ABSTRACT
The final chapter focuses on two self-identified adherents of the Piscatorbühne line: Judith Malina, Piscator’s student and co-founder of the Living Theatre, and Frank Castorf, former Intendant of the Volksbühne-am-Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, who has described Piscator as a “father figure” and “historical model” for his own radically politicized, technologized theater. More broadly, the chapter surveys Piscator’s influence on the American avant-garde and off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and on practices in post-unification German theater. Of particular interest is the “postdramatic” theater, a mode anticipated by Piscator’s intermediated experiments. Acknowledging the range of groups, artists, and techniques descended from Piscator’s example, this final chapter attempts to answer the question of why radical ruptures such as the Piscatorbühne remains the exception rather than the rule in modern theater practice, emerging at key moments of heightened political tensions. As Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 and the abrupt end of Castorf’s reign at the Volksbühne both show, global capitalism continues to exert distorting effects on politics and art. As this study reminds the reader, in a timely fashion, theater that seeks to change society is today just as threatened as it was in Piscator’s time, confined to the margins by powerful opposing forces.
