Since the turn of the century, most art forms have vastly expanded their materials and scope. Totally abstract or non-objective painting and sculpture, unheard of in 1900, is practiced by many major artists today. Composers tend to discard traditional Western scales and harmonies, and atonal music is relatively common. Poetry has abandoned rhyme, meter, and syntax. Almost alone among the arts, theatre has lagged. But during the last few years there have been a number of performances that begin to bring theatre into some relation with the other arts. These works, as well as productions in other performance-oriented fields, force us to examine theatre in a new light and raise questions about the meaning of the word “theatre” itself.

In discussing this new theatre, new terms are needed. A few have already been provided by public usage, although they need clarification and standardization. Others will have to be created. Accurate nomenclature is important—not for the sake of limitation but to facilitate easy, accurate, and creative exchange among those concerned with the work and its concepts.

—And we?
—I beg your pardon?
—Where do we come in?
—Come in? On our hands and knees.
Samuel Beckett, playwright

According to statistics published in the New York Times and Fortune, more than $3 billion was spent last year on “everything from Bach and the Beatles to Shakespeare, Shaw, the opera … Peter, Paul, and Mary … Monet and Melville.” Consumer spending in the arts jumped 130% between 1953 and 1960—about “twice as fast as spending on all recreation and better than six times as fast as outlays for spectator sports.”

In Chicago during the summer of 1961, I offered part of a paper on “Dramatic Form and Human Motivation.” I began with the theory of classical form (as the arousing and fulfillment of expectations) which I had originally developed in Counter-Statement. Form as so conceived was reduced to three principles: progressive, repetitive, and conventional.

“Progressive” form was said to involve the use of situations which led the audience to anticipate or desire certain developments. “Repetitive” form involves the ways in which a work embodies a fixed character or identity, the ways in which a work, however disjunct, manifests some kinds of internal self-consistency. “Conventional” form (or “categorical expectancy”) involves the kinds of expectation which an audience brings to the theatre as an established institution.

The information contained in the following tables is only the rawest of raw material, to be approached with awesome cautiousness. They are by no means comparisons of theatres, since often the same figure will mean different things to different theatres. Salaries, for example, in one instance may include the pittance paid to non-Equity extras, in another there may be no non-Equity to pay. Foundation grants may throw box-office percentages off. A proper sorting job would have required a particularly active computor—and it is being done by the 20th Century Fund for publication next year.

The figures have been gathered bit by bit from all over. In every case they have been checked with the director or business manager of the theatre involved, but only with imagination, intuition, and a certain amount of brashness can they be interpreted.

Eat, an Environment by Allan Kaprow, was presented during the mornings and afternoons of the two last weekends in January, 1964. Prospective visitors made reservations through the Smolin Gallery and were given directions on getting to the caves in the Bronx in which the Environment was created. Only twenty reservations were made for each one-hour period in an attempt—almost always successful—to forestall overcrowding and keep free circulation in the space.

After entering an old building that fronted low cliffs, the visitor walked through several corridors and doorways and finally came to the Environment. The rock from which the caves were carved had been somewhat incompletely covered with white paint—the place had once been used by the Ebling Brewery—and age and seeping water had created a sense of decay. Black charred wooden beams stood propped against the walls in several places.

During the past ten years, a theatre modelled more on European patterns than on anything to be found in North America has arisen in Canada and has established itself in the principal cities—Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax—from coast to coast.

This European look is not surprising: of 11 Canadian Artistic Directors, five are European by birth, three are French-Canadians whose first influences in professional theatre came from France, and only three are English-speaking Canadians whose first experiences in theatre were “North American”—of these, one has been strongly influenced by observation of the English repertory system and a second by the work of the Berliner Ensemble; the third is a rugged individualist who runs Canada's only frankly profit-seeking producing organization. All the other theatres are non-profit organizations administered by professionals under the guidance of volunteer Community Boards of Governors.

In the prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the people of two collective farms in Soviet Georgia debate their respective titles to the ownership of a piece of land. It has belonged to one farm, but now the other claims to be able to make better use of it. Who should own anything! Should possession be nine-tenths of the law? Or should law and possession be open to review? That is the question Brecht raises. In the first draft of the play, the date of this bit of action was the Thirties. Later, Brecht shifted it to 1945 for two reasons: first, so that the land can be approached as a new problem, in that the farmers on it had all been ordered east at the approach of Hitler's armies; second, so that the farmers newly claiming it can have partially earned it by having fought as Partisans against the invader.