First, acknowledge the talent of so many American actors. Why, then, is their acting so bad? Between talent and its expression on stage stands an Establishment which brutally uses its people, even while improving the theatre. Earlier still, the actor in training is confused and misled, over-worked and under-trained, frustrated and stunted. Training is so isolated, haphazard, and contradictory that it is hard to discuss it, almost impossible to evaluate it with anything but blanket condemnation. In no other profession is there so little agreement about standards and methods, so little active contact among those doing the work.

It is not unprecedented for street magicians to annex a given area of the city and make it their own. “The magician of the Chateau d'Eau,” who performed in Paris during the 1820's, could always be found in front of a certain fountain. The spot that Jeff Sheridan has chosen as his is the Walter Scott statue in Central Park.

Sheridan's form of conjuring is traditional but in many ways his execution of it is not. He works as minimally as possible, using few props, rejecting a costume for the simplicity of a black turtleneck sweater and trousers.

The production of the first German Expressionist play, Murderer, the Women's Hope (Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen), broke upon the staid Vienna art scene with the force of scandal in 1909. (Although Kokoschka is credited with having written and performed Murderer, The Women's Hope in 1907 and 1908, his own accounts of the improvised rehearsal for the July 4, 1909 production at the Kunstschau make it doubtful that an earlier script or production could have existed.) Oskar Kokoschka angered the public and most of the critics with his play, which they considered dangerous to the public morals and offensive to esthetics. Reviewers called him a “degenerate artist,” “bourgeoise-baiter (Bürgerschreck),” “corrupter of youth,” and “common criminal.” The savage attacks in the press caused, the Minister of Education to suggest that the twenty-two year old artist and teacher end his association with the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts.

The students and critics of Pirandello are almost unanimous in their assertions that a chief, if not the chief, contribution of his dramatic works lies in his reevaluation of the nature of man and his reassessment of conceptions of reality. Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, in his Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University in October of 1952 and later published under the title “Modernism” in the Modern Drama,: places Pirandello among the chief four or five modern dramatists and among the foremost contributors to modernism chiefly because his plays are centrally concerned with the “dissolution of the ego” and hence sets Pirandello centrally in that main stream of modern thought about the nature of man represented likewise by the novels of Proust and James Joyce, among others.

In the preface to his most famous theoretical essay, the Little Organon for the Theatre, Brecht in part retracted his early vituperations against aesthetics, which in the 1920's had led him to ask (as the title of an article of his goes): “Shouldn't we liquidate aesthetics?” With the growing maturity and complexity of his poetry and plays, the feedback from practice to theory which was a permanent feature of Brecht's work led him to recognize that those vituperations —which he never wholly abandoned —were directed at the bourgeois German aesthetics of his epoch, at “the heirlooms of a depraved and parasitic class” (SzT VII.8), and not at a philosophical and sociological discipline dealing with the pleasing and the beautiful (mainly in art), as such or as a whole. For, by the end of the 193O's, Brecht had in his lyrics and dramas, as well as in his theoretical writing, recognized that his own work was also pleasurable —if pleasure were no longer opposed to learning.

Much has been written about Brecht in this country, some—though not enough—of his theoretical writings have been translated, and most of his plays have been published in English. From all of this, people quite naturally get the idea that Brecht was primarily a poet and playwright. But, although this is true, in order to understand Brecht the playwright one ought to know Brecht as a man of practical theatre—as a director. Brecht's influence on the theatre of his time stems mainly from the productions he created at the Berliner Ensemble; Germany's theatre has changed totally since he did his exemplary work during the early and mid-fifties in East Berlin. The new movement in England— The Royal Court, Peter Brook and Peter Hall, Kenneth Tynan, to mention a few names only—would probably have been vastly different if the Berliner Ensemble had not presented his work in London in 1956, and again in the sixties, and Giorgio Strehler in Italy and Roger Planchon in France have been deeply influenced by what, and how, Brecht created in Berlin. Though Brecht had worked for the theatre nearly all his life, as a critic first, then as a playwright and director, it was not until 1949 that he found a permanent place for his experiments, a company, and later a building, which he could form into the ideal instrument for his ideas, a theatre which was a laboratory, a place for investigation, analysis, and construction of models.

There seem to be four major theatrical traditions in Southeast Asia: the Eastern, strongly influenced by Chinese theatre and found in the coastal region of Vietnam; the Southern, previously Hindu-Buddhist and now Moslem, covering parts of Indonesia and Malaysia; the Central, Hindu-Buddhist, found in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; and the Western, more strictly Buddhist than the Central tradition and found chiefly in Burma and Ceylon. The traditional theatres of the Southern, Central, and Western areas share many features: they are commonly nightlong performances, done outdoors on a temporary bamboo stage, accompanied by a mainly percussive orchestra; they use either live actors or puppets; and dialogue and action are usually improvised around Indian epics and religious stories.

Yet there are important differences even within the geographical areas. For example, in the South, shadow puppets are comparatively small, with articulated arms, and operated by a single puppeteer, or dalang. In the Central area, puppets are large, not articulated, and operated by a number of dancers; the dalang sits at the side of the screen narrating the story.

Neglect alone would be sufficient excuse for writing about Firmin Gémier. Remembered hazily as the creator of the role of King Ubu and as the founder of France's Théâtre National Populaire, Gémier remains for most of us only a name. There are reasons for this. The history of French theatre in the twentieth century lends itself easily to schematic ideas of “progress,” and Gémier refuses to fall in line. Our “march-of-theatre” allows Antoine to pass a torch to Lugné-Poe, followed by Copeau, the Cartel de Quatre, Barrault, Vilar.

The American stage has been called style-less. It has been criticized for not maturing realism but being trapped by it. And, of course, the blame has been laid at method's door. This is unfair. We can just as well blame our “cool” society for its inhibited, self-conscious exhibitionism. Method incorporates style, and sincere and creative use employs it richly. In movement this is precisely mime's concern.

If every actor could perform as a total performer, executing illusions that could create place, time and properties then we could free the stage from its constipated d6cor and reaffirm the essence of theatre—a vital human performing for a live audience.

Magic Theatre’s San Francisco production of Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady plays with theatrical time to stage a confrontation between the 19th-century American past and the Trump-era present.

A performance lasting ninety minutes, a language few of the audience can understand, a play more than 2,400 years old, and the immediate result—continuous applause for more than twenty minutes. This is a measure of the success of ancient tragedy in modern Greek translations and productions when on tour. In Greece itself, performances are frequently attended by audiences of twelve to fourteen thousand, most of whom have come from considerable distances, such as the 112 miles from Athens to Epidaurus.

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

Using “climate change” to name a recent, unnatural, and rapid process of warming that is the result of pollution conceals the causal order of events. Those who generate this semantic confusion are in the service of those who produce the global warming at the root of accelerated climate change. Theatre can pass judgment on them, as a virtual, possible, and probable Areopagus of our age.

The complexity of current ecological crises, such as climate change, calls for new modes of knowledge production. Common Dreams — Flotation School (2017) by the Portuguese, Brussels-based artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia is a construction site and a pedagogical prototype that challenges the linear transfer of knowledge in scientific research.