A black who works in the theatre, who cannot survive without it, can easily go out of his mind trying to write about it. It is even more difficult if he is a black writer writing in a white publication for a white majority. The white majority— who have unlimited access to the mass media—always expects a black writer to prove something about the black state of mind, something most blacks know exist, and that whites know exist—after four major riots. Yet these same1 whites are trying to deny that knowledge by pretending integration is just around the corner.

Jean-Luc Godard, that paragon of paradox, takes time out in La Chinoise to rewrite film history by challenging traditional notions of what is real and what is not real. Lumière, Godard argues through a mouthpiece character, was no more a pioneering realist than Méliès was a mere magician. Lumière did photograph the reality of trains steaming into a station or of workers filing out of a factory, but these were painterly subjects fashionable with the Impressionists of the late 19th century. By contrast, Méliès may have staged the state visit of a Balkan monarch to France with actors and fake sets, but nonetheless he transformed the cinema into a kind of Brechtian newsreel. Hence, Méliès came closer to reality and modernity through artifice than Lumière did through literal reproduction.

If the symbol was a hard nut for Stanislavski to crack, so is Lee Strasberg, symbolically and literally, a hard nut for anyone, friend or foe, to crack. Certainly it is easy to take an emotive view of him whether you admire him or not. In a most remarkably simple-minded way, his friends and disciples adore him while his enemies detest him. He is one of those figures who, like a supreme politician as opposed to an expert statesman, invites no middle ground, no neutral view. He suggests, as much by his nodding silences as by his little attentions, a classically formed love-hate relationship. But when the nut is there to be cracked, it almost always comes out melting love or towering hate, rarely both together.

My anthology The Modern Theatre — five volumes in Anchor Books—is made up of plays written between 1830 and 1950. The première of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 has always been considered a landmark, though closer to my own thoughts were Musset, Büchner, and Gogol, all of whom wrote plays in the early eighteen thirties.

That anthology, readers will agree, was not just another bundle of famous plays. On the contrary, justly famous items—and unjustly famous ones—were omitted. Famous authors like O'Casey and Anouilh were represented only by non-famous works. It was an anthology of protest—against the standardization of the repertoire. For our theatres limit their range even more than our orchestras and our museums do. My anthology was issued in the hope of persuading some of them to look at other things, other kinds of things. The volumes serve a purpose even if that hope is vain.

Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School were first presented by the Performance Group at the Performing Garage in New York City in the spring of 1975, 1977, and 1978 respectively. They opened again as a trilogy of theatre pieces in December of 1978 under the collective title of Three Places in Rhode Island. Each production came about as a result of concentrated preparations that were begun the fall prior to their opening, and they demonstrate a final result that only a generous amount of time and effort could have produced. The process involved not only Spalding Gray and Elizabeth Le Compte, the chief collaborators, but also Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, Bruce Porter, Bruce Rayvid, Gabrielle Lansner, and a variety of other participants. In form and style, the pieces differ widely, but all three concentrate on a single subject: the development of a character named Spalding Gray as a person and as an artist.

In the decade or more since the women's movement began, a number of books on the female experience in literature, art and architecture, film and dance have been published, but no comparable attempts have been made to identify a women's tradition in the complex art of theatre. Some excellent volumes of plays by women and some about women, some interesting articles on individuals and on the new feminist theatres, a symposium or an interview here or there have appeared. With the exception of the reissue of Rosamund Gilder's classic, Enter the Actress, however, no overall study has tried to see how women have used and have been used in theatre.

Yet questions about women's participation in all aspects of theatre have become more insistent.

Peter Schumann's Fire(which I count among the finest plays I have seen), more than any play I have seen has the quality of prayer.

Prayer (for me) is a childhood memory, but I remember things like these: a peopling of death with human forms; a vague yet affecting sense of the scale of things; a notion of the preciousness of life, and of its vulnerability; a touch of fear, since fate is everywhere and has little to do with one's wishes.

I have tended to think of prayer under its aspects of supplication and faith. I am more impressed now by the rationality of prayer. To kneel, to bow one's head, and then to rise is to affirm, in a profoundly rational spirit, one's human place in a world only in small part human. If prayers are addressed to God or to gods they nevertheless signify to other men that we have arrived at some sort of outer limit.

We have now reached the difficult point and must turn to the unpleasant truths. I regret it, but there is no other way if we want to exhaust our subject. I shall do it as painlessly as possible—without anesthesia. In the preceding chapter we followed the development of several important points in the theory of acting and reviewed the theorists’ artistic demands upon the actor. Finally, we arrive at the actor himself as a type, as a person. The length and purpose of this book do not permit us to occupy ourselves with all the great names, the celebrities, the unforgettable enchanters from the past and the present, so notable and so different. There is only room to mention isolated, selected examples out of which one—as elsewhere in the book—must represent many. It is reassuring to know that certain fundamental traits are alike and common to the majority of the great, leading scenic artists.

The pastoral ethic is that set of ameliorative principles in La devotión de la cruz (Devotion to the Cross) and El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea) working to assuage the intolerable burden of fear and vengeance exacted by the autocratic honor code. These principles receive maximum dramatic range, with the happiest consequences, in The Phantom Lady. The issue is not so much the honor of a woman in danger of losing it, though this hazard is real and accounts for much of the play's dramatic interest. It is rather the clandestine yet clearly approved means by which a lady of rank asserts her rights as a woman in love. Without knowing the odierwise fatal role of honor in Calderonian drama, a casual reader would miss these positive implications of the theme so tfiat the play would seem little more than an auspicious forerunner of Restoration comedy, which indeed it influenced.

Ostal, the home environment as a workshop in madness, is a series of performance pieces produced by the Italian experimental group Cfr., directed by Aldo Rostagno. Ostal was performed by the group in New York for two weeks in April 1977.

Ostal [pr.: oo-stou’(t)] is a word of Languedocien, the dialectal variant of Old Provencal spoken in Southern France west of the Rhone. Ostal meant house, when the house was abode and temple at the same time, a sacred place where life was celebrated as a ritual—as opposed to the home of present days, a jungle of electrical appliances in which we cultivate our private neurosis.

The Cfr. (short for confrontation) was founded by Rostagno in 1975, after leaving the U.S. and returning to his native Italy.

Bertolt Brecht's adatation of Scophocles' Antigone, first performed in Switzerland in 1948, presents an interesting combination of ancient and contemporary elements. In this paper I shall describe and attempt to explain the playwright's handling of his material.

For the most part, his version follows Sophocles' play, as translated into German by Friedrich Hölderlin, early in the 19th century. The parts added by Brecht are in verse, with rhythms not unlike Hölderlin's. In diction, then, there is no attempt at modern dress. Modernity appears in the changes made in the action.

In Sophocles' play, you will recall, Antigone's brother, Polynices, has enlisted aid from Argos and other cities to fight his way to the kingship of Thebes, and has died in the attempt. Creon, regent of Thebes, forbids the burial of Polynices, on the ground that he was a traitor.

The theatre is an anachronism. Once the only form of dramatic entertainment, it now survives as a handicraft industry. What the assembly line did for automobiles, movies and television have done for drama. Like hand-woven sweaters, theatre has become a luxury that can be afforded only by a very few. And because its essence is live actors performing before a live audience, attempts to mechanize it are vain. Costs per spectator, and consequently ticket prices, will always be higher than movie admissions—and the aesthetic results more uncertain than in film. It is therefore a myth to suppose that the live theatre will ever be “popular.”

A number of other beliefs about the theatre are likewise myths. Articles proclaim that the “theatre is dying” or “costs are pricing the theatre out of existence.”