Richard Schechner – Performance theory
New York City, 1968. In a converted garage on Wooster Street in Soho—gritty walls, low ceiling, the smell of sweat and incense in the air—a group of performers and spectators are entangled in a wild rite. This is not a traditional theatre with a stage and seats; here, the action unfolds all around, and the audience is part of it whether they like it or not. An actor draped in a leopard-print cloth, eyes wide and body glistening with sweat, leaps onto a wooden table shouting “I am Dionysus! Join me!” Around him, other actors and a few audience members form a writhing circle. They chant, they laugh, they shed inhibitions like old skins. In one corner, a cluster of spectators clambers onto scaffolding to get a better view as two performers begin to reenact an ecstatic dance, one that resembles an ancient Greek ritual crossed with a 1960s love-in. A middle-aged couple, clutching their coats, look equal parts scandalized and intrigued as a naked actor streaks past them, pursuing an actress who is beckoning seductively. Amid this carefully orchestrated chaos stands Richard Schechner, the director and mastermind of the evening, his presence somewhat camouflaged among the performers. Dressed casually in jeans and a black turtleneck, Schechner watches like a ringmaster in the circus of Dionysus. He isn’t barking orders; the performance has a life of its own now. But he moves here and there, nudging an audience member gently into the circle, offering a steadying hand to an actor balancing on a railing. This experience, Dionysus in 69, is his creation—a happening that breaks down the boundaries between performer and spectator, between theatre and life, until all are participants in a communal frenzy.
The scene in that garage is emblematic of a revolution in theatre that Schechner helped ignite. Born in 1934, Richard Schechner came of age in a time of change. By the late 1960s, he was a young professor and director who believed that theatre should not be a polite affair of velvet seats and fourth walls. It should grab people, shake them, wake them up. He founded The Performance Group (TPG) in 1967, assembling a troupe of actors, artists, and free spirits in downtown New York. They took over the Performing Garage, an actual garage, transforming it into a flexible space where any corner could be a stage and every spectator might find themselves in the middle of the action.
Schechner was deeply influenced by the era’s counterculture and by his studies of rituals and performances from around the world. He’d read Antonin Artaud’s calls for a Theatre of Cruelty that would bombard the senses; he’d been impressed by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s intensely physical, spiritual actor training. He had also traveled to study traditional performances—village ceremonies in Asia, drum dances, and the like—seeking the roots of why humans perform. To Schechner, a Balinese temple dance, a football game, and a Broadway musical were not entirely separate species; they were variations of performance, with different rules and degrees of participation.
This broad perspective helped Schechner formulate what he would call “performance theory.” But long before he wrote down his theories, he tested them in shows like Dionysus in 69. This production was an adaptation of Euripides’ ancient tragedy The Bacchae, which tells of how the god Dionysus drives the citizens of Thebes into frenzied revels, leading to the king’s gruesome demise. Schechner and TPG turned The Bacchae inside out. Rather than a cautionary tale witnessed from afar, Dionysus in 69 invited the audience to become the god’s followers for a night. They workshopped it for months, often using unconventional exercises: hours of improvisation, primal scream sessions, even something called “attack therapy” where actors confronted each other with raw emotion to break down personal barriers. By opening night, the troupe had devised a production that felt spontaneous, almost dangerous. The performing space had no fixed stage or seating; spectators found themselves sitting on the floor or on wooden scaffolds, sometimes moving as scenes roamed about the room. The actors broke the story apart, inserting modern commentary, sexual liberation, and direct interaction with the crowd. At one climactic moment, the character of Pentheus (the doomed king) was stripped of his business suit by both actors and willing audience members—a symbolic tearing down of authority and inhibition that left more prudish onlookers gaping.
That night, and others like it, often ended with the boundary between theatre and reality thoroughly blurred. The line “May I take you to your seat, sir?” became an ironic chorus—the actors would chant it even though there were no assigned seats, highlighting that everyone had to find their own place in this environment. Some audience members jumped in fully, dancing and chanting with the cast, feeling the thrill of communal freedom. Others held back, observing but inevitably drawn into eye contact or physical proximity with the performers, which in itself was a shock compared to normal theatre etiquette. Dionysus in 69 became a downtown sensation. It captured the spirit of the late ‘60s: anti-establishment, participatory, sexually frank (yes, there was nudity and simulated orgiastic writhing, scandalous to some), and politically charged. Even legendary filmmaker Brian De Palma came to film the production’s final performances, creating a movie that intercut footage from different nights to immortalize that ephemeral happening.
Schechner’s work at The Performance Group didn’t stop with Greek tragedy turned to collective orgy. He went on to stage environmental, provocative pieces like Makbeth (a reimagining of Macbeth in a mud-filled pit with witches and punk rockers), Commune (about free-love communal living), and others. In each, he sought to reinvent how stories could be told and experienced. Sometimes the play itself was devised from the actors’ own experiences; other times he’d deconstruct a classic text. Always, the aim was to make the audience active—emotionally, intellectually, even physically. Schechner believed that theatre wasn’t a one-way transmission but a circular energy exchange between performers and spectators. If you as an audience member climbed a scaffold to escape a roaring Dionysian revel only to find an actor scaling after you, shouting a line from Euripides in your face, well—that adrenaline spike meant you were alive in the moment, not passively watching from a cozy distance.
By the 1970s, Schechner began articulating his ideas in writing as well, coining terms and frameworks that would birth a new academic field: Performance Studies. He studied not just theatre productions but rituals, sports, social behaviors—anything with a performative element. One of his key insights was the concept of “restored behavior” or “twice-behaved behavior.” This idea was that all performances (from a sacred ceremony to an actor’s role) consist of behaviors that are rehearsed and repeated. When an action is performed, it isn’t happening for the first time; it’s a restored version of something we’ve seen or done before, now put in a new context. This concept helped explain how an actor could transform into a character (they restore behaviors of others or fictional people), or how a community re-enacts its values through rituals (restoring behaviors of ancestors or archetypes). Schechner was essentially saying: look at the underlying performance in everything. A politician giving a speech, a child playing pretend, a group doing the wave at a baseball game—these are all performances with roles, audiences, and a kind of script.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the early ‘70s, Richard Schechner was still very much a hands-on director. One can imagine a rehearsal in 1974 at the Performing Garage: Schechner is guiding an exercise for a new piece. The actors stand in a circle, breathing together. He asks them to share a personal memory of a time they felt truly part of a group. One actress talks about marching in a civil rights protest and feeling one with the crowd’s chant; another actor recalls playing in a high school basketball championship game; someone else describes a family religious festival from childhood. Schechner listens, nodding, and then says, “How do we create that feeling here, in this room, tonight, with our audience? That’s what I want. I want us to transform this theatre into a space where we are all in it together, not watching from outside.” He then might lead them in a ritual-like exercise, perhaps borrowing from his observations of global theatre: he might have them practice an Indonesian chant he learned, or a Sufi whirling motion, blending it into their performance vocabulary. He constantly experiments: what happens if the actors welcome the audience at the door with hugs? What if a scene moves into the restroom, or out to the street? In one instance, The Performance Group actually did lead audiences out of the theatre to parade through the streets as part of a show—a literal breaking out of the confines.
Schechner’s interest in ritual led him beyond the garage too. He spent time in other cultures observing how performance lives in daily life. A famous example: he traveled to India and was enthralled by the Ramlila, a traditional performance of the epic Ramayana, which takes place over many days in a whole town, with actors playing gods and demons and crowds following from scene to scene, almost like a moving theatre. This and other experiences cemented his view that the roots of theatre lay in communal, transformative events, not just in the polished proscenium productions of the West.
In 1979, Schechner wrote a book called “Environmental Theater”, recounting the lessons from his experiments: he described the need to reshape spaces, to involve audiences, to use found texts and personal stories. He emphasized the concept of theatre as a social event rather than just an artistic one. He wrote about Dionysus in 69 and how the transformation of an aesthetic event into a social event—where everyone in the room felt part of something—was the ultimate goal. By the 1980s, his writings and practical work laid the groundwork for a more formalized study of performance. He became one of the founders of the Performance Studies department at New York University, training new generations to look at performance in expansive ways. If you were a student under Schechner, you might one day be analyzing a Kabuki play, the next day learning about a Native American healing ceremony, and the day after conducting an exercise in class where you treat the classroom like a stage for a political protest performance. He broke down the walls between disciplines: anthropology, theatre, dance, psychology all fed into understanding performance.
Yet Schechner never abandoned the magic of live theatre itself. Into the 1990s and beyond, he continued to direct shows worldwide, often revisiting classics through his unique lens. He staged Waiting for Godot in post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, making the environment (a ruined city) part of the performance’s meaning—a nod to environmental theatre in a broader sense. He remained an active voice in discussions about how performances can effect change or at least awareness. One of his lasting contributions is the idea that performance can be a rehearsal for reality. That is, by acting something out, we in a way prepare or experiment with how we live. This can be liberating: a protest can be seen as a performance that prefigures the society the protesters want; a play can allow us to experience dangers and emotions safely, so we better understand them in real life.
Now, recall that swirling scene at the Performing Garage. The chant of Dionysus in 69 reaches a climax. In the story of The Bacchae, the frenzied followers eventually tear Pentheus apart limb from limb, mistaking him for a wild animal. In Schechner’s version, the “tearing apart” of Pentheus becomes a communal catharsis: they don’t physically harm him in reality, but symbolically strip away his ego, his status. The actor playing Pentheus has surrendered to the group—he lies on the floor, letting them pile on him in a chaotic embrace. Suddenly, a whistle blows. It’s an actor, signaling the end of the ritual. The performers freeze, breathing heavily. The audience members who were involved also pause, uncertain. Schechner slowly steps into the center of the room and thanks everyone for coming, as if concluding a workshop or a ceremony. Some spectators laugh nervously, some clap and cheer uproariously. Others are too stunned to react immediately. Over the next minutes, performers and audience disentangle, pat each other on the back, exchange glances that say “Wow, what did we just experience together?” Strangers who might never speak on a subway find that they’ve howled in each other’s faces or held hands dancing in a circle. A certain barrier has fallen, if only for the night.
One older gentleman, a theatre critic who came skeptically, scribbles in his notebook: “Not sure this is theatre at all—more like a tribal rite or group therapy.” But as he writes it, he acknowledges that he felt something raw, maybe even profound. Another audience member, a young man with a burgeoning interest in theatre, feels he has seen the future; he walks out into the cool night air with his mind racing: What if all theatre could be like that—alive, responsive, breaking rules? That young man might go on to make his own experimental plays one day. Indeed, many artists were inspired by Schechner’s work, even if indirectly. The immersive theatre experiences popular in later decades (where audiences roam through warehouses following actors, for example) owe a debt to Schechner’s pioneering. The idea that an audience isn’t just a passive consumer but a co-creator of the event is now almost taken for granted in certain progressive art circles, thanks in part to his influence.
As we step back from the Dionysian revelry and watch Richard Schechner turn off the lights in the Performing Garage after the last audience member has left, we might notice a satisfied glint in his eye. He sees the messy cushions on the floor, the props strewn about—evidence of a space well-used, boundaries broken. He hears in his mind the echoes of laughter, gasps, chants that filled the room earlier. For Schechner, theatre was always about those moments of transformation—when people cease being separate individuals and, through performance, become a temporary community. He dedicated his life to crafting those moments and understanding how they tick.
Schechner’s legacy is twofold: the thrilling productions he created and the intellectual framework he provided for others to create their own. If you attend a contemporary experimental play where actors pull you into their story, or if you read an analysis comparing a political rally to a stage performance, Schechner’s spirit is in the room. He showed us that “all the world’s a stage” is more than a cliché; it’s a call to see patterns and possibilities in every human action. And he insisted that the stage itself could be as free and wide as the world: a place where anything can happen, and where spectators can be players, and where, perhaps, we rehearse the kind of society we aspire to.
In the end, think of Richard Schechner less as a director and more as a shaman of theatre—someone who guides participants through a shared ritual. The shaman’s goal is healing, understanding, transcendence. Schechner’s goal was awakening, connection, transformation. The garage theatre might have been humble, but in it he conjured the spirit of Dionysus, the ancient god of theatre and revelry, to shake modern souls. And when the spell broke, as all performances must end, those souls carried a spark of Dionysian freedom back into everyday life. That spark, small as it might be, lights the way for performance to continually reinvent itself—and for us to reinvent the world as a stage where everyone can play a part.
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