We did not want to create a play about New York (especially not about America); we have never wanted to create a play about something, because theatre is not about something but it is from something, it is itself; from a given place, from the social and personal forms of life. It is conceptual and existential at the same time. And it is In and From New York where one can come to speak.

Andy Warhol's Last Love, the first play made by Squat Theatre in the U.S.A., opened in their New York storefront theatre and home on West 23rd Street on June 2, 1978. Pig, Child, Fire! (T75), their previous production seen in New York, had been created largely in Holland, although one scene was originally done in their apartment in Budapest after they had been banned from performing in the theatre there. The new work of the group reflects their experience in New York. And, as in Pig, Child, Fire!, the spontaneous New York street events seen through the front window become an important part of the performance. In fact, two performances take place simultaneously—the one seen from inside by the paying audience and the one seen free by the spectators outside. The first section of Andy Warhol's Last Love takes place in a room on the second floor.

According to Squat, the downstairs stage of Andy Warhol's Last Love is Warhol's Factory: the place he used to manufacture his art-objects. And upstairs the Blue Room, where the first part of “Warhol” is staged, is the actual living space of Eva Buchmüller and Istvan Balint. The street is 23rd Street, a theatrical environment only by virtue of the casement glass window separating Factory from street. As in Pig, Child, Fire!,the street is used in the show both randomly and by careful design. Randomly as passersby (and a few regulars, or knowing ones, like me) stop to see the same movie those in the Factory are seeing (the screen is transparent) or crowd in around the glass door to glimpse Kathleen Kendel, the naked witch, being interviewed in the Factory by (a) Warhol (lookalike).

The number of methodological options available to the contemporary critic of any art is quite intimidating: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, etc. Of course, the situation is even more complicated than this list suggests because on the one hand, each of these headings can be subdivided into more specific, often warring, camps, while on the other hand, some of these headings can be conjoined by hyphens, generating newer positions, like Marxist-Psychoanalytic-Structuralism. You could devote an entire career to mastering all these methods without ever applying one of them.

In this essay, I don't want to invent another perspective. Instead I hope to clarify what I take to-be our ordinary approach to theatrical analysis when it is unaided by the explicitly formulated philosophical or scientific categories of schools of thought like Freudianism or Critical Theory. By divorcing criticism from these larger enterprises, I don't think it ceases to be a cognitive activity.

The group Mabou Mines is named after a small town in Nova Scotia. The members are Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, JoAnne Akalaitis, Frederick Neumann, William Raymond and Terry O'Reilly. The Shaggy Dog Animation is the third piece by Lee Breuer in a series of animation plays that began in early 1970 with The Red Horse Animation; The B. Beaver Animation followed some years later.

The term “animation” is used both in its original definition “to make alive,” as well as in relation to the animated cartoon. In The Shaggy Dog Animation, the actors come “alive” primarily through being hooked up to the sound system. This means that they are not controlling the final sound output. Volume, amplification and distortion are controlled by an Eden Harmonizer. Thus the actors can refrain from projecting their voices. The employment of a puppet manipulated by several actors is another example of “making alive.”

The first point of gay analytical guidelines is personal: Is that character gay? Is that character like me?

The second point is political: Is that a good way to represent me? How does that reflect on me?

The third is esthetic: Do I like being represented that way?

The fourth is psychological: Is what I am seeing the work of the oppressors, or the work of oppressed brothers and sisters; i.e., is this how they think?

The fifth is philosophical: Why do people represent other people that way? What does it do? Is it good or bad to represent people that way? In what way is it good and/or bad? How could it be improved?

There are at least two ways of approaching a literary work of art from the standpoint of psychology: first, by simply analyzing the characters through their words and actions as real people; and second, by treating the work as a dream turned inside out, in which each character is a facet, or refraction, of the dreamer's personality. The virtue of the second approach is that it objectifies the action to the degree that it is easier to treat the problem on a social rather than on an exclusively personal level. Outside of therapeutic analysis the aim of a psychological approach to art should not be to read the mind of the artist, but to read the work of art as a societal dream; not as personal pathology, but as social pathology.

The second approach is also more profitable in certain works that are manifestly dream-oriented on a societal level—such works, for example, as Faust II, Ibsen's late plays, Strindberg's expressionist works, and Albee's Tiny Alice.

What I am proposing here in relation to the The Shaggy Dog Animation is not, strictly speaking, a semiotic analysis. Rather, I would call it if the term was not even more intimidating, because it does not exist yet, trans-semiotic. Any other approach, including traditional semiotics, could make sense—lots of sense—but I am convinced that sense, good sense, normal neurotic sense, is precisely what Shaggy Dog is up against. So should I enforce conformity by means of an already existing theory or alter the approach itself in order to record the impact of a specific production? This obviously raises a somewhat ethical question about the function of criticism. Can we devise a battery of approaches independently of the pieces they are meant to elucidate? Is it advisable to try to establish a “library” of methods that could be used eventually by other critics no matter what type of production they might intend to study?

Alan Finneran, founder and director of SOON 3, comes from a visual-arts background, having studied sculpture and painting in Ann Arbor, where he also started The Third Incident Company. Since moving to San Francisco in 1973 by way of Boston—where he was a cofounder and director of Zone—his creations have progressed from gigantic, technologically complex structures that, ideally, required a gymnasium-sized performance space to small intimate pieces that only need a twenty-foot-square playing area. In the Cinemasculpture to be Performed, as he called the large-scale steel-and-plastic modular fabrications, Finneran tried to create a unique “hybrid performance form” synthesizing sculpture, film, and performance. Evolving from the cinemasculptures and retaining several connections, A Wall in Venice/3 Women/Wet Shadows represents Finneran's latest focus. The piece, hereafter referred to as “Venice,” was performed on April 28 and 29, 1978 at SOON 3's Dreamland Ballroom at 2678 California Street, San Francisco.

In September 1923, four months after the premiere of his provocative circus production of The Wiseman and three years before his recognition as Europe's foremost filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein collaborated with the writer and linguist Sergei Tretyakov in the preparation of two new revolutionary plays, Do You Hear, Moscow?! and Gas Masks. More than Nikolai Foregger and Meyerhold, more than all of his teachers, the twenty-five-year-old Eisenstein was now considered by many as the most radical director in a theatre-mad Moscow. His manifesto “Montage of Attractions” [LEF #1 May 1923] and extreme reworking of Alexander Ostrovsky's nineteenth-century comedy, Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman set theatrical circles on edge. [See T61 for a translation of the essay and a description of this production.] The young proponents of left-wing culture, centered around the poet Mayakovsky and the periodical LEF, hailed Eisenstein as the next intellectual/artistic savior.