to secure financial backing for the troupe with a greatly reduced number of plays and a new plan of attack: "four plays a year, eight months of preparation, four months of stagings, one month in Paris and three months in the provinces and abroad" (Journal II, 219). Copeau's request for funds and the plays failed to garner the needed financial support and he continued his lectures both in France and Belgium. At this point both actors and apprentices were given their freedom to leave and, given his reduced financial status, he devised a new approach. After the departure of some of the student actors and teachers, Copeau began work with his reduced troupe on the "New Comedy", an attempt to reproduce the Italian commedia dell'arte with masks and an acting style based on improvisation. He composed a text, Le Veuf (The Widower), that the actors began to rehearse on a simple platform in the main hall at Morteuil. The residents of the surrounding villages, now accustomed to the fanciful lives of the actors, their costumes and their parading through their towns, baptized them les Copiaus. Starting in May 1925, the Copiaus performed plays by Molière as well as those written expressly for them by Copeau, using masks of their own invention. Their presentations were preceded by a parade of the entire troupe, accompanied by drums, horns and colorful banners. They performed on a bare platform in village squares or whatever indoor space they could find. Copeau continued his work with this troupe as best he could, despite his heavy schedule of readings and lectures. But given their inventiveness and creativity, his control over the troupe lessened. At the end of the year, the troupe moved to Pernand-Vergelesses, a village in the heart of the wine-producing region of Burgundy, where Copeau had purchased a house and property better suited to his family and the needs of the Copiaus. From this headquarters the Copiaus would take their increasingly sophisticated offerings to many of the little towns of Burgundy and abroad to Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and eventually to Italy. Copeau, too, continued his heavy schedule of dramatic readings to help support himself and the troupe. In November 1926, he left on a lecture tour in the United States where he was also to direct The Brothers Karamazov in English for the Theatre Guild in January 1927. In June 1929, the Copiaus formed