Repertory: Secular Holiness

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Actors should be like martyrs burnt alive, still signaling to us from their stakes.

—Antonin Artaud

The actor makes a total gift of himself.

—Jerzy Grotowski

Artaud and Grotowski are as different as pure and applied science, but the latter would not be possible without the former. Artaud was an unsuccessful French actor who died insane in 1948. He was also a visionary and a prophet with a dream of what theater might be. In poetic though sometimes muzzy language, he coined the idea of "a theater of cruelty." To interpret the phrase solely by conventional usage is to miss a great deal of what Artaud meant by it. For example, he wrote, "Everything that acts is a cruelty," and "Cruelty is rigor."

Artaud's vision encompassed a theater that could sweep through an audience like a plague, be as direct as a bullet, release the torments and ecstasies that may be found in death, martyrdom and love. He felt that the theater was strangling in words and could be reborn only through signs, sounds and the primitive force of myth. Above all, he wanted a burning intensity to be felt in the theater that would sear an audience: "The spectator who comes to us knows that he has agreed to undergo a true operation, where not only his mind but his senses and his flesh are going to come into play. He must really be convinced that we are capable of making him scream out."

Anguish of the Age. Put that way, the Artaudian conception of theater sounds a trifle sadistic, and it can be comprehended only as a refraction of the European experience in the 20th century, with all of its tortures and holocausts.

If Brecht wanted to slap an audience into intellectual awareness so that it would correct the evils of the age, Artaud wanted to gore it into a blood-dripping emotional awareness of the anguish of the age; Among those who have most notably tried to follow Artaud's precepts in the modern theater are Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater, British Director Peter Brook (Marat/ Sade) and Director Jerzy Gro-towski with his Polish Laboratory Theater. The Living Theater is sloppy, Brook is marvelously disciplined but a trifle too cerebral, and Grotowski combines fantastic discipline with lacerating emotional intensity.