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Finishing up her art manifesto with reflecting upon time, mostly through visual art (and lyrics) remarked upon for their supposed timeless qualities. And yet, being outside of time and tackling it head-on recalls the great Dormammu/Dr. Strange face-off that does the same thing only different. For her theatre practice, built upon the many exciting theories, make for a marvel that I hope someday will see on SITI stage.

This chapter on content is where many of the airy ideas I was considering for my dissertation began to click, first time I read it, and now going at a Nietzschean "slow reading" pace I can understand better how it happened. The repeated mentions of alchemy started the process, forward and backward into my research, with interconnected authors Artaud, Jung, Pauli and Brecht in addition to not getting Macbeth.

The circus comes to town, or at least the Fuller farmhouse, as the Seeds are there to meet their guru and dynamic starts to shift, thankfully, with the family as the grandkids are in close contact with people more outlandish than themselves, even grandpa (Tutu) Lloyd warms up to the admiring crowd, overlooking their hippie habits and sinful ways - a rapidly aging Yumi is the only one skeptical over his new situation.

From the German Alps, along with the philosophies of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, to an abandoned warehouse in Berlin, a possible home for the grounded theatre practices of Brecht, Anne journeys between the extremes to find right attitude, mentioning the Buddhist Eightfold Path and an astronaut's outer space navigation. Not surprisingly it all come back to New York, the Will & Grace version, of being genuine.

It's all about college and connections: the underlying message of all the Conversations that gets special emphasis here. Meredith went to Sarah Lawrence, Elizabeth L. as Performance Yvette and later Woostered with Spalding, Elizabeth S. got on a motorbike for San Francisco and returned to New York to slam bodies into others. Meanwhile, Anne didn't get into any of the good schools, but plays well with others.

Back to the basics for bilingual education, meaning less research-based charts, more friendly classroom photos. The third section develops the idea of Vygotskian scaffolding for students who have language barriers, are shy or cannot understand instruction yet. And for teachers candidates soon to start reading this textbook, they get to hunt for several Coelho contradictions strategically placed in various paragraphs.

A year ago, my PhD committee hit the nail on its head when they got me to include Bogart's magnetic forces in my research questions: not only is there Artaud and virtual reality mentioned in the same section, alchemy, but also it follows her prying thoughts on education, the need for eudemonia to be questioned throughout a play. Yet these are just two of the seven forces she mentions, and VR might have more?

My travels taking me through parts of Tokyo really draw out how and entire society patiently attends to peers, teachers and religious figures who often speak for a score or two of minutes uninterrupted. Most tellingly at Noh plays where spoken text seems to take a backseat to gesture and music, there is still a sense that every word repeated through centuries has a way of shaping the unconscious mind in quantum ways.

Not much alchemy here, but mention of the magnetism it later becomes part of still suggests something transformational in the text. Today is the opening night for Suzuki's Toga Mura Summer Season, and while I am pulled away in an opposite direction my brief visit last week to Toyama instills me with the intention to return and find my own place of art and research, much like Anne's flight from San Diego created SITI.

Again Anne mentions alchemy, and I suspect it is the common thread to describe her art making in every chapter. Here, she articulates how aggravation and anger, two inarticulate energies, can transform into poetic expression. She gives opposing examples of filmmakers: Fassbinder died soon after failing to find words for his craft while Girard spun metaphorical gold from a dinner conversation to fund his next project.

Christmas came and went with only a few glimmers of the Fuller family reconnecting. Lloyd feels the growing pains of winning back his daughter, perhaps his wife as well. Unbeknownst to him, by New Years he has become the Seeds of Resistance's guru, fatefully bringing them back to Liberty Falls, bring a French frying spud in the oven (deep fryer? What is the McD euphuism for getting knocked up?) Yummy and Cass squash.

Starting off with a semiotics-strewn analysis of the shifting context for when a play gets put on stage, Anne mentions a couple of groundswelling events that contributed to a memorable run: Welles' War of the Worlds just prior to WWII, her own Radio Play before and after September 11th, but it is an undergraduate NYU production of Gorky's Lower Depths that first hints at contextual alchemy.

Tina and Ben and Eduardo reveal something about the double life that comes with living for theatre. On the one hand, they are very successful after many years of effort. On the flip side, there is the anxiety, frittering and trauma that come with spreading yourself too thin. Tina wants to quit every six weeks, Eduardo can't sit through one of his plays. Ben sums it best: burning out disconnects from your core values.

After reading everything Anne wrote I could get my hands on, I return to the book that started me off as a drama educator and arts-based researcher: my dissertation will seek to reply to her thoughts on magnetic forces. With a better understanding of mostly New York-based artists who inspire her work, it is no wonder that September 11th was Anne's call to turn up the music and think deeply about the role of the arts.

Nearing the halfway point of this textbook and the writing starts to get bogged down with data analysis and an earnest plea for teachers to delve into multifaceted findings from research. I suspect not many teacher candidates will care, wanting more practical application like in Chapter 6 - and yet, without the theory and research, it becomes a shopping list of so many "display questions" making for passive learners.

Extending the circle of influence beyond Broadway and New York, Anne conversed with artistic directors from far-flung places as San Francisco, Juneau, Washington and back again to Central Park. The freedom found in the smaller corners of the country, and the more personal connection people have to shows being put on such as Molly's Yup'ik Antigone make it possible for Oskar to poke fun at a future president.

Bringing people together is not as easy as it seems, especially when there is so much emotional baggage being carted around. Cass and Yummy have the most to unload, weighed down by the two little Fuller kids pestering their elders. Momoko uses her second childishness to get Lloyd to grow up a bit. Even Elliot stands a chance to redeem himself as BigFoodCorp sends him hurtling back to collide with the Merry Seedsters.

Bringing people together is not as easy as it seems, especially when there is so much emotional baggage being carted around. Cass and Yummy have the most to unload, weighed down by the two little Fuller kids pestering their elders. Momoko uses her second childishness to get Lloyd to grow up a bit. Even Elliot stands a chance to redeem himself as BigFoodCorp sends him hurtling back to collide with the Merry Seedsters.

A theatrical revolution, Boal's coup de théâtre is to make the would-be spectactor a Joker, and shape a whole system around this magical realistic "card" in the Arena Theater. Using a lot of play history to back up his claim, it was powerful enough to incite change in his native Brazil, most notably his own change of location due to another coup across South America now eerily mirrored in the north.

Due to an opportunity to visit SCOT this week, I decided to read from the other end and work my way to the middle so that I am a bit more familiar with the Tadashi Suzuki-initiated SITI company. Great to see artists beyond the dark years in Bush's America. Mary O. patiently accepts that Anne's Viewpoint have succeeded her own, while Mary Z. waits until tech rehearsal, or after, for her play's script to come together.

A bundle of letters found in Yumi's unmentionables drawer reveal the falling out with her family, some lengthy pleading and others almost haiku-like insults. This one-sided conversation invites the reader to consider how Lloyd's heart hardened and Momoko's dementia rooted. After meeting the crew of the Spudnick, Yumi narrates events surrounding the magical year 1974 as if it were a plot summary of King Lear.

An Idahoian Thanksgiving past, present and perhaps future - kind of like A Christmas Carol if Scrooge had nine dollar potatoes on his mind. The family drama plays out like something else a bit more homespun Americana with an Asian element mixed in. Yumi poses as an Indian at the school pageant, bindi dot and all, while her hippie history teacher Mr. Rhodes gives her a firsthand lesson on cultural domination.

Boal reveals the structure of the whole book in this chapter, how the history of theatre moved from confining spectators in a passive role to the glimmer of freedom in Brecht's plays. The revolutionary true revelation comes with an educational project in Peru, introducing the many languages to illiterate citizens, making the audience (here called participant, soon "spectactor") responsible for what could happen next.

It is a narrow path to remain as optimistic and outgoing as Joseph when many in the theatre world seem bitter or beyond mainstream such as the lifers on each side: JoAnne gets lots of praise but has nothing but contempt for academics, philosophers, estate relatives of Beckett and Genet; Lee on the other hand is completely unbound by convention, sends up everything. Of the two, Lee's pataphysical extreme appeals most.

I took a bit of a break between sections of this chapter, realizing that I had read little of the two German authors mentioned and Brecht would be a bit more accessible than taking on Hegel. After reading Good Person of Szechwan, I feel a bit more familiar with the open-ended nature of Brechtian theatre, but still need to delve a bit deeper to understand Boal's argument how empathy is a most terrible weapon.

As challenging as the play was to read - I have yet to develop that inner ear to make Brecht/Weill's verse sing, it is somewhat of a relief to find out in the appendix how difficult of a play it was to write. Various versions with different names, shifting scenes and much more opium are plotted out by the editor giving three takes on the play: an early draft, Finnish and Swiss scripts, a more scandalous American one.