Hector Rodriquez, at age thirteen, was considered a “hopeless incorrigible” by his teachers at a “600 School” for problem children in New York City. Rodriquez could not read or write, nor did he show the slightest inclination for mathematics or science. He spent his days playing hooky on Lower East Side street corners, or else he would go up to Times Square to hustle money.

Rodriquez seemed destined to lead the life of the hundreds of other players, pushers, pimps, and prostitutes that infest the Times Square area until he met Miguel Pinero, an award-winning Nuyorican (shorthand for New York and Puerto Rican) playwright—himself a former child of the barrio.

“My brother Louie and I were arguing, and this other dude comes up and punches me in the eye, and I start to cry, and this other dude comes up and says he's Miguel Pinero, and he buys us some hot chocolate and asks if I'd like to be in a play written by him, and I says ‘sure,’ and next thing you know I'm working onstage in Sideshow,” said Rodriquez.

The members of the People Show do not call their presentations “plays.” Nor do they consider themselves to be actors. A show does not begin with a script; there is little or no story or narrative. Between shows, the performers lead very separate lives, but they constantly collect material and ideas for new pieces. When they come together to create a new show, each person contributes his own ideas and helps decide on an over-all structure. They choose their own costumes and create their own characters.

The fact that they are all the “authors” of a show and that the characters they play are created from their own imaginations gives the People Show an unusual energy and freedom. Although the structure and images usually remain the same in each repetition, the performers are free to improvise and experiment, using each other, props, and other elements as cues and motifs.

I “discovered” Giraudoux in the late nineteen-twenties when his Siegfried impressed me as an intelligent contrivance. His comment on the evils of nationalism did not exactly startle me with originality or stir me with passion, but he had an engaging way of projecting a point of view. He was suave, aloof, and ironic while other European pacifist playwrights of the period usually sputtered with anguish and worked themselves up to expressionistic frenzies of protest. He was as articulate as they were inarticulate, and as urbane as they were hysterical. The Giraudoux of my first encounter was an exquisitely civilized writer. And in contriving a tale of amnesia and mistaken identities in consequence of which a French soldier became a German after World War I, Giraudoux was plainly a “fabulist.” His favorite strategy, that of inventing or adapting a fable or myth, was also already in evidence, although Siegfried had originally been a novel by Giraudoux.

Neglect alone would be sufficient excuse for writing about Firmin Gémier. Remembered hazily as the creator of the role of King Ubu and as the founder of France's Théâtre National Populaire, Gémier remains for most of us only a name. There are reasons for this. The history of French theatre in the twentieth century lends itself easily to schematic ideas of “progress,” and Gémier refuses to fall in line. Our “march-of-theatre” allows Antoine to pass a torch to Lugné-Poe, followed by Copeau, the Cartel de Quatre, Barrault, Vilar.

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

The American stage has been called style-less. It has been criticized for not maturing realism but being trapped by it. And, of course, the blame has been laid at method's door. This is unfair. We can just as well blame our “cool” society for its inhibited, self-conscious exhibitionism. Method incorporates style, and sincere and creative use employs it richly. In movement this is precisely mime's concern.

If every actor could perform as a total performer, executing illusions that could create place, time and properties then we could free the stage from its constipated d6cor and reaffirm the essence of theatre—a vital human performing for a live audience.

In Jean Genet's The Screens the revolt of the Algerian Arabs against their French colonizers is not characterized by the emancipation of human beings. Although the colonizers are described as oppressors inflated with their own power, the misery and the intolerable condition of the oppressed are not denounced in order to promote the liberation of the colonized people. On the contrary, these misfortunes are exalted so that the humiliated individual has the opportunity to make his misery the occasion for an inner experience based on the absolute contrast and conflict between his values and those of the Other—an unceasing contestation through which Saïd achieves a sovereignty which no action founded on the hope of a more just world could yield. For hope can take root only in this world, and the hope of claiming one's rights is lost in the desire to become the Other. The subjective, ascetic, and tragic experience of Saïd has indeed no political value.

Some time ago, some Europeans, libertarian individualists in the post-Medieval manner, robbed this continent from the natives. In the system of robbery they then set up, 80 percent or more of their children are now the daily victims, laboring for subsistence wages which in dollars are sometimes quite magnificent. Symbol-permutators & machine-operators, servicing, in a tight network of functions, a scientific machine which generates war materials & status symbols but in the main just its own growth, they crazily fancy themselves rough & ready free enterprisers out for themselves & their little families. They are employees. They eat shit. Their lives mean nothing. The machine binds them in enmity to themselves, one another, & nature.

A civil war which a century ago sealed these Euro-Americans into their present slavery also initiated the dispersal among them of an Afro-American population, the descendants of savages imported as chattel-slaves. At the bottom of the heap, they have maintained their primitive (communitarian & naturalist) life-stance to this day.

It is not unprecedented for street magicians to annex a given area of the city and make it their own. “The magician of the Chateau d'Eau,” who performed in Paris during the 1820's, could always be found in front of a certain fountain. The spot that Jeff Sheridan has chosen as his is the Walter Scott statue in Central Park.

Sheridan's form of conjuring is traditional but in many ways his execution of it is not. He works as minimally as possible, using few props, rejecting a costume for the simplicity of a black turtleneck sweater and trousers.

I obviously can have no special competence in the field of foreign policy. I only know what I read in the papers and the fact that I am a creative writer does not make my opinions either wiser or more persuasive than those of any other man. But it seems to me that there might be some good purpose in one of my profession expressing himself on this kind of problem. A certain awareness of attitudes outside our borders has been forced on me over the past ten years. My plays are regularly produced on the stages of Europe, Asia, Australia, and other areas. I have not traveled extensively abroad for some seven years now, but I do receive a steady mail from artists, producers, and audiences in foreign countries; there are visits and a steady correspondence with them and frequent newspaper reviews and articles concerning my work.

Once he has arrived on stage, he moves sparingly; his presence is enough to establish a vitality that other important actors strive for with nervous pacings and hand flurries and vocal hysterics and stares that hypnotize and exact tribute from the rest of the cast. It is not so much, I think, that Vilar scorns the habitual run of acting props as that he does not need them. He is of medium height, bony, black-haired and hollowcheeked, with hands that look large but are never obstructive. His voice is unusually deep and has a rasp; it is a long remove from the throatiness of Olivier and the calculated resonance of Lunt. When he speaks poetry it has the directness of prose. When he speaks prose it is punctuated with caesuras and emphases that give it the quality of verse. He is possibly the most ascetic and statuesque performer of our time.

The students and critics of Pirandello are almost unanimous in their assertions that a chief, if not the chief, contribution of his dramatic works lies in his reevaluation of the nature of man and his reassessment of conceptions of reality. Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, in his Messenger Lectures delivered at Cornell University in October of 1952 and later published under the title “Modernism” in the Modern Drama,: places Pirandello among the chief four or five modern dramatists and among the foremost contributors to modernism chiefly because his plays are centrally concerned with the “dissolution of the ego” and hence sets Pirandello centrally in that main stream of modern thought about the nature of man represented likewise by the novels of Proust and James Joyce, among others.

There seem to be four major theatrical traditions in Southeast Asia: the Eastern, strongly influenced by Chinese theatre and found in the coastal region of Vietnam; the Southern, previously Hindu-Buddhist and now Moslem, covering parts of Indonesia and Malaysia; the Central, Hindu-Buddhist, found in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; and the Western, more strictly Buddhist than the Central tradition and found chiefly in Burma and Ceylon. The traditional theatres of the Southern, Central, and Western areas share many features: they are commonly nightlong performances, done outdoors on a temporary bamboo stage, accompanied by a mainly percussive orchestra; they use either live actors or puppets; and dialogue and action are usually improvised around Indian epics and religious stories.

Yet there are important differences even within the geographical areas. For example, in the South, shadow puppets are comparatively small, with articulated arms, and operated by a single puppeteer, or dalang. In the Central area, puppets are large, not articulated, and operated by a number of dancers; the dalang sits at the side of the screen narrating the story.

Andy Warhol's Last Love, the first play made by Squat Theatre in the U.S.A., opened in their New York storefront theatre and home on West 23rd Street on June 2, 1978. Pig, Child, Fire! (T75), their previous production seen in New York, had been created largely in Holland, although one scene was originally done in their apartment in Budapest after they had been banned from performing in the theatre there. The new work of the group reflects their experience in New York. And, as in Pig, Child, Fire!, the spontaneous New York street events seen through the front window become an important part of the performance. In fact, two performances take place simultaneously—the one seen from inside by the paying audience and the one seen free by the spectators outside. The first section of Andy Warhol's Last Love takes place in a room on the second floor.

Lorenzaccio, published in 1834, was revised by Alfred de Musset for the 1853 edition. This final text is reproduced by Paul Dimoff in his La Genèse de Lorenzaccio (1936) together with those passages of Benedetto Varchi's Storia fiorentina which were used by Georges Sand for her Une conspiration en 1537 as well as by Musset, who amply availed himself not only of Varchi's chronicles but also of Sand's brief play.

The play has five acts, each of which is divided into six to eleven scenes. Very seldom do the individual scenes of any act occur in the same setting. This complete disregard for the unity of place produces the effect of a constantly changing panorama of early sixteenth-century Florence, wherein glimpses of the seemingly unrelated actions of a great number of characters gradually merge into an integrated impression which creates a mood, an atmosphere. The technique anticipates the more recent impressionistic concern for apparently fleeting or accidental phenomena.