“The stage of the 212-seat theater is outfitted with a special sprung-floor (it’s easy on the knees), and there’s a steel crane that rolls along the length of the ceiling for use in special staging effects.

“‘If they wanted to lift a 5,000 lb. Peter Pan all the way up to the projection room, they could do it,’ mused one amazed architect.” (The Washington Post, ‘In Caravan of Dreams, Texas Envisions a Smorgasbord of Life, ’Paul Taylor, 2-27-83.)

Kathelin Gray described the Theater of All Possibilities as “a scrappy interdisciplinary touring ensemble that was 100% participatory and where everyone did everything from cooking and washing the dishes, to repairing roofs and fixing the tour bus. Through theater study, we researched our motivations and emotions, as well as cultural histories, strengths and biases.” (Kathelin Gray, TL Magazine, 3-21-22)

“Our history began in ’67 in the Summer of Love.10 of us moved in together into a Victorian house in San Francisco and created what became the Institute of Ecotechnics and the Theater of All Possibilities, and many other projects. Our first performance was the Mystery Rite, which was based on the Mysteries of Eleusis, which those of you in the psychedelic world know was a theatrical experience, but also transformational.

“We decided to go through, historically, what made history history, what were the decisions, what were the attitudes that were created along the line that has led to the world we’re living in now.

“So we took theater in a broader context, a broader meaning. Theater was and still is, for us, a simulation of decisions. It’s like a cyclotron, except it’s a ‘psy’clotron. It’s a magic circle, where inside the theater you have very specific rules and laws, like the laws of gravity or whatever, that are different than when you go outside the theater.

“Therefore, we use the theater to explore, ‘If I were king, if I were queen, if I were a beggar-woman, if I murdered somebody, if I die.’ The thing about a theater is, you don’t have to pay the consequences, so it’s like a ‘karma-free area.’

“So that is the way we used the theater throughout our history.”

Kathelin Gray, speaking at the Elevate Symposium,11-19-2018

“…a thousand novels compressed into that time”

“Everybody participated in the theater work. I believe at one time we had 13 projects going, and every project had its theater. I was talking with somebody the other day saying, ‘Okay, 1978? Yeah, let’s see, I was in Santa Fe, and I was working on getting the drawings together for the hotel in Kathmandu, at the same time we were finishing up the Llano project with 30 adobe houses, and I was also doing the final drawings for the next project, which was supposed to be Plaza Canyon,52 townhouses down on Canyon Road there near the loop, and then I also was - well, let’s see, that was ’79? -I was still bouncing back and forth to Australia to the project down there, that was ’77, ’78?’

“So anyway, we were doing several things simultaneously… while doing our theater work! It was really wild. I was saying to Mary, ‘I can’t imagine packing more stories into a smaller space of time!’ I remember in 1979, we were having our annual conference in Penang, Malaysia, and our venue was an old leprosarium right offshore, on an island somewhere off of Penang. So for one of our afternoon sessions, we always did some sort of crazy work-exercise, and our thing that day was to write the history of the Synergia, up to that point. Well, I had joined in ’70 and this was ’79, and I’m standing there with several other people who had been through quite a bit of it, and we just looked at one another laughing, because it was like there was a thousand novels compressed into that time, just from what we knew, and then there were other people who had their novels in their minds! ‘Truth is Stranger Than Fiction’ just suddenly overwhelmed us all, and we were just cracking up! It would seem like total insanity to most people. They couldn’t understand it - it got a lot of flack, because it was inexplicable, and most people don’t want to touch things like that, because ‘it smacks of madness!’ But god, it was so incredible.”

Conversation with Phil Hawes, 8-29-23

“The Caravan of Dreams founders drew inspiration from a collage of sources: the Transcendentalists, Surrealism, the Beat Poets, and Tibetan Buddhism; the Works of Brecht, Artaud, Jarry, and bio-geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky; and friends like Charles Mingus, ethnologist Conrad Lorenz, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs,  Brion Gysin, painter Gerald Wilde, and Tamil poet and publisher Tambimuttu.

“If ‘Cowtown’ seemed an unlikely spot for such a confluence, it was also at the vanguard of another kind of synthesis, the consolidation of corporate culture (as a way of life and political force) and of the ‘military industrial complex’ that President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell speech, had solemnly warned the nation against. The Caravan of Dreams appeared in downtown Fort Worth like an antibody born to neutralize a pathogenic conservatism.”

(Maria Golia, Ornette Coleman: The Territory and theAdventure, p. 180.)

This is just the beginning of this volume. If you want to keep reading, here's a link to Williams' website, where you can download all three volumes for free! Thanks for reading!