PUBLIC DOMAIN

by Richard Schechner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1968

How Broadway has changed since the ""daring"" plays of Tennessee W., the profound social dramas of A. Miller, and the critical hegemony of Brooks Atkinson and the Times! Now we have off Off-Broadway whirligigs of absurdity, dialectical noise, youthful wow! pam! eeh! (right now it is terribly chic to compare a truly revolutionary musical like Hair with the fuddy-duddy West Side Story), and Artaudian revivals of Euripides. The latter is the work of Richard Schechner (cf. his audience-involving production of The Bacchae, a resonant writhing bodies special known as Dionysus '69, who is also the editor of the militant TDR--The Drama Review, where most of the essays collected here first appeared). Schechner is a polemicist and a propagandist, but his particular brand of avant-garde or radical theatre is difficult to discern, partly because it is still in its formative stage (he would say ""fluid""), and partly because it is a theoretical collage. Here game theory, myth and ritual, Levis-Strauss and structural anthropology, Grotowski and the Polish Lab, Artaud and le theatre de la cruaute, early Cage and latter Happenings, Brecht and politics, ""environmental"" stagings, and whatever else is modish and ""contemporary"" meet in a colorful, clashing display. It is invigorating reading Professor Schechner. He is lively and erudite, and aside from an unfortunate closing piece, ""The Politics of Ecstasy,"" so close to self-parody, and foolish praise lavished on Megann Terry, not given to unsupported arguments. Still, in the end, one feels the absence of a genuine analysis of the current and, to some people, agonizing confrontation between the forces of experimentation and tradition, a lack also notable in a book somewhat similar to Schechner's, Herbert Blau's hurly-burly The Impossible Theatre. The are manifestos without direction.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION