The report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., published as The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (McGraw-Hill, 1965), is the product of two years’ labor by a committee. The report's porridge-like prose shows that each member of the committee exercised some editorial judgment. Yet the document is distinguished for its effort to reach beyond diagnosis toward some prescriptions.

The assessment of the theatre's current economic situation offered by the report is predictable: “ … no one expects Broadway to collapse. … But Broadway as we knew it … is being challenged, its audiences are turning elsewhere.” According to the Rockefeller report, the theatre's future lies outside New York, with non-profit professional groups. The report further concludes that “the non-profit performing arts should not be expected to pay their way at the box-office.”

Creation of Washes followed the procedure established in previous pieces:

1. A period of about two weeks, of priming myself with possibilities—practical and impractical—for a pool piece, recording these in a book, and writing a number of script drafts.

2. Familiarizing myself with the particular place. In this case by signing up for massage etc., at Al Roon's. Noticing the importance of sound in the hall, the impossibility of any rapid action. Details of the normal activity of the Health Club.

3. Recruiting the cast from volunteers, some new and some familiar from past performances. Setting up schedule of rehearsals. First meeting.

4. Purchase of objects and costumes. In this case mostly from Canal Street stores, Avenue C used clothing stores, several “thrift” shops, swimming pool suppliers, and sporting goods stores.

5. First three rehearsals, combining prepared ideas, actual place, individuals in cast, and objects and costumes. Confusion and numerous trials and errors.

In September of 1963 Gordon Rogoff, to whom I had shown a couple of my plays, suggested I come with him to a loft on 24th Street where a group of actors were working together improvisationally and were looking for playwrights to help them in some new fashion. The group was the Open Theatre, and had been in existence a few months. At that time there was nowhere, to my knowledge, that an unknown playwright with a few unconventional one-act plays could go to see his work performed sympathetically, to say nothing of a place to experiment with actors and directors.

I had just finished reading Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double. I had ideas about possible new relationships between action and audience, about plays for huge non-human figures (I had written one called America Hurrah) and plays involving improvisations (I had written one called War).

An American visitor to London is dazzled by theatrical illuminations that shine even more brightly by contrast with our own darkling stage. America now has an ever-growing number of permanent companies, and some of them can boast of considerable achievements. But it will be a long time, I fear, before we can begin to match the adventurousness of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych, the fine, fearless integrity of the English Stage Society at the Royal Court, or the expertise of the National Theatre at the Old Vic. There is something in the American character that has thus far proved resistant to collective artistic enterprise—something at the same time invigorating (an anarchic independence of will) and degenerate (a selfish opportunism)—with the result that our serious theatre has been continually engaged in an exhausting struggle with the frailties that are always threatening to destroy it, whether reflected in the actor's glory-lust, the producer's venality, the designer's self-indulgence, the director's careerism, or the spectator's fatigue and apathy.

Off Off-Broadway is theatre without theatres, but it accounts for the most adventurous and promising work now being done in New York. Half a dozen plays or more, most of them by new playwrights, are produced every month on Off Off-Broadway's four principal stages. Many of the actors and directors are amateurs, students, or novices trying their wings; others are trained professionals who, finding few occasions to work and almost no chance to develop as artists within the professional theatre, are opting out of the system. They can—and sometimes do—work in the new regional theatres. But New York is still the center of the arts in America: someplace has to be.

Off Off-Broadway began as entertainment in coffee houses. The Caffe Cino was producing plays regularly as early as 1959, and various other Greenwich Village cafés had occasionally presented theatre to their customers.

The Graphis series is the result of a feeling that conventional theatre notation in which one action follows another leaves untried an enormous variety of techniques that could enrich our experience. This feeling was of course one of the causes of my “millieu play” form of which The Tart is an example. With the Graphises I was trying to set up a form that was unsemantic, even choreographic, in conception if not in execution.

Experimental music has frequently used extraordinary notations. Stockhausen, Graettinger, and Cage have found notations which expand musical vocabularies. So I started out with drawn notations such as, “The higher up on this page this line goes, reading from left to right, the louder you speak. Where there are two lines to be read vertically you choose.” What I did not specify was what was to be said. I thought people would quote the newspapers.

The ambiance of The Mayor of Zalainea (El alcalde de Zalainea) is free-flowing and quick-changing. Though many scenes take place in Crespo's house, the impression is that the out-of-doors predominates, that things are literally and figuratively out in the open. From the soldier Rebolledo's raucous expostulations against marching orders in the opening scene, to the crowds of farmers, soldiers, and officials listening to the banter of Don Lope and Crespo, Chispa and Rebolledo in the closing scenes, the play abounds with jaunty speech, the excited intermingling of classes, and rapid scene shifts which follow the intrigue and the conflicts of interests. Characters tend to pair off and move now toward and now away from other pairs as they reflect or mark off changes of situation: Rebolledo and La Chispa, his sweetheart; the captain Don Álvaro and his sergeant; the impoverished hidalgo Don Mendo and Nuño his servant; Pedro Crespo the mayor and Don Lope the commander; Crespo and his son Juan; Crespo and his daughter Isabel; and finally, Isabel and her cousin Inés.

The thing about The Tart is that I wanted to be specific and unabstract. Most experimental theatre has been done by painters who think abstractly. But I was a musician in rebellion against my medium; I didn't come to Happenings from the visual arts. I felt that the painters were too elegant and iconoclastic. What was missing was danger. So I wrote The Tart to express a sociological concept through choreography. It was not successful; neither was it intended to be. As it has no psychological empathy, The Tart does not permit the audience to view it as a play or ballet. But my hope was that audiences would sympathize with the performers (not the characters) in their social contexts and that the lines would be more tragic than funny.

Keep Tightly Closed began as an actors’ project of the Open Theatre. Three of them rehearsed it for about a month under the supervision of one of our actresses. The work stopped for the next month, because of a busy production schedule. At that point I was asked to direct the play, only two weeks and a few days before the scheduled opening, with one cast change necessary. The actors’ morale was low because of the delays, the time limitations (some of us had day-time jobs and could only rehearse at night), the problems which had not been solved. The preliminary work they had done was very useful, but necessarily limited.

I began by having the actors work on improvisations for basic character and situation. These were of an abstract nature, dealing with dependency, enclosure, and isolation, and they threw the actors off guard.

Winnie is buried up to her waist. Happy Days opens with the terrifying sound of a bell. A moment later the bell rings once again. Winnie wakes up, raises her head, opens her eyes. What does this bell mean? Winnie talks about it often, and throughout the entire first act she waits for it to ring. The bell rings when it is time to get up and when it is time to go to sleep. When I was in the hospital, there was no bell; the nurses woke us up and turned out the lights at night. But there was a bell when I stayed in a nursing home. The bell had a horrifying sound and woke us up every morning. The bell rang also at night, and when it had rung, we were not allowed to have the light on.