As Robert Wilson's theatre is more widely publicized, he is inadvertently developing a reputation as an experimental “therapist.” Several newspaper articles have pointed to his work with brain-damaged children in Texas, his early involvement with Headstart programs and his work with the aged and terminally ill at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Although this work was done many years ago, his reputation as a “therapist” continues to grow because of his continuing collaboration with Christopher Knowles, a brain-damaged youth, and, earlier, his work with Raymond Andrews, a deaf-mute. However, Wilson is not a therapist and does not consider himself one.

According to Webster, therapy is “a remedial treatment of bodily disorder” or “an agency (as treatment) designed or serving to bring about social adjustment.” If we accept this definition, then what Wilson has done is very different; in fact, almost the opposite.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre has often been described as a street theatre whose desire is to reach a popular audience. Often this has meant performing in streets, parks, and city ghettos, doing anti-war parades, setting up workshops in poor neighborhoods, or building puppets with children and getting them involved in the preparation of a show. However, along with these outdoor performances, they have always done indoor shows. There are obvious differences between a “chamber play” such as Fire, played in a specific area before a limited number of spectators, and a street piece like A Man Says Good-bye to His Mother: Although both plays have the same “subject” (the war in Vietnam), the first one conveys the story by the form itself—movements, sounds, colors, volumes, etc.—and it is, in a way, the spectator's job to “read” it through all the assembled elements.

Bunraku puppets are up to three feet tall. They are little men or women with mobile limbs, hands, and mouths; each puppet is moved by three visible men, who surround it, support it, accompany it. The master puppeteer controls the puppet's upper body and right arm; his face is uncovered, smooth, light, impassive, cold as “a white onion which has just been washed” (Basho). His two assistants are dressed in black; cloths cover their faces. One, gloved but with his thumb left uncovered, holds a large, stringed, scissors-like extension, with which he moves the puppet's left arm and hand; the other, crouching, supports the puppet's body and steadies its course. These men move along a shallow trench, which leaves their bodies visible. The scenery is behind them, as in the theatre. On a platform to one side are the musicians and narrators; their role is to express the text (the way one squeezes a fruit).

The film experience is not necessarily a single rectangle of light and shadow that flickers at one end of a darkened room. Call this “movies” or “cinema”—that archetypal dream world in which the spectator, seated in a near-foetal position, attempts to ignore the physical space, the other spectators, the projector's shifting beam, to concentrate on the images and the sounds that accompany them. Of course, the movies are a film experience—and a theatre experience—but the use of motion pictures is not so limited, and theatre is just beginning to realize the possibilities inherent in film.

For many years, motion pictures have been used as elements in staged drama—epic and “total” theatre, the “living newspaper,” etc. In 1941, Robert Edmund Jones foresaw “in the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture…a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself.”

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.

The performances usually begin for us in setting up the space on the previous night. The process is similar each time. We both approach it as a kind of ritual.

Come, come whoever you are,
An unbeliever, a fire-worshipper come.
Our convent is not of desperation.
Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times,
Come, come again.

On December 17, 1273 A.D., a universal genius, one of the greatest servants of humanity, the founder of the Mevlevi Sufi Brotherhood, the poet Mevlana Jalal al-din Rumi died at Konya. He was a philosopher and mystic of Islam, but not a Muslim of the orthodox type. His doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness and charity, awareness through love. To him and to his disciples all religions are more or less good, as all are roads leading to the truth. Looking with the same eye on Muslim, Jew and Christian alike, his peaceful and tolerant teaching has reached men of all sects and creeds.

Musical comedy seemed for so long to be nothing but noisily sexy entertainment for an off evening that it is difficult even yet to get anyone to give it a really serious thought. Sophisticated theatergoers who have a taste for it seem to feel they must apologize for that taste as a kind of secret unsophisticated vice—like catsup on French fries—which they somehow never have managed to outgrow. They note by way of justification that in the past fifteen years the orchestras are less brassy, the plots less farcical, the ballets more adult and integral parts of the story, that the lyrics are cleverly sophisticated, that the scores have some catchy tunes. But in so doing, they miss the outstanding development of the musical in the past fifteen years or so—the development of a twentieth century dramatic poetry, a lyricism which appeals to sophisticated and unsophisticated alike, a lyricism which seemed impossible to combine with the realism developed by the 1920’s.

Madeleine-Madelaine-Madeleine G.-Madame Madeleine-Madame Magdaleine—the many names under which the famous “sleep dancer” appeared early this century in Europe, only heightens the mystery surrounding her. We do not precisely know where she hails from nor do we know anything about her fate after closing out a strange dancing career of roughly one decade. She lived in Munich, but most certainly was not born there, and no information is available as to when and where her death occurred.

Two famous Munich painters—Fritz August von Kaulbach and Albert von Keller—made portraits of her on which she looks beautiful, even-faced, dark-haired, with extremely bushy eyebrows, protruding Jaws and a low nose bridge. In photographs she always wears a white wrap-around, with her eyes mostly closed.

Theatre, at mid-twentieth century, finds itself in a position of “change or die.” The rapid development of television and cinema have been to it what photography was to representational painting: they can do many of the same things better and more simply. The only means of survival clearly lies in making the very most of the unique quality of theatre—the relationship between a live audience and live performers.

Traditional theatre, with its reliance on “real” props and staging, contributes to audience-performer separation by constantly defining physical limits of size, scale, and distance. The theatre of the future will have to provide an environment which permits the spectator to do more than merely look. He should experience a direct and, as nearly as possible, total involvement, both individually and in relation to the actors.

“How does Brecht’s system differ from Stanislavski’s?” I have often heard this question asked, sometimes in exactly these words, and probably we shall all live to see the question appear in much this form on college examination papers. I recall, too, that as a young admirer of Brecht’s, nearly twenty years ago, I myself described an actor in one of his plays as having gone “beyond Stanislavski.” Will the acting profession soon be divided between Method actors and Brechtians?

Jacques Lecoq's significance exists in several areas. One is that of Actor Training, for through him run the ripples emanating from Jazques Copeau in the 20's. Long after its brief existence, Copeau's school and its influence operated seminally, as did the Bauhaus experience in architecture and other arts. Copeau affected theatre in Europe and America with his explorations into free, non-naturalistic forms demanding great technical skill in voice and body; he was the seed from which new forms of education and production are still springing. Lecoq came to his principles through playing in the company of Jean Dasté, who had worked with Copeau. It is interesting to note that the four famous French names associated with mime: Decroux, Marceau, Lecoq and Barrault, all stem from Copeau; yet it would be difficult to imagine four artists who differ more in their professional choices.

The last thing that I expected when I decided to direct a production of Endgame a few months ago was that I would become more and more impressed with it. I had seen Samuel Beckett's play when it was first acted in this country, at the Cherry Lane in New York, and I had come away with no desire to dance in the streets. The play seemed much less impressive than Waiting for Godot—too simple, too simple-minded even. I had been amused occasionally, moved not at all. The philosophical implications, implicit in the title, seemed neither startling nor particularly perceptive; the assumption that this is the worst of all possible worlds seems as silly as the bromide that it is the best, a point made sensibly by the creators of Candide a few years ago when they provided that Pangloss and the pessimistic Martin be played by the same actor.

At the beginning of Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer-Night's Dream the entire cast, caped like artists of the flying trapeze, stride to the crash of snare drums through the double doors of their canvas-white trapeze-hung set, smile professionally, mindful of later heights and daring, gesture a grand if impersonal welcome and are off into the wings and about their work. This Dream is to be a circus—that best of all dreams for children of a certain age.

The play begins. As at the circus the only color is the costume—the actor is boldly outlined against the white, looking at times like an oleo, at times like a Kate Greenaway illustration, at times Chinese. Musicians, prop men are visible at the sides, those actors not working look on from above with a professional interest.

It was clear from the start that Bernard Shaw was a man of ideas. Later it turned out that he was a fabulous entertainer. But few have granted that the two Shaws were one. The old tendency was to allow that he was a publicist, a critic, an essayist, even a philosopher but to add: “not of course a dramatist.” The later tendency was to concede that he was a great showman but to discount his thoughtful side. As Egon Friedell said, you could suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate.

Neither in the old days, then, nor in the later ones was Shaw considered a dramatist, for even the later generations have only thought him a master of the theatrical occasion, a man with a theatrical line of talk and a theatrical bag of tricks, a highly histrionic jokester—a comedian, certainly, but hardly a writer of serious comedy.

On March 14, 1920, Bertolt Brecht wrote to Doris Hasenfratz (Doris Manheim) that he had just returned to Munich at midday after a fifteen-hour train ride from Berlin and had gone directly to the cabaret Charivari where the comedian Karl Valentin was playing; Brecht sat “convulsed with laughter until 11 o'clock.” Bernhard Reich, a director closely associated with Brecht during the twenties, describes the fascination Brecht had with these performances: