The now-expatriate Hungarian theatre company Squat performed a new work called The Skanzen Killers in January, 1972, in Kassak, a suburb of Budapest. After one performance at the town culture house, the group's license to perform was withdrawn by government authorities on the grounds that the play was “obscene” and “apt to be misinterpreted from a political point of view.” For the next four years Squat went underground.

Between the time of The Skanzen Killers and the group's problem-ridden emigration to France in 1976, the fifth floor apartment of Squat members Peter Halasz and Anna Koos in Kassak became an outlaw theatre. Here more than a dozen complete experimental theatre pieces were developed and presented in private performances for friends, theatre aficionados, artists in various fields, and political sympathizers. The group also performed privately in an unused country chapel and in a sand pit on an uninhabited island.

“Have you been to the Theatre on Chekhov Street?” was a question often heard in Moscow in the mid-seventies whenever people interested in theatre got together. Actually, to call it a “theatre” was something of an exaggeration. What it really amounted to was a room in one of those old communal apartments still left in the center of town, the kind that has a shared kitchen and bathroom, and sometimes as many as a half dozen doorbells outside the door. The brainchild of Igor Vasilyev, a young actor and director at the Moscow Art Theatre, the Chekhov Street group operated on and off for about seven years. (To my knowledge they have since disbanded, though not for the first time.)

In recent years, theatre groups such as Vasilyev's have been springing up like proverbial mushrooms after an autumn rain, especially in theatre-starved Moscow and Leningrad.

John Zorn founded the Theatre of Musical Optics in 1975. Since then he has developed two different types of concerts. In one he plays a musical instrument. As a saxophone player and composer, he appears regularly with a group of musicians working with “improvised music” or “music for improvisers.” In other concerts he performs alone in intimate situations using small objects visually as though they were musical “notes.” Though he has performed these shows with objects at Anthology Film Archives, the Collective for the Living Cinema and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, most of the work has taken place at his small studios on Lafayette Street and, more recently, on the Lower East Side.

Ten or twelve spectators attend each performance, and that is too many. The size of the audience is partly by choice, and partly it is forced by the size of the theatre, which is a small living room. The play is called I Misteri di Londra (London's Mysteries). A panorama of Victorian society written, prepared, animated, and interpreted by Guido Ceronetti and his wife, Erica Tedeschi, with the assistance of two young women from the neighboring apartment, it is performed by beautiful marionettes.

Guido Ceronetti is a writer and poet and a translator of ancient texts. In newspapers and periodicals, he is an ironic moralist who doesn't believe in progress and has a pessimistic vision of contemporary society. This is something that is not appreciated by the progressive Roman intelligentsia, who have marked Ceronetti as reactionary. Ceronetti, then, is an isolated and singular character in the Italian cultural field.

The invitation to see Bye Bye Blacksheep came privately. It was the summer of 1976 and Jamie Leo, then a member of Iowa Theatre Lab, invited me to view a short piece he had written and directed for actor Mark Bronnenberg. The performance was private, not in the sense of excluding the public, but in that the audience was limited to one observer.

The invitation came at the last moment—I was to be there in 20 minutes—an action that belied the elaborate timing and logistical complexity of the performance. I arrived at the large, old apartment house and waited in Jamie's living room until he came in, blindfolded me with a black silk scarf, and led me into the corridor. As he carefully guided me down the long passage, he gave me the following information and directions:

For many reasons in Roman theatres, both large and small, you always have to wait at least 20 minutes beyond the announced curtain time. These are vaguely anguishing waits, in which one is forced to stay in the company of strangers in foyers, corridors, and hallways that come to resemble doctors’ waiting rooms. One of these Beckett-like waits became an organic part of Itinerario-Corpo (“Body-Itinerary”), presented by the Teatro Autonomo di Roma from March through June, 1979, on the two upper floors of a private apartment building on Via degli Scialoia.

Via degli Scialoia is neither a street of theatres nor of artists, like Via Margutta, nor is it a loft area such as is found in New York City. It is one of a group of streets located north of Piazza del Popolo between the Tiber and the Villa Borghese park.

It is six o'clock on a spring day in rural Virginia. The year is 1938, and in a small C.C.C. camp located near Charlottesville the enrollees are just finishing their evening meal. (The C.C.C—Civilian Conservation Corps—was the relief agency created in 1933 to employ jobless young men on land and forest reclamation projects.) Talk of the day's work is interrupted by a large black automobile that roars to a stop in front of the mess hall.

A uniformed man jumps from the car, rushes into the hall, and, flashing a sheriff's badge, demands to see the camp commander. The two men move to a corner of the room where they engage in an animated conversation. Everyone else is silent, straining to hear what is being said. The consultation ends, and the sheriff pounds on the nearest table for attention.

“Theatre in the Corridor” was written, in Czech, in December 1939; that explains why the first paragraph sounds rather anachronistic. It has remained unpublished for nearly forty years.

This was my third attempt to write a theoretical paper, after “Man and Object in the Theatre,” published in 1940 (English translation in: Paul L. Garvin, ed., A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, Washington, D.C., 1964) and “Mácha's Conception of the World,” published the same year.

My approach followed the general theory of the Prague Linguistic Circle, focusing on the concepts of structure and sign. But I was much more influenced by the Prague School's poetics, linguistics, and general esthetics than by its sporadic studies about the theatre, which I found somewhat loose in their reasoning.

Some discussions of the semiotics of theatre limit themselves to one tradition of performance, while others use examples from different theatre traditions to illustrate their theories. Rarely, however, has there been an attempt to examine what occurs when a tale or element that is an integral part of one cultural code is translated into the performance code of another very different culture. An interesting example of this is John Emigh's production of Little Red Riding Shawl, which is presented within forms associated with the Balinese topeng tradition. (Although many productions of topeng use several actors, Emigh's performance is based on topeng pajegan [T82], the oldest form of topeng, where one actor plays all the roles in succession.) We will look at what modifications the topeng codes undergo in the course of the performance, what extratextual information is required of the audience, and how Emigh employs the various performance codes in order to convey messages on many different levels.

There is no question, in these few pages, of presenting methods of semiotic analysis applied to the theatre or even of completely describing a performance and its structural principles. Rather, beginning with some theoretical concepts and a montage of photographs we simply would like to develop some thoughts on a performance and its semiotic analysis and to try to find a middle ground between concrete description and abstract semiotic theory: an approach, therefore, determinedly practical and theoretical that could contribute to a new phase of theatrical semiotics. Following some indispensible epistomological reflections on the justification of an approach derived from linguistics and structuralism, and following the examination of general models of theatrical functioning, it is imperative that the facts and the hypotheses be verified by comparison with precise analyses and practical observations of theatrical production.

Between May 12,1664 and March 15,1669, there took place one of those battles of the theatre without the understanding of which it would be difficult to correctly evaluate the force of the theatre, its ability to adapt, and the limits of its evolution. The premiere of L'lmposteur—written by Molière who, after a none too easy career, was finally being spoiled by the muses and his king (without whom the contribution of the muses would have had less effect)—resulted in the banning of the play and a series of events that finally led to royal permission granting that a completed text be published and presented onstage, a permission under whose grace we still find ourselves. Between the possible premiere and the version considered acceptable, the text was changed several times, proposing even more variants for performance.