Following his expulsion from the core surrealist group due to political disagreements, Antonin Artaud co-founded the Théâtre d'Alfred Jarry alongside Roger Vitrac. Artaud sought to wrench the subconscious out of the passive pages of dream diaries and unleash it as a physical, visceral force on stage. He aimed to create a theater that acted like a plague, utilizing disturbing dream-logic, non-verbal screams, and aggressive staging to bypass the audience's intellectual defense mechanisms and expose their primal anxieties.

Artaud's radical theatrical experiments laid the groundwork for his influential essays in 'The Theatre and Its Double'. His methodology fundamentally changed poetic drama and performance art, demonstrating that language should be used as an incantatory, physical weapon to evoke the terrifying, unedited reality of nightmares.