Director, playwright, actor and outcast surrealist Antonin Artaud is perhaps best known for the manifestos set forth in his book Theater and Its Double, which envisioned a new form of radical performance he dubbed “The Theater of Cruelty.” Artaud intended to shock audiences out of complacency by replacing the familiar comforts of naturalistic psycho-drama with a surreal, sensually graphic theatricality, one that traded escapism for confrontation and – Artaud theorized – would rock the bourgeois establishment with “humor as destruction.” more ›