In a certain sense, politics—the organization of people's living together—is always implicit in the theatre performance, whose one defining trait is the presence of figures showing forth human relations in the “holy circle” of the stage. The only matter of special interest here is to find out when, why, and how the normative framework of human relations on the stage begins to differ so radically from a code acceptable to the audience that the performance has to explicate, thematize, and make programmatic its new and strange ethics and politics.

Holstebro is a Danish town which nourishes ambitions rather like those of an Italian Renaissance city-state, where the rise of bourgeois economics was accompanied by dreams of artistic splendor. The Scandinavian Welfare State seems uneasy; there is a kind of neurotic squeak in the well-oiled machinery of daily life. An ultramodern industrial center, Holstebro—perhaps as unconscious compensation for its wealth—now hopes to become a center for “culture.” The city fathers of this small provincial town have built one of the two largest stages in Denmark, “bought” a young composer of electronic music and commissioned him to create a laboratory of musical research; they subsidize a good amateur orchestra and plan to install a professional one; finally, they have given Eugenio Barba the means of creating a theatre lab on the model of Jerzy Grotowski's at Wrøclaw—Odin Teatret (Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium for Skuespillerkunst).

Modern drama resembles a child half wise, in both knowing and not knowing its own father. By familiar usage, consecrated in the textbooks, Ibsen is “the father of modern drama”; the phrase instantly evokes the companion term “naturalism,” followed perhaps by a dim after-image of A Doll House, the consensual firstborn of our present theatrical age. This familiar view of the father has its partial truth, yielding certain academic rewards. It invites the editing of anthologies laid out on a taut straight line from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, with occasional detours into the essential non-realistic styles; or, if the anthologist is less sympathetic to Naturalism, it allows a backward glance at Hedda Gabler before one takes off for the real beginnings of modern drama somewhere in the volcanic foothills of Strindberg, finally to disappear in the farthest out thickets of the Grove Press.

The Living Theatre's four splendid spectacles were a great event. Like an astonishing portion of the country's popular music, they proved to be in content form outside the social system, not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory. The tribe of disdainers of the money-job-marriage game came to celebrate, greeted the Company with the frivolous cynicism of the stray salesmen present & made a closed party of it, perfuming the air of liberty that they polluted. But the word was Revolution, it was posed in fundamental terms & urgent tones—in the most radical sense possible. Even the attending communists, finding the affair objectively counter-revolutionary, could hardly deny the validity of the ultimate ideal: “eine Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung für die freie Entwicklung aller ist” (an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all).

This sure is fun. You know, the city news bureau here in Chicago, where you can always call and get their version of what's happening, is ST2-8100. You might want to take care of a cat named Jack Lawrence from CBS who threw me out while I was fuckin’ with their teletype machine last night. That was very unfair. I had some good news items. Now, let's see who else is here. The police, there's some good numbers. OK. Now this is a top secret number that like only a few of the top police have. It's the central number for the police station up here in the zoo. They're very fucked up in there. I've been up there, and you think they're organized, well you're full of shit ‘cause their walkie-talkies don't work. I mean they're all stoned up there, tripping over each other, you know, they're rapping, all they want to do is fight and they don't care about all the walkie-talkie shit, they just want to fight, you know.

A man has a wife and a male child. He also has a male secretary. Between the wife and the secretary there arises what the husband considers an understanding of a harmless sort. He wants to help them in some way, but whenever he speaks to them they exchange a significant look that seems to ask how they should receive what he says if they are not to annoy him. But this itself annoys him. He ends up firing the secretary. Then he sends the wife after him. In the wife's view, he fairly throws her into the secretary's arms; and the pair set up house together. The husband, however, does not lose interest in the wife. His continued interest, indeed, though he considers it “pure” (that is: asexual) is a source of embarrassment to the former secretary.