A Bike for a Year and Bars, both recent productions by the young actors of the Haifa Theatre Project Group, raised a two fold debate with both the public and theatre critics. One issue involved the artistic qualities of the shows as they reached the stage; the other concerned the social settings against which they were produced—for both productions were the results of special experiments in theatrical activity.

The initiator of the Haifa Theatre Project Group was Nola Chilton, a newcomer to Israel from the United States. A former Lee Strasberg student and now a member of a kibbutz, she is a resident director with the Haifa Municipal Theatre. Her most successful work there was based on a collectively compiled social research which evolved, over a prolonged period of study and experiment, into a stage-documentary.

The Research University organized by Jerzy Grotowski from June 14th to July 7th, 1975, in Wroclaw. Poland, was a series of introductions to the Laboratory's paratheatcal activities that are part of the “Mountain with a Pillar of Flame” project. The vocabulary as well as the work of the Teatr Laboratorium has been evolving since the first public exposure in 1973. The entire series of events which took place: in Philadelphia and the University ot Pittsburgh at that time was called “The Grotowski Special Project” (and included performances of Apocalypm cum figuris. workshops, and a symposium) but the term “Special Project” referred only to a certain kind of activity. This activity has “paratheatrical” objectives, synonymous with those articulated in “Holiday/The Day That is Holy” (T-58), and which, according to Grotowski, is a new kind of performing art (in contradistinction to the art of performing in the theatre).

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.”

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.

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.

When we were putting on Arthur Miller's All My Sons in New Haven and I was talking with Arthur about the function of scene design, he said, “Don't talk to me about stage form, scene design and all that. What matters in the theatre is character and situation.” I was about to say something in answer when a friend of Arthur's who was present warned me, “Arthur is tense about the show.” So of course I dropped the subject. Afterwards I went to Europe, where I spent three years doing research for the Rockefeller Foundation. When I came back I saw Miller at his home. In the meantime I had read the introduction which he wrote for Death of a Salesman, in which he stated how much he owed to Jo Mielziner, who had designed that play: if it wasn't for Jo's contribution scenically the play wouldn't have taken die form that it did, and so on, very laudatory.

The soil from which art will grow is ever unpredictable and its discovery after the fact often suggests that caprice, rather than mind or nature, governs the relation. Why Dublin?—one would like to know. The question recurs whenever one thinks of how much poetry and drama has come from that mediocre city in the last hundred years: Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Sean O'Casey—to say nothing of their lesser brothers inside or outside the Abbey Theatre: an unlikely but unmistakable golden age.

If we look at O'Casey, now its chief survivor, the mystery turns into paradox. For although commonly accounted a leading dramatist of the age, he commands no theatre and is rarely played. He is clearly in the Abbey tradition, but the Abbey rejected him early in his career.

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.

This theatre has attracted little but unfavorable notice: it is slovenly, amateurish, silly, just boring; a put-on, really an actors’ lark; not art, certainly not serious art; a coterie occasion for a pariah in-group; by & for queers (not the nice kind, but drag queens & dykes & leather/motorbike/S&M hard trade); a display case for transvestites, pure camp, devoted to movie fetishism; anyhow just adolescent pornography; ritual enactment of an impotent humiliation of women (vicious, loveless); pointless, emotionally impactless, untheatrical; certainly devoid of social relevance; in sum, stupid & immoral.

The theatre of the ridiculous is an important theatre and theatre form.

I want to interpret here my impression of the theatre's theatrical impact, in the light of interviews with John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam, Mary Woronow & some written pieces of Ronald Tavel's & Jack Smith's—keeping Freud, Sartre, Artaud, de Sade, Genet, Warhol & la pataphysique out of it.

The staging of Dinabandu Mitra's Niladarpan, December 1872, marked the beginning of the modern professional Bengali theatre in Calcutta. Before this, performances of Bengali plays were given only for invited audiences in private theatres sponsored by the aristocracy. Jatra, the traditional theatre of Bengal, was of course available to everyone, but the rising middle classes of Calcutta, which had come to favor Western forms of art, regarded it as a corrupt and indecorous entertainment. Jatra, complained the middle-class audiences, followed neither the classical Sanskrit definitions of drama, nor the newly fashionable Western models. Jatra was two-thirds song; the dialogue, improvised during the performance by illiterate players, had no literary distinction; and, unlike the new drama represented by Niladarpan, Jatra used no scenery or permanent stage.

Performances of Niladarpan were open to anyone who could afford a ticket, an innovation in Bengali theatre which led to the opening of several other public theatres in the city, each with its company of players, giving regular performances.

Vsevolod Meyerhold first considered producing Alexandr Griboyedov's Woe from Wit in 1924, the year of its centennial, but because of other demands, he dropped his plans. Then following the premiere of The Inspector General in December 1926, again faced with a serious repertory crisis, he turned to Griboyedov's comedy once more.

Meyerhold continually stressed that the classics should not be treated as museum pieces—something to admire but not touch. He believed that the only way to make these plays meaningful for a modern audience was to chip away the thick encrustation of false tradition and find new interpretations that would be closer to the genuine intent of the authors. “A play,” he wrote, “is simply the excuse for the revelation of its theme on the level at which that revelation may appear vital today.”

For his interpretation of Griboyedov's comedy, Meyerhold decided to go back to the author's earliest plan, even changing the title to Griboyedov's original and more personal Woe to Wit.

An account of Apocalypsis cum figuris has long been overdue. It is total theatre, collectively created, no sooner thought through than orchestrated for the proper instruments, for the specific members of the company. It is the most mature fruit so far produced by the ascetic labors of the Wroclaw Theatre Laboratory. In any case, it is an event, one of more than local interest, and we don't get those every day of the week. It needs, therefore, to be recorded as accurately as possible before it slips out of focus. Fair enough, only how? Seldom does something so straightforward prove so baffling.

Ordinarily in describing a play we can always fall back on the script, on the lines and the plot. In Apocalypsis there are only the bare bones of a scenario. In the reading, the text is a haphazard jumble of quotations from the Bible, liturgical chants, Dostoevski, T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil.

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.

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.

A cave bear skull from the Upper Paleolithic is carefully positioned on a modified block in the Skull Chamber of Chauvet Cave. The Skull Chamber, as the culmination of a speleological parcours, has apparently been strategically modified in order to increase its performative potential — an early architectural attempt to reconfigure a space en route towards a theatre.