Word: schechner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dionysus in '69--Richard Schechner's strange and fascinating version of Euripides' "The Bacchae." At the PERFORMING GARAGE, 33 Wooster...
...Paradise Now, a Living Theater production designed (among other things) to break down the barriers between audience and actors. During the performance, the players strip down to what Barnes describes as "skimpy yet adequate bikini-like covering." Even before they did, the barrier broke. Up stood Fellow Critic Richard Schechner, editor of the Drama Review, champion of audience participation. As Barnes tells it: "Mr. Schechner-to the everlasting glory of his profession-stripped completely, an action I had never previously observed from any of my other colleagues, although Mr. Schechner was, in fairness, wearing a mustache...
...improvise. The cast begins speaking in tongues, but English is the least of them. The program says that the play is "somewhat like Euripides' The Bacchae," but no one is likely to recognize it. Anyway, thought is the last thought in the mind of Director-Adapter Richard Schechner, who is also editor of the passionately avant-garde Drama Review. His production Dionysus in '69 belongs to the doin generation...
...Schechner has also stirred up interest with his caustically outspoken editorial comments. He delights in dissenting. While critics almost unanimously praised Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Schechner called it "a classic of bad taste." He attacks plays that promote what he calls "morbidity and sexual perversity which are only there to titillate an impotent and homosexual theater and audience." He denounces Broadway as "commodity theater," and crusades for a quickening of local professional and university theaters, where, he believes, the true future of American theater lies. When just about everyone else was doing stories...
Running Rebuttals. Although Schechner states his case with an almost belligerent finality, he is not at all averse to inviting an adversary to write a rebuttal that he runs directly after his own piece. The result, says Historian Jacques Barzun, "takes the theater out of the realm of mere grease paint and glamor and into that of ideas and feeling. Aeschylus and Shaw would applaud...