ABSTRACT
Ariane Mnouchkine, despite her claims of not being a theoretician, has accorded over the past thirty-five years a series of judicious and substantive interviews about her work from which we can readily discern what theater means to her. As in the quote that introduces this chapter, she enumerates consistently her sense of what theater must do. It must confront history in an attempt to understand history’s impact on both the individual and the collective life. It must move people metaphorically out of their own skins in order to transform them – not only through an encounter with human others but also through meeting the others within oneself.
