In September of 1963 Gordon Rogoff, to whom I had shown a couple of my plays, suggested I come with him to a loft on 24th Street where a group of actors were working together improvisationally and were looking for playwrights to help them in some new fashion. The group was the Open Theatre, and had been in existence a few months. At that time there was nowhere, to my knowledge, that an unknown playwright with a few unconventional one-act plays could go to see his work performed sympathetically, to say nothing of a place to experiment with actors and directors.

I had just finished reading Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double. I had ideas about possible new relationships between action and audience, about plays for huge non-human figures (I had written one called America Hurrah) and plays involving improvisations (I had written one called War).