Until 1965, when Imamu Amiri Baraka and others founded The Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, there was not a black theatre but an “American theatre of Negro participation” (the phrase is Clayton Riley’s, I think). The Negro Digest’s commemoration of black theatre in a 1968 issue was titled “Black Theatre: From Shakespeare to LeRoi Jones.” It contained a photographic galaxy of the “stars” of black theatre: actors, actresses, and other performers predominated over playwrights and directors. The point, of course, is that the major playwrights, producers, and directors in this black theatre were white. In practically all the histories of black theatre (except Loften Mitchell’s Black Drama), one finds that the black actors and performers played merely supporting roles to the true white heroes of this black theatre.

In a review for Ms. (December 1973), the poet Yvonne contrasted the musical Raisin with Lorraine Hansberry's original play, in which the

Theatrical criticism, as we know it, is primitive and naive, arrogant, and immoral. We accept that this should be so because it always has been so. Mental and cultural inertia justifies nothing, however. Criticism should be changed.

There are two aspects to criticism: the passing of value judgments and analysis. It is the former that will be questioned here. Indeed, the word “criticism” will be used to refer specifically to the act of publishing statements of value. (One definition given by Webster is “a finding fault; censuring; disapproval.”) Thus, the evaluative and analytical functions will be considered as separate and distinct; “analysis” will be opposed to “criticism” rather than being included in it. In these terms, it is not merely a change that will be asked of criticism. Criticism as value judgment is a harmful anachronism and should be eliminated completely.

Where is your grave—
Or maybe even just a mound-
Vsevolod Emilyevich
Meyerhold?
Where can we put a monument?
There is no grave.
You cannot be frozen into a statue,
Like some docile teacher's pet.
You blaze
From the pedestals of the world stage,
Vsevolod Emilyevich
Meyerhold.

The 100th anniversary of Vsevolod Meyerhold's birth on February 9, 1874, was celebrated this year in the Soviet Union. The centennial celebrations honoring the great Russian theatre director began in January and continued well past the actual birth date. The recognition extended throughout the Soviet Union, including Leningrad, where Meyerhold began his career as director more than a decade before the Revolution. As a result of these celebrations, his rehabilitation is openly recognized now and his influence widely acknowledged.

Biomechanics was a system of actor-training that Meyerhold devised shortly after the Revolution. Although not always clearly understood, it received wide attention during the twenties and thirties due to Meyerhold's unique position as the foremost revolutionary avant-garde director. Curiously, Meyerhold's own conceptions about Biomechanics, which were almost unchanged throughout his career, appeared to be both grandiose and seemingly modest: While maintaining that the mastery of Biomechanics afforded the actor all the essential skills necessary for scenic movement—skills that would take the ordinary actor nearly a life-time to learn, he relegated his own class in Biomechanics at the Meyerhold Workshop to a status equal to that of the other studies in body movement that were taught there, such as acrobatics, modern dance, or eurhythmics.

Vsevolod Meyerhold first considered producing Alexandr Griboyedov's Woe from Wit in 1924, the year of its centennial, but because of other demands, he dropped his plans. Then following the premiere of The Inspector General in December 1926, again faced with a serious repertory crisis, he turned to Griboyedov's comedy once more.

Meyerhold continually stressed that the classics should not be treated as museum pieces—something to admire but not touch. He believed that the only way to make these plays meaningful for a modern audience was to chip away the thick encrustation of false tradition and find new interpretations that would be closer to the genuine intent of the authors. “A play,” he wrote, “is simply the excuse for the revelation of its theme on the level at which that revelation may appear vital today.”

For his interpretation of Griboyedov's comedy, Meyerhold decided to go back to the author's earliest plan, even changing the title to Griboyedov's original and more personal Woe to Wit.

One always begins with the desire to write a certain kind of sentence (to put on stage a certain “kind” of gesture. That “kind” then turns out to be about that-which-becomes-your-content).

The key, however, is in this sentence (gesture) cell. Most people don't see the cell, are perceptually unable to see small enough (ephemeralization). Because their LIFE training is that to “see small” means to enter the realm where contradictions are seen to be at the root of reality—and that disturbing realization they would avoid at all costs.

The desire to write a certain kind of sentence (gesture) is akin to the desire to live—be—have the world be in a certain kind of way. (Art as a solution to what is—Musil. Through style, through smallest possible units. Bricks determine one style of architecture, stone another, etc.)