Thus, theater could not have been a genre among others for Artaud, who was a man of the theater before being a writer, poet, or even a man of the theater: an actor as much as an author, and not only because he acted a great deal, having written but a single play, and having demonstrated for an aborted theater, but because theater summons the totality of existence and no longer tolerates either the incidence of interpretation or the distinction between actor and author.