Theatrical rivalries in the underground were shaped by autocratic directors

Evidence

Horror and Fantasy was not the underground’s only outlandish political metaphor. Tumultuous before it even opened, Conquest of the Universe was founded on a backstage power play. A month before the November 21 premiere at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, the autocratic director John Vaccaro fired the egocentric playwright-actor Charles Ludlam, who took most of the actors with him, among them Smith associates Mario Montez, Bill Vehr, and Jeanne Phillips. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: The factionalism here (Smith associates splitting between Vaccaro and Ludlam) is a micro-instance of scene dynamics the reader is charting — how a scene becomes a market.