the open theatre [1963-1973]: looking back

The Open Theatre [1963-1973]: Looking BackAuthor(s): William Coco, Gordon Rogoff, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Joyce Aaron, SusanYankowitz, Paul Zimet, Richard Gilman and Joseph ChaikinSource: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1983), pp. 25-48Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245147 .

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THE OPEN THEATRE

[1963 - 1973]

LOOKING BACK

"It is to the actor and to no one else that the theatre belongs. When I say this, I do not mean, of course, the professional actor alone. I mean, first and foremost, the actor as poet."

-Max Reinhardt

The American experimental theatre companies of the 1960s astonished their audiences with an unpredictable blend of fresh theatrical discoveries. Committed as they were to unvarnished theatricality, they looted tradition and set about inventing a dramatic order of their own. The shows they created were bold democratic assemblages, drawing on improvisation, pop culture, and the circus sideshow, as much as from political agit-prop and the continental avant-garde. If the playwright was unseated for a time by these young and spirited adventures, it was most often in the service of a fresh dramatic synthesis of image and scene, founded upon the creativity of the actor. In company after company, it was the life on stage, and not so much the writer's part in it, which signaled the value of a theatrical enterprise.

The prophets of this decade of experimentation were, of course, Judith Malina and Julian Beck. It was their Living Theatre which inaugurated, in 1948, the New York experimental theatre prototype, staging modernist theatre intimately in their own apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and in spaces far downtown. With the bold creation of an independent theatrical institution, surviving along the margins of New York's theatre life, the company of Beck and Malina was emulating the loft performance idea and ideal that modern dancers had known for decades. Like the European symbolists before them, like Yeats, like the Provincetown Players, they all seemed to feel that it was within the boundaries of a smaller theatrical room that the flickerings of a new dramatic art might arise.

Among the actors of the Living Theatre, few stood out in the company as Joseph Chaikin did, beginning in 1959, with his engaged and sensuous performances in the plays of Gelber, Brecht, Pirandello, and others. Yet by vir- tue of his training and maybe even more by temperament, Chaikin grew restless within the Living Theatre, resigned and came back, and in his last year there he established his own study group to search for new styles of acting. Though deeply loyal to Beck and Malina, in the end his preoccupa- tions led him away from the company's rising interest in a dramaturgy of political confrontation.

In 1963, by the time the Living Theatre had bid farewell to America, Chaikin himself had taken final leave of the company and founded a loose collective that came to be known as the Open Theatre. Together with him in this new venture was a dedicated band of young actors, writers, and what we today call "dramaturgs," all dissatisfied with the commercial theatre and each willing to pay monthly dues for the maintenance of a communal workshop space. In the company of this ensemble, Chaikin now could independently set out for undiscovered territories of theatrical expression.

He began to elaborate a theatre vision that was open, radical, and had no Way-in an aesthetic, moral, even political sense. It was his credo that the deepest possibilities of the theatre were still unknown, and a new expressiveness could be liberated upon the stage through the creative in- tervention of the performer. The fragile life of acting even could suffuse the spirit of the dramatic text and challenge its claim to finality. Chaikin had played in the Pirandello dramas for which the Living Theatre was known, and the Open Theatre well might have taken for its motto the subtitle of Pirandello's play of Six Characters-"A Comedy in the Making." For the ensemble was to celebrate, perhaps more than any modern troupe in our time, the virtues of the work-in-progress, the commedia of life in the process of becoming itself.

So it was only after bringing his relationship with the Living Theatre to a close that Chaikin's imagination bore the mature fruit of his acting experience there. The turning point, it appears, had come with his undertaking to play the chief role in Brecht's Man's a Man for the Living Theatre in 1962. Chaikin discovered in Brecht's parable one of his finest parts, that of Galy Gay, the innocent dock worker who undergoes a metamorphosis onstage into a murderous soldier. Of even greater consequence, though, were Brecht's epic vision and its scenic rendering. They illuminated for Chaikin a dramatic strategy which was to become the heart and signature of the Open Theatre: the actor in transformation from one role to another-before the eyes of the audience.

Chaikin's vision of the centrality of the actor was to be supported with a new stage technique, based upon the idea of transformation, and forged by the Open Theatre in its vigorous experiments with exercises in acting,

breathing, voice, and open improvisation. Inspired and emancipated by these freewheeling investigations, the performer could begin to renew the wellsprings of acting and the expressive world of performance.

In its workshops and stagings over a lively decade, the Open Theatre navigated three channels or phases of life. In the beginning were the years of nearly pure discovery, in an abundance of workshops initiated by members of the group and by Chaikin himself. Here experimentation was polymorphous: questioning all the actor's resources; investigating new relations of performer-writer-and-audience; and experimenting with new ground rules for performance style. During this period of restless discovery, from 1963 to 1966, an audience for the Open Theatre's new work began to form. From the start, observers often attended the workshops, and the company went public from time to time, on Monday nights at the Sheridan Square Playhouse, at La Mama, and elsewhere. These venturesome and ex- uberant evenings presented the workshop discoveries as though in an experimental variety show, with as many as nine numbers making up a program of songs, poems, exercises, improvisations, and short plays by Eliot, Arden and D'Arcy, lonesco, and Brecht, along with those of the company writers Jean-Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry, Patricia Cooper, Sharon Thie, and Maria Irene Fornes. (Some of the short plays, by van Itallie, were per- formed in 1966 in a commercial production off-Broadway, as America Hur- rah.)

Next came the years of the ensemble's creation of a new type of collective theatre piece, each shaped by a single writer: Viet Rock, by Megan Terry (1966-also given off-Broadway); The Serpent, by Jean-Claude van Itallie (1968); and Terminal, by Susan Yankowitz (1969). In their elaboration of these central works, it was as though the group conspired to blend the disparate elements of the "variety" evenings of song and play and language into a single and larger fantasia, on themes of war, creation, death.

Once Terminal was made, the Open Theatre appeared to reach a third phase, signaled by the contraction of the group into a tighter and far smaller ensemble. Consolidating the discoveries of the "middle" years, this leaner theatrical body evolved a series of intimate chamber works, in the shape of a compressed Terminal, The Mutation Show (1971), and Nightwalk (1973). Then, in an astonishing move, after a celebrated decade, the Open Theatre chose to extinguish its light, to end its work. That, rather than to awaken transformed into something it never aspired to be, an institution, a success in the good old American way. In this, the closing of the Open Theatre was as daring as its foundation.

To commemorate-to celebrate-the beginnings of the Open Theatre twenty years ago, I asked several of its principal members to reflect upon

the significance of the Open Theatre, both as a theatrical venture and a chapter in their lives. Many of them have never spoken extensively about the nature of their contributions, and within the pages that follow are col- lected the personal reflections of this small group, representing performer, writer, and critical advisor-the roles the Open Theatre sought to renew. The concluding words are from Chaikin, bringing his theatrical investigations to the present. The result is a montage of views and reminiscence, ser- ving to remind us of the rich converging energies that made and sustained this singular American theatre.

William Coco

_3. -D

0 o 'JT

AN EARLY OPEN THEATRE WORKSHOP

GORDON ROGOFF

America really wasn't more fun in the early sixties, only more open. That loft in the West Twenties where the Open Theatre began its work was a sensible place to retreat from the spell cast over theatrical vocabulary by the witch- fathers of the Group Theatre and The Actors' Studio. Surely, righteous in- dignation need not be theonly guiding force in drama, mothers alwaysstand- ing bravely by their stoves as Mosaic daddies hurled titanic threats at the dreaming heads of easily abused sons. There must be something in play- making and acting that urges the imagination to look outside of the home. Where was the theatre that might dare to search for the theatrical equivalents of Mondrian's and Stravinsky's geometries? The wrong Rus- sians had been colonizing our lives long enough: time to find new shapes for life on stage, to declare freedom from acting as unlicensed therapy, to bring back the eloquent body, the unpredictable gesture, the resonant silence.

Not that anybody in the Open Theatre ever talked with such missionary zeal or in brutal comparisons and dangerous, clumsy analogies. The actors, as always, simply wanted to work. Once a week, however, they were encouraged by Joe Chaikin to join a discussion usually led by Richard Gilman or myself, or sometimes both of us together. Gilman talked frequently about painting and I referred usually to the contrast I could see between the actors' work with their fantasy, and the exercises I had watched for two years under Lee Strasberg's direction.

What a liberation-at least for me! Strasberg was a collector of classical recordings and books, spending $300 a week on records alone while rarely mentioning to his actors what he was finding in Mozart, Fischer-Dieskau or Berg. Chaikin, on the other hand, could barely contain his need to end sessions with music or especially to play the Walter-Lehmann-Melchior Walkure first act for the actors over and over again. Somehow they were ex- pected to make connections on their own, perhaps with a little help from me at the end of the week, but more likely, putting the other arts into those free- floating containers of impulse and inspiration they were being encouraged insistently to trust while doing their work. Years later, I learned from Robert Pasolli's A Book on the Open Theatre that Gilman and I had been viewed as "instructors in perspective," a dreadful codifying title that must have been invented to account for the strangeness of our presence. At the time, however, we really weren't part of a group aching to become an institution. Like the actors, we were just there to think, feel, make, and collaborate.

Years after the facts, I can't be certain that episodes such as Walkure happened as frequently as my memory would have it: what I recall, finally, is a time in which perspective was everything. I remember bringing friends such as Jean-Claude van Itallie and Gilman to observe this phenomenal grouping

of actors and a few would-be directors (some, such as Peter Feldman, as quietly inventive as any in the gathering); I remember meeting a gawky, loose-limbed eighteen-year-old playwright named Sam Shepard who had allegedly written 75 plays by then; and by 1966 when I had accepted, perhaps foolishly, an invitation to join Brustein at Yale, I recall the haunting presence of still another under-twenty-year-old named Robert Wilson who made me feel old by declaring his doubts about the work. The romance of good, hard, disinterested, intelligent, unpolitic, engaged, sensual rehearsal seemed to have come and gone so quickly.

All those exercises had been so much more suggestive and-yes- entertaining than anything being done in theatres those days. (These days, too, for that matter.) I knew, however, and said as much to Chaikin, that such a group could sustain itself only so long without an audience. But as I said it, I wished I hadn't. Those Monday evenings in Sheridan Square, even presenting a much better version of Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes than the British ever did, were obviously an invitation to wider presentation-theatrical production, in short, from whose bourne no traveler returns. So the Open Theatre, as we had known it, was doomed to succeed. Those productions, particularly works in collaboration with Megan Terry, van Itallie, and Susan Yankowitz, were undoubtedly worth the loss of the original romance. Yet: how to live with loss? That is always the question.

A group devoted to transformation exercises was surely right to transform itself into a producing unit of a sort. The Living Theatre is evidence enough that American actors can grow old comfortably together in America. Better to self-destruct on schedule as Chaikin always intended, admitting that behind all our early work was the lesson that actors, like people, don't have to hold tightly to anything. A fresh vocabulary had indeed been found and demonstrated. Unlike theatres that wanted only to be like other theatres, the Open Theatre wanted only to be itself. When that ceased to be possible, it quite wisely ceased to be. For a time, at least, there had been a peculiarly American theatre in a loft that gave a damn about art.

JEAN-CLAUDE VAN ITALLIE

It was in September of 1963 that I was taken to the Open Theatre loft by Gor- don Rogoff, who was teaching with Joe Chaikin at the New School. My first image of Joe is of him having trouble finding a key to the loft and going downstairs for it. He looked like a kid-I guess we all did-and I was amaz- ed that this "kid" was heading the group.

The walls of the loft were painted dark blue, very dramatic, which seemed to

make the actors stand out a lot. That first time I was fascinated by the acting exercises Joe was doing and I asked him, How do you make this into plays? And he said, That's the question I've been waiting for someone to ask me. And basically my work over the years as writer of the ensemble was to create structures for the exercises Joe was making. It also involved writing scripts out of the exercises for the first performances at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and other places, for which I also wrote short plays. Slowly, from this, I wrote more, structured more, in a progression that culminated five years later with The Serpent.

When I wrote, I never worked directly from the verbal improvisations of the actors. It is enough for actors to do what they are doing and not have to write on their feet too. I wrote from the emotional totality of the sounds and movements of the actors. It would be closer to the truth to say that the improvisations inspired the playwriting. I discovered that the most fruitful was what I call a honeycomb method. One sets up parameters or an architec- tural framework which divides time or space, within which the actors are free to do what they want. Then there is a gong or a moment or a signal to announce that the rules of the game are to start or change, and the actors are free again but in another way. There was an exercise in which we divid- ed the floor into different emotional areas and when an actor entered one of the emotional areas he or she would "emote" in the appropriate fashion.

Through these early years I continued to write my own plays and had a commercial success outside the Open Theatre with America Hurrah. Some people still like to think of it as an Open Theatre production, which it wasn't, though it did include one piece, "Interview," which was inspired by a speaking-in-unison exercise Joe had given the actors. After America Hurrah our work was no longer as if in a dark room-there was much publicity. Previous to America Hurrah the media would have cared less what we were doing. Afterward, we felt "watched," and this created a subtle pressure even in the work process. It was the reason we decided to open The Serpent in Rome rather than New York, and, of course, on the other hand, the publicity and interest was what made the European tour possible.

The Serpent was a dive back into a more exploratory world. It was particularly so for Joe, who had worked with actors for two months before I was brought in. They wanted to explore Genesis and had evolved a Garden of Eden-without words-for which each actor had created an animal, and they had found a way to speak for God. Not the words God would say, but a physical image of God's speech, in which one actor would hold another with both arms. Things such as these were established, very solid and in- teresting. I then structured this material, came up with words, and added more. There had been a Kennedy Workshop, run by me and Jacques Levy, and I added some of it to The Serpent. I also added some personal material-all the doctor stuff-which had to do with my mother in the hospital for an operation. In time, I decided there should be a chorus, and

Scenes from THE SERPENT

collaborated with the women to make one.

Once we had six or seven sections we felt worth keeping, I'd say, Let's structure these as a funeral. We'd do it that way for about two weeks and Joe then would say, The general structure isn't working. So we'd destroy it. I'd find another frame. This discouraging pattern was repeated again and again. One of Joe's fortes in collaboration is to knock down the carefully structured house of cards and suggest that we can make a better one.

It was a tough experience for me as a writer to work with the Open Theatre. I should imagine it difficult for any writer to work with any group, especially a writer who has his or her own ideas. Joe and the actors comprised the visi- ble arena of work from day to day, and there was the myth that everyone was equal, that the pieces were created by everybody. It may have been a necessary myth, to facilitate the actors' commitment to the material. Yet it was a myth. Joe was very much the head. I saw my role as that of taking this rich stuff that Joe and the actors were working on and fashioning of it a bridge to the audience. That's what words and structure are for, especially when words are used with great economy, which one had to learn to do because of the great distrust of words in the late 1960s.

What was especially good about the writer's situation in the Open Theatre was that everyone was carrying the same ball. If I would get discouraged about the vast, amorphous piece we were making, the actors might carry it for a while, or Joe would. We were all directing our attention upon something unnameable, finding forms for a common energy we perceived. They would do it through acting, I through writing, and sometimes we'd con- tribute to one another's areas. But this too had its difficulties. Sometimes I knew quite clearly what needed to be done in terms of structure or words. Then, to have to pass through a court of 18 people, for them to come to the same conclusion, demanded a great amount of patience. Of course, I did trust Joe very much about what was useful to include. If I had trusted him less, it would have been absolutely impossible.

It was not until we were sailing to Europe to give our initial performances that we actually sat down and worked out the order for The Serpent. I listed each section on a three-by-five card, and put them in what I called a "breathing" order, a contracted piece followed by an expansive one. When we showed it to the actors, some were appalled, even hysterical, that their favorite parts had been thrown out. When the Roman press reacted favorably, everyone's reservations vanished. The pressures of publicity, however, were felt. Gone were the days of complete egolessness. After 1966, the closer the Open Theatre-actors, director, writer-came to the moment the program was printed, the posters, the reviews-the more everyone became involved with billing and "credit."

After The Serpent I contributed in some measure to most of the later works,

but my role was a diminishing one. Once we returned from Europe with The Serpent, I spent the summer in the country with the Serpent script-a big mess of papers-and tried to arrange it so it could be published. I found ways of fashioning titles for scenes and making clear descriptions which would allow the piece to be done by others. Once I had finished it, it seemed to put a kind of bookend on things. No doubt I'm prejudiced, but I believe that the most creative time for the Open Theatre was from its beginnings through The Serpent. Without at all expecting it to, I think that The Serpent established a prototype from which all the subsequent Open Theatre pieces more or less followed, at least in terms of form. Even Chaikin's subsequent work with the Winter Project bears the clear marks of this ancestry, although the pieces seem more stylized and compressed. The publicity lavished upon America Hurrah and then on The Serpent led people to expect us to produce more, and I believe that's also what eventually induced Joe to initiate the disbanding of the company after ten years of experiment.

Today it is no longer important for me to make the distinction between "experimental" and any other kind of theatre-excellence is all, and rare enough. Each time I write I try to create a new form, but I want my plays to be accessible to people without having to struggle over it. My effort now, in playwriting, is to work toward being as directly human, articulate and funny as Chekhov, and at the same time I want to make use of a contemporary sense of time and space.

What kind of writer would I have been without the Open Theatre? I think I would have been more sure of myself, and perhaps less economical with words. I might have fallen on my face more times. I've always liked playing with form-so I doubt I would have been a more conventional playwright. Motel and War, my first staged play which is about two actors "improvising" in a loft, were both written before the Open Theatre happened.

Would I work with the Open Theatre if I had it to do again? Absolutely. We-and suddenly there was a "we," a family of individuals-knew we were doing something exciting and at the right moment. We were making theatre of poetry, politics, and our lives. When I was in college-1954 to '58-nothing much seemed to be happening in the arts or elsewhere. Then there were the beatniks, and after that, for a brief moment-1963 to '66-the ball of energy was with us, the theatre people in Greenwich Village. After that there were hippies, yippies, and then rock ... but for a moment we were working in the right place and in the right way-and I knew it, and it was a thrilling time in our lives.

JOYCE AARON

I was introduced to the Open Theatre by Richard Gilman, who felt I ought to see what this new theatre group was doing. I arrived after the initial period of months when the group was formed, and at first I only observed the work. Yet from the beginning I felt a connection with the improvisations which shaped the heart of the Open Theatre. I'd had training in improvisation at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner, but of a different kind. It was my two years with the Paper Bag Players that helped me to see what the Open Theatre was exploring. At the Paper Bag Players, I had worked with Remy Charlip, Judy Martin, Shirley Kaplan, and Sudie Bond, in a com- plex form of movement and gesture and text improvisation that was very different from my previous work, and this formed a bridge to my Open Theatre experience.

The Open Theatre people had come together out of a dissatisfaction with the theatre as it was. The commercial system was for us an impediment to creating theatre we could care about and be responsible for. So the richness of the Open Theatre was first of all one of spirit. It arose from a very pure questioning and a structuring out of an innocence-we searched for new forms of expression. Another source of that richness derived from the range of the talents of the people, the participants and observers, who carried this search with them into the workshops, where we found new ways to create and explore material. Jean-Claude might structure an exercise, Joe would then bring it to the actors, and we'd work on it. Sometimes there would be text, at other times we'd work up our own, and there were many exercises without words. We played with style changes, speaker changes, there were experiments with rhythm, playing conductor for the other actors, and finding new ways of relating to the audience.

At this point the Open Theatre was a constellation of independent workshops given at different times by many of the members. Joe would lead the one or two principal workshops given each week. There were no performances, only this pure research. At times, though, there were visitors or observers, sometimes as many as thirty of them, and it certainly made some of the sessions feel like performances.

When we did begin to perform the Monday evening programs at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and at La Mama, there was great joy and yet a reluctance in finally being viewed by people who had not been in on the process. We'd begin with a sound-and-movement exercise, maybe there would be a text by Jean-Claude, the airplane exercise, perhaps an improvised sketch, then we'd jump to an expectation or an unnoticed-action exercise, and then to something scripted. We'd always close with The Chord, with that full continuous sound coming from all of us as we stood in a circle with our arms around each other. We'd establish the order before going on-and

I'M REALLY HERE

by Jean-Claude van Itallie

Alix Jeffry

Joe would be in the light booth, bringing the lights down when he decided an improvisation was over.

These beginning years were very bold, very adventurous. Things started to grow more difficult by the time of Viet Rock and America Hurrah, for we were confronted with commercial success, and people began to expect things from us and we began to expect things from ourselves. Up to that point there were no stakes; people were there because they wanted to be there, to explore in an atmosphere that wasn't commercial, and where freedom was possible.

In the spring of 1967, some of us took America Hurrah to the Royal Court in London, and when we returned we all began to make The Serpent. There was a big shift at that point. The organization of things began to change. Many new members joined the Open Theatre. Grotowski exercises had been introduced, Kristin Linklater worked with our voices, Joseph Campbell came to talk about myth, Susan Sontag spoke to us about the different strands of narrative in Genesis. The workshop activity at that point became focused almost entirely on making the piece, and we worked long hours over a period of six to eight months.

The fact is that the whole story of the Open Theatre can never really be known. In the early period, before The Serpent, the diversity and multiplicity of the work make it impossible to chronicle a single history of what went on. It was a creative process very hard to explain. To a lesser extent this was also true with The Serpent. There's no question that Jean-Claude was responsible for the words and structure; these were his great contributions as writer for the ensemble. To develop the chorus of four women, for instance, he would take us aside-Shami Chaikin, Cynthia Harris, Lee Worley, and me-and we'd work together, talking and improvising. Yet who can recall all of the individual contributions-there we were, all working together on the stage, with things from one another and from outside too, with Joe orchestrating and editing it all. These were grueling and wonderful hours and months of exploring Genesis, the Cain and Abel story, the movement, the women, the sounds, the music.

After the European Serpent tour in the spring of 1968, we returned to New York to work on Terminal. Over the summer we all thought about the piece. The Terminal rehearsals ran through the winter, then we went to Europe with it and other pieces such as Brecht's Clown Play. For personal reasons, I had decided to stay in Europe after the tour, and I didn't come back to the U.S. for four years. During that time a second version of Terminal was created, with the group reduced from eighteen to about six; Mutation Show was made; and Nightwalk completed. After the Open Theatre disbanded, I returned to New York to perform in A Fable, which was the first piece made with many of the Open Theatre people, in an independent production, after the disbanding.

Soon after that Joe started the Winter Project and I worked in it for several seasons and through its first formal piece, Re-arrangements. The spirit of the work, though, seemed to me to have changed; yet I couldn't define the source of that change, whether it was within me or something from outside.

Joe's major contribution, his uniqueness, lies in his ability to galvanize people's creativity. His personal and wonderful obsession, which is to question all that is, transforms the atmosphere when you work with him, and the questions he brings up resonate in all that you do, finding an expression in voice and movement and text. This spirit remained with him in the Winter Project, but now there seemed to be a stillness surrounding it.

In the early Open Theatre there was an anticipation of great discovery. On the stage we had a community of people, whatever they were to one another privately. Each person in the ensemble was there for the other in the form of trust. The early days I am speaking about, including the experience of The Serpent and Terminal, were still filled with a sense of play and discovery. By the time I returned from Europe for A Fable and the Winter Project, however, the fame of the Open Theatre had grown and we sensed in the work, in our different ways, that now a great amount was "known."

Knowledge does become a part of you, and it became a part of the identity of the group.

My Open Theatre experience was invaluable and I continue to draw upon it. Joe's gift to me was that spirit of inquiry, and through it I became very con- scious of the actor as messenger. What is being expressed? What is being seen? There is a voice, an awareness I carry within me now, a kind of questioning based on an objectivity, a third eye, that provokes my deepest energies.

SUSAN YANKOWITZ

For better and for worse, my experience as a writer in the Open Theatre has shaped, tormented and illuminated my life as a playwright. This association was no marriage of convenience but a passion, for which most of us sacrificed, gladly sometimes and sometimes reluctantly, the usual rewards of work in the theatre: money, publicity, power. What we had instead was continuity, a sense that we were traveling together on a long, unexplored road, one which had many forks, pitfalls and beauties along the way, each of which (even the swamps) led some of us somewhere. For me, a writer in 1968 just finding her voice, and not a conventional voice, this environment, a large, raw loft that kept changing addresses, was a spiritual and artistic home.

CLOWN PLAY by Bertolt Brecht

Above all, what the Open Theatre's work fostered in me was a faith in the visual image as equal in importance to the word. I learned that actors, with a gesture or a movement, could often supply what an extended monologue couldn't. Silence, too, is a language, in which bodies speak. And speech itself, I came to understand, had properties independent of meaning: it was music, rhythm, patter, inflection, an element of theatrical style that sometimes accompanied, sometimes fought, and sometimes even replaced the words themselves. In this, my first experience in the theatre, I had what writers struggle all their lives to find: an almost ideal union (though not without battles) between the text and the production, among writer, director and actors. Whatever its miseries, this was a genuine collaboration.

Today, so many years after my work on Terminal with the Open Theatre, having written many plays and a novel, having confirmed my voice, I look backward with longing and some degree of bitterness that the path we were following did not become a major road, and that most of us, myself includ- ed, find ourselves fighting the pressures and venalities of the marketplace that we abhor. The few good environments for playwrights are hampered by hard financial realities, limited space, and, too often, a lack of courage. Not only individual talents in the theatre but the theatres themselves are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival these trying days. Despite the difficulties I faced as a writer-an outsider-in the Open Theatre, the com- promises I then made were always in the service of the artistic venture, not of the box office. Words or scenes were discarded, not because they might offend a middlebrow, middleclass, paying audience, but because we didn't judge them to communicate.

In all our projects, even in our most heated arguments, there was integrity, commitment, and a spirit of ardent inquiry. That was a working theatrical community in which I occupied a valued and valuable place; I could count on it; I could go to sleep at night in the security that when I awakened next morning I would still have that home. Now, each morning, or each month, or each year, I embark on a search, too often unrequited, for such a community. When I saw the Bunraku this winter, I thrilled to the form, so close in ideology to the Open Theatre: an ensemble, disciplined artists faceless in the background, devoted to the perfected play of those puppets. The star was the work. That is what I continue to want in my profession as a playwright: a balance of service and creation, a collective mission, a joy in process and in discovery.

PAUL ZIMET So much has happened since the Open Theatre, it seems like another lifetime. Luck brought me there. I'd studied at Harvard Medical School for a year and dropped out, knowing I had to come back to New York to do

theatre. I tried acting and directing, at the Judson Poets' Theatre and other places. Then Marcia Jean Kurtz, whom I'd known at the High School of Music and Art, told me of a new workshop Lee Worley was starting at the Open Theatre. The idea, as I recall, was to cultivate a new group of actors. Once I began working with Lee for that period of four or five months, I knew I'd found what I wanted to do.

From the members of Lee's workshop, Joe drew new people for the ensemble which was to begin making The Serpent. That's how I began. The Open Theatre formed me, for I had no strong background in a traditional theatre approach. What attracted me from the beginning was the autonomy an actor was allowed there. Even from the beginning we actors were functioning as "director" and "writer." In The Serpent, even more than in some of the later work, Joe would say take this section and work out the direction. The scene of the six-person serpent giving Eve the apple was done that way. Joe simply told me to take the group and work on the language of the over- lapping speeches. An actor had come up with the image of the serpent and a text was written. I'd work for a few days and Joe would come around to review what we'd arrived at. In all our pieces-especially so in the Winter Project series which Joe began after the Open Theatre-we'd go home and even write the speeches for our characters. In Nightwalk it was a matter not of writing, but more of finding texts to use.

It was the integrated creative process in The Serpent that made sense to me. Later, we did seem to become more specialized, with writing and directing handled by certain people, but even then it was assumed that actors were creating the works too, especially in the early phases. We took nine months each to create The Serpent and Terminal, three months for Nightwalk, and working with Joe in the Winter Project over the last decade we found we could put together a piece in a compressed six to eight weeks of rehearsal and creation. Joe works more quickly now, partly out of economics and partly out of experience. He is less afraid to say what he wants or doesn't.

The most valuable thing about Joe, then and today, is the kind of questioning he brings to the theatre, always asking: Is this worth doing? Why do theatre unless you can move people, shake them up? Is what you speak of worth talking about? Will it make a difference? These are fundamental questions to which I still return.

In addition to the inspiration and models the Open Theatre provided for the theatre company called the Talking Band, which I've directed since the Open Theatre ended, we wanted to deal far more intensively with text and language. Where Joe was dealing with a very lyrical and music-like structure in his pieces, we took as a challenge the bringing of the Open Theatre's vitality of non-linear presentation, into the telling of stories. We seem to have achieved that in our last few productions, combining a strong

physical, visual and musical presence, with the telling of a story. What I've admired in Kabuki is the way a given element is assigned the role of telling the story at different moments, now the music, now the actor, now the setting. Each has integrity and can carry the weight. That is our goal too.

Though we began with a poetry evening and then an oral epic-The Kalevala-the Talking Band is now experimenting with image and story. For instance, I thought of treating our current Hot Lunch Apostles as a Bur- roughs cut-up; but though I pulled back from that radical form, it's now a series of layered actions: a gospel thread of action, a strip-act, offstage and onstage at once, scenes played against one another. I learned from Joe the value of having more than one thing going on. The mind can take in a cluster of images in a single gestalt. Yet the focus must always be clear. In all this I'm fortunate to have a writer I trust, Sidney Goldfarb, who has worked with us for three years. In the Open Theatre, Joe was always a hidden writer of the pieces. By temperament, I guess, he felt he couldn't give the writer the same autonomy he gave the actors. His own vision and stamp were very strong.

Parallel with my theatre work in the ten years since the Open Theatre, I've been teaching acting in the theatre program at Princeton. I began by teaching what I'd learned with the Open Theatre. In a later phase I was interested in working with Shakespeare and the freedom of the Princeton program allowed me to do that. Now we are doing scene work, monologues, and stories. I usually teach a beginning acting course and I find much of the Open Theatre approach and what we've developed with the Talking Band seem very fundamental for any kind of acting. The physical and vocal work, linking one's imagination with the body and voice and breath. I return to these fundamentals all the time.

Scenes from TERMINAL

RICHARD GILMAN

I was introduced to the Open Theatre early in its existence by Gordon Rogoff, who told me about a new group whose work he suspected would interest me. It did indeed, and before long I found myself thoroughly involved in the enterprise. After a time Rogoff and I became full-fledged members of the company, being listed on the program as "advisors." This meant that we functioned roughly as what we would now call "dramaturgs," though the word and the activity were scarcely known in those days, in this country at least.

If I'd had to define my work and responsibilities on a job resume, it would have gone something like this: advised on plays the group might do or had decided to do; served as critical eye on the "experiments" being conducted in acting and, especially, in ensemble playing; gave informal talks on many aspects of dramatic and theatrical history, aesthetics, the philosophy of performance, etc.; contributed to the formulation and articulation of the Theatre's credo-what it eschewed (psychology, naturalism, the quotidian, the "culinary" in Brecht's usage) and what it aspired to ("myth," revelations of the unconscious, the submission of personality to art, spontaneity, vi- sionary force).

I learned as I "taught." I learned even more when I directed plays by Meg Terry and Irene Fornes for the Theatre. What was so exciting about those days in the loft on Spring Street was that nearly everybody in the group was without prejudice in regard to ideas about theatre and drama, unless you can call our rejection of conventional theatre a "bias." We were really rather like Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre (about which at the time none of us knew more than rumors) in that we kept testing things, seeing what worked and what didn't, making "stabs" (Brecht's versuche) into the possible nature of drama and performance.

For me, who had been almost wholly abstract and theoretic in my ap- proaches to the newness I wanted in theatre, working with the Open Theatre was a ground, an anchor in the physical; I felt myself implicated in living substances instead of notions. Or rather I became committed to trying out notions, moving constantly between theory and practice. We all did that, and I think it was what distinguished us from other groups, at that time and since, who simply wanted to do "good" plays or who had a special, usually ideological, concern. At the time, in those early years, we thought of ourselves in fact as a leading edge of theatrical revolution in New York, not smug or arrogant about it but carried by the elan that came from being new, adventurous and unfettered by congealed tradition.

As to the effect we had on others, our place in theatrical history, to be formal about it, I think it falls into two categories. On what might be called the

THE MUTATION SHOW

T I ,.

THE MUTATION SHOW .

THE MUTATION SHOW

RE-ARRANGEMENTS (Winter Project/The Other Theatre)

TOUR(STS AND REFUGEES (Winter Project/The Other Theatre)

technical or procedural level the Open Theatre did of course influence subsequent theatre in a number of ways: by its work on "transformations"; its ensemble ideal; the idea of creative reciprocity between playwrights and actors.

Perhaps more significant, although scarcely amenable to research, the Open Theatre was a source of morale for many. I remember how often people would say to me, after seeing one of the productions we began to do in late 1964 or after watching work in the loft, how excited they were by the things themselves, what they'd witnessed, but still more by the spirit behind it all, the enthusiasm, the zeal. And they were energized, too, by something else: a new or renewed sense of possibility.

JOSEPH CHAIKIN

It is possible to say that the Open Theatre emerged out of a confusion of the kind that accompanies any throwing up of values. There is a creative focus, a concentration, and an energy there, because in confusion one is no longer grounded in interpretations and conclusions. Sometimes the confusion arises from the very time we are in. The Open Theatre was a place to in- vestigate answers to questions which might arise from this state of turmoil. Things were not in place at that time, certainly it was not steady, but then steadiness is not something one can ask for too much of the time.

My work in the Open Theatre-and even since-has never been in a single direction, but I see it as a confrontation with some "live" questions that have to do with the theatre. These were brought up, dropped, and raised yet again. There was also a continuity of questions, for example, dynamic questions about the actor. Further, I sought to avoid fancy terms in acting-the ones we knew or ones we might invent-because I felt especially in acting there were jargon terms that tyrannized the work as one was doing it. It too easily becomes an abstract measuring stick: "Am I closer to or farther from the superobjective of my character?" What I most wanted from the Open Theatre was that it could be a place of discovery, breaking down, exploring, a place of re-perceiving-through the theatre, through images and breathings and pulses. It was a laboratory.

The Open Theatre ended and I got extremely sick and within a year I fell into a grave illness, with a slow and arduous recovery. In between illness and recovery I did a series of plays that I've always wanted to do, and I can't say even now why I wanted to do them: acting in Woyzeck (1976); and directing The Seagull (1975), a form of Electra (1976), The Dybbuk (1977, and at the Habima, 1980), Endgame (1980). I did know I wanted to be more intimate with Beckett, and Steve Kent and I created Texts (1981), an adaptation of Texts for Nothing and How It Is.

HOT LUNCH APOSTLES (The Talking Band)

I've never followed a single track. What I have pursued since the disbanding of the Open Theatre has taken the form of branches or strands of activity. One interest has to do with plays, the "written" theatre. There is another of making plays, as I did with Sam Shepard in Tongues and Savage/Love (1978-79), co-authored by the two of us. And there are crossovers. Though we put together our own script for Texts, working on Beckett's fiction was actually related to the "written" theatre. Another strand was political theatre, the most recent and strongest of which was made in the summer of 1982 in the Middle East with Palestinians and Jews, called Imagining the Other, staged in Israel.

Then through the years there has been a series of collaborative pieces with the Winter Project, which this year came to a close. Some of the pieces were good, some terrible, some wonderful. To a degree the seasons of the Winter Project extended the work of the Open Theatre, and some of the people in the Project were drawn from the Open Theatre, people I have worked with. Our experiments went beyond acting, into light and setting much more fully than we had during the Open Theatre days. Most of the pieces arose out of a theme or question-for instance, "homelessness" in Tourists and Refugees (1980-81). Some of this work unfortunately was suffocating, due to problems of funding and cutbacks, which gave us so little time and required our making pieces with a restricting timetable. So you see, I don't have a course. I go project to project on the basis of an intuitive or a political interest, and you may perceive in these strands a kind of continuity.

One of the things I've stressed a lot with the Winter Project workshops has to do with the expression of zones of human experience that in a sense are

out of fashion in our time but nevertheless are linked with a main artery of passion. There are what I have called "exiled" emotions that seem fundamental-mourning, for example, or even tenderness. In Chekhov, there are so many opportunities for tenderness and he is not equivocal about it, you don't meet it with suspicion in the characters. In contemporary plays, if someone is to express a genuine tenderness, we limit the emotion, and generally it must be assigned to a woman or a parent. Apart from these in- stances, the emotional factor of tenderness is ruled out. Or, take exultation: it must be related to religion or to a drug. But surely one doesn't necessarily need them to be enthralled or in rapture. These words are practically ar- chaic now, and they deny us experience.

I am still interested in questions of precise expressiveness: through the body, through the voice, the understanding, intuition, and intelligence of the actor. The more abstract the grammar in a performance, that is, the more distant it is from a naturalistic mode, the more it must be precise and clear. From the time of the Open Theatre through the Winter Project I have believed that the more you venture out, the more the expression must become strict, precise, or it will become obscure, arbitrary, esoteric, and too easy to do. Two things must be kept in motion: one must search for ways of giving testimony to living experience, and at the same time one must test for precision of expression.

William Coco is a Contributing Editor to PAJ.

the open theatre [1963-1973]: looking back

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