ABSTRACT
Kantor occupies a unique place in twentieth-century theater. His theater is an investigation into the very nature of theater, which he pursues through an exploration of the foundational theme of the Return of Odysseus from the cataclysm of Troy. Odysseus must return if theater is to perform its function, he believes. Two worlds separated by an impassable barrier must be re-united: ours and “the other side,” a world of lost, dead objects that keep returning as ghosts. Their point of contact brings about a “meta-physical shock.” Kantor struggles to find a “ford in the river” that would allow such a re-union of the two sides, but his desperate efforts are repeatedly frustrated. Yet “repetition is the essence of art”: theater, for him, is always a repetition: the re-enactment of an original traumatic, catastrophic event that has been lost in the dark recesses of memory. Theater’s essential task is to break through illusion, “to reach the inaccessible regions of the mind” and to reveal the Real.
