Cherry Smash by Marjorie Strider was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on the 23rd and 24th of March, 1971. The spectators occupied temporary seats or sat on cushions on the floor at one side of a large display room; they faced the performance as they would have done in a proscenium theatre.

Close to the gallery wall at the rear of the performance space stood a white paper wall 40 feet wide. Seven feet high, the wall was seen to be divided by frame lines into eight rectangular segments.

Eight performers, wearing the simple, white belted “uniform” of karate, aligned themselves facing the audience at equal intervals in front of the segmented paper wall; two others, dressed in the same way, stood at the ends of the wall. These performers came from the S. Henry Cho Karate Center. On the harsh, shouted commands of their leader, the eight advanced toward the spectators, performing a sequence of karate blows and kicks in unison.

Mask plays, one principal form of traditional theatre in Korea, were developed during the late Yi dynasty (around the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) from a pure folk origin. Since the Confucian ruling class of the Yi dynasty ignored or tried to suppress all forms of theatrical entertainment, these plays have followed the tastes of popular audiences and thus reflect commoners’ resentment towards the privileged classes of those days. They were performed in the open air and usually lasted throughout the night. Among them the most representative forms still extant are the Yangju Pyol Sandae mask play and the Pongsan mask dance.

Mask plays consist of ten scenes or so, very loosely linked. All the characters—every Korean mask play has more than twenty—wear masks, which differ according to role: there are twenty-two masks in the Yangju Pyol Sandae and twenty-six in the Pongsan.

The performance area is a large rectangle set off by silver tape. The audience is arranged on three sides of the rectangle.

Throughout the performance a young girl holding a cane sits on a stage or a platform. She is “Antigone.” She does not move until Section Fifteen.

There should be spotlights focused on the performance rectangle and one dim spot on “Antigone.” Behind her should be a large screen for slideprojections. Everything else should be dark, and the lighting should be arranged in such a way that it will be possible to see the slide projections without turning off the lights.

All of the objects and props to be utilized are arranged within the rectangle. There are: Silver tape, incense sticks stuck into small lumps of clay, four full-length mirrors—the inside of the mounting is painted red so that when they are broken this becomes visible, but the backs are painted black—twelve wooden yardsticks, six pairs of nylon stockings, the I Ching, three gas masks, three stones, a hammer.

When European theatre was introduced to Japan, Kabuki (including its bastard offspring Shimpa—Kabuki-style modern theatre) was practically the only theatre there was, and it consequently became the referent for all theatrical endeavor. Kabuki actors and Kabuki language, Kabuki gestures and Kabuki notions—there was nothing else. When in the early 1920s Aoyama Sugisaku directed a play using the vernacular, he was met with praise from some quarters, contempt from others, but amazement from all. It was thus natural for Osanai Kaoru to see Kabuki as a vehicle for modern theatre. In a lecture delivered in Moscow, Osanai declared:

One recently published book on Kabuki is called Kabuki: The Popular Theatre. But today Kabuki supports its claim to popularity mainly with body counts: each year Kabuki audiences are six times larger than those for all modern theatre (Shingeki) productions combined. Kabuki's devotees claim that Kabuki audiences enjoy and appreciate what they see, while Shingeki's adherents are firmly convinced that they do not. Whatever the case, we can be sure that large numbers of people do not go spontaneously to a Kabuki theatre for a good night's entertainment, that Kabuki is not supported by revenue from individual ticket sales, and that the scions of Kabuki themselves are worried that their audiences do not understand what goes on onstage.

In 1969 Tokyo's National Theatre raised the price of tickets sold at the box office from 1,800 yen ($5.00) to 2,000 yen ($5.56) while at the same time giving considerable discounts, sometimes more than fifty percent, to package audiences.