“The Theatre of the Third World” was the main theme of the Seventh Festival of Arts that was held this year as in years past in the spectacular ancient environments of Shiraz and Persepolis in Iran. The festival, which was held from August 30 to September 9, presented a number of works by “Third World” theatre troupes in addition to hosting the Second Third World Theatre Conference.

Where is the Third World? The term Le Tier Monde (the Third World) was invented by a number of French writers during the late 1950's. To them, the Capitalist countries constituted the “first” world, while the “second” consisted of nations living under Communist regimes. Thus, the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia were termed “the Third World,” with some South American states, for little reason, also being lumped into this category.

Strangers had come to town to construct and operate a new kind of recreation: a great fun-house for adults. A sinister Disneyland with overtones of the World's Fair, carnival, gambling house, brothel, side-show, circus, and The Balcony. Here one could buy adult adventure. The strangers leased a great, empty warehouse near the docks and in it they built a labyrinth of rooms and passages. There were gates, obstacles, puzzles, games, and other people. What choices one had no one knew, and these choices would often be changed. It was all synthetic and symbolic, safe and legitimate.

But rumors alerted the town that concealed within the Great Gaming House were real games: gamblers could find high stakes, hostesses would sleep with patrons, etc. There was no way to distinguish the real from the synthetic, nor could the player sort the shills from the guests.

The French theatre group ATEM (Atelier Théâtre et Musique) was formed by composer Georges Aperghis in the fall of 1975 to begin explorations that would lead to a series of productions in which commonplace gestures and sounds are scored according to musical principles. The group has developed what Aperghis calls a “grammar” consisting of “systems” that provide a means of structuring fragments of everyday life, setting them off in such a way that the spectator perceives them afresh rather than ignoring them as commonplace.

Five actor-musicians, together with Aperghis, comprise the entire group, taking on all of the research, administrative, technical, and performance responsibilities. They are subsidized in part by the city of Bagnolet, a bedroom suburb of Paris with a population of 36,000, and have attempted to relate their work to everyday life in the community.

Modern dance makes more choreographers, I believe, than ballet does. A conventional modern dance company is a very small group working with the specific ideas of a single artist. There are a limited number of these situations and an extraordinary number of dancers in training. It is not always difference in ideology or the compulsive need to explore a single vision that produces a new modern dance choreographer. It is simply expedient to create a personal marketplace in which to exhibit one's wares. The leniency with which modern dance has come to treat the eccentricities of body structure and performance as opposed to continued restrictions in ballets, allows for great variety in style and stature. But the small company, with its specific vision, often does not. So, choreography, for some of us, is self-defense.

When I began performing publicly in other peoples’ work, I had a fairly goodlooking body, (though not a very flexible one), good height, good balance, and no training.

It was clear from the start that Bernard Shaw was a man of ideas. Later it turned out that he was a fabulous entertainer. But few have granted that the two Shaws were one. The old tendency was to allow that he was a publicist, a critic, an essayist, even a philosopher but to add: “not of course a dramatist.” The later tendency was to concede that he was a great showman but to discount his thoughtful side. As Egon Friedell said, you could suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate.

Neither in the old days, then, nor in the later ones was Shaw considered a dramatist, for even the later generations have only thought him a master of the theatrical occasion, a man with a theatrical line of talk and a theatrical bag of tricks, a highly histrionic jokester—a comedian, certainly, but hardly a writer of serious comedy.

Since 1973 the California artist Linda Montano has used her own life—past and present—as material for her performances. After her estranged husband died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in August 1977, her work focused on reactions to his death.

Some of her earlier performances consisted of her usual activities being observed by others, in 1973, when she lived in San Francisco, she sent announcements to her friends saying that she would stay home for a week and would be available. She photographed everyone who visited during the week and documented food intake, telephone calls, and dreams. In other events she lived-in at several galleries and on the beach for three days at a time. In one of these events, she was blindfolded; in another she listened to her heart murmur with a stethescope. These living events are “framed“ for the viewer by being removed from their usual context.

On October 1, 1923, the Abbey Theatre produced a new one-act play by a Dublin laboring man, Sean O'Casey. The Abbey had created considerable interest in April, 1923, by giving the first production anywhere of an O'Casey play, The Shadow of a Gunman, a tragedy about the Black-and-Tan war. By the end of its three-day run, the Abbey was turning people away, despite the fact that the theatre was under armed guard because of the Civil War; Lady Gregory wrote in her journal after the final performance that The Shadow of a Gunman was “beautifully acted, all the political points taken up with delight.” O'Casey's new play, Kathleen Listens In, was received quite differently.

The Abbey management was theatre-wise enough to schedule Kathleen Listens In as a curtain-closer to a revival of Shaw's Arms and the Man: the soothing syrup of Shaw's “pleasant” exposé of “romantic convention” cannily preceded the bitter pill of O'Casey's “phantasy”—which turned out to be a no-holds-barred, deadly accurate satire of warring contemporary Ireland.

The pantomime, Pierrot Assassin of His Wife—one of the most extraordinary solo performances of the late 19th century—was first created in 1881 by a stage-struck twenty-one-year-old Parisian student, Paul Margueritte, who spent his summer vacations outside the city putting on amateur theatre in an old barn loft. For the rest of the decade, Margueritte, although embarked upon a successful literary career, continued to present his pantomime whenever and wherever he could—for friends and relatives, before peasants in rented rural ballrooms, in fashionable Parisian salons for elite private audiences of artists and writers, and at special showings in professional theatres.

A radically new interpretation of the traditional comic figure derived from cornmedia dell'arte, Margueritte's macabre Pierrot contributed directly to the revival of pantomime that characterized the 1880's: Margueritte quickly became celebrated, and his work was written up in popular magazines; Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonsé Daudet, and André Antolne were among the admirers of Pierrot Assassin of His Wife.

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 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.

In the years 1943-1944, when the German High Command, despite alarming losses on all fronts, suddenly began to divert, precious fuel supplies, men, building material, and transportation facilities for the mass extermination of over six million European Jews; when, independent of any Nazi blueprints, vicious pogroms broke out everywhere in German-occupied Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; when the British government found itself spending millions of pounds patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean, preventing escaping Jews from reaching sanctuary in Palestine; when the United States broke off secret negotiations with the Hungarian government and the Swiss Red Cross to save 100,000 Jewish children, who later perished; in the years 1943-1944, thought to be the most disasterous, by many historians, in the Jews’ nearly four-thousand-year-old history, an ancient community performance was being recreated in a small kibbutz in Mandate Palestine.

Great acclamation for realism in the theatre tends to be cyclical. While the form itself may always be with us, every so often it becomes fashionable again, especially in England, and is praised a little more than it deserves. Recently it has been the playwrights who work in the idiom of the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop who have been given rather more critical notice than their achievements warrant. Both the Royal Court and Miss Littlewood have followed, in their preoccupation with working-class life, all similar fashions before them. Real life always seems to live in a particularly unfashionable district. This can be an occasional welcome change from too much costumed romanticism; but apparent verisimilitude in speech or setting does not insure a genuine and perceptive authenticity.

On March 4, 1953, Brecht noted in his journal: “Our performances in Berlin achieve hardly any response anymore. In the pre1ss, reviews appear months after opening night and they contain nothing except a few meager sociological analyses….The efforts won't be quite meaningless only if the mode of acting can be revived at some later time, i.e. if its teaching potential will once be realized.” Brecht's Berliner Ensemble had been working for four years and had mounted ten productions, among them Mother Courage; Puntila; The Motherand The Tutor, but Brecht voiced his deep disappointment about the lack of impact he sensed. Many of us who were active in the Berlin theatre in those days wouldn't have been in complete agreement with his pessimistic statement.

In the opening scene of Jack Gelber's The Apple an action painter is flicking large globs of pigment at a piece of celluloid, commenting as he works, “No design is a grand design,” and, “Art is precision.” He takes a rolling pin and smears the paint over the celluloid, creating an arresting pastiche of brilliant colors, chaotic patterns, intriguing textures, and—if you look at it in just the right way—some sort of artistic expression. Then Julian Beck enters and asks, “Whose wet dream is that?” This jarring punch-line sets the tone of the Living Theatre's preoccupation with illusion and reality, a theatrical pair of dice that are constantly tumbled about and spilled into the audience. And the audience pays for it: the night I was there, the painting was auctioned off for $6.50.

Fuente Ovejuna is probably Lope de Vega's best-known work, perhaps because it can so easily be given an unintended slant: the nature of the central situation, in which the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna join together to kill their tyrannous overlord—the Comendador—and are ultimately pardoned by the King, has made it a favorite with left-wing producers. It is not really a proletarian manifesto, however, and should not be set against a Marxist background: Fuente Ovejuna—like all Spanish Golden Age plays—requires to be seen against the same structuralized vision of Creation as Elizabethan drama. Like so many Elizabethan plays, it is primarily concerned with order and disorder: social disorder seen as cosmic discord, and the restoration of order constituting a reestablishment of cosmic harmony.

All members of the cast dress conventionally, and with the dignity and style that is appropriate to a wedding ceremony.

The Bride wears a bridal gown, etc., but her face and hands are made up with thickly matted hair so that she appears to be some sort of animal. She is shackled with white ribbons to the frontside of an open box (6’ long, 2’ wide, 1’ deep, with carrying handles on either side) which rides upright on, but not attached to, a small, caster-wheel dolly. The open side of the box (facing toward the audience) is curtained with an opaque veil that can be lifted aside. The nude girl (the “cake”) rides inside of the box, hidden from the audience. At the entrance of the Bride in the wedding ceremony the Father of the Bride pushes the rolling structure with the two girls into position in front of the minister.

In speaking of The Jew of Malta as “farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens …” T. S. Eliot set the pitch for modern Marlovian criticism. We are reminded of Coleridge's remark about a critical dictum by Milton: “Speaking of poetry he says (as in a parenthesis), it is ‘simple, senuous, passionate.’ How awful is the power of words! fearful often in their consequence when merely felt, not understood….” When Eliot called Marlowe's play “farce,” he was saying what, in effect, most previous critics had said—the word can be “understood.” But when he added (as in a parenthesis) that this farce is “terribly serious” in the manner of the “decadent genius” of Dickens, the words can be “merely felt.”