The middle-class hero, product of Western culture, still dreams of seeing his moral sense triumphant over all rebellions. This mediocrity has a bête noire—free art. He thinks that he, personally, is being attacked by the transformations which young artists claim to be bringing into his life as well as to their own.

Some of the youngest wave of playwrights, who are not quite as young as they at times pretend to be, find fun in exploring and exploiting the fantasies that fed their parents—movies of the thirties and forties—an entire folk culture of false values—a set of malfunctioning myths rewoven into wildly comic metaphors.

How much of a Naturalist was Strindberg? It is true that he first made international reputation as one, but a few years later he turned to symbolism and created the proto-expressionistic works that won him another and perhaps greater reputation. And though The Father and Miss Julie are generally regarded as masterpieces of Naturalism, Zola, the chief apostle of the movement, found fault with The Father; and Miss Julie is less naturalistic than the preface Strindberg affixed to it would indicate. Miss Julie is the play that most nearly satisfies the requirements of Zola's naturalism. Strindberg labelled The Father simply “a tragedy,” but he gave Miss Julie the subtitle “a naturalistic tragedy.” This subtitle and the play's greater attention to physical detail are probably due to Zola's criticism of The Father.

People become myths overnight these days. It is worth looking at the elements of myth and truth in the matter of Tom O'Horgan, not just to save a soul or two, but because the truth in this case is much more interesting. O'Horgan, newly discovered if not newly made director of Hair, Futz, and Tom Paine, and (with England's Brook and Poland's Grotowski) a director who has got something there. But while Brook seems stuck (at least momentarily) in mannerisms and overused-effects, and Grotowski is busy turning theatre into a perpetual wailing wall, O'Horgan manages to make theatre a consistently colorful and often unabashedly joyful experience, with a vitality that even when spurious (which happens), is as catching as the common cold. He is unique, not in method or message, but in his uses of methods and messages: Ohorganism seems the only apt term for what he is doing and being, as none of the common labels quite covers the phenomenon.

Naturalism wasn't a label any of the early new-wave British dramatists would have chosen deliberately, but a shape for which they reached instinctively: it happened to meet many of the demands which they were beginning to make on the English theatre. It served as a convenient vehicle for direct social comment, as opposed—very much opposed—to that poeticism in symbolic drawing-rooms which delighted the cultural establishment, and which was being vaunted abroad by the British Council as a renaissance of verse drama. Eliot's high toryism was as much out-of-tune politically with the new dramatists as his sugar-coated cadences were stylistically ill-adapted to their themes. Conversely, naturalism was a time-honored form for the problem play, and well suited to the semi-autobiographical idiom in which the new-wavers tended to play with their problems.

Naturalism has its roots in a scientific approach which melds man inextricably to his environment, studying him as a complex amalgam of audible rhythms and spectacular mutations for survival. Chekhov, the passionate doctor, applied this discipline to the ailing conventional drama of his time.

This theatre has attracted little but unfavorable notice: it is slovenly, amateurish, silly, just boring; a put-on, really an actors’ lark; not art, certainly not serious art; a coterie occasion for a pariah in-group; by & for queers (not the nice kind, but drag queens & dykes & leather/motorbike/S&M hard trade); a display case for transvestites, pure camp, devoted to movie fetishism; anyhow just adolescent pornography; ritual enactment of an impotent humiliation of women (vicious, loveless); pointless, emotionally impactless, untheatrical; certainly devoid of social relevance; in sum, stupid & immoral.

The theatre of the ridiculous is an important theatre and theatre form.

I want to interpret here my impression of the theatre's theatrical impact, in the light of interviews with John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam, Mary Woronow & some written pieces of Ronald Tavel's & Jack Smith's—keeping Freud, Sartre, Artaud, de Sade, Genet, Warhol & la pataphysique out of it.

Peter Brook's “experiment,” as it became known, was originally launched by Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris in May, 1968, under the auspices of the Théâtre des Nations, and later performed in London. Barrault had invited Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company to organize a company of international artists—actors, directors, scenic designers (including Joe Chaikin, Victor Garcia, and Geoffrey Reeves)—to examine and experiment with some fundamental questions in form: what is theatre, what is a play, what is the relationship of the actor to audience, and what are the conditions which serve all of them best? As a frame of reference for this research, Brook decided to work on ideas from The Tempest. The play appealed to Brook because, according to him, it had always appeared on the stage as something sentimental and pallid.

A classic tends to age, disappear from active repertory, and then revive to meet the spiritual needs of a new audience, no less—and sometimes more—than do contemporary plays.

In recent years, Soviet theatre has increasingly produced the classics. Plays which not long ago saw little more than a dustrag have become the subject of violent debate, making new names for actors and directors.

Venerable academicians, learned literary scholars and theatre historians who have devoted their lives to the study of Russian classics react with divided feelings. They are pleased that their beloved plays once more meet the needs of the day, but are infuriated by what they see as the disrespect of the directors. Some of the older theatre-goers are also unsatisfied with contemporary interpretations of the classics.