SOURCE: “Plays in Performance Festivals: Dublin and Avignon,” in Drama, No. 143, Spring, 1982, pp. 30–1.

In the following essay, Shorter recounts what it is like to experience Różewicz's Birthrate in the theater.

Ought we to be primed for the play? Should we get ready for it, like students? How much are we expected to know before the curtain rises? Is it best to have read the book, or not? Suppose you do not even speak the language in which the play is written?

These and other questions filtered vaguely through the minds of some playgoers at the 1981 Dublin Theatre Festival on their way to the Gate [to see Tadeusz Różewicz's Birthrate]. Of course the Gate has never cultivated the idea that we should go to the theatre without an idea in our heads. Decades ago Hilton Edwards and Michael Mac Liammoir turned it into a playhouse where the...