To act means to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate. As Happenings demonstrated, not all performing is acting. Although acting was sometimes used, the performers in Happenings generally tended to ʺbeʺ nobody or nothing other than themselves; nor did they represent or pretend to be in, a time or place different from that of the spectator. They walked, ran, said words, sang, washed dishes, swept, operated machines and stage devices, and so forth, but they did not feign or impersonate.

In most cases, acting and not-acting are relatively easy to recognize and identify. In a performance, we usually know...

Traditional approaches to structural analysis are primarily inductive. They create rules or principles by generalizing from particular examples—classic Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, the ʺgreatʺ plays. Other forms of theatre are ignored. The emphasis on narrative (and on the script rather than the theatrical production) makes theatrical structure similar to literary structure. Line graphs like those that, at least in cartoons, show the fortunes of Wall Street or the health of a hospital patient are proposed as abstract illustration of theatrical structure. Even when such thinking is relevant to the type of drama from which it is derived, it is useless...

Some believe that theatre must refer to and make a comment upon the world and everyday life. ʺWhat is it about?ʺ they ask on learning of a performance. ʺWhat does it mean?ʺ they ask (others and themselves) after having seen it. The assumption is that all theatre must be about something and mean something. Although most theatre—certainly the mainstream of traditional European theatre—is about something and means something, the assumption is not true for all theatre. Let us consider meaning and ʺaboutnessʺ or reference.

The basic metaphor in referential theatre is the letter or message. Theatre is thought...

Except for such states as dream and hallucination, every experience ʺbonds togetherʺ the objective and the subjective. Part of the experience depends on the objective reality; part depends on and is created by the individual spectator. The thing that is ʺout thereʺ and our response to it become fused. Ultimately, it is this fusion—the experience of the spectator—that concerns us. We need to ʺpry apartʺ the two aspects of the experience to analyze it. The concept of eye-movement analysis has already given us a tool.

Although, as the name indicates, the particular form of eye movement that we...

Criticism is not part of theatre. It is part of the social context of theatre. It mediates between theatre, considered as experience, and the larger world in which the theatrical event exists. That is why a discussion of criticism belongs in this second section, which is devoted to certain aspects of the social context of performance.

The ʺquestion of efficacyʺ that is asked in the second chapter of this part concerns the practical impact of theatre on its spectators and the larger ʺindirectʺ audience. We are not concerned here with experience but with transtheatrical application in the ʺrealʺ world. This,...

There is no such thing as good or bad acting. There is only acting that we or someone else thinks/feels is good or bad. Value does not inhere in the performance. Objectively, there are only technical and quantitative differences between different actors and different styles of acting. All kinds and degrees of acting are equally good, and no point on the acting/not-acting continuum elaborated in the first chapter is better or worse than any other. All value judgments are, by definition, subjective.

Therefore, criticism functions as a social screen to separate us from the actual theatrical production. Much of the...

Many people believe that theatre—and all art—must have efficacy in the everyday world. They think theatre should change what people think and the way they act. Theatre that does not attempt to do this is merely entertainment.

Political theatre is certainly a clear example of performance that attempts to make practical changes in the society. If we were constructing a continuum against which to measure degrees of social efficacy—at least intended efficacy—we could place most political theatre at one end of the scale, the ʺhighʺ end. In this sense, political theatre can be seen to represent...

Many years ago, I overheard a sailor who had traveled all over the world telling a story. One evening in some foreign port—letʹs say that it was in China—he happened to meet a young woman. After conversing for a while in what we may imagine to be pidgin English, the sailor was invited by the woman to her room. Happily, he went with her. As he was undressing, however, he heard someone laugh; it was not the young woman. Examining the room, the sailor found that people were watching them through small holes drilled in the walls.

Was...

Historically, formalism in theatre has been more or less synonymous with style, with abstraction. It has been a theatre of visual and auditory formalism that related to painting and music and emphasized the senses. Vsevolod Meyerhold, for example, was famous for his formalist, stylized interpretations of realistic scripts (indeed, the ʺcrimeʺ with which Meyerhold was charged, and for which he died, was ʺformalismʺ). Almost always, formalism in theatre has been subservient to content. The people who emphasized formal elements felt that these elements most clearly supported and helped to express the intellectual material, message, or theme. Historically, a formalist production...

The Structuralist Workshop, a theatre group of which I am the artistic director, attempts to use structural analysis as an approach to performance. The workshop is involved with what it calls ʺStructuralismʺ in theatre. Some have claimed that this use of the word is improper. ʺThe term ʹstructuralism,ʹʺ they say, ʺalready refers to certain philosophies, to certain kinds of thought. Indeed, the intellectual popularity of structural linguistics and structural anthropology might almost be described as a fad. ʹStructuralismʹ canʹt be used now to apply to something else.ʺ This, of course, is not persuasive. Many words have multiple meanings. The important...

The first of the three productions described in this chapter, my lowa Transfer, does not use acting—at least not very much of it. It is more closely related to a Happening than to a play. (I worked in Happenings for several years, and my Structuralist plays developed out of them. My first Structuralist play—any work that uses acting extensively may be called a play because the performers ʺplayʺ at being someone else—was Room 706, done in 1966. The chronology of this development from Happenings to Structuralism has been documented in my book The Art of Time.) In...

Many structuralist plays could be made directly into structuralist films. The time or durational structures of the live performances could simply be filmed, with or without the filter of changed camera angle and variation of frame size, to make a movie. Even the three-dimensional spatial structures important to most structuralist plays could be represented or ʺtranslatedʺ in film. (For example, two alternating and interwoven stories separated spatially on stage could be distinguished in a film by using different color filters for each; spatial progressions could be translated into color progressions, and so on.) Yet it would be impossible to make...