Blaming the parents is one of the primal dynamics of world theater, from "Antigone" (also at the National) to "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (currently in revival at the West End).
Her connection with the theater is primal, and she decides to become an actress not out of worldly ambition but out of an urgent need to express the feelings that her everyday self can barely name.
The room, hung with portraits of their parents and relatives (on Jackie Chau's excellent set, they are naked torsos with partial heads or cutout faces), is something like the primal scene of European theater, a place for the characters to act out, watched over by mute, damaged ancestors.
Who would have thought that the dark and primal Butoh form of Japanese theater and dance could be so much fun?
Computer-generated visuals wrestle with the sort of primal, physical performance that is as old as theater itself.
In the video featuring Mr. Battle of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he extols dance as "the most primal of the performing arts".
Stories like these make up "Flood!," a wonderful show from a young theater company whose name seems suited to primal quests: Double Helix.
Then, addressing the assembly, he continued, "I think these gentlemen have earned a round of applause," thereby moving an ideological attempt at an authentic primal experience into the self-conscious realm of scripted theater.
Dairakudakan developed from the Japanese dance and theater art of Butoh, which plunges unhesitatingly into primal postwar angst.
A Broadway transplant from the New York Theater Workshop (as is "Once"), "Peter" anatomizes the primal human desire to fly and in the process makes us feel truly airborne, without an iota of "Spider-Man -style technology.
