Transcript Fragments of a Greek Trilogy

 The
most notorious and far-reaching of these
efforts came from the Performance Group,
which grew out of a New York University
work-shop led by Richard Schechner in 1967.
 In
1968, Schechner published “6 Axioms for
Environmental Theatre,” which combined
elements of transactional analysis, Brecht,
and Meyerhold as it explores the nature of
the theatrical event both as a self-contained
work of art and as an interaction with an
audience.
 Schechner
was setting out not merely to
disrupt traditional understandings of the
nature of theatre but to explore and resituate the role of the spectator in relation
to the performance.
 For Schechner, environmental theatre was
democratic theatre, and one of his goals was
to destroy theatrical illusion by making the
spectators believe they were equal to the
performers.
 Environmental
theatre not only transformed
the entire theatre into a potential
performance space, it also destroyed the
unified focus of the audience.
 Upon entering the theatre, spectators were
greeted by casually dressed actors, who
spoke to them informally and helped to guide
them to seats.
 The
lack of any traditional stage or seating
area and the lack of clear spatial
demarcations within the Performing Garage,
the melding of actor and character, the
nudity and ritual activities, the
encouragement to participate, the final
procession into the street, even the location
in a then desolate part of the city, all
contributed to an experience new for most
spectators.
 Occasionally,
the audience participation
crossed acceptable boundaries as some male
spectators took advantage of ritual-like
scenes to join the action and fondle the
female performers. The performers
demanded that Schechner restructure these
scenes more rigidly so that clear-cut and
appropriate boundaries would be established.
These glitches in performance caused by the
failure of the audience to participate according
to the “script” points up a fundamental problem
with audience participation and ritual-style
theatre.
 In para-theatrical performance, or performative
activities, such as those found in certain
religious rituals, weddings, funerals, civic
festivals, and the like, there may be, properly
speaking, no separation of performer and
spectator, or else the spectators may have
“roles” or clearly delimited participatory
behavior.

 Schechner
saw environmental theatre as
political in the sense that encouraging
participation “is to demand changes in the
social order.”
 Once the initial novelty had faded, and
without something of certified quality ass a
draw, audiences were, by and large,
unwilling to forgo the security of assured
seating and the safety of a darkened
auditorium, The prohibitive costs of
renovating Broadway theatres for
environmental production quickly brought an
end to the experiment.
 The
ensemble theatre movement had
essentially disappeared by the mod-1970s,
but in a sense it went out with a bang. The
work of Chaikin, Grotowski, Brook, and
Schechner was brought together in what
most agreed was a stunningly powerful
production of three Greek tragedies under
the title Fragments of a Greek Trilogy ,
directed at LaMaMa by young Romanian
director named Andrei Serban.
 Described
as an enfant terrible of the
Romanian theatre, he was seen in Bucharest
by Ellen Stewart, who brought him to
LaMaMa on a Ford Foundation grant in 1969
at the age of 25.
 Serban’s first LaMaMa creation was in fact an
Artaud-inspired adaptation of the
Elizabethan tragedy Arden of Faversham,
which received glowing reviews and, just as
important, the notice of director Peter
Brook, who invited Serban to the
International Centre of Theatre Research in
Paris.
 When
Serban returned to LaMaMa in the fall
of 1971, he began to work on Euripides’
Medea. He combined it with Electra and The
Trojan Women in Fragments of a Greek
Trilogy.
 Serban’s
four-month development of Medea
was an exploration of how to communicate
the power and passion of the play without
the mediating influence of modern language.
 The subsequent parts of the trilogy included
fragments of English, but also, in The Trojan
Women, fragments of pre-Columbian
languages.
 Serban
also employed a form of
environmental theatre. The original
production of Medea was performed in
LaMaMa’s long, narrow basement rehearsal
place.
 Despite
the proximity of actors and
spectators, and despite the ritual-like
aspects of parts of the production, and even
despite the direct physical involvement of
the audience in The Trojan Women, there
was never any question of the audience
joining in the action as they had in Living
Theatre and the Performance Group.
 Serban’s
production created a vibrant
emotional connection and intimacy through
the staging, but it never violated the implicit
boundary between performer and spectator.
 The critics attested to the success. “The
immediacy of Mr. Serban’s theatre,” wrote
The New York Times critic Clive Barnes, “far
transcends the narrative notion of knowing
what happens in any literary sense. Mr.
Serban makes you feel such basic emotions
as love, suffering, anguish, disgust, and fear,
at a level not so far removed from reality.”
 But
following these productions there
seemed to be no place further to go. In next
productions, while some of the spectators
were placed on the stage, they remained
passive – it was the bleachers on which they
say that were moved about on air casters.
The spectators were not observers or
participants at a ceremony; they were on a
carnival ride.
 Ensemble theatre had truly played itself out.