There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length.

Continue reading → The Occupied Space from The Empty Space