The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory. Blau's struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style. If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau's struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau's previous books have come to expect. |
From inside the book
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... Hamlet to the incrimi- nating gaze in Ibsen's bourgeois parlor , confounded by Pirandello and turned back upon the watchers in the mirrored brothel of Genet ? For a while it was claimed , in the vanity of critique , that the system of ...
... Hamlet to the Ghost ( 1.5.1 ) , having followed on the ramparts— " He waxes desperate with imagination " ( 1.4.87 ) —to the perilous site of what , if he can hardly believe his eyes , has never been heard before . Or so , in its ...
... Hamlet in my work with the KRAKEN group — it might have followed what I say of Lear , in " Set Me Where You Stand ' : Revising the Abyss , " because Elsinore was in the derangements of its conception another case of such revision . It ...
... Hamlet or , as I suggest in an introductory note , Hamlet's rethinking of us . In that process there was a kind of cerebral passion in the remarkable bodies of the actors , who — speaking of corpo- real style could literally perform ...
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Contents
Theater at the End of the Real | 9 |
2 The Impossible Takes a Little Time | 26 |
3 Spacing Out in the American Theater | 45 |
Rehearsing the Resistance | 61 |
5 A Dove in My Chimney | 70 |
An Analytic Scenario | 78 |
The Grail of the Voice | 126 |
Chills and Fever Mourning and the Vanities of the Sublime | 140 |
13 Readymade Desire | 207 |
From Tango Palace to Mud | 214 |
The Group Idea and Its Legacy | 223 |
New Music and Theater | 238 |
17 FlatOut Vision | 254 |
Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher | 273 |
Revising the Abyss | 289 |
The Insane Root | 315 |
9 The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity | 145 |
Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America | 165 |
Educating the American Theater | 189 |
12 The Pipe Dreams of ONeill in the Age of Deconstruction | 197 |
Notes | 329 |
343 | |
345 | |