Holstebro is a Danish town which nourishes ambitions rather like those of an Italian Renaissance city-state, where the rise of bourgeois economics was accompanied by dreams of artistic splendor. The Scandinavian Welfare State seems uneasy; there is a kind of neurotic squeak in the well-oiled machinery of daily life. An ultramodern industrial center, Holstebro—perhaps as unconscious compensation for its wealth—now hopes to become a center for “culture.” The city fathers of this small provincial town have built one of the two largest stages in Denmark, “bought” a young composer of electronic music and commissioned him to create a laboratory of musical research; they subsidize a good amateur orchestra and plan to install a professional one; finally, they have given Eugenio Barba the means of creating a theatre lab on the model of Jerzy Grotowski's at Wrøclaw—Odin Teatret (Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium for Skuespillerkunst).

A man has a wife and a male child. He also has a male secretary. Between the wife and the secretary there arises what the husband considers an understanding of a harmless sort. He wants to help them in some way, but whenever he speaks to them they exchange a significant look that seems to ask how they should receive what he says if they are not to annoy him. But this itself annoys him. He ends up firing the secretary. Then he sends the wife after him. In the wife's view, he fairly throws her into the secretary's arms; and the pair set up house together. The husband, however, does not lose interest in the wife. His continued interest, indeed, though he considers it “pure” (that is: asexual) is a source of embarrassment to the former secretary.

The middle-class hero, product of Western culture, still dreams of seeing his moral sense triumphant over all rebellions. This mediocrity has a bête noire—free art. He thinks that he, personally, is being attacked by the transformations which young artists claim to be bringing into his life as well as to their own.

Some of the youngest wave of playwrights, who are not quite as young as they at times pretend to be, find fun in exploring and exploiting the fantasies that fed their parents—movies of the thirties and forties—an entire folk culture of false values—a set of malfunctioning myths rewoven into wildly comic metaphors.

This theatre has attracted little but unfavorable notice: it is slovenly, amateurish, silly, just boring; a put-on, really an actors’ lark; not art, certainly not serious art; a coterie occasion for a pariah in-group; by & for queers (not the nice kind, but drag queens & dykes & leather/motorbike/S&M hard trade); a display case for transvestites, pure camp, devoted to movie fetishism; anyhow just adolescent pornography; ritual enactment of an impotent humiliation of women (vicious, loveless); pointless, emotionally impactless, untheatrical; certainly devoid of social relevance; in sum, stupid & immoral.

The theatre of the ridiculous is an important theatre and theatre form.

I want to interpret here my impression of the theatre's theatrical impact, in the light of interviews with John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam, Mary Woronow & some written pieces of Ronald Tavel's & Jack Smith's—keeping Freud, Sartre, Artaud, de Sade, Genet, Warhol & la pataphysique out of it.

Clytaemnestra was murdered six days ago; the pyre on which her body burned is still warm. She murdered Agamemnon in the first year of the war; his tomb is some hundred yards from the palace, next to her tomb. Euripides’ Orestes begins at this moment. The war is over, at least onedirty and hateful war is over. Yesterday Menelaus disembarked in Nauplia and today, at dawn, Helen sneaked into the palace. “Home from Troy at last,” Menelaus says. “How happy I am to see this house once more.” I was astounded when, at the opening night of Orestes and at all following performances, the audience received this line, Menelaus’ first, with jeering laughter.

In his introduction to the translation, William Arrowsmith has underlined the most striking aspect of Orestes: in no other Greek plays, with the possible exception of Aristophanes, has anachronism as a method of political and artistic provocation been carried so far.

Late in 1960, soon after I came to New York to work in the theatre, I met my first disprized playwright, Jerome Max—26, largely self-educated, witty, poor, and unhappy. He had actually written something, unlike the neglected young novelists I had known, and when he finally allowed me to read his play, I thought it eccentric and very good. Max didn't think it was good at all, however, and he was full of pessimism about his prospects. But he was working on two new plays. When he finished them some months later and showed them to agents, producers, and directors, people started telling him that he was a good writer, and when a producer took an option on the new plays the point got through to him. Max took a leave from his job and lived on the option money.

“Myths” are experimental. The performers, members of the Dancers’ Workshop Co. and participants in Ann Halprin's Advanced Dance seminar, are unrehearsed. What unfolds is a spontaneous exploration of theatre ideas. “Myths” are meant to evoke our long buried and half forgotten selves. Each evening will explore a different relationship between the audience and performers, and between our awareness, our bodies, and our environments. The audience should not be bound by accustomed passivity, by static self images, or by restricted clothing. “Myths” are your myths. They are an experiment in mutual creation.

For 10 consecutive Thursdays, starting in October 1967, groups of about 50 people came to the Dancers’ Workshop studios in San Francisco. Most of them expected a “performance,” and instead found themselves “performers.” The Workshop had attempted to prepare the public by mailing the above announcement, but people were too pre-conditioned to understand what the release meant, and could only be convinced by the actual experience.