ABSTRACT
The rediscovery of the early avant-gardes in Italy sprang from specific practical problems confronted by New Theater creators as they took up the instruments of theatrical art. The arrival of the Living Theatre in Rome in 1965 revitalized the response to Bertolt Brecht, pushing the reception of the German dramatist beyond the narrow borders of political ideology, joining his example to that of Artaud, whose Theater and Its Double exerted widespread influence in art and literature, well beyond the bounds of theater. The epistemological rupture with concepts of continuity and spatio-temporal linearity led each company to form its own "adopted culture", choosing from a much vaster repertory of influences than what could be absorbed by the standard genealogy of Italian theater. Pier Paolo Pasolini's theater is a-dramatic, in that it is based on a pseudo-dialogic skeleton: the original impulse to write in the genre of tragedy came not from a rereading of the Greek classics but rather from Plato's Dialogues.
