The Theatre Of The Marvelous

Extract

When I was young and easy—not so long before we really reached for the absurd—and when theatre was all the thunder and hooves of the Old Vic or, if you chose, that something wild and psychotic in Stanislavski New York, I became involved in a very curious circumstance. It was then that the possibilities of a theatre of the marvelous dawned upon me.

I was working at the time as a social investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare. My clients were the mentally deteriorating, the physically disabled, old people left alone to die, frustrated and inept unwed mothers, and last, but not by any means the least, children: in other words, people representing that large segment of our population who do not know the theatre and to whom America, itself, is one huge stage show. Indeed, when I studied their case records which read like epics, I realized that nothing in our modern theatre would be inspirational to them.