The group, rather than the individual, is the typical focus of the alternative society, and this is reflected in the structure of the new theatre organizations, their manner of working, and their theatre pieces. The collective creation of theatre pieces has become the method of conceiving and developing works in the alternative theatre. Society has become increasingly specialized and competitive. This is reflected in an established theatre based on competition and a theatrical method that focuses on individual specialists, such as playwright, director, and star actor. In reaction to the fragmentation of the established society, which for many has become disorienting, the alternative society has sought wholeness. This is evident in many ways, including its focus on group living and group activities, and in its theatre, which is based on the cooperation of a creative collective.

Instead of the two-process method of the traditional theatre—a playwright writing a script in isolation and other artists staging it—the new theatre practices a one-process method, wherein the group itself develops the piece from initial conception to finished performance.

I would like to explain a few aspects of Peter Handke's plays, not from the critic's point of view, but from that of direct practical work. By way of introducing my credentials for this task, let me say that I directed the world premiere in West Germany of Offending the Audience in 1966 and subsequent world premieres up to and including The Ride Across Lake Constance.

For those unfamiliar with the German theatre scene, it can be stated that Handke's works are played today on stages all over the country. Their premieres are the highlights of the season. This has given the critic cause to reflect on the theatre in general and the phenomenon of Handke in particular. For some of Handke's plays are being performed in numbers similiar to the musical successes on Broadway, and his books and essays can be found at the top of best-seller lists. And then, too, his works are just beginning to reach the stages of other countries in Europe, not to mention America.

In Kaspar, Peter Handke's protagonist learns to master language only to become the victim of language: a man destroyed by his instrument of communication. “The last thought I had on Kaspar became the first thought to The Ride Across Lake Constance,” Handke wrote in his notes for the Berlin premiere of his last play. This thought was “to demonstrate the modes of human interchange in our society by means of precise observation.—The first attempts to define these observations were the plays My Foot My Tutor and Quodlibet, in which theatre forms appeared isolated from plots, so that these forms became poses and could become identical with poses in daily life: the representation of the theatre poses was, among other things, an attempt to present the modes of everyday behavior as poses, too.”

Joan Jonas uses video TV as an imagemaker and conjures herself. Working alone in the studio with the camera, the TV is her toy and her other. She plays with it and constitutes with it. As a form of play, the TV is a fixation. Fascinated by her image on the monitor, she locks into it. Playing with it, she explores the black and white image, relating it to objects and materials … her accumulated special effects. As a form of constituting, the TV supplies an other. The TV image is an opposite: oneself given back as an other. It suggests one who can become a series of identities, a complexity of associations, a series of images.

As she used it in the studio, the TV was a mediumistic device … a magic and an instructive tool. It allowed for exploration in privacy and for the making of a solo, video tape.

On the stage is a table with a folding chair behind it. On the table are a bottle of wine, a wine glass, a bell, a hammer, a book, chalk and a small blackboard propped up so that the spectators can see it. The long booms of three microphones angle down over the table.

Between the audience and the stage, three television monitors rest high on a board stretching between two ladders. The spectators may easily watch the television sets and any activity at the table at the same time. Close to the television sets, in the center of the hall, is a television camera aimed at the stage. Below it, technicians sit at video tape recorders.

A man—Robert Israel, who conceived the piece—enters the stage. He picks up the hammer; his image appears on the first television screen.

Women's theatre groups in the United States have developed during the last five years as a means of exploring and expressing women's identity, potentialities, and the nature of oppression. By dramatizing their conflicts and joys, the women in these groups seek to make other women feel good about being female and to experience outrage at what they consider to be the gross injustices in the relationship between the sexes.

Feminists began forming their own theatre groups because they felt stifled by male domination in both the traditional and experimental theatre worlds. The groups, most in the New York area, vary in performing style, intent and internal structure from the traditional mode of The New Feminist Theatre, a group with a well-defined leader, to the collective arrangement of the It's All Right to be Woman Theatre, where feminism is expressed through the structure of the group and theatre pieces.