The thing about The Tart is that I wanted to be specific and unabstract. Most experimental theatre has been done by painters who think abstractly. But I was a musician in rebellion against my medium; I didn't come to Happenings from the visual arts. I felt that the painters were too elegant and iconoclastic. What was missing was danger. So I wrote The Tart to express a sociological concept through choreography. It was not successful; neither was it intended to be. As it has no psychological empathy, The Tart does not permit the audience to view it as a play or ballet. But my hope was that audiences would sympathize with the performers (not the characters) in their social contexts and that the lines would be more tragic than funny.

It is not an easy job to write about something which may not exist. Theatre? Does it still exist? And Italian theatre? Has it ever existed? Many people doubt it. Italian opera existed once, but what about Italian comedy and Italian drama? As far as I know, people have always spoken of them as being in crisis.

At times I try to find comfort in the thought that when something is in crisis, it probably exists. If I remember correctly, St. Anselm tried to prove the existence of God with a rather similar demonstration—but he succeeded only in proving that men desire God. So we might say that Italian theatre has been living for many centuries in mente italicorum, which does not mean that it has found its own reality in a living body of images, characters, stories, and styles. When we talk about it with foreigners, the conversation slides immediately to commedia dell'arte, to opera, and to neo-realistic movies.

As a sculptor, photographer, playwright and director, Michael Kirby has been and is still an articulate proponent of the interanimation of the arts. As a practitioner as well as a theoretician of several arts, he has made and defended work that not only mixes media but also transposes forms and preoccupations of one art to others. Kirby’s commitment to the lively cross-fertilization of the arts partially accounts for the rise of Structuralist Theatre since that movement, in certain respects, appears to have been influenced in important ways by the tendency of Minimalist Art referred to as systemic painting.

Some of Kirb’s Structuralist plays, like Revolutionary Dance and Identity Control, are composed of a series of dramatic, narrative vignettes that have no apparent causal or chronological relation. Kirby created his dramatic incidents as a painter might choose a color or shape, i.e., with an eye to its place in the overall formal structure.

The actions of Hamlet are all beginning and end, with no middle. The play takes place in the shadow of three events—the murder of King Hamlet, the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude, and the death of Polonius. The consequences of these events—the suffering of the wronged, the remorse of the wrongers, the extensive repercussions in subsequent events—are fully and inexorably worked out. Within this atmosphere of prolonged aftermath, numerous actions are begun, stopped, started again, stopped, and not generally brought to completion until the finale. It is these arrested actions which set the main rhythm of the play.

Okada is one of the most internationally produced contemporary Japanese playwrights. American directors approach his work both as uniquely Japanese and as a synecdoche for the world. The story of Okada’s web of institutional, professional, and personal relationships is an object lesson in the foreign assembly of international works.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre was established in New York in 1962 by Peter Schumann, with the idea that “the theatre should be as basic as bread.” Using masks and a variety of puppets as their basic theatrical tools, the group has created its own distinctly innovative performing style. Their presentations often combine religious themes with a political message, with the war in Vietnam a particularly persistent topic. The troupe has done a large amount of traveling outside of New York, performing at GI coffeehouses and at various political demonstrations in the United States and Europe. Their desire to reach a popular audience that does not usually go to the theatre has led them to perform in the streets, parks and ghettos of cities. Bread and Puppet has always been a poor theatre, with unpaid actors and little or no admission charge.

The transnational circulation of persistent racial types that are attached to Asian/American women have shaped Asian-focused narratives and roles on Broadway. The King and I (2015) and KPOP (2022) exemplify Asian/American women’s performative labor and the tensions embedded in and disruptive of the contested political arena of Broadway musical theatre.

The scenic experiment Silence of the World brought together indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and performer Andreia Duarte. The show deeply explored the perception of time in mythology as a space for reinventing the world and evoked the recognition of humans as just another planetary species alongside so-called nonhumans: animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and everything that exists. Silence of the World drew attention to indigenous peoples who connect with the living organism that is the planet.

Ionesco is the closest thing we have to an abstract expressionist in the theatre. His plays are plainly autobiographical and confessional. “I try to project on stage an inner drama (incomprehensible even to myself) telling myself, nevertheless, that since the microcosm is the image of the macrocosm, it may happen that this torn up, disarticulated inner world is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions.” He discovers the astonishing in the banal, the unreal in the real, the new in the old, the fresh in the stale, and the archetype in the stereotype. His work is romantic and subjective, mirroring his own anguish and inner struggles, translating them into symbols and patterns that have been empathetically embraced by audiences throughout the world. But this empathy should not confuse us.

When the Berliner Ensemble came to Paris to play Mother Courage for a second time in 1957, the photo-journalist Pic took pictures of the entire production with a telephoto lens. Thanks to this, we possess a true photographic history of Mother Courage, something quite novel, I believe, in theatre criticism—at least for France. This succession of about one hundred photographs dealing with a single play is not only very fine in itself (for Mother Courage is a fine story); it is also of great value for those who want to reflect on the theatre. For what the photographs reveal is precisely what was brought out by the production details. But the details are at the same time the meaning, and it is because Brecht's theatre is a theatre of meaning that its detail is so important.

How much of a Naturalist was Strindberg? It is true that he first made international reputation as one, but a few years later he turned to symbolism and created the proto-expressionistic works that won him another and perhaps greater reputation. And though The Father and Miss Julie are generally regarded as masterpieces of Naturalism, Zola, the chief apostle of the movement, found fault with The Father; and Miss Julie is less naturalistic than the preface Strindberg affixed to it would indicate. Miss Julie is the play that most nearly satisfies the requirements of Zola's naturalism. Strindberg labelled The Father simply “a tragedy,” but he gave Miss Julie the subtitle “a naturalistic tragedy.” This subtitle and the play's greater attention to physical detail are probably due to Zola's criticism of The Father.

Edinburgh is an impressive place to hold a festival: its center, where virtually all of the activities take place, is dominated by a sixteenth-century castle perched at the top of a steep craggy rock. From there the “Royal Mile,” consisting of a main artery, myriad picturesque alleys, and tall grey sandstone buildings, stretches to Holyrock Palace, the domicile of former Scottish kings. “Auld Reekie,” as this area is called, has a brooding quality to it, somewhat like the old city of Prague: One feels it should always be raining. The hilly geography extends to the southeast, where the legendary “Arthur's Seat,” described as a “volcanic eminence,” overlooks Holyrock Park and the rest of the city.

Thoughts come to my mind at any point, anywhere—I could be on the subway—and if I am alert enough and I have a pencil and paper, I write these messages that come. It might be just a thought, like a statement about something, an insight, or it could be a line of dialog. It could be something that someone says in my head.

I have a box filled with these scribbles. Some of them are on paper napkins or the backs of envelopes. These things are often the beginning of a play. Most of the lyrics of the songs that I write are based on these notes—as opposed to a play, which, once it starts, I make. I usually gather a number of those things that have some relation—again, I do not even know why I consider that they are related—and I put them together.

Dario Fo, Italy's foremost practitioner of AgitProp theatre, is one of the world's most versatile theatrical talents: actor, director, playwright, scene and costume designer, dancer, mime, mimic, and political clown. Because of his extensive use of mimicry, masks, and puppets, Fo's theatre is mistakenly characterized as stemming primarily from commedia dell'arte.But commedia satirized social stereotypes, whereas Fo's political satire (broad comedy and highly presentational), originated in the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the post-feudal age when the Italian peninsula experienced a burst of political freedom; jesters roamed the land with a repertoire of gags and skits celebrating the end of feudalism, and ridiculing the remaining feudal overlords and the Church. Performing in streets and market places, presenting comic routines consisting of simple language, mime arid mimicry, the feudal jester delighted the common people while awakening them to the tyranny of the nobility.