Peter Brook and the world we call "World"
One thing that strikes me about Brook is the nature of the "world theatre" style he's developed. It's certainly an orientalist vision, centred on dignified, spiritually-radiant characters from distant, exotic and "unspoiled" cultures. It's, in other words, a projection onto the other of what the (liberal) West wants and needs it to be.
This vision is generally focused on "timeless, universal storytelling" and features beards, deities, elegant robes and haunting ethnic music. Brook's theatre company mixes-and-matches different ethnicities (there's a Japanese, an African, and so on, all with remarkable, striking faces), cutting and splicing different cultures and traditions in a way which is either calculated to produce some sort of Brechtian alienation (and Brecht is certainly an influence) or to suggest that traditional world theatres all have something in common -- an implied universality which would be the opposite of the alienation effect.
Something about this -- and the New Age spirituality in the Gurdjieff film -- sticks in my craw a bit, even if I'm essentially a member of the Western bourgeois audience who laps this stuff up and finds it "spiritual" and "beautiful" so on. I associate it with joss sticks and copies of David Sylvian's precious 1980s records "Words with the Shaman" and "Plight & Premonition".
What's odd, to me, is the idea that it took America to "globalize the world". Surely the world was already global? What Zakaria probably means is that this was a specific kind of globalization which matched America's aspirations and suited its needs (until relatively recently, when China and India started succeeding beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and beating America at its own game). And that's how I feel about World Theatre (or World Music, for that matter). The world has a huge variety of theatrical traditions, but World Theatre (and I think immediately of certain robes, certain synthesizer sounds, certain notions of "human dignity", and a certain Western audience with its own requirements) is a narrow and recognizable genre, just as World Music is -- a genre defined more by our need to find something beautiful and spiritual and dignifying than by what's actually out there.