Pirandello's masterful dramatic technique stands in sharp contrast to the wariness of his thought and the relativism of the human truths he presents. Scepticism usually begets a certain amount of detachment toward human weaknesses. By and by weariness, disillusion, and contempt build a wall between the thinker and life. But human nature follows mysterious ways and the most cynical of men may feel an overwhelming desire to confide in other men and to pour out his disillusions, his defeats, and his philosophical conclusions.

My “Composition 1960 #9” consists of a straight line drawn on a piece of paper. It is to be performed and comes with no instructions. The night I met Jackson Mac Low we went down to my apartment and he read some of his poems for us. Later, when he was going to go home, he said he'd write out directions to get to his place so we could come and visit him sometime. He happened to pick up “Composition 1960 # 9 “ and said, “Can I write it here?” I said, “No, wait, that's a piece. Don't write on that.” He said, “Whadaya mean a piece? That's just a line.”

Recently, while touring with a New York road company, I performed at a number of universities across the country. I saw splendid, expensive facilities at schools which are doing little either to train students for theatre work or to nurture future audiences. And I saw ambitious and active departments making do with whatever was around when they began their programs years ago. There is little correlation between the money spent on theatre programs and the uses to which facilities are put.

At the South Bend Campus of Indiana University, where theatrical activity is limited and where few students attend what productions there are, our road company played in an exquisite theatre with a costly lighting system so complex that the head of the theatre department confessed he had difficulty making use of it.

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.

Comedy and its opposite lie in the same disposition of feeling, and they are inside the process which results from it. In its abnormality, this disposition is bitterly comical, the condition of a man who is always out of tune; of a man who is at the same time violin and bass; of a man for whom no thought can come to mind unless suddenly another one, its opposite and contrary, intervenes; of a man for whom any one reason for saying yes is at once joined by two or three others compelling him to say no, so that yes and no keep him suspended and perplexed for all his life; of a man who cannot let himself go in a feeling without suddenly realizing something inside which disturbs him, disarranges him, makes him angry….

It is commonly assumed by those who discuss the theatre's present economic difficulties that there were no serious problems before 1929, when the talkies and the stock market crash brought prosperity to a sudden halt.

Actually, activity on the road began to drop sharply about 1910 and in the mid-twenties reached a point not far above the present level. Though the fact is sometimes acknowledged, the decline of the road is rarely seen in relation to the later decline on Broadway. I suggest that we ask whether both might have been brought about by the same causes.

The question has not been asked because it appears to us in retrospect that the economy of Broadway was sound in the years when the road was declining.

A young man loves a woman and is not loved in return. What is more, he has a rival. In a costumed cavalcade, the rival causes the young man's horse to slip, and the young man falls, faints, and, when he comes to, is the victim of the delusion that he is the person whose costume he is wearing: the German Emperor Henry IV. His sister converts a villa into a replica of this Emperor's palace so that the young man can live on as Henry IV undisturbed. After twelve years, however, the delusion wears off. Our man, no longer so young, decides not to let anyone know it and to stay on as Emperor, though sane.

After eight more years, his sister dies. But she had visited him shortly before her death and gained the impression that he might now be curable. She tells her nephew this, and soon after her death he brings a psychiatrist to the villa to see what can be done.

During May 1963, the Smolin Gallery sponsored a month-long program of Happenings, Events, music, dance, chance theatre, etc. called the Yam Festival (“Yam” is “May” spelled backward). One of the many performances listed on the published calendar was The First and Second Wilderness, subtitled A Civil War Game. It was presented for one evening only—May 27.

When the spectator climbed four flights of stairs to the loft where the piece was being done, he found himself in a clean, freshly painted room about ninety feet long and twenty feet wide. Near the center of the space, the squares of a large game board had been laid out on the floor with tape. The usual rectangular grid pattern was extended by pyramids of squares at each end which ended in single squares marked “Washington” and “Richmond.” Blue and grey cardboard soldiers about two feet tall stood near the opposite ends of the board.

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.”

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.

I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne.
—W. B. Yeats

I began with an idea about a piece that had to do with the making of a theatre work, with itself as its own subject. It seemed to me that one of the first theatrical things is when the sun goes down, night falls the stars come out, and people imagine what the constellations are.

Out of this came The Night Time Sky, performed in May, 1965.

The audience arrive a few at a time and walk down a tunnel towards the place. They hear steel drum band music, crowd noises, and steamship whistles: boat-leaving sounds. At the end of the tunnel is a movie projected on a white cloth, of passenger liners leaving. As an audience member approaches this, his shadow is cast on the screen. His shadow is momentarily in the movie, participating in the boat leaving. All this is seen on both sides of the screen.

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.

… The drama of modern art and its public, Everyman after Hiroshima faced with the debris of Dubuffet, the chromatic tumors of Wols, the burlap canvasses, Burri's industrial red-lead on shards of sheet metal, the orchestral blasts of Nono, the “what cannot be said is better left unsaid” of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophy; a drama already dated, if it is true that the levelling-off of taste, the techniques of psycho-control, the establishment of the marketplace in the cultural sphere all threaten to deprive Everyman (and his artist) of any right to tragedy. In this respect Each In His Own Way can be presented, today, not at all as a manifesto of Pirandellism, but rather as nothing less than a lyrical consummation without a trace of discursive reasoning, a poetics that is poetry. For someone working in the theatre it has the same value as a page by Mallarmé on poetry would have for a poet.