theatre policy has consistently reflected the principles spelled out by Mao Tse-tung at the Yenan Forum in 1942.

Biomechanics was a system of actor-training that Meyerhold devised shortly after the Revolution. Although not always clearly understood, it received wide attention during the twenties and thirties due to Meyerhold's unique position as the foremost revolutionary avant-garde director. Curiously, Meyerhold's own conceptions about Biomechanics, which were almost unchanged throughout his career, appeared to be both grandiose and seemingly modest: While maintaining that the mastery of Biomechanics afforded the actor all the essential skills necessary for scenic movement—skills that would take the ordinary actor nearly a life-time to learn, he relegated his own class in Biomechanics at the Meyerhold Workshop to a status equal to that of the other studies in body movement that were taught there, such as acrobatics, modern dance, or eurhythmics.

Arthur Miller's introduction to his Collected Plays (New York, 1957) is one of the major documents of American theatre. It reveals an eminent playwright having struggled to understand and perfect his craft. It shows him eager to use the theatre to express his evolving ideas. It shows his strengths, and also his weaknesses.

The foremost asset Arthur Miller possesses as a playwright is his knowledge that the theatre must dedicate itself to public matters. He has an acute sense of his audience as persons to be addressed, never merely spectators to be tolerated. “A play,” he writes, “ought to make sense to common-sense people … the only challenge worth the effort is the widest one and the tallest one, which is the people themselves.”

His writing, although it usually has an axe to grind, does not attempt to startle society with new ideas. Indeed, he does not believe that the theatre can promulgate entirely new ideas, because it must gather the assent of its audience as it moves along, and this is impossible with the radically new.

The weakness of Edward II, the speaker of these lines, not only deprives him of the fascination exerted by other Marlovian heroes but affects the character of the entire play. None of the dialogue can match the glitter of the greatest speeches in Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus or even of the remarkable opening speech of The Jew of Malta. The story of such a king inevitably lacks the magnificence radiated by one who seeks to rule the world or command the legions of hell. Yet it is a mistake to underestimate Marlowe's achievement in this play. Only Tamburlaine is more completely an artistic success. There the dramatic possibilities of what we have come to consider the typical Marlovian hero are given their logical fulfillment in a design which is both grand and neat.

The current popularity of the Japanese arts in this country has extended only in a very limited way to what is perhaps the most beautiful of those arts: the Noh drama. The reasons for this are simple. One is the inaccessibility of the Noh. Unlike the Kabuki, it has never been performed in this country and probably never will be, at least in its pure form. Only once in its history, in fact, has the Noh been performed outside of Japan, at an Italian drama festival in 1954. Another reason for this relative neglect is the esoteric quality of the Noh. A Noh play is about as difficult for a Westerner unversed in Japanese culture to understand as, say, a medieval mystery play or Jacobean court masque would be for a Japanese who knew no English.

In March, 1976, the FramartGaiiery of Naples, Italy, sponsored the performance of an original Allan Kaprow work, Maneuvers. By previous arrangement, Kaprow had been commissioned to prepare a performance scenario of his choice to be performed, under his supervision and with his participation, by friends and patrons of the gallery.

Kaprow designed and sent on ahead a brief scenario of actions that could be carried out in unspecified locations, private or public, by participants working in couples. No formal audience would be present, and couples would be generally free to choose the place and time for performing each phase of the scenario. Because there would be no direct supervision of the couples as they performed, participants would be on their own to interpret the directions given in the scenario. Any even number could participate in the event.