In Kaspar, Peter Handke's protagonist learns to master language only to become the victim of language: a man destroyed by his instrument of communication. “The last thought I had on Kaspar became the first thought to The Ride Across Lake Constance,” Handke wrote in his notes for the Berlin premiere of his last play. This thought was “to demonstrate the modes of human interchange in our society by means of precise observation.—The first attempts to define these observations were the plays My Foot My Tutor and Quodlibet, in which theatre forms appeared isolated from plots, so that these forms became poses and could become identical with poses in daily life: the representation of the theatre poses was, among other things, an attempt to present the modes of everyday behavior as poses, too.”

The parable of Eugène Ionesco's new play, Le Rhinocéros, is simple and obvious. The inhabitants of a small provincial town are transformed into rhinoceroses. At first this process is gradual, and then more and more precipitous. The protagonist, whose name is Bérenger, like that of the protagonist in Tueur sans gages, sees in the first scene one or two of the inhabitants of his town metamorphosed. In the second scene, a colleague in the office where he works becomes a rhinoceros. In the third, his best friend, Jean, is transformed before his very eyes. In the last scene, his mistress rushes off to join the herd. He remains alone, the last soul in the town to resist the epidemic. He refuses to comply with the collective mania, the standardization or nazification of his world. The parable is on the sacred individuality of man. Alone the protagonist Bérenger remains faithful to his vocation of man.

The traditional performing arts of Japan (the various Gaku, Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki) are built on a set of contrasts between understatement and exaggeration; between distance and immediacy. Both setting and performance exploit such negatives as stillness, distance, absence and separation, but these occur against a background of opulence ranging from the elaborate Noh costumes to the technical magic of the Kabuki stage, and the lifelike movements of the Bunraku puppets. Although contrasts pre-dominate, mergings also occur in these theatre forms. Multiple evocations of the sacred appear in even the most secular of texts. One theatre genre evokes the others just as all the arts in Japan interpenetrate one another to a high degree. A constant feature of Japanese theatre is the consistent, if paradoxical, presence of the not-there which infuses the text and action to create a rich fabric of suggested meaning. It is this fact that connects Japanese classical theatre to modern experimental theatre in the West.

Habimah, Israel's National Theatre, was born in the midst of the great upheaval of the Russian Revolution. In 1917, under the inspiring leadership of Nachum Zemach, the first group of 12 actors began training for the attainment of their goal—the establishment of a professional repertory theatre group to perform in Hebrew. They formed their theatre as a collective officially called “The Mutual Society, Ltd.” in which all had equal privileges and obligations. It was their hope that this dramatic group would be part of the process of national rebirth in Palestine.

From 1918 until 1924, at a time when Hebrew was considered a “counter revolutionary” language and Zionists were being arrested by the hundreds, Habimah's repertoire consisted of plays dealing with Jewish subjects, giving dramatic expression to the traditions and aspirations that nourished the Russian Zionist movement.

Ever since John Osborne dropped his dramatic H-bomb on the complacent British middle-class theatregoer in April 1956 in the shape of Look Back in Anger, critics and public alike have been looking to London for a steady flow of new plays of revolt, plays that would be leavened with the yeast of a new social criticism and rooted in the new post-war realism. This new realism is, to my mind, best described as a compound of two elements. The first represents an involuntary and instinctive resistance to the irksome class structure of British society and the other, in one form or another, the universal dilemma which has split the world down the middle in an age of threatening nuclear destruction and exacerbated the rivalries inherent in class, in nation, or in industrial or commercial power. The technological complexities of our new era are hardly touched on in the new drama.

Roberta Sklar is one of the three artistic directors of The Women's Experimental Theatre and a co-author with Clare Coss and Sondra Segal of The Daughters Cycle Trilogy: Daughters, Sister/Sister, and Electra Speaks.

Sklar began her work as a student-director at Hunter College in 1960. She was active in the off-Off-Broadway theatre movement at its inception in the early sixties and frequently directed new plays at the Caffe Cino. In the mid-1960s she joined The Open Theatre and was the co-director of the major ensemble works The Serpent, Terminal and The Mutation Show and directed Beckett's Endgame. These works toured both the United States and Europe and have been widely acclaimed. Throughout the sixties she worked extensively with playwrights and actors in the creation of new works and new work methods.

In the 1970s she began an ongoing research into the development of a feminist esthetic for the theatre.

The appeal made to an audience by a theatre piece has always seemed to me primarily visceral. Even in periods of elevated verbal device and stringent academic rule, the spectator's real impulse was toward the flesh and blood. In an era when this impulse is obstructed by production techniques, habits of delivery, and domination by theme and character, a concrete, approachable personality still persists. Especially now, when we aren't in a context of observed tradition and literacy, we find this personality—a compound of the audience's desires for fiction, for fantasy situations, for the offertories of individual performers. It can control, gratify, outrage, and exhaust an audience in much the same way that any other publicly-met personality touches our private needs, our unacknowledged inhibitions, our unconscious animosities and loves. As long as its actors appear alive, the theatre can avoid the static existence of a thing and retain vitality.

Among all the great personalities who, early in this century, created and established the modern concept of the director in the theatre (Antoine, Lugné-Poe, Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky), Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) is often dismissed as an eclectic who took his ideas from others and dabbled in all forms of theatre for the sake of personal commercial success. While there is a grain of truth in this view, it nevertheless completely misrepresents one of the greatest personalities in the theatre of this or any other age.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre has often been described as a street theatre whose desire is to reach a popular audience. Often this has meant performing in streets, parks, and city ghettos, doing anti-war parades, setting up workshops in poor neighborhoods, or building puppets with children and getting them involved in the preparation of a show. However, along with these outdoor performances, they have always done indoor shows. There are obvious differences between a “chamber play” such as Fire, played in a specific area before a limited number of spectators, and a street piece like A Man Says Good-bye to His Mother: Although both plays have the same “subject” (the war in Vietnam), the first one conveys the story by the form itself—movements, sounds, colors, volumes, etc.—and it is, in a way, the spectator's job to “read” it through all the assembled elements.

Women's theatre groups are seeking new forms—forms that have not been derived from the male-oriented and male-dominated theatre that now exists. A search for new content also characterizes these groups, but their most important aspect is their relationship with their audiences. The theatre done by these groups is aimed at a specialized audience and often is performed exclusively for that audience—women. Almost all of the women's theatre groups reserve at least one of their performances for women only, and most prefer to play only for women, even when they admit men.

While women's theatre groups exist in many cities throughout the country, New York provides a base for a large number of troupes. Many of these groups maintain themselves by touring colleges, universities, and women's centers throughout the United States and Canada.

It has become common to view drama in the post-Ibsen period as falling into two broad categories. On the one hand there was a strong and persistent tradition of the A Doll's House type of play, called for convenience “social problem plays,” and on the other a number of diverse styles of drama that represent counter-realism; plays in verse, expressionism, formalistic styles as in Yeats’ plays, revivals of myths, fantastic drama, surrealism, plays of Freudian psychology, Cocteau-ish poésie de théâtre, and so on, all of which, however different from each other, have in common that they turn away both from social problems and from the dramatic style associated with them. They do not necessarily, however, renounce realism for “romance,” or for something “poetic” in the escapist sense. Neither are the themes they treat always without relevance to the social situation.

So you need a foreword. But what is there to say about a play from which I felt detached even before it was finished? To speak of its composition would be to evoke a world and climate without grandeur. But I would rather say a few words about the theatre in general. I dislike it. One will gather as much from reading this play .What I have been told about Japanese, Chinese, and Balinese revels and the perhaps magnified idea that persists in my brain make the formula of the Western theatre seem to me too coarse. One can only dream of an art that would be a profound web of active symbols capable of speaking to the audience a language in which nothing is said but everything portended.

But any poet who tried to realize this dream would see the haughty stupidity of actors and theatre people rise up in arms.

As Robert Wilson's theatre is more widely publicized, he is inadvertently developing a reputation as an experimental “therapist.” Several newspaper articles have pointed to his work with brain-damaged children in Texas, his early involvement with Headstart programs and his work with the aged and terminally ill at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Although this work was done many years ago, his reputation as a “therapist” continues to grow because of his continuing collaboration with Christopher Knowles, a brain-damaged youth, and, earlier, his work with Raymond Andrews, a deaf-mute. However, Wilson is not a therapist and does not consider himself one.

According to Webster, therapy is “a remedial treatment of bodily disorder” or “an agency (as treatment) designed or serving to bring about social adjustment.” If we accept this definition, then what Wilson has done is very different; in fact, almost the opposite.

The performances usually begin for us in setting up the space on the previous night. The process is similar each time. We both approach it as a kind of ritual.

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.