The most notorious and far-reaching of these efforts came from the Performance Group, which grew out of a New York University work-shop led by Richard Schechner in 1967.

In 1968, Schechner published “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,” which combined elements of transactional analysis, Brecht, and Meyerhold as it explores the nature of the theatrical event both as a self-contained work of art and as an interaction with an audience.

Schechner was setting out not merely to disrupt traditional understandings of the nature of theatre but to explore and re-situate the role of the spectator in relation to the performance.

For Schechner, environmental theatre was democratic theatre, and one of his goals was to destroy theatrical illusion by making the spectators believe they were equal to the performers.

Environmental theatre not only transformed the entire theatre into a potential performance space, it also destroyed the unified focus of the audience.

Upon entering the theatre, spectators were greeted by casually dressed actors, who spoke to them informally and helped to guide them to seats.

The lack of any traditional stage or seating area and the lack of clear spatial demarcations within the Performing Garage, the melding of actor and character, the nudity and ritual activities, the encouragement to participate, the final procession into the street, even the location in a then desolate part of the city, all contributed to an experience new for most spectators.

Occasionally, the audience participation crossed acceptable boundaries as some male spectators took advantage of ritual-like scenes to join the action and fondle the female performers. The performers demanded that Schechner restructure these scenes more rigidly so that clear-cut and appropriate boundaries would be established.

These glitches in performance caused by the failure of the audience to participate according to the “script” points up a fundamental problem with audience participation and ritual-style theatre.

In para-theatrical performance, or performative activities, such as those found in certain religious rituals, weddings, funerals, civic festivals, and the like, there may be, properly speaking, no separation of performer and spectator, or else the spectators may have “roles” or clearly delimited participatory behavior.

Schechner saw environmental theatre as political in the sense that encouraging participation “is to demand changes in the social order.”

Once the initial novelty had faded, and without something of certified quality ass a draw, audiences were, by and large, unwilling to forgo the security of assured seating and the safety of a darkened auditorium, The prohibitive costs of renovating Broadway theatres for environmental production quickly brought an end to the experiment.

The ensemble theatre movement had essentially disappeared by the mod-1970s, but in a sense it went out with a bang. The work of Chaikin, Grotowski, Brook, and Schechner was brought together in what most agreed was a stunningly powerful production of three Greek tragedies under the title Fragments of a Greek Trilogy , directed at LaMaMa by young Romanian director named Andrei Serban.

Described as an enfant terrible of the Romanian theatre, he was seen in Bucharest by Ellen Stewart, who brought him to LaMaMa on a Ford Foundation grant in 1969 at the age of 25.

Serban’s first LaMaMa creation was in fact an Artaud-inspired adaptation of the Elizabethan tragedy Arden of Faversham, which received glowing reviews and, just as important, the notice of director Peter Brook, who invited Serban to the International Centre of Theatre Research in Paris.

When Serban returned to LaMaMa in the fall of 1971, he began to work on Euripides’ Medea. He combined it with Electra and The Trojan Women in Fragments of a Greek Trilogy.

Serban’s four-month development of Medea was an exploration of how to communicate the power and passion of the play without the mediating influence of modern language.

The subsequent parts of the trilogy included fragments of English, but also, in The Trojan Women, fragments of pre-Columbian languages.

Serban also employed a form of environmental theatre. The original production of Medea was performed in LaMaMa’s long, narrow basement rehearsal place.

Despite the proximity of actors and spectators, and despite the ritual-like aspects of parts of the production, and even despite the direct physical involvement of the audience in The Trojan Women, there was never any question of the audience joining in the action as they had in Living Theatre and the Performance Group.

Serban’s production created a vibrant emotional connection and intimacy through the staging, but it never violated the implicit boundary between performer and spectator.

The critics attested to the success. “The immediacy of Mr. Serban’s theatre,” wrote The New York Times critic Clive Barnes, “far transcends the narrative notion of knowing what happens in any literary sense. Mr. Serban makes you feel such basic emotions as love, suffering, anguish, disgust, and fear, at a level not so far removed from reality.”

But following these productions there seemed to be no place further to go. In next productions, while some of the spectators were placed on the stage, they remained passive – it was the bleachers on which they say that were moved about on air casters. The spectators were not observers or participants at a ceremony; they were on a carnival ride.

Ensemble theatre had truly played itself out.