The very diversified exploration of the semiology of theater, which has not ceased to renew itself since 1938, date from the first works of Jindrich Honzl, Petr Bogatyrev, and Jiri Veltrusky,1 can both reassure and intimidate because of the richness and the radicalism of its questioning. It will be especially striking to the observer because of the severity of its initial demands, a severity long intrinsic to the search (the alibi?) for pertinent and universal scientific grids, and therefore to the refusal to proceed according to the criteria of a momentary advantage (a photogram, a map, etc., in film). It underscores, in any case, the urgent need for an epistemological summary which establishes the punctum dolens beyond the sustentative frustrations and thereby eliminates recurrent obstacles. My purpose here is assuredly not as grand. A too rapid overview of the subject, it attempts to identify, isolating and exploring, the suggestions of several dominant investigations already undertaken. We must first insist on the specific status of theatrical semiology and on the meager methodological results that the consultation of the sister semiologies of the narrative (recit) and of film offers. Because of its real dimension, its intricate network of codes, and its call for another's visual perception, the structure of the theater is hardly accessible to a method of analysis designed for the narrative (recit). Nor can theatrical semiology be assimilated into cinematographic analysis: the institutional and productive background of film creates a chasm between the film-maker and the spectator which cinematographic research echoes in its fractionalizing. The relation stage subject/spectator can be conceived of in a totally different manner: the division between an optic of expressivity, that is, of meaning, in which the semiologist identifies with the spectator, and a perspective of intentional communication where the adopted point of view, that of the subject of transmission (scenic/textual), is incorporated into an approach which Umberto Eco qualifies as multilinear and which integrates the transactional relation between the setting and the theater into the pluralistic study of codes and messages. Moreover, without trying to deny the logical aporia of the humanities, it is necessary to recognize that there is in theater a practical experience-dialogical-which the observer can utilize. Finally I must add, the contributions and the contradictions of the alleged general semiology of which theatrical semiology has often been a polemical mirror, for example in Mounin, cannot be ignored. When the relation between text and representation is studied in its still meager and dispersed bibliographical corpus, we are quickly led to recognize a relative consensus marking the limits of the theatrical text and to question not only the definition of representation, the theatrical phenomenon, but also the mode of construction of the object considered by semiology, and the limits of the semiological field and method. We can, moreover, isolate several tendencies which seem to express a dissatisfaction with the resurgence of certain epistemological blocks and which are presently developing a non-semiological trend. Without arriving at Pasolini's mystical conclusions and at schizo-analytical ones, this trend notably leads to a reflection nurtured by the practice of theater (especially with Osolsob6 in Czechoslovakia and in the stage directions of