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Towards an International Theatre ROSETTE C: LAMONT In a recent double issue of Performing Arts Journal (50/5t), entitled "The Arts and the University," Bonnie Marmoca, the journal's co-creator and coeditor with Gautam Dasgupta, penned a provocative survey of the numerous lacunae in theatre studies as practiced throughout the United States. Her essay, "Theatre and the University at the End of the Twentieth Century," adds up to a detailed medical examination of the body politic of various curricula. Marranca points out that theatre in America "lacks a definable epistemology .'" She goes on to diagnose the ills of an education which has been unable to formulate a well-established critical discourse on the history and nature of this art. Such is not the case, she declares, for Film, Literature, Anthropology, Communications and Media Studies. In her ' ~J' accuse," Marranca calls theatre "a champion of the status quo" (58). Why should this be so? The malaise comes in part from the pressures of commercialism, as well as from the low esteem in which intellectuals are held in the United States. Marranca is a fearless critic of our society's educational practices, and she speaks with the authority of one who shaped her own educational program once she quit academe. She shares with her readers her sense of shock when she realized in the process of teaching that notions of art and culture she had taken for granted "seemed remote from the way students understood them" (70). She suggests that when a civilization's criteria are based on the media, and the self-created demands of the business world, they are truly debased. The result is nothing less than the loss of memory. Marranca is one of the few theatre analysts in the New World to state forcefully that it is through memory and culture that we survive. She exclaims with noble indignation: "At a time when the world is globally interconnected, theatre is becoming more localized and insular" (61). A non-existent government policy vis-a-vis the arts has brought about a brain drain as writers and performers desert the U.S. for Europe. There were, Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 585 586 ROSETTE C. LAMONT of course, famous precedents for this exodus at the beginning of our modem era - Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Henry James, Djuna Barnes - but these were individual decisions, artistic life choices. Presently there is a powerful second wave of self-exiled creators, for Europe, once again, beckons to original artists. One emblematic example: David Warrilow , a British journalist who became arguably the greatest Beckett actor when he joined, in the Paris of the late '950s, a group of American actors/ directors/writers (later known as the Mabou Mines). He .reached stardom in New York where Lee Breuer, the group's leader, was offered acting space by Joe Papp within the Public Theater. These were glorious years of the New York avant-garde. However, once Mabou Mines disbanded to pursue individual interests, Warrilow, a magnificent bilingual actor (he could do a Beckett text in either French or English), returned to France, where he performed Beckett, Pinget, and other minimalist dramaticules until his early death last year. Throughout the sixties and seventies American performers blossomed in the congenial milieu of Europe, where cultural institutions received at that time generous government subsidies, and where young people, raised with the assumption that going to the theatre on a regular basis, like attending concerts or museum exhibitions, is an essential"component of a civilized person's life, flocked to what they considered "cutting edge" spectacles. Shows which in New York are strictly off-off Broadway draw capacity audiences, with people willing to perch on the steps when benches are full. This is still true, despite the dire predictions that film and television are killing theatre. There is a social texture to being together at Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du SoleH, where, at intermission, some of the actors you havejust seen on the stage serve food and drink at the long counters, with the great Ariane herself clearing the tables - an experience that cannot be duplicated by sitting passively in a dark cinema, or at home in...

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