Open Theater

Open Theater, group established in New York in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin (1935– ), a former member of the Living Theatre, with the intention of exploring by means of Collective Creation the unique powers of live theatre—which, according to Chaikin's book The Presence of the Actor (1972), is based upon the encounter between live performers and spectators—and to concentrate on abstraction and illusion in contrast to the realistic and psychological method of Stanislavsky typical of the modern conventional theatre. The group's first performances were exercises and improvisations developed into short productions by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Megan Terry [ Marguerite Duffy] (1932– ), an avant-garde playwright whose other work included Approaching Simone (1970), a play about the French philosopher Simone Weil. These productions made frequent use of ‘transformation’, whereby one object or character becomes another, as where the performers were first parts of an aeroplane as it took off and were then ‘transformed’ into the people on the plane. The first long play to be developed collectively was Viet Rock (1966), a collage of transformations on the war in Vietnam created in a workshop conducted by Megan Terry and produced under the aegis of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. Later productions were The Serpent (1968), based on the Old Testament and including images from the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King; Terminal (1969), a study of human mortality and responses to death; and Mutation Show (1971) which focused upon human adaptation. The last production created by the group before disbanding was Nightwalk (1973), an investigation into levels of sleep. Megan Terry later became playwright in residence at the Magic Theatre in Omaha.