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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... thea- ter , " which in its canonical absence ( the insubstantial pageant faded ) never seems to forget . The order of essays is such that , in the successions of thought , some of what appears to follow was actually written before , as ...
... thea- ter ? " the answer was — considering the expectancies that came out of the sixties — not all that much , though the essay pays attention to what there was at the time , with the Wooster Group and Squat , the Mabou Mines , and the ...
... thea- ter with a political conscience . There was a period when I directed , one after the other , plays by Brecht , Sean O'Casey , and Arthur Miller , all of them on the left , sufficiently so that we developed a considerable follow ...
... thea- ters around ( " regional theaters " then , " resident professional " now ) , out- side of New York , than there were at the time ( about three hundred now , I hear , as opposed to the handful then ) , 13 and I like to think that ...
... thea- ter departments . There were intimations of that view in the earliest things I wrote for Theater Journal , and I am surely one of the oldest living contributors , going back to when it was Educational Theater Journal . Half a ...
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 | |