The American Conservatory Theatre publishes the most elaborate programs in the Bay Area. In addition to credits for all 16 of the season's plays, the programs introduce us to “The Man behind the ACTion,” William Ball; to “The ACTion People” —other directors, design and production staff, training staff, acting company, and acting fellows. A brief history of the two-year-old company is included, as well as behind-the-scenes information on training, staging, and funding. Almost everyone connected with ACT, however remotely, can see his name in print —with the exception of those in ACT's publicity department. And that's a pity, because they may well be the busiest people of this very busy company.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan is a system for activating the body for the simultaneous development of physical, emotional and mental well-being. It is useful for the actor because it promotes a heightened perceptivity, sensitive awareness and stamina. Since the exercise has no stylistic mannerisms, it enhances the ability to manipulate the body expressively for any desired effect.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan (pronounced Tye Gee Chwon) has a long history. Its roots go back into the Chou Dynasty (5th Century B.C.), when concern for physical and mental health was being expressed in a philosophy of movement. But the organized exercise of T’ai Chi as we know it today dates from the 12th Century.

In the eighteenth century a theory of acting is formulated for the first time. We have just traced the development of the art form from its obscure origin up to its new maturation in connection with the appearance of the geniuses Shakespeare and Molière. The art is liberated from dilettantism; new relationships are developed with society on the one hand, and with literature on the other! The person who play-acts is first of all an amateur—and can become a dilettante—then a professional actor, and finally becomes an artist. If we must set a date for the complete transformation it is the year 1750. About this time two books appear in Paris, epoch-making for the theatre and consequently for the new style of acting.

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.

For some time now I have been trying to shrug off the hunch that contemporary audiences and dramatic critics have lost the art of seeing plays. Now this is a disturbing thought to anyone engaged in the practice of theatre. It is hard to work without some faith in the intelligence and appreciation of either critics or audiences. When you don't succeed in maintaining that faith to some degree, you feel anxious and guilty, and begin to get paranoic.

But “paranoia” occurs when imaginary dangers are identified as real; and although I am perfectly willing to regard my feelings as neurotic, I have also found that they seem to be widely shared in the profession. Something has happened to audiences and critics that fills the theatre with irritation. The mere mention of a critic's name in professional circles causes hackles to rise.

The facts are well enough known. On April 2, 1956, a new company began a term of management at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It called itself the English Stage Company, and announced its intentions of becoming a writer's theatre, playing new English plays and contemporary classics from abroad in repertory. This sounded brave and worthy, though enough similarly brave and worthy ventures had foundered in the years since the war for the few interested people to have no great confidence in the new company's survival. The first repertory season was to consist of five productions: first a play by the novelist Angus Wilson, The Mulberry Tree, which had already been tried out at Bristol, then the first British production of The Crucible, then Look Back in Anger, a new play by a young actor, then a double bill of poetic dramas about Don Juan by one of the company's directors, Ronald Duncan, and finally Nigel Dennis's adaptation of his novel Cards of Identity.

West German theatre, says critic Günther Rühle, is currently fraught with insecurity about where it is going and what its function is. That may be, but there's no question that the theatre has changed considerably over the past two decades and entered an as yet ill-defined post-Brechtian age. Gone are the productions of coolly staged parables, instructing the audience in how the world might be changed through rational, social action. Gone are the bright, evenly lit settings, sparsely furnished and purged of destructive atmosphere. And gone, too, is whatever bond once existed between the performers and the audience. That relationship, says Brecht Schüler Peter Palitzsch, is now “deeply disturbed.”

The German director has become the great interpreter, probing texts, usually the classics, searching for something that matters to contemporary man. The results of his dramaturgical investigations are subjective, fragmentary, and generally bewildering to an audience who hasn't accompanied him on his month- or year-long journey of discovery. His insights are not always theirs. Rich material imagery fills the stages, and it is personal, often violent, and tinged with expressionism. The Prince of Homburg stands naked in a field of potatoes as he is pardoned. The chorus in Antigone, consisting of a single contemporary woman, smears animal organs on her face as she speaks of Haemon's impending death. The actors in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale slip and slide around a stage decked with Mattel “Slime.” Vernunft (reason) has given way to Sinnlichkeit (sensuousness).

On the 20th of April 1922, having rehearsed with a scratch cast of actors for less than a week, Meyerhold mounted a production (his fifth version) of Ibsen's “Nora” (A Doll's House). The performance took place at the Actors’ Theatre in Moscow (formerly the “Nezlobin”) and the set consisted of old Nezlobin flats with their painted surfaces reversed, arranged in a fairly indiscriminate manner against the back and side walls of the stage.

A few days after this, on the 25th of April, this time with a fully trained cast of actors from his own Workshop, Meyerhold staged a production of the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck's lyric farce in three acts, The Magnificent Cuckold (Le Cocu Magnifique) with Constructivist decor by Liubov Popova.

It had been placed there by Aleister Crowley, occult magician, poet, and author of the advertised ceremonies. It was located directly at the end of an article that rapturously praised a preview of the Rites held during the past summer. The article was signed “P.”—certainly not the most inventive of Crowley's numerous pseudonyms, which included “Lord Boleskine,” “Oliver Haddo,” “Count Vladimir Svareff,” and his favorite, “The Beast.”

Crowley's predilection for fictive names was matched by his fascination with costume, whether it was the leopard-skin robe he wore as a Magician of the Golden Dawn, the black gown of the alchemist, the Headdress of Horus with the eye in the triangle, or, as “Baphomet,” full Masonic regalia. The theatrical urge in Crowley becomes apparent from whatever direction he is viewed. His early interest in the occult and its secret systems of knowledge was quickly focused on ritual magic. His poetry was soon elaborated into dense mystery plays. He even dramatized the personality conflicts between himself and others—William Butler Yeats, for one—by engaging them in “magical combat.”

The Rites of Eleusis occurred in Aleister Crowley's life at a point midway between a series of visions he had in North Africa in 1909, which revealed to him his true nature as a Magus, and his involvement with a secret society called the O.T.O. in 1912, from whom he learned the rudiments of the sex-magic that obsessed him for years. He was 35 years old at the time of the performances. The persecution by the press, which was to last until he died in i947, had not yet begun. He saw himself as the prophet of a new religion— Crowleyanity—and the Rites were to be his first great evangelization.

Every year during Easter Week, about 50,000 people gather in a tiny town in southern Poland to participate in an unusually realistic open-air reenactment of the major events in the last week of the life of Jesus Christ. These incidents are not portrayed on a single stage; instead, each takes place in front of one of a series of twenty-four chapels spread over a six-mile route that winds up and down gently sloped hills and weaves in and out of thick forests. Spectators and players walk together from chapel to chapel, singing appropriate songs that link scene to scene. As the crowds follow Jesus, they relive his experience with deep emotion, freely weeping, crying out against the Roman guards, and trying to touch Jesus’ robes as he walks the path to his death.

The title Room 106 refers to the large lecture hall on the seventh floor of Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, in which the piece was presented. Although the following description is intended partly as a guide for anyone wishing to recreate the work, the title and almost everything else in such a re-creation—the dialogue, the structure, possibly even the physical set-up —would change. As was indicated when such a re-creation was presented in Argentina, based only on a vocal description, the “integrity” of the piece lies not in the particular words and images used in the original performance, but in the concept and the manner in which the material is generated.

Whoever coined the expression “cultural explosion” to describe America's flirtation with the arts must have taken a decibel count first. For whether we are experiencing a true artistic renaissance, or, as the recent Twentieth Century Fund study suggests, merely witnessing a modest expansion of arts activity, one thing is certain—whatever is happening is not happening quietly.

When a community, an organization, or even a small group of individuals decides to build a new theatre or arts center, the announcements stream forth, press conferences are called, and words flow endlessly from mayors, civic leaders, businessmen, and occasionally from arts professionals. On December 11, 1966, for example, three lengthy articles about arts centers appeared in the New York Times.

A new play by Jean-Paul Sartre is always an important and controversial event. At fifty-five Sartre is for many, however prematurely, the “grand old man” of French letters. There are, however, others who see in Sartre the supreme nihilist who has failed of artistic achievement for lack of a unifying faith and there are even some who will go so far as to speak of charlatanism. Perhaps the kindest critical view is that held by many conscientious people who think of Sartre as essentially “negative,” a well-meaning but misled philosopher whose ideas have been swept away by the flux of history. They point out that the political world as it exists today is scarcely the place for the “engaged literature” of 1940-45 with its requirements of personal commitment and anonymous heroism. Young people in France are not reading Being and Nothingness.

The analysis by Darko Suvin in regard to happenings (T47) has much in it of interest—but much also, I fear, which obfuscates the last few years of theatrical experiment, and which wrongly discredits the happenings tendency. Since Professor Suvin paid considerable attention to an article of mine on this topic in formulating his view, perhaps you will permit me to respond.

Foremostly, the Suvin piece smacks of remoteness from an adequate experience of happenings and related theatre pieces. To found this suspicion, one need not have picked up on the statement that his theorizing about this mode of theatre proceeded “basically from scenarios and descriptions” rather than from firsthand contact.

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”