The Theatre of Spontaneity (3rd edition)

Abstract

It is difficult to trace what the impact of this book has been since its original German publication in 1923. Most students of theater would not know of Moreno. Yet Moreno had contact with the Group Theater and the Civic Repertory Theater when he was first in New York. More recently Eric Bentley, in his collection of essays on the experimental theater entitled Theatre and War ( 1972), devotes a whole chapter to Moreno's work. And it is interesting that the Summer 1983 issue of the Drama Review, which is devoted to '' grass roots'' theater, should feature two theater companies influenced by Moreno's ideas: Playback Theater and Ecotheater, an Appalachian Mountain theater whose director, Marat Lee, was influenced by Moreno in New York in the 1950s