If one thinks historically about the theater, it is easy to see its conventions as reflections of the various ages through which it has passed.  The Athenians, for example, showed their theater to be an extension of the strong sense of community they had eveolved, by attending their plays like they were a legislative meeting.  It was a state ritual and, and arranged in tiers, the citizens stared down at tragic admonitions and comic harangues with the sense that half was pagent and half parliament.  It was very clearly they, the audience as a group joined by commmon custom and past, who were the subject of the action before them.

Similarly, the restiveness of the Elizabethan Age - its individualism, imagination, and perhaps above all, its love of good talk - shows up clearly in the way it went to its plays.  This was an audience of personalities who used the pit and galleries for everything from a meeting place for assignations to a platform from which the actors could be debated.  Whatever else a trip to Shakespeare's theater was, it was not a solmn occasion.  There was, to be sure, a community there, but it was a community of the marketplace rather than of the assembly, and bringing all of those disparate spirits together, getting, in the most basic sense, their attention, was the job of a theatrical style that had meyhem and murder at its core.  It seems that only the extremes and frenzies of existence could fasion something cohesive out of the Lords and groundlings at The Globe - or at least make them shut up long enough so that they might realize that something marvelous was being said.

Gradually, of course, the adience grew more managable until Voltaire, a playwright who needed all the quiet and concentration that he could get, banished it from the stage proper and established symbolically that aesthetic schism by which spectators and performers behave as though each is unaware of what the other is doing.  This was not a simple shift of convention but a very deep alteration in the way one was to experience the theater.  The audience was no longer to be wrestled with or brought to a sense of communal self-judgement.  Passive, sitting in darkness, silent with expectancy, it now was a collection of random voyeurs who could offer nothing to the drama but the most primitive responses.  Through the 19th century it swooned, wept, and ogled at the great stars in five-act romances and melodramas tailored to egomaniacle proportion.  The whole social situation of the theater was now something quite unreal, something that demanded greater and greater fantasy in order to sustain its unreality.  Occasionally, there would be an atavistic hoot from the gallery to unsettle the mood, but, for the most part, the audience yielded its right to a persona of its own for the luxury of being flabbergasted by thirty sets and an astounding profile.  Even when naturalism appeared and demanded that at least the most blatant part of the fantasy come to an end, it would not break down the separatist tradition.  Wanting to thrust its truth at the heart, it contented itself with the peep-show methods of melodrama, and considered the audience  still as something repressed and muted, somthing that could be easily bustled into a sob or laughter by the raw chunks of life thrown at it.

If I seem hard at this, the Victorian tradition of theater-going which is still with us, it is not that I don't realize that many fine playwrights have worked within it and, what is more miraculous, many good plays and productions have come out of it.  But I am also aware that if one sits down and thinks rationally about our customs in the theater and the manner of presentation that goes with them, one cannot help but be somewhat embarassed by their absurdity.  This gathering of cultural strangers, this docile acceptance of rules for the actor seen forty times previously be granted the right to huff about in front of us deep in his new "character" (in direct contradiction of the fact that he was immediatly recognized and applauded when he made his first enterance); this obligatoy adoptionof the ethics of invisibility which demands that we may not walk out to skip a boring part or call for something particularly fine or complex to be repeated; this tightly-planned emotional schedule with flamboyant scenes carefully spaced so that we may make some approving sounds to prove that we are, indeed, after all out there, somewhere, and are at approximately the emotional point worked out  - can this be an art form for any but idiots and will surrender not only their senses o the artist but their sense as well.

Most of us have been just such idiots and will remian so.  What seems ludicrous and impossible on reflecton, appears in practice in eluctably natural.  With all its intolerable demands and weaknesses, tradition does offer us an easy access to the occasional states of mind we need for the intense experience of life, and this tradition of theater has had, as I said, its successes.  I have been abusing it only so that it not seem so formidable, so that it not seem a necesary condition for a notion of theater.  I am doing this because there is an attitude at the moment - it is by no means so organized as to be called a movement - which is heading away from this species of thester toward something which, in the language of our times, might be termed a theater of confrontation, and while I am excited by its goals, I can seethat it will need all the help it can get.

This new direction has been germinating in cafes and in church and loft productions and Off Broadway during the last few years, has both the Theater of the Absurd and the Happening as its aesthetic antecedents.  However, what is uniquely its own is its style, the style of performing not for an audience, but at it.  By this I do not mean that the spectators are simply acknowledged for a preachment or invaded by the action of the play, or even that, as in Tom Paine, they are asked to participate in an informal dialogue with the actors on current events.  These are crude and simplistic devices which,at this atsge of the new style's evolution, are heavy-footed embarrassments to everyone.  What I am speaking about - and for the purposes of this review I am using as models Futz, Hair, and Tom Paine, all directed by Tom O'Horgan - is the fierce consciousness in all of these productions that every movement is indeed being watched and that the purpose of performance is to make that observation a self-conscious one.  This is to deny the individual in the sudience his private crescendo of understanding and feeling, even to mock them if they should occur; it is to comment on the play's action action with body positions that thrust the physicallity of the actors uncomfortably upon one: it is to perform not as one drowning in character involvement but as one who is aware that character is a weapon that can be used; it is, finally, to keep the actors as well as the audience out of their emotional petticoats and to force them to encounter each other naked.

Now, writing about the theater can do strange things to one, the least of which is to see mirages of great significance where there is in fact only a small water-hole of promise.  The plays that Tom O'Horgan has directed by no means blister the soul, and for all his feral ingenuity at physical movement and his actors lack of restraint, there are long stretches of time when the proceedings seem like a children's party where everyone is frantically being bad in order that some attention be paid him.  But it can neverthe less be said that these works did startle, did make one disquietingly apperceptive, and did make of the theater something more than a two-hour hiatus from social abrasions.  It must also be considered that our theater gives little of its resources to the experimenter, and, even if it did, it is apparent that what O'Horgan is striving for cannot be fully realized within the designs of stages that have been created for the very tradion he has been working against.  All three of his plays were put on in theaters planned with the disjunction of performer and audience as an archetectural principle, a principle which makes the engulfment of the viewer litterally impossible.  Until this almost axiomatic arrangement of the watcher and watched is broken down as much as possible - say, by scattered clusters of seats within a theater that is all stage - -the attack methos of O'Horgan will always seemuncertain and out of its true environment.  Comfortable habits are not easily shed, and no amount of confrontation will make an audience a creative force in the theater until its individuals are exposed without the safe retreat back into anonymity that the usual seating arrangement affords.  And, too, if this method is ever to be anything but a dramatic curio, the spectator must be allowed his attack too.  He must be more than the conditioned response response the theater has made of him, even if that response is now to be a contextural one.  He, too, must have his action, and the production must be conceived so as to ingest the the that action withotu turning into a shambles.  If he does not, if he is treated only as a prop, then one has not a confrontation but rather an awkward encounter that will produce little but feelings of superiority on both sides.

Finally, one must come to the plays themselves.  Whatever they will be, they cannot be so hermetically sealed as they have been in the past.  Futz and Tom Paine, for example, both use the narrative voice for much of the time, and this allows the company to act out in movement what is being recounted.  It is one way of setting up action as something meant to be observed and depicted, a way which fits in well with O'Horgan's intentions; but one hopes that something more salutary to the poetics of the theater can be joined to the new method.  Futz, which, so help me, manages to make a sentimental, moral tale out of the love of a man for his pig and his neighbors' hostility to this peculiarity, runs amuck in a lot of Ozark fustian until it can truly be said that the language gets in the way of the play itself.  And Tom Paine, which does well enough when it sticks to the words of its protagonist, dribbles away when its author takes to what I would call the language of cariacature in dealing with history.  Hair, which used the extended lyric form of popular music for  eighty per cent of the production, does less with it than some of the better writers in this style, and makes no attempt at anything that might be considered a coherent dramatic language.

In short, what I sensed in watching O'Horgan work was a style in search of a language that would not be overpowered by it, that could make its own confrontation.  Indeed, it would have to be a language of such force as to become in its individuality, color, and rhythm, part of the actor's very imagination so that, when he had to, he could use it creatively.  This of course, presupposes actors with much greater literary sympathy than we have at present.  Indeed, it presupposes the ultimate ensemblw theater of actor-writer.

I began by saying that one can tell a great deal about a period of history by the way it attended the theater.  Conversly, one can tell a great deal about the theater by the way its conventions meet those of its era.  In its great moments there has always been a connection; in its fallow periods there has been little.  We are at a moment when it seems to me that the entire notion of the theater experience could stand alteration before it becomes so completely alien to all that is vital in the world about it that it lapses irrevocably into the hands of antiquarians.  There is no way of telling if the glimpses of excitement I caught in these plays betoken an idea strong enough to grow into a way of presenting to us out time and ourselves in it.  But it did show, or at least occasioned one to imagine, how the theater might be encountered as a mad relative or a quarrelsome lover, as something almost dangerous and personal as a walk into one's own living room.  It did show, too, that we can at least think of a theater divested of its grand airs, a theater which we can talk to again.

Copyright Commentary.