In Chicago during the summer of 1961, I offered part of a paper on “Dramatic Form and Human Motivation.” I began with the theory of classical form (as the arousing and fulfillment of expectations) which I had originally developed in Counter-Statement. Form as so conceived was reduced to three principles: progressive, repetitive, and conventional.

“Progressive” form was said to involve the use of situations which led the audience to anticipate or desire certain developments. “Repetitive” form involves the ways in which a work embodies a fixed character or identity, the ways in which a work, however disjunct, manifests some kinds of internal self-consistency. “Conventional” form (or “categorical expectancy”) involves the kinds of expectation which an audience brings to the theatre as an established institution.

In the prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the people of two collective farms in Soviet Georgia debate their respective titles to the ownership of a piece of land. It has belonged to one farm, but now the other claims to be able to make better use of it. Who should own anything! Should possession be nine-tenths of the law? Or should law and possession be open to review? That is the question Brecht raises. In the first draft of the play, the date of this bit of action was the Thirties. Later, Brecht shifted it to 1945 for two reasons: first, so that the land can be approached as a new problem, in that the farmers on it had all been ordered east at the approach of Hitler's armies; second, so that the farmers newly claiming it can have partially earned it by having fought as Partisans against the invader.

That Tennessee Williams is presently in crisis probably goes without saying. There are reasons, however, why it should be said yet again; not the least of which is the need to name the crisis, place it, forget about it, and move on to more helpful abstractions. To name it, at least as it comes to us from the theatre page of the New York Times or the gossip columns of the New York Journal-American, all we have to ponder are those twin obsessions, money and sex.

The popular image of Williams is that of the Successful Playwright, man about many towns, suavely wearing a pencil moustache that seems to have been bought as an elegant accessory to his debonair tropical suit.

One of the persisting functions of art, even of iconoclastic art, is the restoration of morality. Art continues to find eloquence for our suffering, heraldry for our strife, lyricism for our passion. And one of its ways of doing this is by reminding us that while we exist in society, we are also participants in culture. Beyond the immediacies of our everyday lives, we have a kinship with generations.

If it can be said that certain times are better and others worse for art, then these times seem very bad indeed. Cultural exponents of contemporary society have been especially scarce. I have in mind the past twenty years. Picasso's Guernica, a bit of fiction, some poetry by Randall Jarrell are among the last works of art which managed to salvage any dignity from society's military impulses.

Freud defines theatre in America, and Che Guevara tells us what to do about it:

This society, our society—America, U.S.A.—is chock-full o'ennui. Distracted by superficial values, and without a sense of humanness, we let machines rule; it is easier to kill from a B-52 than to choke every Viet Cong.

The Living Theatre Company of New York has been playing Europe, in voluntary, self-imposed exile, since September, 1964. During this period, despite extreme physical and financial hardship, they have created and produced two astonishing new works, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces and a new version of Frankenstein, both of which have had an enormous impact on critics and large audiences in Europe. Both are remarkable in that they are the result of the collective authorship of an entire company working deliberately with the concepts of Artaud. Each has a freedom of movement, an imaginative inventiveness, and lyric qualities that transcend Artaud. Each has a unity of form and content, fusing the political and aesthetic directions in which the Living Theatre had been groping for many years.

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).

Off Off-Broadway is theatre without theatres, but it accounts for the most adventurous and promising work now being done in New York. Half a dozen plays or more, most of them by new playwrights, are produced every month on Off Off-Broadway's four principal stages. Many of the actors and directors are amateurs, students, or novices trying their wings; others are trained professionals who, finding few occasions to work and almost no chance to develop as artists within the professional theatre, are opting out of the system. They can—and sometimes do—work in the new regional theatres. But New York is still the center of the arts in America: someplace has to be.

Off Off-Broadway began as entertainment in coffee houses. The Caffe Cino was producing plays regularly as early as 1959, and various other Greenwich Village cafés had occasionally presented theatre to their customers.

Keep Tightly Closed began as an actors’ project of the Open Theatre. Three of them rehearsed it for about a month under the supervision of one of our actresses. The work stopped for the next month, because of a busy production schedule. At that point I was asked to direct the play, only two weeks and a few days before the scheduled opening, with one cast change necessary. The actors’ morale was low because of the delays, the time limitations (some of us had day-time jobs and could only rehearse at night), the problems which had not been solved. The preliminary work they had done was very useful, but necessarily limited.

I began by having the actors work on improvisations for basic character and situation. These were of an abstract nature, dealing with dependency, enclosure, and isolation, and they threw the actors off guard.