ABSTRACT
These are notes, they are tentative. Grant Grotowski and his actors a superb craft, possibly the best in the world today. A distinct craft amply expounded in Towards a Poor Theatre, TDR, and elsewhere. Grant Grotowski and his actors a focus and intensity hardly, if ever, seen, heard, or felt in a theatre. A duplicate reality, the “double” Artaud insisted lay in the heart of the theatrical experience. Wasn’t Cieslak signaling through his own personal flames during those moments in The Constant Prince when sound issued from his back as if he were himself the burning sacrificial wood? Grant Grotowski and his actors a singular (and peculiar) triumph over the New York theatre reviewers, John Simon excepted, but no one enters Simon’s world, not even John Simon. The journalistic and theatrical tribute laid humbly before the man in the dark suit and shaded glasses is touching. Those who, previously, had not even thought seriously once about the theatre are now “thinking through again” the “meaning” of the theatre; people are starting to “speculate” and “wonder,” old “values” are called into “question,” new values are “revealed."
