A bird has flown

 

Avant garde director Peter Brook has died, at the age of 97. I remember seeing one of his plays at the Brooklyn Museum, when I was in high school at Walden in New York. The troupe was called Open Theater. 

I don't remember much about The Conference of the Birds, a play based on the writings of the Sufi mystic Farid ud din Attar, except that it was utterly incomprehensible to me at my young and tender age and let's face it, I have never been blessed with a surfeit of intellectual depth, at any age.

I started looking around the net, trying to date the performance and curiously, the chronologies show it was performed in 1977. And I know that I saw it much earlier.

Thankfully I am not daft and was not making it up. I found this old New York Times archive.  September, 1973. Bingo. And pretty much everybody found it incomprehensible, apparently. Whew!