My trip to Moscow in 1934 was a present from Sidney Kingsley, whose play, Men in White, I directed. He wanted to give me something because the play was such a success, and he asked my wife of that time, Paula Miller, what would be the best thing to give me. She said a trip to Russia.

For me, it was an unusual opportunity. I had seen the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and 1924. This was the beginning of my engagement with the practical problem of creative acting. I'd read a great deal, but until I met the people from the Moscow Art Theatre, some of whom remained in New York to open a laboratory theatre, I had little actual awareness of the training methods used at the Moscow Art Theatre.

“Since Gordon Craig, every artist of the theatre has tried every way conceivable to bridge the gap between audience and stage,” wrote Blanding Sloan, artist, scene designer, and Eastern Regional Director of the Federal Theatre Project, in 1939. “The Infinidome is the answer, and makes possible the ultimate in theatre production and creation.” It was to be, as he put it, “the last word in modern theatre design, and the first step toward the theatre of the future.”

From the beginning of Sloan's career, a radical approach to design was an integral part of his work. In an article in Theatre Arts in 1918, a critic wrote that Sloan's sets revealed “a structural sculpturesque sense of the play of light and the third dimension. Like the other stage artists to whom the unities of the drama are something felt, and not a merchant phrase, Mr. Sloan has searched in vain for a definition, a word, that will explain rationally and coldly what he can consummate irrationally and artistically.

The perception of space as primarily visual and “pure” enters man's consciousness as a fairly late development. In the Western world the transition from the multi-sensuous space of the nonliterate societies to the visual space of our recent past occurs with the geometry of Euclid. But the purely visual perceptions of Western history can no longer function as the only clues in perceiving a discontinuous and multileveled environment. High-speed, space-time, simultaneity, and the rise of the pervasive, ephemeral technologies of light and electronics have elevated acoustical values in our society. Auditory phenomena emerge in our culture as perceptual agents for defining space. Sound is existential: it connotes existence and the presence of activity, something going on. The depth and dimension of sound unite people as nothing else does.

The return of acoustical values to Western society should be a signal to practitioners of theatre to become aware of the audience's newly tuned-in acoustical perceptions.

When I watched some acting classes in Moscow in 1969, it soon became apparent that my conception of the Stanislavsky System (based on books and on the work in some New York studios) had little bearing on what I was actually seeing. This was a refreshing experience. I had reached a point in my own work at which I could no longer accept, at least without considerable modification, some of Stanislavsky's pet theories. I was agreeably surprised to find that the ideas I most objected to were either largely ignored in practice or interpreted in a way that I could agree with, and that the actual way of work was one I could admire and learn from.

The following account by Rima Shore of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty is based on her viewing of the performance in Moscow on January 7, 1973. The production was directed by Yuri Lyubimov. The small Dramatic Theatre on Taganka Square, where the performance was staged, was founded in 1946. A. K. Plotnikov, the Theatre's first director, retired in 1964 and was succeeded by Lyubimov, who at that time was teaching in the studio attached to the Vakhtangov Theatre.

The production of Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty has raised some debate in the European and American press. As part of this introduction we are reprinting excerpts from an article that appeared in the news columns of The New York Times and Yevtushenko's reply, which appeared in the Letters to the Editor section of that same newspaper.