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. In the course of the Theatre du Soleil's 1970–2 elaboration of its now legendary collective reinterpretation of the French Revolution, Mnouchkine frequently invoked the need to tell a story about history with which every audience, and particularly a popular audience, could engage. Mnouchkine's desire to interact intimately with her spectators, so as to keep them aware of their own potential for action, also led her to make the audience part of the creative process. This effort – echoed in the work of a number of radicalized French companies of the 1960s and 1970s – brought culturally disenfranchised people to the theater and encouraged them to partake in theater-making.
