Christopher Marlowe in a real sense belongs to the twentieth century. Not only did he reflect the doubts and uncertainties of his own time in a manner which we today can find particularly meaningful, but only in the last fifty years have either the man or his works come to be seen for what they really were. In his own day, Marlowe was slandered while he lived by his fellow dramatist Robert Greene and reviled after his death by moralists like Thomas Beard in his Theatre of God's Judgements (1597) and William Vaughan in his Golden Grove (1600) as merely another blasphemous sinner whose murder might fittingly illustrate the visitation of God's judgment upon atheists. Among the poets, Chapman, who probably had been his friend, did praise him, and Michael Drayton wrote the only appreciation of any consequence:

Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That our first poets had: his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

“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.

Few artists have managed to play a leading role in the avant-garde for half a century without taking their share of barbs and innuendos. This holds particularly true for a director working within the sensitive, politicized milieu of Soviet theatre, and Nikolai Okhlopkov is no exception. His colleagues tended to regard him as a dangerous anomaly, someone who, like Kafka's Odradek, does no apparent harm to anyone, but whose mere survival is almost painful.

Western theatregoers are highly suspicious of anyone working in a political theatre that upholds the Establishment. Soviet reviewers, both those who support Okhlopkov and those who deplore his “social irresponsibility,” are obliged to discuss one major question: does his theatre reflect the essence of life in an evolving socialist society? Further complications arise from the fact that any director subsidized by the state is continually called upon to affirm the expectations of both spectator and sponsor.

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.

Beneath a hot roof, on an oppressive summer's day, in a roasting room, Brick and Margaret Pollitt face each other. Brick, heated and hardening in this oven-like bedroom, turns his thoughts toward the liquor cabinet. Margaret, wanting a child by her husband (“in the oven,” as father-in-law Big Daddy would say), and tense (as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof) because of enforced continence, turns her thoughts toward the bed.

Indeed, the two most prominent scenic elements of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—elements which fulfill the needs both of the world on stage and the box office in the lobby—are a liquor cabinet and a bed. The former is a “monument,” and the latter is “slightly raked to make figures on it seen more easily….”

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.

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.”

Coleridge's celebrated theory of dramatic illusion was doubtless formulated to deal with the problem of Shakespeare and “the three unities.” The unities of time, place, and action so dear to the hearts of the French were, he felt, based on a doctrine of literal delusion, mistakenly supposing that the audience is deceived into taking the play as a real happening. In his Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, had maintained that a theatrical audience was never deceived for a moment. The spectator understood that he was viewing a presentation of fictional events, and judged it according to its adherence to sound morality, logical probability, and general human nature. For Coleridge the truth was a reconciliation of these two extreme views: the audience of a play is neither deceived nor wholly undeceived about its reality. It is in a state of illusion, a complex attitude in part self-willed, in part created by the skill of the playwright and the actors.

Theatre, at mid-twentieth century, finds itself in a position of “change or die.” The rapid development of television and cinema have been to it what photography was to representational painting: they can do many of the same things better and more simply. The only means of survival clearly lies in making the very most of the unique quality of theatre—the relationship between a live audience and live performers.

Traditional theatre, with its reliance on “real” props and staging, contributes to audience-performer separation by constantly defining physical limits of size, scale, and distance. The theatre of the future will have to provide an environment which permits the spectator to do more than merely look. He should experience a direct and, as nearly as possible, total involvement, both individually and in relation to the actors.

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:

Among the ancient Aztecs and Mayans, the sign of the serpent was often one of rebirth and transfiguration. So it is with the Mexican and Chicano of today—heirs of those moss-covered symbols etched on stone—who are using La Serpiente to signify change. Like the serpent that sheds its old skin, The Teatro Campesino of San Juan Bautista, California, is growing into a new way of life that revolves around the spiritual and material reconquest of their Indian origins.

Luis Valdez and his gente (people) have expanded into El Centro CampesinoCultural (Farmworkers Cultural Center), which is situated on forty acres of land. The center includes, besides the Teatro, facilities for creating music, publications, paintings, videotapes, and films. It also will house the more than thirty members (ranging in age from a year to thirty-four) of the Teatro as well as sheep, cows, chickens, and horses.

I would like to explain a few aspects of Peter Handke's plays, not from the critic's point of view, but from that of direct practical work. By way of introducing my credentials for this task, let me say that I directed the world premiere in West Germany of Offending the Audience in 1966 and subsequent world premieres up to and including The Ride Across Lake Constance.

For those unfamiliar with the German theatre scene, it can be stated that Handke's works are played today on stages all over the country. Their premieres are the highlights of the season. This has given the critic cause to reflect on the theatre in general and the phenomenon of Handke in particular. For some of Handke's plays are being performed in numbers similiar to the musical successes on Broadway, and his books and essays can be found at the top of best-seller lists. And then, too, his works are just beginning to reach the stages of other countries in Europe, not to mention America.

“How does Brecht’s system differ from Stanislavski’s?” I have often heard this question asked, sometimes in exactly these words, and probably we shall all live to see the question appear in much this form on college examination papers. I recall, too, that as a young admirer of Brecht’s, nearly twenty years ago, I myself described an actor in one of his plays as having gone “beyond Stanislavski.” Will the acting profession soon be divided between Method actors and Brechtians?

Musical comedy seemed for so long to be nothing but noisily sexy entertainment for an off evening that it is difficult even yet to get anyone to give it a really serious thought. Sophisticated theatergoers who have a taste for it seem to feel they must apologize for that taste as a kind of secret unsophisticated vice—like catsup on French fries—which they somehow never have managed to outgrow. They note by way of justification that in the past fifteen years the orchestras are less brassy, the plots less farcical, the ballets more adult and integral parts of the story, that the lyrics are cleverly sophisticated, that the scores have some catchy tunes. But in so doing, they miss the outstanding development of the musical in the past fifteen years or so—the development of a twentieth century dramatic poetry, a lyricism which appeals to sophisticated and unsophisticated alike, a lyricism which seemed impossible to combine with the realism developed by the 1920’s.

Beginning with his introspective Finnish vacation in 1906, Stanislavski spent thirty-two years developing his work through speculation and experimentation. He was not a systematic thinker, and his books do not represent the consistent development of a single set of ideas; rather they are notes outlining the evolution of his methods. Stanislavski’s work is held together by its goal: to achieve excellence and truth in theatrical production. Because of the work of the American Lab and Group theatres, Americans are most familiar with Stanislavski’s early and middle periods. An understanding of his late work—his “method of physical actions”—would complete our grasp of his contribution.

The reconstructed theatre, using every technical means at its disposal, will work with film, so that scenes played by the actor on stage can alternate with scenes he has played on screen. Going further, a dramatic production could become a kind of revue in which the actor uses dramatic, operatic, and film methods, as well as those of the ballet dancer, acrobat, gymnast, clown. And, of course, the play's division into acts, the inflexibility of conventional dramatic structure, must be superseded by episodes after the model of Shakespeare and the dramatists of the old Spanish theatre, making it possible to abandon the antiquated pseudo-classical unities of time and action. We are entering upon a new phase of playwriting. We are creating a new kind of play.

Immersive experiences in theatre and digital games are often characterized by immediacy in space and time, focusing on the imminent action of the here and now. Live action roleplay (larp) practices, by contrast, can encourage reflexivity. Such reflexive play can support the agential capacities of players in participatory performance works to visualize and pursue alternative futures.

In her conversation with TDR, Hadestown director Rachel Chavkin discusses the development, casting, music, and choreography of the Broadway hit musical—a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus.