The American Conservatory Theatre publishes the most elaborate programs in the Bay Area. In addition to credits for all 16 of the season's plays, the programs introduce us to “The Man behind the ACTion,” William Ball; to “The ACTion People” —other directors, design and production staff, training staff, acting company, and acting fellows. A brief history of the two-year-old company is included, as well as behind-the-scenes information on training, staging, and funding. Almost everyone connected with ACT, however remotely, can see his name in print —with the exception of those in ACT's publicity department. And that's a pity, because they may well be the busiest people of this very busy company.

One of the most amazing recent phenomena in our theatre is the discovery and gradual acceptance by audiences and critics of the plays of Beckett, lonesco, Adamov, Genet, and Ghelderode. With a prudishness that is just about par for the course, we tend to reject these plays and label their authors opprobiously as avant-garde. But somehow—in spite of our rejection—these plays keep reasserting themselves; they have a mysterious hold on our sensibilities. We find ourselves going to them, being moved or amused by them, and applauding them fully aware that we don't always know what they mean or what their authors intend. For all their seeming unintelligibility and simplicity, these plays possess a vitality we have missed, and more important, in their boldly experimental nature they are symptomatic of the unrest which prevails in the contemporary theatre. These playwrights want to “fix” the theatre, and their plays suggest ways that have been taken to revitalize it.

In the eighteenth century a theory of acting is formulated for the first time. We have just traced the development of the art form from its obscure origin up to its new maturation in connection with the appearance of the geniuses Shakespeare and Molière. The art is liberated from dilettantism; new relationships are developed with society on the one hand, and with literature on the other! The person who play-acts is first of all an amateur—and can become a dilettante—then a professional actor, and finally becomes an artist. If we must set a date for the complete transformation it is the year 1750. About this time two books appear in Paris, epoch-making for the theatre and consequently for the new style of acting.

A new play by Jean-Paul Sartre is always an important and controversial event. At fifty-five Sartre is for many, however prematurely, the “grand old man” of French letters. There are, however, others who see in Sartre the supreme nihilist who has failed of artistic achievement for lack of a unifying faith and there are even some who will go so far as to speak of charlatanism. Perhaps the kindest critical view is that held by many conscientious people who think of Sartre as essentially “negative,” a well-meaning but misled philosopher whose ideas have been swept away by the flux of history. They point out that the political world as it exists today is scarcely the place for the “engaged literature” of 1940-45 with its requirements of personal commitment and anonymous heroism. Young people in France are not reading Being and Nothingness.

The Piccolo Teatro of the city of Milan, now entering its seventeenth year, represents both the result of a historical movement for the renewal of the Italian theatre and an entirely new phenomenon whose methods and orientations have served as a model for many similar organizations. Historical precedents can be found in the sustained efforts of persons like Eduardo Boutet, Eleonora Duse, Luigi Pirandello, and Silvio D'Amico; it was they who encouraged the Italian theatre to organize in permanent companies and to improve its technical and aesthetic levels, thus putting it on a par with the theatres of leading foreign countries.

When the Piccolo Teatro began in 1947, the Italian theatre was characterized by two traditions: the star, and the traveling company. Throughout Europe the day of the great director (Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Copeau, etc.) had ended; but in Italy it had not yet begun.

Edinburgh is an impressive place to hold a festival: its center, where virtually all of the activities take place, is dominated by a sixteenth-century castle perched at the top of a steep craggy rock. From there the “Royal Mile,” consisting of a main artery, myriad picturesque alleys, and tall grey sandstone buildings, stretches to Holyrock Palace, the domicile of former Scottish kings. “Auld Reekie,” as this area is called, has a brooding quality to it, somewhat like the old city of Prague: One feels it should always be raining. The hilly geography extends to the southeast, where the legendary “Arthur's Seat,” described as a “volcanic eminence,” overlooks Holyrock Park and the rest of the city.

The facts are well enough known. On April 2, 1956, a new company began a term of management at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It called itself the English Stage Company, and announced its intentions of becoming a writer's theatre, playing new English plays and contemporary classics from abroad in repertory. This sounded brave and worthy, though enough similarly brave and worthy ventures had foundered in the years since the war for the few interested people to have no great confidence in the new company's survival. The first repertory season was to consist of five productions: first a play by the novelist Angus Wilson, The Mulberry Tree, which had already been tried out at Bristol, then the first British production of The Crucible, then Look Back in Anger, a new play by a young actor, then a double bill of poetic dramas about Don Juan by one of the company's directors, Ronald Duncan, and finally Nigel Dennis's adaptation of his novel Cards of Identity.

SAHOO: I am now sixty years old; I started dancing at the age of four. I belong to the tradition. My father and grandfather were dancers. I belong to the Kansari caste, which is engaged In the practice of these dances; its main vocation is the making of household utensils. My family also made works of art in gold and other material. In our country often a particular caste or community is involved in the practice of a particular craft or a form of dance and theatre. Arts are community based and family based. The techniques are passed from father to son, from one generation to the other. Since the transmission of the techniques is oral, this pattern works more effectively than any other.

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”

Every year during Easter Week, about 50,000 people gather in a tiny town in southern Poland to participate in an unusually realistic open-air reenactment of the major events in the last week of the life of Jesus Christ. These incidents are not portrayed on a single stage; instead, each takes place in front of one of a series of twenty-four chapels spread over a six-mile route that winds up and down gently sloped hills and weaves in and out of thick forests. Spectators and players walk together from chapel to chapel, singing appropriate songs that link scene to scene. As the crowds follow Jesus, they relive his experience with deep emotion, freely weeping, crying out against the Roman guards, and trying to touch Jesus’ robes as he walks the path to his death.

Ionesco is the closest thing we have to an abstract expressionist in the theatre. His plays are plainly autobiographical and confessional. “I try to project on stage an inner drama (incomprehensible even to myself) telling myself, nevertheless, that since the microcosm is the image of the macrocosm, it may happen that this torn up, disarticulated inner world is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions.” He discovers the astonishing in the banal, the unreal in the real, the new in the old, the fresh in the stale, and the archetype in the stereotype. His work is romantic and subjective, mirroring his own anguish and inner struggles, translating them into symbols and patterns that have been empathetically embraced by audiences throughout the world. But this empathy should not confuse us.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan is a system for activating the body for the simultaneous development of physical, emotional and mental well-being. It is useful for the actor because it promotes a heightened perceptivity, sensitive awareness and stamina. Since the exercise has no stylistic mannerisms, it enhances the ability to manipulate the body expressively for any desired effect.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan (pronounced Tye Gee Chwon) has a long history. Its roots go back into the Chou Dynasty (5th Century B.C.), when concern for physical and mental health was being expressed in a philosophy of movement. But the organized exercise of T’ai Chi as we know it today dates from the 12th Century.

The Ma'yong theatre of Malaysia, though little known outside the province of Kelantan where it once flourished, is a rare example of a court entertainment which changed into a popular performance within the relatively brief period of about fifty years. Ma'yong, now performed only two or three times a year by wives of rice farmers in the remote villages of Kelantan, carries little evidence of its court origins; however, the magical propitiatory function which seems to have been associated with it from the beginning is still recognized. Furthermore, Ma'yong is unique in that all the leading roles, both male and female, are taken by women, while only the parts of the servant-clowns, or peran (generally two in a given play), are played by men. This introduction to Ma'yong is based on a three-month expedition I made in 1968 to record this theatre and its music on video tape.

How much of a Naturalist was Strindberg? It is true that he first made international reputation as one, but a few years later he turned to symbolism and created the proto-expressionistic works that won him another and perhaps greater reputation. And though The Father and Miss Julie are generally regarded as masterpieces of Naturalism, Zola, the chief apostle of the movement, found fault with The Father; and Miss Julie is less naturalistic than the preface Strindberg affixed to it would indicate. Miss Julie is the play that most nearly satisfies the requirements of Zola's naturalism. Strindberg labelled The Father simply “a tragedy,” but he gave Miss Julie the subtitle “a naturalistic tragedy.” This subtitle and the play's greater attention to physical detail are probably due to Zola's criticism of The Father.

The title Room 106 refers to the large lecture hall on the seventh floor of Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, in which the piece was presented. Although the following description is intended partly as a guide for anyone wishing to recreate the work, the title and almost everything else in such a re-creation—the dialogue, the structure, possibly even the physical set-up —would change. As was indicated when such a re-creation was presented in Argentina, based only on a vocal description, the “integrity” of the piece lies not in the particular words and images used in the original performance, but in the concept and the manner in which the material is generated.

The analysis by Darko Suvin in regard to happenings (T47) has much in it of interest—but much also, I fear, which obfuscates the last few years of theatrical experiment, and which wrongly discredits the happenings tendency. Since Professor Suvin paid considerable attention to an article of mine on this topic in formulating his view, perhaps you will permit me to respond.

Foremostly, the Suvin piece smacks of remoteness from an adequate experience of happenings and related theatre pieces. To found this suspicion, one need not have picked up on the statement that his theorizing about this mode of theatre proceeded “basically from scenarios and descriptions” rather than from firsthand contact.