Volume 12, Number 3 · February 13, 1969
The Third Theater Revisited
By Robert Brustein
In the middle Sixties I wrote an essay saluting a new theater that was just beginning to evolve in opposition to the existing theater on Broadway and in the culture centers. At the time, the 'third theater' as I called it, was a fringe movement whose continued survival was as problematical as its anti-war position was unpopular, so it was with considerable surprise that I watched it, soon after, begin to take a position of power in the theater. This development paralleled a failure of nerve among the middle classes, as the forces of conventional culture seemed to grow guilty and weak before the culture of the young, and the American avant-garde, for the first time in its history, became the glass of fashion and the mold of form. What was once considered special and arcane—the exclusive concern of an alienated, argumentative, intensely serious elite—was now accessible, through television and the popular magazines; vogues in women's fashions followed hard upon, and sometimes even influenced, vogues in modern painting; underground movies became box office bonanzas, and Andy Warhol's factory was making him a millionaire.
Feature, 2805 words
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