Repertory: Secular Holiness

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...