In the casinos of Las Vegas the black-jack tables and roulette wheels stand silent from five to seven A.M. Slotmachines alone remain for the stragglers unconquered by night and fatigue. These slotmachines do not give their players even the illusion of control, for the game consists only of throwing in money and moving the metal arms. Fate is blind and completely encased in the mechanism. The player merely sets fate in motion, and fate in turn brings either a loss of the stake or its manifold increase. The slotmachines are closed structures: the player and the mechanism—no one and nothing beyond that. “Others” in this structure do not exist. No one stands between the player and fate. “God,” who arranges the mechanism, repairs it, takes out the money, is invisible. He doesn't exist, at least not for the player.

Peter Schumann's Fire(which I count among the finest plays I have seen), more than any play I have seen has the quality of prayer.

Prayer (for me) is a childhood memory, but I remember things like these: a peopling of death with human forms; a vague yet affecting sense of the scale of things; a notion of the preciousness of life, and of its vulnerability; a touch of fear, since fate is everywhere and has little to do with one's wishes.

I have tended to think of prayer under its aspects of supplication and faith. I am more impressed now by the rationality of prayer. To kneel, to bow one's head, and then to rise is to affirm, in a profoundly rational spirit, one's human place in a world only in small part human. If prayers are addressed to God or to gods they nevertheless signify to other men that we have arrived at some sort of outer limit.

The genesis of the play reveals some of the differences between Barba's work and Grotowski's, as well as Barba's special use of the resources of his Jutland province. It was the resident literary advisor of the Odin Teatret, Christian Ludvigsen, the Danish translator of Ionesco and Beckett, who suggested that Barba treat the subject of Euripides’ Alcestis, the sacrifice of a woman who agrees to die in place of her husband, the King of Pherai in Thessaly.

Cuba has had only ten years of revolution. It is a country still struggling to overcome a history of economic imperialism, social oppression, and hurricanes. Before 1959, Cuba was the world's leading supplier of dope and whores, and in Havana alone were the three most famous pornographic theatres in the world. By most standards, however, a Cuban culture, Cuban art, did not exist. (The one exception was the folk culture of the Afro-Cubans which is now flourishing and statesupported.) “Cuban theatre” consisted of a few professional groups in Havana who, by and large, did European imitations aimed at the tiny Cuban bourgeoisie.

Since 1959, the Cubans have developed an excellent professional theatre which is open to stylistic experiment; a large public which is much more honest than polite; and amateur theatre on all levels of society—in schools, factories, small towns, hospitals, cane-cutting brigades, youth brigades, the armed forces, etc.