In round numbers, 60 million people presently live in the Federal Republic of Germany, including West Berlin. Theatre lights are regularly turned on in approximately 340 cities of this relatively small country (comparable in size to the state of Oregon). Seventy-five of these 340 cities have their own theatrical troupes; 10 even have several. In the Federal Republic altogether, there are at present 83 tax-supported theatres for drama, opera and operetta in 223 separate houses. Eighteen of these are subsidized as so-called state theatres from funds of the separate states. An additional 16 theatres financed by various organizations and counties give regular guest performances while on tour. The majority comprise the 52 so-called city theatres, which are usually supported by the local municipality. Among the publicly-supported theatres, the most frequent is the triadic operation, often uniting drama, opera/operetta/music, and ballet under one general manager, frequently under one roof.

In the decade or more since the women's movement began, a number of books on the female experience in literature, art and architecture, film and dance have been published, but no comparable attempts have been made to identify a women's tradition in the complex art of theatre. Some excellent volumes of plays by women and some about women, some interesting articles on individuals and on the new feminist theatres, a symposium or an interview here or there have appeared. With the exception of the reissue of Rosamund Gilder's classic, Enter the Actress, however, no overall study has tried to see how women have used and have been used in theatre.

Yet questions about women's participation in all aspects of theatre have become more insistent.

In the fifth century B.C., the Jews of Persia were saved from a plot to murder them. Their deliverance, narrated in the Scroll of Esther, is celebrated each year on the holiday of Purim in the Hebrew month of Adar (February/March). The holiday includes a variety of performances: masquerade, pranks, intoxication and general licentiousness pervade the holiday and contribute to the inversion of the social order that is its hallmark. One major performance is the ceremonial public reading of the Scroll of Esther, where the ralson d'être for the holiday is retold. During the reading, the villain Haman is smitten by the listeners, who make loud noises to kill the sound of his name each time it is mentioned. A second opportunity for performance is the festive meal, which may feature extended parodies and folk plays.

Molissa Fenley's choreography bewilders the eye, entices the ear, and challenges both the memory and the intellect. Incessant, everchanging motion, saturated with polymorphous arm gestures, performed to a driving, repetitive, percussive beat, the dances are complex series of tensions between constancy and mutability, structure and disorder, abstraction and imagery, exoticism and familiarity, social and theatrical forms.

American dance audiences are accustomed to watching ballets composed of legible phrases, often matched to equally distinct musical patterns. The traditional modern dance creates a succession of expressive postures and gestures that prompt the spectator to arrange them in a narrative flow or a metaphoric gestalt. The achievement of post-modern dance was to isolate an even smaller unit of perception in dance—to frame the posture, gesture, or movement itself as the central subject of the dance—either by repetition or complexification.

Recently the Yiddish theatre has been the object of considerable study, translation and revival; yet the world of Yiddish vaudeville remains virtually untouched. This is odd, considering that what we would now call vaudeville skits and playlets were among the very first products of the Yiddish stage (1870s), while similar material is still being presented to Yiddish-speaking audiences today. It is almost a truism to state that the rise of the Jewish-American comedian in the 1950s and 1960s was rooted in the low humor of the Borscht belt, but few have shown any interest in tracing the genealogy further back. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the scorn with which Jewish theatre critics, historians and activists view all ethnic entertainment not directed towards creating an “art” theatre. An even more important impediment is the almost total lack of surviving printed or manuscript versions of early Yiddish vaudeville.

In the performance area are two wooden-frame tents side by side. They are 8 feet square, 6 feet at their apex, and covered with white muslin. The “insect” tent is at the right, tent flaps open, a duplicate miniature tent suspended within the opening. Two flourescent industrial lighting fixtures form a bright “V” upstage on the tent floor. From the opening a clear plastic tube coils its way over to the “scientist” tent at the left. This tent is closed, except for a triangular window centered on its front wall. It is illuminated by a blue light from within.

Despite various differences in their internal organization, the majority of German theatres share a common profile. They are usually large-scale, publicly-controlled cultural institutions, with more than 80 percent of their budgets covered by public subsidies. Within these complexes, which can include opera and dance facilities, a relatively stable theatre company (artist contracts normally run from one to three years) strives to satisfy the demands of a predominantly subscription audience by mounting as many as fourteen productions a season in full repertory.

Such theatres confront their artistic staffs with a number of problems. The pressures created by the subscription system are the worst, but not the only ones. The manifold details concerned with administering such huge physical plants and executing the paperwork that comes with governmental subsidy are handled by a large, expensive bureaucracy with a vested interest in making sure the stamping-out of productions runs smoothly.

The traditional or so-called conventional play has never interested me. It's not because of any great esthetic reason, it is simply that in our house we didn't have a room to ourselves. We slept in the dining room. My mother had radios that she turned on to the soaps, and we had to listen to them whether we wanted to or not. Subsequently, anything that even resembled a soap opera I would try my damnedest not to do. It's something that's lodged in me.

Improvisation has always had a shaky reputation in the dance field. All too often, it's been shown up as a license for playing around, a grand and ultimately disturbing notion of freedom. Some dancers never get beyond reproducing movements they've learned, simply jumbled around in a satisfyingly lawless way. During the 1950s most dancers and choreographers of any consequence associated improvisation with the windy impressionism they had encountered in children's classes or even in college dance departments (“be a cloud”). The Judson Church choreographers of the 1960s, however looked on it with some favor — particularly as the individual's unplanned working-out of a predetermined task — and there have always been some, like the contemporary Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, who improvise in performance because, clearly, anything other than a response to the immediate climate (interior and exterior) would be unthinkable.

West German theatre, says critic Günther Rühle, is currently fraught with insecurity about where it is going and what its function is. That may be, but there's no question that the theatre has changed considerably over the past two decades and entered an as yet ill-defined post-Brechtian age. Gone are the productions of coolly staged parables, instructing the audience in how the world might be changed through rational, social action. Gone are the bright, evenly lit settings, sparsely furnished and purged of destructive atmosphere. And gone, too, is whatever bond once existed between the performers and the audience. That relationship, says Brecht Schüler Peter Palitzsch, is now “deeply disturbed.”

The German director has become the great interpreter, probing texts, usually the classics, searching for something that matters to contemporary man. The results of his dramaturgical investigations are subjective, fragmentary, and generally bewildering to an audience who hasn't accompanied him on his month- or year-long journey of discovery. His insights are not always theirs. Rich material imagery fills the stages, and it is personal, often violent, and tinged with expressionism. The Prince of Homburg stands naked in a field of potatoes as he is pardoned. The chorus in Antigone, consisting of a single contemporary woman, smears animal organs on her face as she speaks of Haemon's impending death. The actors in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale slip and slide around a stage decked with Mattel “Slime.” Vernunft (reason) has given way to Sinnlichkeit (sensuousness).

Roberta Sklar is one of the three artistic directors of The Women's Experimental Theatre and a co-author with Clare Coss and Sondra Segal of The Daughters Cycle Trilogy: Daughters, Sister/Sister, and Electra Speaks.

Sklar began her work as a student-director at Hunter College in 1960. She was active in the off-Off-Broadway theatre movement at its inception in the early sixties and frequently directed new plays at the Caffe Cino. In the mid-1960s she joined The Open Theatre and was the co-director of the major ensemble works The Serpent, Terminal and The Mutation Show and directed Beckett's Endgame. These works toured both the United States and Europe and have been widely acclaimed. Throughout the sixties she worked extensively with playwrights and actors in the creation of new works and new work methods.

In the 1970s she began an ongoing research into the development of a feminist esthetic for the theatre.

At 10:00 a.m. a red metrovan truck rolls up to a Bay Area park. Along its side white letters blare “San Francisco Mime Troupe.” Within a few minutes two old cars park near the truck, and 10 people alight from the vehicles. They confer swiftly before unburdening the truck of collapsible platform, costume rack and prop boxes on wheels. One of the people points to the sky, designating the path of the afternoon sun; the stage must be positioned with the sun behind the audience. Practiced hands then set the small platform on jacks, elevate the stage frame with its narrow curtain, and underpin the whole. Casual conversation punctuates the hard physical labor. By noon the small performance space is ready, and the Mime Troupe actors select their several costumes for the afternoon's play.

Peter Zadek grew up in the English theatre, using the English language and applied himself to the plays of Shakespeare with intensity. After preparation in Ulm and Hannover, Zadek made his first great experiments with Shakespeare on the German stage in Bremen. Measure For Measure presented a radical reformulation of the play's characters and their potential through the acting of the performers, thus furiously destroying the narrative structure of the play. This was based on the self-investigation and self-discovery of a group of theatre people—the articulation of their situation with theatrical means was the primary impulse motivating the performance.

Blondell Cummings has worked with Meredith Monk's company, The House, since 1969. She performed in Juice (1969), Needle Brain Lloyd and the System's Kid (1970), Vessel (1971), Education of the Girlchild (1973), Chacon (1974), the film of Quarry (1976) and Venice/Milan (1976). In addition to working independently, she now performs with the Nimbus Dance Theatre Company and Bill T. Jones' Everybodyworks. The Cycle Arts Foundation presented a program of Cumming' works May 1-4, 1980, at the Warren Street Performance Loft in lower Manhattan, offering The Ladies and Me (1979) that will be discussed here, and A Friend (1980). Excerpts from The Ladies and Me were performed on October 10, 1980, at the All-Craft Community Center on St. Mark's Place in New York as part of the Women's One World Festival.

Habimah, Israel's National Theatre, was born in the midst of the great upheaval of the Russian Revolution. In 1917, under the inspiring leadership of Nachum Zemach, the first group of 12 actors began training for the attainment of their goal—the establishment of a professional repertory theatre group to perform in Hebrew. They formed their theatre as a collective officially called “The Mutual Society, Ltd.” in which all had equal privileges and obligations. It was their hope that this dramatic group would be part of the process of national rebirth in Palestine.

From 1918 until 1924, at a time when Hebrew was considered a “counter revolutionary” language and Zionists were being arrested by the hundreds, Habimah's repertoire consisted of plays dealing with Jewish subjects, giving dramatic expression to the traditions and aspirations that nourished the Russian Zionist movement.