Theater as therapy. Theater as revelation. Theater as direct confrontation.

Polish director Jerzy Grotowski exalted theater as all of these and more in his famous Statement of Principles: "The actor accomplishes this act, but he can only do so through an encounter with the spectator —intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a cameraman, wardrobe mistress, stage designer or makeup girl. The actor's act...is an invitation to the spectator. [It is] genuine love between two human beings.... In our opinion it epitomizes the actor's deepest calling."

There was a time when young directors around the world modeled themselves after Grotowski and held up his Towards a Poor Theatre as the guide for how to make the best, purest and smartest pieces of "experimental" theater. Grotowksi, who died in 1999, was a rebel. A student of all the great European acting-training styles, he explored Stanislavki and Meyerhold and took on the more esoteric work of Delsarte and the particularly physical aspects of Peking Opera and Japanese Noh. He discarded them all as worthless to his art. Why teach actors a proscribed set of skills, he asked? Grotowski called it all a "bag of tricks."

Grotowski wanted theater to move away from the deductive style of actor training and into the reductive. He sought to strip away the actor's ego and any hint of artifice in performance, and in the process he could move the focus off props, scenery, costumes, wigs and other externals. His was a naked, soul-baring way of expression in which the actor went into a nearly trancelike state.

Don't teach actors to act, said Grotowski; instead, peel away at the actor's resistance to acting. Freeing up the psyche, splaying open the soul—that was Grotowski's goal. "Impulse and action are concurrent," he wrote. "The body vanishes, burns and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses."

Wow. When's the last time you saw any actor do that?

I've been thinking about Grotowski a lot lately as I've traversed the paths between Dallas' small, experimental fringe theaters, places like Matthew Posey's Ochre House, Tim Shane's Dallas Hub and others. Talk about "poor theater," in the budget sense anyway. Posey's stage is in the living room of his Fair Park storefront-home. At The Hub, director-playwright Billy Fountain is putting up his own new play, Crushing Grain, on a budget of $200. Fort Worth's Johnny Simons has long used Grotowski principles in his original shows at The Hip Pocket.

There were elements of Grotowski, too, in Upstart's recent hit production of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio. This show was heavy on externals that Grotowski would have eschewed. They performed on an authentic reproduction of a 1980s-era Cleveland radio studio. But actor Elias Taylorson, playing a late-night talk show host in the throes of an on-air nervous breakdown, gave as soul-baring a performance as I can remember seeing in a long time. Here was an actor who was simultaneously very still physically, but emotionally explosive. Remembering the final 15 minutes of that show, I hear Taylorson's Barry Champlain character not yelling dialogue at his listeners, but growling like an angry, cornered animal. This was a visceral stripping down of actor artifice. His body did seem to vanish and all we heard and saw were impulses of madness.

As gimmick-ridden as Dallas Theater Center's recent A Midsummer Night's Dream was—come on, bubble machines, disco balls AND watergun fights?—director Kevin Moriarty gave us some Grotowski by including the audience in the telling of the story. Theatergoers were pulled onstage to play the "moon" during the Pyramus and Thisbe section and, by the end, the audience was onstage, dancing and singing right alongside Puck, Oberon and the rest of the gang. This two-way exchange, this breaking down of the invisible walls between stage and audience, is all Grotowski. (And it's something Moriarty has done in all three shows he's directed at DTC so far.)

In a no-budget Rocky Horror in Grapevine that blurred the lines of cast and audience, in a clever retelling of The Old Woman in the Wood by The Drama Club at the Bath House featuring recycled trash as props and costumes, I have seen little bits of Grotowski at work.

My old drama teachers in college and grad school loved to drop Grotowski-isms, mostly as a smack at film and TV actors whom they saw as dependent on the technology of those media to juice inauthentic performances. They also seemed to dwell on the really grim utterances of the Polish director: "The rhythm of life in modern civilization is characterized by pace, tension, a feeling of doom," went one. Well, these were the Nixon years.

One of my more outre classmates in college was a Grotowski disciple. For solo class performances, he'd wear a dance belt and throw himself around a bare stage uttering guttural grunts and howls. He might have been taking Grotowski a bit too literally.

This economy has made many companies into "poor theater" by necessity. But art finds a way, doesn't it? More and more companies are cropping up in gallery spaces, community centers and church basements. They may not even know they're doing it Grotowski style. They're just making it work by stripping things down to the bare essentials. Sometimes that's all you need to make great art.

Email me at ElaineLiner@TheaterJones.com. Go ahead. Really.