[Man] is a misfit in the present and this condition is reflected in the drama he creates….

One recurrent element in that drama is ritual action. We shall consider such action in three contemporary plays: Genet's The Maids, Triana's The Night of the Assassins, and Kopit's Chamber Music. Belonging respectively to the French, the Spanish-Cuban, and the North American cultures, these plays illustrate in their striking analogies a much talked-about phenomenon: the emergence of a planet-wide culture, whose common denominator, in the western world, seems to be the individual's show of alienation.

All three plays are about man's estrangement from himself, about his fears, his flights from an unbearable reality, his gropings towards identity, and his failure to achieve it. (p. 369)

[In Kopit's Chamber Music], it is doubtless expected that we should see in the board-meeting in the asylum, beyond the mere pretext of pathological delusions, a representation...