Journal Name:
- Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi
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Abstract (Original Language):
The new American theatre movement has been given various appellations so far; experimental, avant-garde, absurd, surrealist, seminal and has been made up of various ensemble groups through whose works it became one whole, a multi-faceted movement unique in the diverse methods it employed in its various approaches to the American theatre. The headquarters of such controversial movement naturally is New York City and the groups which wél be mentioned in this sessay were in New York area. However there have been experimental groups all over the States that have contributed to the eeaeept of a new theau*. The San Francisco Mme Group, The Actor s Workshop, The 'Fme Souther* Theatre; The Firehouse Theatre of Minneapolis aie just a few of the foremost regional theatres which applied various experimental methods just as successfully as those in New York and what is more helped to establish and spread the maxims of the experimentalists outside of the thin strip of cultural centers of the East coast
By now it is almost impossible to seperate various playwrights and their works from the performance groups with whose emergence theirs coincide. Still, the groups should have »n entity and recognition if one is to evaluate and appreciate their contributions to the making of a new theatre and new names in the world of drama. Among the most prevetant of such groups still of great importance in their own rights can be mentioned The Living Theatre, Open Theatre, Performance Group and Bread and Puppet Theatre. The need for such groups naturally arose from the impatience of young and idealistic and most of the time, extren^ist mtellectuals who, like" the. play Wrights and artists of the period, wanted to show their discontent with the present state of decay and conformity in American theatre. Writing about the American theatre with its picture stage ossified under a concept of realism long discarded in other arts ,1 John Lahr applauds the efforts for new forms and predicts the reaction of a critical press:
In trying to find different kinds of images, to forge a new relationship between the stage object and the audience, the avant-garde theater work of La Mama Troupe, The Open Theater, The Performance Group, and even Jerzy Grotowsky's Polish Lab Theater, embodies the impulses of abstract expres¬sionism and must bear the same initial hostility from a critical press whose values are threatened by their work.2
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