I obviously can have no special competence in the field of foreign policy. I only know what I read in the papers and the fact that I am a creative writer does not make my opinions either wiser or more persuasive than those of any other man. But it seems to me that there might be some good purpose in one of my profession expressing himself on this kind of problem. A certain awareness of attitudes outside our borders has been forced on me over the past ten years. My plays are regularly produced on the stages of Europe, Asia, Australia, and other areas. I have not traveled extensively abroad for some seven years now, but I do receive a steady mail from artists, producers, and audiences in foreign countries; there are visits and a steady correspondence with them and frequent newspaper reviews and articles concerning my work.

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

To get at the nature of farce we go back to beginnings, in either time or structure. Russian folk drama from the seventeenth into the twentieth century, for example, recapitulates much of what we know or infer about rude origins. Here, as Berkov remarks, necessity creates and fixes a manner. Out-of-door performance calls for exaggerated tones, sweeping gestures, loud singing and furious dancing, features which persist when public square and puppet stage, but not groundlings, are left behind. An impudent tone, imposed by the turbulent crowd, provokes performers into the picaresque asides, the jibes and the cheeky stepping out of role which, all the way down from remote beginnings in Attica to Hellzapoppin in New York, have raised their roars of laughter. Brutally enlarged, this is the way of folk game and folk tale, and should remind us, once for all, of the indissoluble bond by which farce is tied to folklore in general; and of what it owes to the point of view and the aesthetics of the folk.

Using “climate change” to name a recent, unnatural, and rapid process of warming that is the result of pollution conceals the causal order of events. Those who generate this semantic confusion are in the service of those who produce the global warming at the root of accelerated climate change. Theatre can pass judgment on them, as a virtual, possible, and probable Areopagus of our age.

The American stage has been called style-less. It has been criticized for not maturing realism but being trapped by it. And, of course, the blame has been laid at method's door. This is unfair. We can just as well blame our “cool” society for its inhibited, self-conscious exhibitionism. Method incorporates style, and sincere and creative use employs it richly. In movement this is precisely mime's concern.

If every actor could perform as a total performer, executing illusions that could create place, time and properties then we could free the stage from its constipated d6cor and reaffirm the essence of theatre—a vital human performing for a live audience.