Joseph Chaikin Research Articles

Directorial strategies for enhancing stage presence: When practice- based research meets phenomenology

ABSTRACT Combining phenomenological methods with practice-based research, this article explores what and how directorial strategies influence stage presence. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Joseph Chaikin’s idea of heightened awareness, in particular, it describes directorial strategies that can heighten awareness in the interdependent actor–audience relationship. Adopting the vocative method addresses the research questions by providing phenomenological descriptions of and reflections on the author’s lived experiences as a spectator and an actor. From first-person accounts of lived experience in performance, ‘giving and taking stimulation’ and performing ‘face-to-face’ prove to be two practical strategies for heightening awareness by placing the actor and spectator into each other’s perceptual focus, thereby enhancing stage presence.

조셉 체이킨의 실험실 연극-오픈시어터의 퍼포먼스 작품 ≪터미널≫을 중심으로-

조셉 체이킨의 실험실 연극-오픈시어터의 퍼포먼스 작품 ≪터미널≫을 중심으로-

조셉 체이킨의 실험실 연극-오픈시어터의 퍼포먼스 작품 ≪터미널≫을 중심으로-

조셉 체이킨의 실험실 연극-오픈시어터의 퍼포먼스 작품 ≪터미널≫을 중심으로-

...Beyond folie à deux...

In this text I attempt to recognize and identify two conditions that make engagement possible. One certainly refers to the word, while the other is inscribed onto the body - every or any body - and it regards affect. I illustrate the first condition by a brief reading of a poem by Samuel Beckett, whose English translation the author dedicated to his friend and long-term collaborator, Joseph Chaikin. The second condition I place into Spinoza?s, that is, Deleuze?s understanding of affect.

Acting

Acting1 James R. Hamilton (bio) What is the nature of that bit of human behavior we English speakers now call “acting”? I do not want to press too hard on the evolutionary pedal, but it is intriguing to wonder first what might have led members of our species to act, and second what already existing, hence “precursor,” behavior they adapted to the tasks of acting? The first question, the evolutionary question proper, is not likely to get an answer that is better than a “just so” story. Despite the fact that there are some highly plausible stories to that effect, most recently one offered by theater theorist Bruce McConachie,2 we simply no longer have access to the relevant evidence and, lacking that evidence, we are left only with plausible stories. And plausible stories are not science, as biologist Richard Lewontin has recently reminded us.3 Acting is not unnatural behavior, to be sure, even when it is uncanny. But it is hardly the sort of behavior for which an empirically supportable biological adaptive story is likely to be forthcoming. Nor is it quite obvious what sort of spandrel it, or any other form of art, might be, as philosopher Stephen Davies argues.4 The second of these questions seems at least partly tractable, however. For even if the origins of enactment are lost in the mists of time, how we think of acting now is reflected in the kind of behavior we take it to be. And, so, that is the question for which I will pose an answer in this paper. I will continue to use the term “precursor behavior” as a way of signaling that acting comes from somewhere and that our models for it are largely conceived of as something from which acting, per se, emerges.5 But I want to be clear at the outset that I believe that no one has anything more than mere clues as to how acting actually got started in our species. In this paper, I elaborate on the simple idea that actors show audiences the features of the characters they portray. The view I develop first presents performing as a kind of display behavior. I then show how to situate acting within the broader practices of performance, to treat it as a distinctive kind of performing. It will follow that acting has no greater (or lesser) significance than is determinable apart from the terms in which acting is describable as a distinctive form of performance, or display. As a first step in developing the sketch, consider three explanations of the importance of the performer. On the first, which theater maker Joseph Chaikin [End Page 35] and others have espoused,6 performers are important because they are the sources of energy or power in theatrical performances. On the second, as suggested by philosopher David Davies,7 performers are important because they are sometimes the source of the contents of performances. Much that is illuminating can be and has been said regarding these explanations of the importance of performers. The view I now present you, however, is more general and more inclusive than either of these. It is less mystifying than the first, and begs fewer ontological questions than the second. On this third view, performers are important primarily because they are typically the main sources of whatever information is transferred in a performance to any spectator.8 That is, I take performances, including those performances involving acting, to be coordinated sequences of actions that cause information present at a “source” to become present at a “destination.” The sources in this case include the performers and the destinations are human spectators. The produced sequence of actions is the performance. This may seem no more than a metaphorical extension of the technical idea of “information;” but while it may seem fanciful, I mean it quite literally. The view I will propose is not the view that plays are information systems wherein, as theater theorist W. B. Worthen puts it, “the text [consists of] abstract information to be decanted to the proper platform.”9 The idea of plays as information systems, which Worthen critiques in depth and detail,10 has also excited...

‘I see you, but I don't see you dying …’

In his notes from the summer of 1970 Joseph Chaikin gives an example of a rehearsal process the Open Theater used to generate performance material for its new piece Terminal, which took as one of i...

Joseph Chaikin: The Presence of the Actor

ABSTRACTIn his book The Presence of the Actor, Joseph Chaikin says that he has learnt more about acting and character from the time he spent with Julius Orlovsky than from any other single experience he has had. Julius was a schizophrenic1 and Chaikin met him when they were both working on Robert Frank's film Me and My Brother, made between 1965 and 1968.In this article I would like to argue that Joseph Chaikin's understanding of the presence of the actor, as it is evidenced in his book published in 1972, as well as in traces of documentation of training and performance, was crucially influenced by a sense of ontological insecurity2 in relation to notions of a single 'self and that this idea of division within a human being, and, at the same time, a recognition of the need for interconnectivity between people, was being given voice to, significantly, by R. D. Laing in his book The Politics of Experience, published in 1967, as well as in his studies of interconnectivity, Self and Others (1961), and his seminal analysis of schizophrenia, The Divided Self (1959).

"So what will you do on the plinth?”: A Personal Experience of Disclosure during Antony Gormley’s "One & Other" Project

"So what will you do on the plinth?”: A Personal Experience of Disclosure during Antony Gormley’s "One & Other" Project

Joseph Chaikin and the Classics

Joseph Chaikin and the Classics

Night Sky Illuminates Struggles With Aphasia

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Jul 2009Night Sky Illuminates Struggles With Aphasia Kellie Rowden-Racette Kellie Rowden-Racette Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR5.14092009.24 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In When Ellayne Ganzfried, executive director of the National Aphasia Association (NAA), went to the May 2008 wedding of her husband’s client, she could have spent the hours doing what most peripheral wedding guests do—nibbling food, drinking wine, maybe doing the Chicken Dance, and then going home. But Ganzfried is a natural networker and when she found herself sitting at a cocktail table with a stranger, she did what came naturally—she asked him what he did for a living. “I’ve always believed in the power of networking,” Ganzfried said. “Great things have come my way because of it.” And this time was no exception. The stranger turned out to be Stan Raiff, a Broadway producer looking for new projects. Coincidentally Ganzfried had an idea for him. What about producing Susan Yankowitz’s “Night Sky,” a play about an astronomer with aphasia? The play, which was inspired by the late theater legend Joseph Chaikin’s own battle with aphasia, had last been on stage in 1991. Raiff, who studied speech-language pathology as an undergraduate student, was intrigued. After several follow-up discussions and a staged reading, Raiff hopped on board and agreed to produce an off-Broadway production of “Night Sky.” What happened after that can only be described as a whirlwind. Less than six months after that fateful wedding meeting, a stage production was conceived. Although Ganzfried described herself as someone who has “tried many, many things,” theater was never one of them. Nonetheless, she took part writing, staging, and even casting, where she sat behind a table and watched as the actors auditioned. “I felt like Paula Abdul on ‘American Idol’!” she laughed. She also learned about theater’s condensed time frame. From the time that Raiff agreed to produce “Night Sky” to the benefit performance on June 4 (the beginning of National Aphasia Awareness Month), the play went through an enormous amount of rewrites, staging tweaks, and editing. “There really wasn’t a lot of preplanning, which was strange for me,” Ganzfried said. “I had to adjust to what felt like flying by the seat of my pants, but it was just business as usual to them.” But this involvement was more than just an educational opportunity for Ganzfried to learn about theater—it was also a chance for theater to learn about aphasia. On the first day of rehearsal, Ganzfried arranged for the actors to observe a local aphasia support group, where they met people living with aphasia—some with mild cases and others who were affected more severely—and asked a lot of questions. The trip proved to be eye-opening, Ganzfried said. “It was interesting for [the actors] to learn that people with aphasia retain their intellect, humor, and other capabilities. That’s one of the most common misconceptions,” she said. The visit was eye-opening for her as well. “I guess I took for granted that everybody knows what speech-language pathologists do and their role in treatment, but they don’t. I was giving suggestions on everything from whether an SLP would be touching a patient to if they would be wearing a white coat.” The aphasia-immersion program didn’t stop there. A week later Ganzfried arranged for people with aphasia and their families to attend one of the rehearsals. She wanted to see their reactions to the actors’ performances and to make sure the story resonated with them. Happily, it did. The performance was very well-received and the actors gladly incorporated suggestions from their audience into their performances. The play has been through rehearsal after rehearsal, had an NAA benefit performance, and ran May 22–June 20, receiving several positive reviews. The New York Times called it “evocative as well as informative.” NAA will use all proceeds from the benefit performance to help provide resources and services to people with aphasia and their families. “This has been an incredible experience,” said Ganzfried. “[The actors and the audience] really embraced the subject because it’s more than about aphasia—it’s about communication between people.” Author Notes Kellie Rowden-Racette, print and online editor for The ASHA Leader, can be reached at [email protected]. For more information about “Night Sky” visit the play’s Web site and The National Aphasia Association. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 14Issue 9July 2009 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Jul 1, 2009 Metrics Downloaded 64 times Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagleader-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2009 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Beckett and Kurtág

Hungarian composer György Kurtág has completed three significant Beckett-based compositions. Kurtág includes in his works numerous associative references to people, events, ideas, and other music. This treatment of reference and meaning parallels aspects of Beckett's work; a comparative examination of the role of memory in Beckett and Kurtág sheds light upon the work of both. Additionally, the article considers the performative quality of the finding (or remembering) of words in Joseph Chaikin's and Ildikó Monyók's readings of the Beckett and Kurtág versions of , relating this to the discussion of the relationship between reference, memory and meaning.

Freakery and Prosthetic Actuality in Joseph Chaikin's Body Pieces

Whereas his early exploration of disability issues addressed impairment as a point of departure for non-standard theater, Joseph Chaikin's Body Pieces in 2001 made disability the standard frame of reference. In this workshop production, amputee characters and actors mitigated audience alienation and fear of dismemberment by attaching and detaching their prosthetic limbs both on and off the stage. Chaikin combined humor with actuality in these moments, inviting spectators to contemplate their relation to disability. In his post-stroke aphasic direction of this piece, Chaikin necessitated a similar reconception of mental wholeness. His disabled actors provided a physical model for reassessing ability where cognitive and physical fragmentation replaced wholeness as new actualities: they exposed and detached their prosthetic legs in order to revise audience perceptions of fragmented bodies. Chaikin and his actors used comedy to familiarize the unfamiliarity of amputee bodies and to critique non-disabled responses to disabled difference. Appropriating the traditional freak show premise, Chaikin and disabled playwright John Belluso forged a contemporary meditation on freakery that played with and against sideshow stereotypes.

One Day in the Rehearsal Life of Joseph Chaikin

One Day in the Rehearsal Life of Joseph Chaikin

Roots & Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theatre Bonnie L. Vorenberg Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theatre. By Arthur Strimling. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004; 175. $18.95 paper. In Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theater Arthur Strimling argues that when young and old performers use personal stories as the basis for plays, it makes powerful theatre. Writing for both professionals and amateurs, Strimling presents effective models for the creation of intergenerational theatre programs. His practical techniques and philosophy serve as a blueprint that will guide future work in this creative form of drama. After graduating from Columbia University, Arthur Strimling worked under the direction of Joseph Chaikin for ten years. They created workshops and productions based on actors' lives and experiences using ensemble techniques. Later, Strimling developed his techniques with the Talking Band, an avant-garde group of the 1970s, which toured internationally. Strimling's theatre work was then influenced by author and documentarian Barbara Myerhoff, whose work with seniors helped a generation of social workers, gerontologists, and artists appreciate that "reminiscence is a major developmental task, essential in the process of aging well and dying well" (10). She encouraged Strimling to listen to seniors' stories. Inspired, Strimling created an intergen-erational storytelling project in New York with kids from poor neighborhoods and Jewish senior citizens. The seniors told their memoirs to the youngsters; before long, they formed close relationships. The "unbreakable links between young and old" fueled the program (24). Though successful, Strimling felt the life-story interviews were too limited and that the project's impact [End Page 502] would be stronger if they were performed. Soon he began to adapt the seniors' stories for the stage. Roots&Branches, the book, explores the work of the company of the same name that Strimling formed in 1996 with a group of elder actors (the "roots") and college-age actors from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (the "branches"). Through his work with these performers, Strimling developed the creative process that the program continues to employ. During a nine-month series of meetings, the company experiments with storytelling, improvisation, and discussion exercises based on the members' lives. Tape-recorded sketches are transcribed and eventually shaped and developed into a script. The final product of this process is a fully mounted production that tours primarily to New York locations. The company's polished performances balance lighthearted explorations of humanity with serious issues ranging from death, aging, and loneliness to immigration, beauty, and fairy tales. The book highlights the company's most notable work, Playing Lear, producedin 2002. Here the company wove the actors' personal narratives, life events, and opinions into scenes using Shakespeare's text as a springboard for a new exploration of aging and values. For example, in King Lear, as Lear divides up his kingdom, he insists that he must keep a retinue of a hundred knights in order to retain his sense of identity. In Playing Lear, Roots&Branches performers ask, "What is your 100 knights? What is it that if you lost it, you would no longer recognize yourself; would no longer be yourself?" (126). At the end of the play, both the characters and the generations come together, paralleling the magical transformation that happens in the Roots&Branches company. Strimling wrote the book as a guide, but he urges directors to adapt his methods to their own needs, casts, and audiences. He suggests ways to locate interested agencies and provides guidelines for conducting the first meetings. He offers techniques for workshops, steps to use in creating a script, and a recommended process for rehearsals. Tips help readers avoid troublesome problems because, as Strimling acknowledges, intergenerational theatre challenges directors to accommodate two groups of performers with different needs and skills. Even scheduling is difficult because seniors usually prefer to rehearse and perform during the day when young actors are in school or at work. Strimling urges readers to leap over the barriers because the experience provides so many rewards to participants, audiences, and communities. Roots&Branches: Creating Intergenerational Theater is a valuable resource that combines the love of storytelling with intergenerational insight. It will be useful to practitioners in theatre, education, therapy, social work, and allied areas. Its ideas apply...

Joseph Chaikin, 1935–2003

Joseph Chaikin, 1935–2003

The Cambridge companion to Sam Shepard

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Chronology Introduction Matthew Roudane 1. Born injured: the theatre of Sam Shepard Christopher Bigsby 2. Shepard and Off-Off Broadway: the unseen hand of Theatre Genesis Stephen J. Bottoms 3. Shepard on Shepard: an interview Matthew Roudane 4. On Sam Shepard Joseph Chaikin 5. Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard in Collaboration Marc Robinson 6. Repetition and regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child Thomas P. Adler 7. Shepard writes about writing Brenda Murphy 8. Reflections of the past in True West and A Lie of the Mind Leslie Kane 9. Patriarchal pathology from The Holy Ghostly to Silent Tongue Carla J. McDonough 10. The classic Western and Sam Shepard's family sagas John Clum 11. European textures: adapting Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus Johan Callens 12. Sam Shepard and the cinema Kimball King 13. Sam Shepard as musical experimenter David DeRose 14. Sam Shepard's non-dramatic writings Ann C. Hall 15. States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela: Sam Shepard's plays of the 1990s Leslie Wade 16. Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss Matthew Roudane 17. Sam Shepard: a bibliographic essay and production overview Susan Abbotson Index.

"Is Race a Trope?": Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity

Is race a trope? Anna Deavere Smith's performances not only ask but embody this question. They also ask another, equally important question: Who is asking? Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her technique of interviewing subjects, particularly on matters of race, and then recreating her subjects' responses with a difference on-stage. She has recently gained tremendous popularity for her work Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, part of her larger project On the Road: A Search for American Character. The question in my title, Is Race a Trope?, comes, however, not from me or from Anna Deavere Smith per se but from a performance of Smith's in which she recreates an interview she conducted with academic and critical theorist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) Early in the development of her technique of interviewing and then performing people of diverse races, ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions, Anna Deavere Smith performed an edited interview she'd conducted with Smith-Rosenberg, who asks and explores the question Is race a trope? The answer to this question for Smith-Rosenberg is complex, and Anna Deavere Smith's performance of Smith-Rosenberg's answer is even more complex. Not only do both social theorists say that identity, in this case racial identity, is experienced as both a fact and as a trope, but Anna Deavere Smith incorporates this post-structuralist model of racial identity into her acting approach. The question Is race a trope? is all the more interesting when it is asked in the context of a black woman (Smith), playing a white woman (Smith-Rosenberg), asking the question of the black woman who is now playing her. First, however, to get to the question of race as a trope, and how Anna Deavere Smith has developed an acting technique that can embrace the complexity of this question. I want to move back to the context of current acting practices, and then forward again into Anna Deavere Smith's interventions into approaches to racial identity and character in theater. What I am calling Anna Deavere Smith's post-structuralist acting practices arose not out of her engagement with post-structuralist race theory but out of her frustration with acting based in psychological realism (Fires xxvi). While poststructuralist models of identity--notions of identity as performative--have become almost dogma in current literary theory, acting practice in the U.S. has been slow to reflect this shift in models of identity, and is still very much based in liberal humanism. Although anti-Naturalistic traditions, which have been quite strong in European drama, have always had a presence in American drama (in forms such as expressionism, surrealism, even camp and neo-melodrama), the preponderant mode has remained firmly a Naturalistic one. There have, of course, been many notable exceptions to Naturalistic theater in the U.S. Some prominent ones include The Living Theatre of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the work of Joseph Chaikin and Roberta Sklar and the Open Theatre, El Teatro Campesino's Boal-influenced people's theatre, Richard Schechner's Environmental Theatre approaches, the Wooster Croup, the campy, postmodem productions of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater and of the WOW Cafe, and many other experimental and avant-garde theaters. (2) The most immediate precursor to Anna Deavere Smith's work is that of Adrienne Kennedy, whose 1964 Funnyhouse of a Negro takes a highly post-structuralist, anti-Naturalistic approach to character and identity, (3) and whose A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, which Smith directed in 1980, Smith credits as the beginning of her non-Naturalistic approach to personae and psychic life (Tate 198). Interestingly, the European anti-Naturalistic form that is most clearly a precursor to post-structuralist theater -- Brechtian alienation and Epic Theater--has had very little presence in American drama, and particularly in mainstream (Broadway and off-Broadway) theater, as can be seen in actors' training approaches. …

Gombrowicz and Faust

My introduction to Jan Kott was through his Theatre Notebook 1947–1967, which for me still captures the paradoxes of the man and his work. For all his cosmopolitanism, his work on Shakespeare, and his many years of life in exile, Kott remains very much an embodiment of the vitality of the post-war Polish theatre he helped to establish and later promoted abroad – this in spite of his disclaimer of being any kind of ‘expert’ on the contemporary Polish stage. Kott has always shown the best qualities of a theatre artist: lack of pretension, seemingly boundless energy, an immediacy of engagement with both theatrical performance and other people. Perhaps even more in person than in his writing, he possesses what Joseph Chaikin has called ‘presence’. As when I first met Kott in the mid 1980s, while Poland was still under martial law and he was unable to obtain a travel visa on account of public statements he had made regarding the Jaruzelski regime, he has remained a key connection to certain values both in the theatre and in Poland itself, and these he has best represented when they have been most needed.

Dance and the specific image: improvisation

After a career in dance as a performer, choreographer, and teacher - Daniel Nagrin has now written this book. In it he explores the roots of his aesthetic philosophy, influenced by Stanislavski, Helen Tamiris, Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, and his work on and off Broadway as an actor and a dancer. Dance and the Specific Image includes over 100 improvisational structures that Nagrin created with his company, the Workgroup, and has taught in dance classes and workshops all over the United States. Designed primarily for dancers, many can be adapted for actors and musicians. In the 1960s, at a time when many modeern dancers were working with movement as abstraction, Nagrin turned instead towards movement as metaphor. His passionate belief that dance must be about something led him to found Workgroup, a small company of dancers who, in the early 1970s, devoted themselves to the practice and performance of improvisation. Dance and the Specific Image is designed to be read by the general reader interested in dance history and philosophy as well as by students and teachers who may benefit from the techniques he describes. Nagrin invites the reader into the mind of a dancer totally absorbed in his art.

Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage by Nick Worrall (review)

Book Reviews 575 costumes, to a point where it was unable to see anything at all. But stage design and all that went with it should help the drama take place, not aim to displace it. This argument led fmally to the grand idea that the staging - if not the building itself- should help the audience's awareness and perception. The sense of an audience's being at one with the performers and not just watching them is a modem (and an ancient!) view of theatre that has been pursued in our own day by directors as challenging as Richard Schechner, Joseph Chaikin, and the Becks, to name only a few of those on the North American continent. In Appia's last years, especially after the Great WaI with its appalling losses, his writing was increasingly taken up with the ethical and social, if not actually political, role of dramatic art as he saw it as a source of healing and renewal: the apparent distinction between the artist and his audience would dissolve when together they created their best art. Both books reviewed here are helpful in telling and explaining this story, and are pleasing in their exhibition of many examples of Appia's designs and scenarios. Nevertheless, it remains true that he was long on theory and comparatively short on practice, and Beacham does not really address this issue. We cannot be assured that Appia's work "swept away the foundations that had supported European theatre since the Renaissance" (Essays, p. 3: Theatre Artist, p. 17), nor that before this theatrical art was in a "disastrous state" (Essays, p. 3). The endless ramps and steps that Appia's sketches convey to us are somewhat uncritically accepted, being presented chiefly in description and not analysis. And it can be readily seen that such abstract sets would be serviceable to only a limited range of productions and a very few genres - the Spie/treppe (Jessnertreppe) that became the vogue were a notorious invitation to histrionic mountaineering. Nevertheless. these books mustjoin the others of importance on the story of twentieth-century theatre. J. L. STYAN, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY NICK WORRALL. Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. pp. 238, illustrated. $49.50. Perhaps theatre scholars owe Mikhail Gorbachev a debt of gratirude. Thanks to the more flexible policies of glasllost and perestroika, fewer obstacles stand in the path of historians who wish to work in Soviet archives and, as a result, interest in Russian and Soviet theatre has revived. Recently published scholarship on Russian theatre includes Nick WorraU' sModernism to Realism 011 the Soviet Stage, a study ofdirectors Alexander Tairov, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Nikolai Okhlopkov. Although Worrall slips in an occasional personal anecdote, the book is primarily a descriptive study of selected productions by these three directors. It includes a very useful "Table of Historical and Theatrical Events," a general introduction, a chapter on each director, and a selected bibliography. Readers familiar with Konstantin Rudnitski 's glorious Russian and Soviet Theatre: 1905-1932 may find Worrall's treatment of Book Reviews Russian modernism rather thin by comparison. Nonetheless, Realism to Modernism on the Soviet Stage is a useful contribution to the growing body of literature about Russian and Soviet theatre and should be of interest to Worrall's designated audience: the "general reader. " The chapters on Tairov and Vakhtangov are particularly intriguing. Perhaps because the tendency in the West is toward commercial theatre, many Western practitioners look with suspicion upon Russian artists who were, as Worra11 puts it, "artistic fanatics." We do not share the reverential attit~de toward theatre that was commonplace in Russia even among many provincial actors. The "religiosity" of Stanislavski's single-minded devotion to theatre is well known and this attitude was adopted by directors like Tairov and Vakhtangov, both ofwhorn displayed a passion for theatre that may, at least in the eyes of Western observers, transcend the bounds of reason. Worrall observes that Alexander Tairov never achieved the international recognition he deserved - indeed, Tairov may be the most underrated director of this century. As cofounder and artistic director of the Kamerny Theatre, Tairov attempted "to forge a theatre of pure aesthetics, founded on...