Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

But Artaud’s focus is on what the performance does to the spectator; theatre’s power is wielded within a performance; it is there that tissues of deception and repression are slashed open and our (the audience’s) psychic illness drained away. The actors do this to us and not to each other. Grotowski did in his practice emphasize the communal and sacred nature of the actors’ training, but his theorizing of his work before he “left the theatre” around 1970 tends always toward the realization of the artistic and social formation in the presence of and with the co-activity of the spectator. “If the contact between the spectator and the actors is very close and direct,” Grotowski told Richard Schechner in 1968:

Even the groundbreaking work of Augusto Boal, whose techniques emphasize theatre as a vehicle for transformation of the spectator-actors, emphasizes nearly always the context of public presentation. For Boal, the transformation occurs in the public forum, and he spends little time exploring the social value of the theatre company itself, the interpersonal melding of its very formation, the communal reality of its preparations for performance.²² The social formation before and indeed after performances, the daily drama of commitment, sacrifice, and rev­elation that takes place within a theatre company is, I believe, the neglected and secret heart of theatre, and the emblem of its uniqueness.

The Radical Interdependence of Theatre

In an age in which the physical insularity of the individual is made ever more possible and attractive through the lure of technology, thea­tre requires physical collaboration with other people. For this reason, now at the time of its seeming obsolescence and diminishment into quaintness, we need theatre more than ever.