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.

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.

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.

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.

Indian civilization is made up of many strands, woven together by the invasions, assimilations, and proselytizings which have characterized its history and prehistory. Generally, however, elements of the Sanskritic culture brought in by Aryan invaders (conjecturally from the Middle East) around 1500 B.C. are dominant, though the farther one gets from the northern regions of India, the less apparent this dominance becomes. The question whether the culture of southern India is a remnant of the pre-Aryan civilization of India or also was imported has never been resolved. However, regional differences in culture within the framework of a Sanskritic civilization are not disputed, nor is the fact that southern India is less Sanskritic in culture than northern India.

Such differences manifest themselves in a variety of customs, artifacts, arts, languages, and rituals.

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.

In September 1923, four months after the premiere of his provocative circus production of The Wiseman and three years before his recognition as Europe's foremost filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein collaborated with the writer and linguist Sergei Tretyakov in the preparation of two new revolutionary plays, Do You Hear, Moscow?! and Gas Masks. More than Nikolai Foregger and Meyerhold, more than all of his teachers, the twenty-five-year-old Eisenstein was now considered by many as the most radical director in a theatre-mad Moscow. His manifesto “Montage of Attractions” [LEF #1 May 1923] and extreme reworking of Alexander Ostrovsky's nineteenth-century comedy, Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman set theatrical circles on edge. [See T61 for a translation of the essay and a description of this production.] The young proponents of left-wing culture, centered around the poet Mayakovsky and the periodical LEF, hailed Eisenstein as the next intellectual/artistic savior.

The film experience is not necessarily a single rectangle of light and shadow that flickers at one end of a darkened room. Call this “movies” or “cinema”—that archetypal dream world in which the spectator, seated in a near-foetal position, attempts to ignore the physical space, the other spectators, the projector's shifting beam, to concentrate on the images and the sounds that accompany them. Of course, the movies are a film experience—and a theatre experience—but the use of motion pictures is not so limited, and theatre is just beginning to realize the possibilities inherent in film.

For many years, motion pictures have been used as elements in staged drama—epic and “total” theatre, the “living newspaper,” etc. In 1941, Robert Edmund Jones foresaw “in the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture…a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself.”

Modern drama resembles a child half wise, in both knowing and not knowing its own father. By familiar usage, consecrated in the textbooks, Ibsen is “the father of modern drama”; the phrase instantly evokes the companion term “naturalism,” followed perhaps by a dim after-image of A Doll House, the consensual firstborn of our present theatrical age. This familiar view of the father has its partial truth, yielding certain academic rewards. It invites the editing of anthologies laid out on a taut straight line from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, with occasional detours into the essential non-realistic styles; or, if the anthologist is less sympathetic to Naturalism, it allows a backward glance at Hedda Gabler before one takes off for the real beginnings of modern drama somewhere in the volcanic foothills of Strindberg, finally to disappear in the farthest out thickets of the Grove Press.

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.

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.

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.

A concept of the theatre has been lost. And in direct proportion to the manner in which the theatre limits itself only to allowing us to penetrate into the intimacy of some puppet or to transforming the spectator into a Peeping Tom, it is to be expected that the elite will turn away from it and the crowds will go to the movies, the music halls, or the circuses, in search of violent satisfactions which at least have no false pretenses.

After the wear and tear to which our ensibilities have been subjected, it is certain that, before all, we have need of a theatre that will awaken us: heart and nerves.

The misdeeds of the psychological theatre since Racine have made us unaccustomed to that violent and immediate action which the theatre must possess.

Madeleine-Madelaine-Madeleine G.-Madame Madeleine-Madame Magdaleine—the many names under which the famous “sleep dancer” appeared early this century in Europe, only heightens the mystery surrounding her. We do not precisely know where she hails from nor do we know anything about her fate after closing out a strange dancing career of roughly one decade. She lived in Munich, but most certainly was not born there, and no information is available as to when and where her death occurred.

Two famous Munich painters—Fritz August von Kaulbach and Albert von Keller—made portraits of her on which she looks beautiful, even-faced, dark-haired, with extremely bushy eyebrows, protruding Jaws and a low nose bridge. In photographs she always wears a white wrap-around, with her eyes mostly closed.

On March 14, 1920, Bertolt Brecht wrote to Doris Hasenfratz (Doris Manheim) that he had just returned to Munich at midday after a fifteen-hour train ride from Berlin and had gone directly to the cabaret Charivari where the comedian Karl Valentin was playing; Brecht sat “convulsed with laughter until 11 o'clock.” Bernhard Reich, a director closely associated with Brecht during the twenties, describes the fascination Brecht had with these performances:

In writing this preface, my purpose is not to conduct a futile investigation to determine whether I have written a good play or a bad one. It is too late for that. Rather, it is scrupulously to subject it to examination (and I should do this under any circumstances), in order to discover whether I have written a blameworthy piece of work.

Since no one is obliged to write a comedy in strict imitation of other comedies, if I have strayed from the well beaten path for reasons I felt to be sound ones, am I to be judged, as the Messrs. so & so have judged me, by rules which are not my rules? Or, as they fatuously proclaim in print, for taking art back to its infancy, because I am attempting to blaze a new trail for that art whose first, perhaps whose only law, is to entertain while instructing? But that is not the question.