ABSTRACT
Augusto Boal undertook formal theatre training in New York, at a point when “serious” drama–as opposed to Broadway musicals, then enjoying a “golden age”–predominantly meant psychological realism. The opportunity to go to New York arose for Boal as a fortuitous by-product of his official studies in chemical engineering, the career path endorsed by his father and for which Boal was offered the enticement of an extra year of training abroad. Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, and Elia Kazan were in different ways all proponents of the “intense, earnestly concentrated” mode of psychological realism that had risen in popularity to the point of dominating the American stage. John Gassner had greatly admired both play and production, applauding Tennessee Williams’ ability–, as in his earlier The Glass Menagerie–to combine “the most stringent realism with symbolism” and “transmute the base metal of reality” into a substance significantly more poetic and expansive.
