The Very Thought of Herbert Blau

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Acknowledgments Portions of this book appeared in somewhat different form in Performance and History: What History? Essays in Honor of Herbert Blau, a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (2009). The editors also wish to acknowledge Performing Arts Journal for permission to reprint Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta’s “The Play of Thought: An Interview with Herbert Blau.” Portions of Elin Diamond’s essay were adapted from “Re: Blau, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming,” The Drama Review (TDR) 44.4 (Winter 2000): 31–43; and “In Memory [of Herbert Blau],” The Drama Review (TDR) 57.4 (2013): 8–9.

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Books by Herbert Blau 1964 The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto [Impossible] 1982 Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater [Blooded] 1982 Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point [Take Up] 1987 The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern [Eye] 1990 The Audience [Audience] 1992 To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance [Appearances] 1999 Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion [Nothing] 2000 Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett [Sails] 2002 The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 [Dubious] 2011 Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual [Reality] 2011 As If: An Autobiography [As If] 2013 Programming Theater History [Programming]

Introduction: The Very Life, The Very Thought Page 1 →Clark Lunberry In truth, the mark of a prelate is not mildness or unction, but the most rigorous intelligence. Our heart is our undoing. —The Bishop, in Jean Genet’s The Balcony What we see of behavior is always subject to doubt, or as if a curtain were always rising on our experience. Or falling. —Herbert Blau, The Audience Herbert Blau spent his entire professional life, as both a theater director and theoretician of theater, striving to realize something of the impossible play of appearance and disappearance that he believed the theater might theoretically, thoughtfully offer, “those moments when you are precipitously about to see something which, in the very activity of perception, disappears, as if in fact exhausted in the energy required for you to see it” (Sails, 153). Of such an acute (exhausting) perception, one in which “the idea of disappearance is engrailed in the very nature of theater.В .В .В . Now you see it now you don’t” (Blooded, 27), Blau describes in one of his later books a stormy encounter from his early days as a director, and of an actor’s lament with his rehearsed role, “I don’t feel this, I’m not feeling this at all,” the actor said. To which Blau vehemently replied, “I couldn’t care less what you feel, or don’t, feelings are cheap! I only care what you think. What we’re doing here is thinking, trying to understand” (Reality, 143). In a later chapter of that same book entitled “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” Blau is looking back from a distance of decades onto memories of emotions always directed toward theater’s own unique vantage onto thought, its corporeal manifestations, its bodily obligations, and, as he repeatedly affirmed, “the ontological fact that the one performingВ .В .В . is dying in front of your eyes” (Reality, 114). Page 2 →The fact of this witnessed dying, the very thought of it, was not—contrary to what one might gather from Blau’s forceful reaction to his struggling actor—an unfeeling or uncaring one but instead a carefully directed response that was to demand of actors, audiences, students, and readers alike the rigors of reflection, a not so cheap cost to the concentration, the kind of thinking, the “trying to understand,” that Blau always insisted on. For, as he affirmed again and again, it is the nature of that thought, as embodied object, as imperiled subject, that Blau most strenuously and consistently sought and engaged throughout his long life. Moving as he did with such compelling effectiveness between a myriad of materials (among so many others, Beckett to Shakespeare, Artaud to The Oresteia, or from a keen awareness of the tortuous movements of history to the day’s own raging headlines), it was always the illusiveness of thought, its very uncertainty, perhaps even its impossibility, that was returned to in his work, with Blau having dared to imagine and confront Artaud’s own terrifying, tragic proclamation that “no matter which way you turn your head, you have not even started to think” (Artaud 48). Blau’s own writing and analysis, turning as they always did every which way (and then some), were a forceful and vigilant manifestation of such a starting point, of such a desire to start thought. For it was, for Blau, at such primordial beginnings that the emotional memory of thought’s rigorous and violent approach was written on the bodies of those performing as thought’s corporeal “condition of possibility, and which as always remains to be seen” (Reality, 148). What Blau would ask of his actors, his audience, and his many students he would also ask of his readers: to think at the “extremity of thought” (Reality, 67) of a theater that, like Hamm’s handkerchief in Beckett’s Endgame, was “blooded with nothing but thought” (Blooded, xx). Emerging within that effervescent tension between the appearance of reality and the reality of appearance, perception itself—“always subject to doubt”—might then rise (and fall) like a curtain. There, at that occluded sight

of the divided eye (at the razor’s edge of Luis BuГ±uel’s open eyeball, to which Blau often alluded), something of the substance of thought itself is finally approached and entered into and where, as if on a stage, life (and death) become illuminated, history happens, and theater thinks, but where nothing of this can “be seen until thought” (34). For, as Marcel Proust’s narrator, grieving for his grandmother, similarly asserts of thought’s necessity for perception to shape into knowledge, “[W]e truly know only what we are obliged to re-create by thought, what everyday life keeps hidden from us” (168). And what is Proust’s obliged recreation “by thought” but the form of thinking-as-theater that Blau demanded, a making visible of the otherwise “hidden” in order for it to be “truly know[n].” In Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm reminds Clov that, like it or not, it is our heads Page 3 →that must be used, thoughtfully, to manage, however fitfully, our way in the world: “Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” Sounding here much like Blau reminding his un“feeling” actor that “What we’re doing here is thinking, trying to understand,” Beckett’s insistence on the need, the obligation, to use the head (a head within which there is nonetheless “something dripping.В .В .В . A heart, a heart in my head”) was always enacted by Blau in his writing, directing, and teaching, and in a life that—with or without a cure—he so actively and productively led. But it was precisely also that “something dripping,” that “heart in [the] head,” that Blau never lost sight of, even if the sight of it, that “something,” remained indeterminate, furtive, and finally fleeting. It should be stated right up front that this volume is not intended as a “tribute book” to Herbert Blau, a festschrift for Herbert Blau—the kind of book by which Blau himself might have been initially flattered but finally restless, or even worse, bored. Instead, this book—the first of its kind to focus on Blau’s work, its rich past, and its enduring implications—has at its core a sustained intellectual focus arising directly from Blau’s own writing, teaching, and many years of working in the theater. As such, the book’s various contributors—ranging from scholars who, in many cases, worked or studied directly with Blau to performing artists who, at various stages of Blau’s long career, worked alongside him—have been carefully selected precisely for their demonstrated capacity to engage the thought, the very thought, of Herbert Blau, the very ideas that he so forcefully instigated and ignited—addressing and responding to Blau’s fierce and polymorphous intellect, his relentless drive and determination, and his audacity, his authority, to think, as he frequently insisted, “at the very nerve ends of thought” (Sails, 149). Herbert Blau was born in New York on May 3, 1926, into a working-class Brooklyn family (the son of a plumber); he died in Seattle on his birthday in 2013, having only months before retired as the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Blau came to theater, and the humanities, relatively late in his studies, having written his first play in college (as an undergraduate chemical engineering major at New York University) before, he claims, he’d never even seen a play performed or set foot in a theater. One has to wonder what motivated the young Blau to write that first play as a science student (a piece entitled When Death Is Dead) and make his initial move into a world of theater of which he knew virtually nothing (though later he would often speak of theater in scientific terms, once linking it to “subatomic physics”). After graduation from NYU, earning his BChE in 1947, Blau made what was, Page 4 →especially at the time, the long trip west to California, having received a scholarship for advanced studies in literature at Stanford University (in part, Blau noted, on the strength of that first play) for both his MA (Drama, 1949) and his PhD (English and American Literature, 1954). Notably, it was while completing his doctorate at Stanford, working there with the renowned poet and critic Yvor Winters (for whom his respect, reverence, and often radical resistance never dimmed), that Blau first began teaching across the bay at San Francisco State University. It was there that Blau was assigned an office with the theater scholar Ruby Cohn, beginning a vital and lifelong friendship, joined together by their shared early interest in the work of a little-known writer of the time, Samuel Beckett. Fig. 1. Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, 1966. (Photo by Priscilla Pointer) Although Blau went on to teach at numerous universities almost uninterruptedly for the next sixty years, he was

initially to establish himself and become known in the theater as the cofounder, with Jules Irving (1925–1979), of San Francisco’s Actor’s Workshop. Blau had first met the Bronx-born Irving at NYU, and they were later reunited at Stanford, the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. It was at the Actor’s Workshop (1952–65), having begun in a “grimy loft above a judo academy,” that many of the earliest American productions of the European avant-garde were performed, including works by Page 5 →Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. In addition, the American premieres of both Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party were staged, as well as the Noh plays of Yukio Mishima and the first play ever produced by MarГ-a Irene FornГ©s. Fig. 2. Herbert Blau (far right) directing Mother Courage, 1956. The actors (from the left) are Beatrice Manley, Stan Young, Malcolm Smith, and Jinx Hone. (Photo by Phiz Mezey) Perhaps most memorably, in 1957 Blau successfully directed Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the maximumsecurity prison of San Quentin. This prison production of Beckett’s play would later stand as a central event in Martin Esslin’s 1961 publication Theatre of the Absurd. It was at the Actor’s Workshop that Blau worked closely with such artists as Beatrice Manley (Blau’s wife at the time), Michael O’Sullivan, Bob Symonds, Tom Rosqui, AndrГ© Gregory, Priscilla Pointer, Ruth Maleczech, and Lee Breuer (both, later, of Mabou Mines), designer Robert LaVigne, and the pioneering electronic composer Mort Subotnick. In this volume, Breuer and Subotnick reflect on and rethink their time with Blau in San Francisco; in addition, Elin Diamond and S. E. Gontarski both write vividly of Blau’s work at the Actor’s Workshop, especially those early productions of Beckett. Page 6 →In 1965, with the groundbreaking achievements of the Actor’s Workshop beginning to make waves beyond the Bay Area, Blau returned to New York, appointed codirector, again with Jules Irving, of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (1965-67). Blau’s work at Lincoln Center, controversial and often stormy in nature (and mirroring in many ways that stormy period in American history), came to a head—and an abrupt and contentious conclusion—with a highly charged and critically disparaged production of Georg BГјchner’s most political of plays, Danton’s Death. The composer Morton Subotnick, having joined Blau and Irving in the move from San Francisco, speaks directly of the tumultuous series of Lincoln Center events, and the toll taken by the endeavor on all involved, in his contribution to this volume. Blau’s relatively brief and combative time in New York—at the very scene of theater so fiercely criticized in his book The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964)—was followed soon after by a return to the West Coast and his being named dean and founding provost at the newly formed, Walt Disney–funded California Institute of the Arts (1968–71), having been hired by no less than H. R. Haldeman, later to be President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. With Black Mountain College as its model, Blau and a core group of high-powered and diversely talented faculty designed and implemented a radical educational curriculum that, at its core, fostered experimentation and interdisciplinarity (avant la lettre), as well as various other forms of pedagogical exploration, including theoretical and artistic engagements within and beyond the university. Eventually coming into conflict with the CalArts Board of Directors, Blau left the school and went on to establish the theater group KRAKEN, first based at Oberlin College in Ohio and some years later moved to Baltimore (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). This small and devoted repertory, cloistered within its pastoral midwestern setting, fostered and fomented many of Blau’s most radical and experimental productions, among them The Seeds of Atreus (1973) from the Agamemnon Trilogy; The Donner Party, Its Crossing (1974), written by Blau in collaboration with many of the group’s members; Elsinore (1976), derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet; and Crooked Eclipses (1977) from Shakespeare’s sonnets. It was perhaps in this move from the administrative offices of CalArts to the studios of Oberlin and KRAKEN that a tipping point in Blau’s thinking took place. There, with his refocused artistic energies, and coinciding with developments in postmodern and poststructuralist theory ascendant in the academy of the 1970s and 1980s, allusions to Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Althusser came more easily—and sooner—to Blau than to anyone in theater and performance studies. Marvin A. Carlson, writing in his comprehensive Theories of the

Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Page 7 →Present (1993), observed that the “richest and most extensive development in America of strategies related to the poststructuralist European theorists was provided by Herbert Blau” (515–16). Carlson tracks the evolution, or, perhaps more aptly, the revolution, in Blau’s thinking from the aspirations of the early institutional repertoire-building/dramatic criticism of The Impossible Theater (1964) to the deconstructionist critique of the very nature of theatrical meaning in Take Up the Bodies (1982) and Blooded Thought (1982), books for which Blau was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism (1982–83). Fig. 3. A KRAKEN rehearsal, 1973. Linda Gregerson (far right) with Bill Irwin on floor in white. (Photo by Christopher Thomas) If, at the Actor’s Workshop, it had been a theatrical avant-garde that Blau introduced to his San Francisco audiences, now the introductions tended toward a more theoretical avant-garde, initiating investigations into a new kind of stage, a new kind of space for the thinking of theater as a “space of consciousness,” of “theory activated by occasions.” A number of contributors to this volume, including Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Bonnie Marranca, and Peggy Phelan, speak directly to the enormous impact of Blau’s own theoretical turn, its far-reaching effect on their work, and its almost immediate transformative influence on theater and performance studies. In his increasingly theoretical works, Blau set forth a number of basic concerns that would occupy him in the years to come: the consciousness of the actor and spectator in the experience of performance; the inevitable consequence of repetition born from our “knowledge of death at the origin of life”; Page 8 →the inescapable fact that all experience is mediated and theater, like it or not, is everywhere, even or especially in “memory”; and that we as audiences come to the theater to experience the privileged but illusory moment in which whatever was there before performance “precipitates into performance,” even as the actor is “dying in front of your eyes.” By looking especially at Take Up the Bodies and Blooded Thought, Carlson highlights Blau’s application of the Derridean theorization of “presence” to performance. Presence is, contra Artaud, neither absolute nor originary but rather mediated and repeated. There is not and can never be a first time. The KRAKEN ensemble, exploring and embodying many of these emerging ideas, made work in part by means of a cocreative process called “reflection.” One performer moved into a space and gave voice to an idea verbally (in language and sound) and visually (in movement and gesture). Another performer, reflecting on those words and images, responded with others, then a third, and so forth, adding layers of expression that overwrote the preceding and were overwritten in turn. Reflection, which requires a kind of poststructuralist deferment of meaning by the performers in the studio, served in the creation of The Donner Party, Its Crossing and The Seeds of Atreus. Both projects took up stories intensified by their status as dark myths (and, in the case of the Donner party, a real but sensationalized history) of cannibalism. Form thus followed content in a most rigorous aesthetic of appropriation and disappearance, a “burrowing” in to see ever more sharply a “ghosting” under way, inciting what Blau described as “the desire to see the thing that remains unseeable, whatever the distance, though it is indeed happening there before your eyes” (Audience, 287). KRAKEN members Bill Irwin, Julie Taymor, and Linda Gregerson recount in this book the importance of this creative, collaborative experience—attrition in the process of theater being achieved, a performing of disappearance—in Blau’s work and, later, their own. In conjunction with and accompanying Blau’s accelerated research and writing, his university teaching never ceased, nor did it even slow down. Prior to taking his final position at the University of Washington, in Seattle, in 2001, Blau was a central figure for nearly twenty years in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s interdisciplinary Modern Studies graduate program, as well as at that university’s pioneering Center for Twentieth Century Studies. Former students of Blau from the Modern Studies program—Anthony Kubiak, Daniel Listoe, and myself—are contributing to this book, each of us uniquely marked and motivated by our extensive work with Blau. Although Blau had largely left the theater by the end of the 1970s, there was nonetheless in his classroom always

the sense that the theater had never left Page 9 →him. Indeed, Blau would often insist that his university seminars were to be engaged as a form of theatrical rehearsal, with a rigorous intellectual and aesthetic concentration directed toward the performance of thought and imagination that, if done right, would need only the mind’s eye to complete it (a performative conviction that perhaps mirrors something of KRAKEN’s earlier investigations into the expanded possibilities of theater, with that group’s own sustained rehearsals undertaken as a kind of theoretical seminar). Thus directed by Blau in the classroom, and with the material activated by the concentrated energies of collective thought, one was positioned to “see it feelingly,” as Blau always urged, quoting often King Lear’s blinded Gloucester on the shores of Dover; or, of such imagined sight (such sight of the imagination), Blau would frequently speak also of Beckett’s Endgame and the character Hamm seeing and speaking as if through the gauze of memory, gazing out to the ocean’s horizon: “Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!” Blau would later select as the title for his book on Beckett this reference to the “loveliness” of that herring fleet, that nearly sublime moment of vivid recollection by a blind man, Page 10 →and all that could still be seen (or was it finally seen?) behind Hamm’s “blood-stained handkerchief,” blooded by thought. For, even if Hamm was in the end “appalled” at the sight before him, there was manifested still in Beckett’s work (and in Blau’s own) a longing for “loveliness” that, if seen at all, would be but briefly seen—a distant, fleeting sight that was no less lovely if fleeting, even if it finally turned to “ashes.” Fig. 4. Robert Symonds as Hamm (seated) and Tom Rosqui as Clov in the Actor’s Workshop production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, 1959. All our employment of constituted sound, syllables, sentences, comes back to the way we say a thing, and it is very largely by saying, all the while, that we live and play our parts. —Henry James The exceptionally large output of books and essays that followed the formative decade of the 1980s branches out rhizomatically from the fecund dialectic of modernism and postmodernism in Blau’s thought. The Audience (1990), for instance, weds theory—poststructuralist and theatrical—to theater history, narrated nonconsecutively but topically. To All Appearances (1992) conjoins a pursuit of the “future of illusion” and the poetry and politics of spectacle, and Nothing in Itself (1999) reconceives Roland Barthes’s fashion system to update “the Look.” And, as noted above, Sails of the Herring Fleet (2000) collects a career-long production of writings on Beckett, an author who was for so many years at the center of Blau’s attention. Other books by Blau include The Eye of Prey (1987), where he addresses directly the cultural and personal shift from theater to theory and the “activism” of each, and The Dubious Spectacle (2002) and Reality Principles (2011), both of which compile a rich and wide range of essays, spanning a quarter century, many of them exploring the theatricalized extensions of theory in performance and body art, in technology, and in new forms of media. Near the end of his life (and responding with some reluctance to requests that he had heard for many years), Blau published the first volume of his autobiography, As If (2011), extending from his Brooklyn childhood to his time at the Actor’s Workshop, followed by Programming Theater History (2013), a collection of his Actor’s Workshop program notes, program covers, and production photographs. Of his prolific and influential writings, Blau was long known for his rigorous and daring form of thoughtful analysis, with a prose style that—as in his public lectures—aggressively and theatrically performed that thought’s forceful emergence through his own richly extending sentences, his own “constituted sound, syllables, sentences” by which Henry James (a writer Blau much admired) insisted “we live and play our parts” (Henry James 48). For instance, in Page 11 →a later chapter of Blau’s Reality Principles entitled “Art and Crisis,” one that addresses responses to theater and performance events arising from 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror,” Blau artfully unfolds within a single sentence a taut analysis that implicates the thinker in the thought, the thought in the process of its own inscription, as well as the individual who is then enscripted into the crisis examined. Fig. 5. Herbert Blau in 2000. (Photo by Dick Blau)

If one wants anything at all from art in a time of crisis (and I’m not always sure that we do) it is—at the nerve ends of thought where thought escapes us, causing us to pursue it, thus enlivening thought—the activity of perception that is something like moral rigor, demanding from every brain cell even more thought, acceding to the indisputable when it’s there, though it’s not very likely to be, and seeing with the utmost compassion, at the limit of endurance, what we’d mostly rather not. (Reality, 207) There is in the very materiality of this singular sentence an instance of thought’s own self-reflexive representation, a performative exhilaration in its clausal extensions (suspended, as if into thin air) that mirrors the extensions of thought, while causing thought, which “at the limit of endurance” culminate in a seeing of “utmost compassion.” When Blau had earlier demanded of his actors that they feel less and think more, this one sentence offers the promise (as well as, Page 12 →whether we want it or not, the moral responsibility) of a compassionate perception that, engaging “every brain cell,” must be thoughtfully earned. Otherwise, Blau implies, why bother at all, for anything less would likely result in platitudes of—let’s face it—brainless repetition. Of theater, Blau dared to think and then ask the most fundamental of questions: not just why bother at all but “Why theater at all?” And, in this volume—The Very Thought of Herbert Blau—we too ask, after Blau, Why, indeed? What did Blau’s extensive and innovative work as a director, writer, and educator (his three occupations inextricably entwined) incite as a response to that existential, ontological question of theater’s particular point and purpose and its capacity for insight and achievement? What determines that which Blau spoke of—ambitiously and audaciously—as the theater’s “universals,” the “truth of its illusions,” and the “impossible” theater’s impossible necessity, what the philosopher Alain Badiou has described similarly as “a theater of the possibility of the impossible; not a theater of identification, but a theater of transformation. Of real transformation” (Badiou, “Alain Badiou,” 3)? What, for Blau, distinguished theater as a unique form of artistic production, as a necessary site of negation and (self)-division, for perceptual, intellectual interrogation intended for “real transformation”? Blau’s own responses to such large questions often return us not to the brain alone but to that mortal body enframing it, containing it (the body and the brain, like Blau’s professions, also inextricably entwined): “What is the theater, but the body’s long initiation in the mystery of its vanishings?” (Take Up, 273). For it was, always, the theater for Blau that effectively offered the thought of that, of that which is disappearing, appearing (in order) to disappear, and of the theater’s own particular vantage onto such an effervescent sight; “theater is thought” (Reality, 11), Blau affirms, where one sees “feelingly,” tenuously, a body in time, a moment in motion, vanishing, “the pull of the organism—its full gravity” on an “ontological fault” (Appearances, 118). There, at this site of time, at this non-site of theater, a threshold of duration and endurance is crossed, a point of departure made manifest at the exposed limits of the performer, revealing what Blau describes as “the dimensionality of time through the actor.” The performing body is vulnerably present in the provisional form of an “evanescence, a living indeterminacy that can never be studied again, that way—because, in a very strict sense, it is the actor’s mortality which is the acted subject” (Blooded, 133–34). Scholars contributing to this book, several already mentioned, include a number of noted writers and theorists, from Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, and S. Page 13 →E. Gontarski to Bonnie Marranca, Peggy Phelan, and Joseph Roach (coeditor of this book), all of whom had long and fruitful intellectual engagements and often close friendships with Blau. Their various essays demonstrate the enduring and transformative impact and provocation found over time in Blau’s work. Sue-Ellen Case, in “Carrying on: The Procession of Blau’s Thought,” traces something of Blau’s own long history, from theater to theory, through his “expository style” and his “allusory chain of sentences.” Case also powerfully contextualizes historical shifts represented in the work of Blau, while asking a question that this very book is asking: “Will the very thought of Herbert Blau continue to matter amongtwenty-first-century readers?”

Elin Diamond returns to and expands on earlier work in “Re: Blau: Theorizing, Resignifying, Mirroring,” reengaging Blau’s writing in light of his passing while expanding the “re“ of her resignifying toward a rich and revealing new regarding of Blau’s own life and work. Diamond applies a specific focus on Blau’s theater as incipient theory, especially as seen in his work—on both the stage and the page—on Beckett. The Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski takes us back to certain vital beginnings for Blau in “вЂWho the Hell Is Herbert Blau?’ The вЂDark Energy’ of An American Cruel Theater,” placing him in the expansive historical context of Blau’s own emergence onto the theatrical scene, especially as played out in his work on Beckett, the theoretical underpinnings of those early productions. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta present one of Blau’s most revealing and far-reaching interviews, “The Play of Thought: An Interview with Herbert Blau.” In this extended exchange, Blau is prompted to elaborate on the “idea of history,” as well as some of the specific moments of his own tumultuous history, on writing and theater, on teaching and theory, and on what Blau calls “the activity of consciousness as the primal scene of theater.” Marranca follows this interview with her own postscriptive reflections on and analysis of that earlier piece in “The Essential Herbert Blau (Rereading his play of thought).” Here Marranca’s own long and valuable work in theater and performance studies tracks and traces the shared and divergent trajectories of Blau’s work. In “Renewing the Ado: An Adieu to Blau,” Peggy Phelan returns to her own enduring investigations into Blau’s work and his (initially) disarming style of writing toward a “molecular view of performance,” offering vivid new reflections on his impact on her and the field of theater and performance studies: “Blau’s writing [as] an homage to the thinking that theater creates and the thinking that writing composes.” In “Blau’s Shakespeare: The Makeup of Memory,” coeditor Joseph Roach tests Blau’s critical methods and theories by applying them to The Winter’s Tale, Page 14 →a late romance that famously sums up its tragicomic action with the Shepherd’s line to the Clown: “Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born” (3.3.113–14). Roach examines how Blau, in his late criticism, juxtaposes two ineradicable memories—the death of his mother and the birth of his daughter—reiterating his early directorial concerns with patterns of doubling and substitution in Shakespeare and thereby discovering in them “the makeup of memory” onstage and off. Also contributing to this book is the playwright and scholar Julia Jarcho, who, in “Dividing the Audience,” joins Martin Harries in a “dialogue” on “divisions” in the theater, addressing Blau’s own insistence that “there is no theater without separation.” Former students of Blau Anthony Kubiak and Daniel Listoe are also included in this volume. Kubiak’s “You Are Living in Your Breathing. You are Dying in Your Breathing: Bardo, Dream-Yoga, and Theater in the Work of Herbert Blau” investigates the inscrutable fact of death as the ghost haunting all performance and theater and the implications to be drawn beyond theater, into life, into death, even into traditions—such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead—that the “fiercely secular” Blau opens for “extraordinarily wide and rich inquiry.” Daniel Listoe, in his expansive and far-reaching contribution “Rehearsing the Promised End,” takes into account an ambitious range of Blau’s work in theater and theory, exploring what he calls the “parallax of theater and history” and how, in so much of Blau’s work, “history and theater appear in such an intimate and necessary relationВ .В .В . [with] each one shading or eclipsing the other into shadow with a mere flinch of perspective.” Finally, among the performing artists in this volume, there are the directors Lee Breuer and Richard Schechner and the composer Morton Subotnick, each of whom reflects on Blau at various stages of his career in the theater; also, from a later period, we hear from the radiophonic artist Gregory Whitehead. Lee Breuer opens the show (and the book) with “HERB,” a kind of Ubuesque epigraph to the volume,

offering his own characteristically ribald recollections of Blau’s “pearls of wisdom” gained through shared, ritualistic “trips to the can.” Whitehead, at the book’s conclusion, offers a kind of coda in “What Thy Memory Cannot Contain,” a radiophonic postscript to a Shakespearean sonnet of the same name that was central to Blau’s work. Whitehead’s contribution is derived from his 1989 sound art collaboration with Blau, Phantom Pain: The Theater of Operations, a poetic distillation on memory, perception, and the drama of loss. Of all of our contributors, the legendary electronic composer Morton Subotnick may have known and worked with Blau the longest, having begun with him at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco in the 1950s, continuing on to Page 15 →Lincoln Center (and experiencing firsthand all its trials and tribulations) in the 1960s, and then returning with Blau to CalArts in the 1970s. In “Re: Herb Blau,” Subotnick offers the most vivid of recollections of his time with Blau, the varied techniques of Blau’s directing, and the infectious nature of his cocreative collaborative strategies by means of which Blau imparted his “deep and driving visceral, philosophic sense; the word вЂrage’ was not a symbol for rage, it was rage. His ecstatic, philosophical rants were some form of physical thinking; not cool rational thought but charged and real.” The director Richard Schechner, in “Herbert Blau Professor Artist Wordist,” explores his own rich memories of his early encounters with Blau, including his drive across the country in 1963 to San Francisco to meet Blau, who was already a bit of a legend for Schechner due to his work with the Actor’s Workshop, his arrival at Blau’s home, and finding himself “face-to-face with a compact muscular man of action who was also a dynamo of intellect. Just the kind of person I intended to become.” The noted actor, clown, and comedian Bill Irwin, in “вЂThere’s One Man Dancing’: Remembering Herbert Blau,” speaks of his own formative time with Blau at Oberlin College, with KRAKEN, and in the early 1970s and the “Blauian ferocity that risked being comic in its size and intensity,” when Blau “grabbed his sweatshirt andВ .В .В . said, “I mean, I ask, вЂWHY THE FUCK AM I NOT A GOD’? That’s the question.” These explosive moments in a long ago Oberlin gymnasium remain, as Irwin describes it, “intensely present after all the passage of years.” In “Learning to Think,” the poet Linda Gregerson points directly to Blau as the one who, in the most fundamental manner, taught her, early on, “how to think,” to understand that “the gaps and nonsequiturs [of the KRAKEN exercises] were precisely the point: that the path from here to there, from speaking вЂin character’ to speaking вЂin chorus’ was ours to discover, each of us on her own and each of us—crucially—as part of the collective.” Finally, in an extended interview, “вЂLiving in Front of Your EyesВ .В .В . Living and Creating,’” the celebrated director Julie Taymor offers her own frank recollections and interpretations of her early work with Blau at Oberlin College, the intensity and often punishing insularity of the KRAKEN rehearsals, and the extended process of collaboration in which, together, “we created the performances,” with Blau as “the editor; the master editor; the master builder.” With the theater understood by Herbert Blau as the staging ground for theater and thought’s own selfinterrogation and, most radically, as “essentially, in every nuance, the site of anti-theater” (Reality, 117), Blau’s long investigationsPage 16 → into it (even after he had ceased directing, or perhaps especially then) led him finally to ask, “What is it that remains extraordinary about the theater?” And in answer to this most innocent-seeming of questions, he insisted that what remains “for myself, [is] what made it impossible to begin with: in every generation, though repeating itself impossibly, the form of (its) disappearance.В .В .В . [T]hose are the terms in which I will be thinking about it till I die. Which isВ .В .В . like dying into the thought of theater thinking about itself” (Dubious, 136). Is there not, seemingly, something impossible, impossible to think, of a theater of such thoughtful self-awareness, such fatal consequence? But might we nonetheless, after Blau’s death, imagine his extraordinary ambitions for the theater somehow enacted, imagining that he did just what he proposed, thinking theater’s impossibility up to the very point of its (his) disappearance, dying into the very thought of it?

Blau asserts, at the start of his early book Blooded Thought, “The theater is an occasion which exists most substantially in the rehearsal of its disappearance . . . [in] the dynamics of vanishing.” Consequently, he continued, “It is then—as with the occlusion of time in the language of the unconscious, the imprint of an absence—that we become aware of what we finally see in the theater” (xiv–xv). Keeping in mind what Blau describes here of “the dynamics of vanishing” and “the occlusion of time,” it is perhaps only now, with the death of Blau and in the imprint of that absence, that disappearance, that the various contributors to The Very Thought of Herbert Blau are positioned to become more fully aware of what we might finally see in the dynamics of Blau’s own work, in those precipitations of sight, those initiations of thought, that he for so long dared to imagine, affirm, and achieve.

References Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud Anthology. Edited by Jack Hirschman. 2nd ed. San Francisco: City Lights, 1965. Badiou, Alain. “Alain Badiou on Theater and Philosophy.” Lana Turner Journal, January 19, 2015. https://archive.li/NoHon Beckett, Samuel. Endgame, a Play in One Act. New York: Grove, 1958. Blau, Herbert. As If: An Autobiography. Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Blau, Herbert. Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Page 17 →Carlson, Marvin A. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. James, Henry. Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene. Edited by Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Edited by John Sturrock and Christopher Prendergast, translated by John Sturrock. New York: Viking, 2004.

HERB Page 18 →Lee Breuer In the period of Herb’s King Lear with the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, I was the twenty-year-old assistant director he never seemed to have the time for, filled, as his life was, with a company that included the likes of actors Michael O’Sullivan, Bob Symonds, Tom Rosqui, and Beatrice Manley; designer Robert LaVigne; and composer Morton Subotnick. Herb’s Lear was a study in barbarism, conceptually inspired by Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Herb was scheduled to leave just after the opening on a lecture tour of Europe, and I, the designated point person for Lear, was petrified to assume the responsibility without further guidance. (In his absence, I would end up having to replace every single member of the cast at least once.) Luckily I noticed that Herb’s frenetic precurtain ritual always included a trip to the can in the five minutes before curtain. So I followed him faithfully—night after night—choosing the stall next to his where, amid a chorus of farts and grunts, I would receive, as in a holy confessional, his notes, his pearls of wisdom, and his blessings. These precurtain exegeses laid the conceptual groundwork of my future. I’m sure no one has held forth more exquisitely on the toilet since Martin Luther.

Carrying On: The Procession of Blau’s Thought Page 19 →Sue-Ellen Case I. The Tiresias who wandered T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land crossed an apocalyptic yet allusory-rich plain; s /he was tattered by doggerel verses, citations from German and Sanskrit classics, and snatched images from other literary works as s/he peeped into domestic dysfunctions and picked his/her way through the ruins of a great past. Tiresias times two wandered that plain as Beckett’s tattered tramps, animated by Buster Keaton–like pratfalls of consciousness through the allusory space of Bible verses and fractured idioms, disremembering dysfunctional social scenes and a more recent, receding past. These allusory extensions of existential musings laid out a stunningly broad topography of citations and obtuse references to create an energetically informed, if melancholy, existential plain. In Eliot, the effect was to create a genealogy and the experience of thinking in verse; in Beckett, the effect was of staging, of having thought, now trying to remember thinking. Herbert Blau assumed this role of a kind of a Tiresias-like knower himself, creating his own allusory extensions across page and stage to bridge the postexistential breach. In Blau, working the effect was to make of theater thought and of thought theater. Wording it out, Blau both memorialized and deconstructed the existential platform of thought that lay beneath his version of the po(a)st. II. It was this practice of allusory agglutination that kept Blau ceaselessly talking and writing and staging through citation, metaphor, and borrowed image. Blau took up not the bodies but the verbiage of the Fathers as he stepped out across that vast plain of signification through extended sentences and directorial notes, tattered, like Tiresias, by Marx, Brecht, Lear, Kafka, Aristotle, Foucault, The Oresteia, Goethe, Genet, White Devil, CalderГіn, Artaud, CГ©zanne, Page 20 →Stella, Grotowski, T. S. Eliot, and Beckett, to name only a few chained through chapter one of Blau’s Take Up the Bodies. Writing in the allusory style of Eliot and Beckett, though set within the project of critical theory, Blau’s allusions are never footnoted, remaining somehow indeterminate, even though sometimes directly quoted: “In any case, as Huizinga says, вЂPlay only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos’” (Take Up, 7). Perhaps here, where Blau directly quotes a passage without footnote, the reader might be encouraged to understand his italicizing of mind as a sign that his own thought joins a transcendent concept of mind in order to lay out the basis of critical thought. Perhaps, even more generally throughout his work, these myriad allusions float like those helium balloons that read Happy Birthday as part of Play rather than working to signify their own formal and historical contexts through scholarly citation. The effect of omitting a footnote is to focus the reader on Blau’s thought process rather than a consideration of how Huizinga had thought. The transcendence of Mind and Play is achieved through invocation rather than citation. Blau commonly engages an allusory chain of the Fathers to emulate the practice and power of invocation. There are moments of condensation when we are literally up against a wall—Bartleby preferring not to, Beckett’s Hamm listening to the hollow, Hamlet beetling over the cliff, CalderГіn’s Julia outside the convent and the ladder gone: “Isn’t this the wall it stood against?” Play Strindberg, and the walls are collapsing all around. Who is going to stand up for the continuity of history? (Take Up, 5) The accumulation of allusions to unlike texts, as an invocation, creates the appearance of history garbed in italics. Blau’s lyrical philosophy, proceeding by image and metaphor, its mastery of the history of theater, and its personal intimacy with snatches of dialogue, crescendos up into the italicized call that secures agreement on the part of readers, or improvisation on the part of actors: the very thought of Herbert Blau. III. Blau makes the Fathers play, but the play is not fun. It tends toward the tragic with titles such as the scary The Eye of Prey (“eye of flesh, eye of prey, subject closing upon object, hunter and hunted, mirror upon mirror mirroring the bloody show”) (Eye, 9) or the wounded Blooded Thought. In Blau, Theater and her twin sister, Thought, stir the brew that feeds the tragedy. [Pause here to note my own allusion to Macbeth, proceed onward through Aretha Franklin’s “Chain, chain chain, Chain of fools,” and add the dark vision of “the shouldersPage 21 → of doom” as Artaud described the crows in Van Gogh’s painting to shadow

Blau’s articulations. You see, Blau’s style is contagious, or more precisely, contagion. A veritable plague, as Artaud and Camus inscribed it.] IV. Even though Blau was a chain-writer, -talker, -director, he cut through the authority established in his allusory chain of Fathers with the sharp saw of Derridean and Lacanian rejectory logic. But that didn’t stop his chainwriting: clauses, subclauses, phrases, and sentence fragments of deconstructive and psychoanalytical strategies accompany the allusory chain to stretch sentences to their final frontiers. In Blau’s style (though style is a shallow term for what Blau produced; it bears a more lyrical tone in consonance with his thinking than the term structure used by those at the other post), sentences do the major work of completing a thought. They dominate the paragraph rather than the reverse. Sentences are Blau’s mГ©tier of extension, stretching out the postexistential plane. IVa. For Blau was not yet a poststructuralist but a postexistentialist whose directing and writing were memorials to the existential notion of action. As a memorial, his work mourned the loss of the existential celebration of action while making a show of continuing to act. Yet, in its spectral mode, acting was still doing, and writing was still writing something, so in that sense they continued to bear the existentialists’ optimistic sense of decision. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: If the given can not [sic] determine the sentence any more than the word can, if on the contrary the sentence is necessary to illuminate the given and to make the word understandable, then the sentence is a moment of the free choice of myself, and it is as such that it is understood by my companion. (Sartre, Being, 661) La phrase est un projet qui ne peut s’interprГ©ter qu’à partir de la nГ©antisation d’un donnГ© (celui-lГ mГЄme qu’on veut dГ©signer) Г partir d’une fin posГ©e (sa dГ©signation, qui elle-mГЄme suppose d’autre fins par rapport auxquelles elle n’est qu’un moyen). (Sartre, L’Être, 573) Blau, Take Up The Bodies: The actor moves (or is moved?) into the space. The first step is a territorial imperative.В .В .В . Not any step, but that step, the first trace upon emptiness.Page 22 →В .В .В . The step might have been retracted like the first word x’d out on an empty page.В .В .В . [But] [f[rom any point of view, the structure extends, finitely breathing and being breathed, in thought, undeniably there. (Take Up, 104) If syntagmatically damned, diachronically there is presence, meaning, and acting. IVb. Repeat: Clauses, subclauses, phrases, and sentence fragments of deconstructive and psychoanalytical strategies accompany the allusory chain to stretch sentences to their final frontiers. How, grammatically, in English, which does not suffer extensions gladly as, say, German or Latin, did Blau stretch the sentence thus? One way was through the use of commas that heroically affix a series, a clause, a phrase, or a set of poststructural strategies to one another. It’s next to impossible to think of Beckett and not get caught up in the compulsive textualization of displaced body parts, the tongue in the uterus, the speechless infant in the mouth, the writing before the letter on the matriarchal wall, going through similar contortions to achieve self-presence in the living present, that pure auto-affection which, like the writing of the unconscious in the libidinal economy of the womb, does not inhabit or borrow from anything outside itself. (Eye, 77–78) Blau empowers the comma in its ability to enhance the sentence, on the one hand, and on the other makes it serve the continuity of his thought. The comma provides the extension of the thought and also holds the coats of the Fathers as they pass through to the period.

Gertrude Stein also highly regarded sentences for their abilities, although she rarely used them to quote anyone but herself or those who referred to Herself. But Stein, unlike Blau, in her Alice-attended writing, perceived the sentence as a form of coupling rather than extension: “A sentence is made by coupling meanwhile ride around to be a couple there makes grateful dubiety named atlas coin in a loan” (Stein, How to Write, 115). Cubistically, Stein’s sentences could, like Atlas, carry all the world at once upon their shoulders rather than mapping its extended plains. Happily married to her sentences, and strong in their composition, the butch Stein eschewed the comma for the very servility that Blau commanded of them. As I say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s interest and I do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing. A comma Page 23 →by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them the use of them was positively degrading. (Stein, “Rooms,” 28) While Blau relied on the kindness of commas, Stein put on her own coat, thank-you very much, pushed open the sentence, and moved on. Is Stein’s strength an independence gained by a grammar without Fathers, while Blau’s is a melancholic one haunted by their ghosts (his Elsinore)? (Not V, but I again) Blau’s not, butВ .В .В . Blau also works in a counterstyle that contradicts all his “posting” of the dying agonies of existentialism and the heroic resistances of Derrida and Lacan: the expository. Simple declarative sentences in chapter two of Take Up the Bodies narrate the story of Blau’s being “there” at Lincoln Center. He moves from San Francisco to New York. He meets members of the board. His production of Danton’s Death is killed by the New York critics. He speeds down 9th Avenue to La Mama. Jules Irving drinks four martinis. They gamble in Las Vegas. Retreat to Lake Tahoe. The Vietnam War escalates. Black Power eschews whites. Then Blau agrees to resign, and in chapter three, he moves back to California. He cofounds CalArts. He does business with the Disneys. He meets a woman on the board. He registers the earthquake. An oil spill. The Disneys are upset with the direction of the school. He makes a decision. He goes to Oberlin where he Burrows with his troupe KRAKEN. In fact, so to speak, Blau’s first and final books are autobiographical. In spite of incisions made by the critical saws of Derrida and Lacan, the subject Blau maintains is “present” over time, witnesses political events, considers the relation of his work to them. Blau’s “not, but,” a notion borrowed from Brecht that both does and does not apply here, is characteristic of many leading characters in critical theory and theater in the aftermath of the 1970s. From Derrida, in critical theory, to Heiner MГјller, in theater, these leading men were involved in activist movements alongside their postproduction production. II. (again). And Events happened “out there” in the world that moved Blau’s internalized frame out of the postexistential closet into a familiar narrative style that seeks to document. In Blau’s expository style, thought and theater are not always their own subjects but turn to politics and even to “reality.” Moreover, exposition documents a Blau in dialogue (to emulate his italicization, perhaps, because the tone of his writing seems monologic) with institutions, individuals, Page 24 →and activists: “There are some very good minds in a warp or lapse of perception who enunciate a politics in theory that they cannot possibly live with in reality, there being no lucid adequation between them” (Eye, 11). Uncharacteristically, Blau calls for “adequation” between theory and “reality.” Here agglutination and slippery signifiers are displaced by the more stable notion of adequation, which, presumably, bridges the breach between thought and action, or thought and experience, “living,” as he put it here. The obsessive untying of sign to referent, characteristic of the 1980s and Blau’s own writing and directing, seems here to be re-fused. Perhaps, for Blau, adequation even pertained to acting, in a kind of postmimesis mimesis that could embody a position within the social frame, both embodying and failing to embody. Discussing his rehearsals for Seeds of Atreus, Blau records the production’s own framing by current events. A truce had just been declared in Vietnam, but the war was hardly over.В .В .В . We were

confronting the use of punishment. . . . Our rehearsals were taken over by arguments. . . . Is the social order, then, necessarily repressive, even cruel . . . ? We concluded with a vigil. . . . But we knew it wasn’t quite over. And if it was over, where were we? We had gone through a myth of the myth as far as thought could take us, but there was also history, imperturbable, and we were still looking for signs. (Take Up, 102)

Again, this is Blau in dialogue with his actors, and they are debating whether their decisions regarding the production are adequate with the Vietnam War’s consequent political order. However, adequating the selfpresentation of that political order creates a postmimesis that does not replicate the old familiar one-way mirror, but a mirror of a mirror, and that double duty is not deconstructive but itself an adequation of contemporary political strategies. Never before in historyВ .В .В . have appearance and show dominated so surreptitiously on so global a scaleВ .В .В . where the illusion of truth establishes credibilityВ .В .В . manipulating the image of truth as strategic policy.В .В .В . This is so even with the vanishing of the staged war in Vietnam and the theatricalized opposition, and would be so even if we hadn’t elected an actor as President. (Take Up, 253–54) Theater was everywhere and that political practice drove critical thought (especially that which was found in the men’s clubs of French postexistentialist Marxists) to lose the potential adequation between theory and “reality” in what Blau often referred to as Genet’s hall of mirrors, or Plato’s Cave, or what BaudrillardPage 25 → called Simulation. Yet the expository Blau is not completely lost among those endlessly reflecting surfaces. He can still name Reagan as the actor and the staging of the war as distinct from the war. III (again). Blau in dialogue produces the impression that the imperative to adequate theory with reality does not proceed from the universal mind that Blau shared with Huizinga but is a process located within individual minds, and, unfortunately, not all minds are up to it. Blau’s passage above continues, “Despite the high IQs among the dissidents and what I have just said of the best and brightest, there were also a lot of dopes” (Eye, 11). Perhaps it is unfair to make much of a remark, which seems to be the status of this observation, but the distinction between those with high IQs and “dopes” does suggest one of the central debates around critical theory and political commitment that raged during those years. The feminist critique embraced the new translations of French critical theory, on the one hand, and eschewed them for their masculinist elitism on the other. Audre Lorde asserted that the “master’s tools” would never dismantle his house; activists demanded that social analysis be written in a language all women could understand, rather than within an abstract, complex argument addressed to the highly educated (sadly, like this one, but early Judith Butler made me do it); bell hooks (a specifically lowercase nom de plume) indicted language for its excision of black idiomatic speech, and so on. Theatrical experiment was similarly divided: while Blau and others “burrowed” in the avantgarde, R. G. Davis (whom Blau mentions from time to time) staged political protest in the city parks with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and feminist theaters put the newly spoken words of silenced women in consciousnessraising groups onto the stage. V. In the final section of The Waste Land, Eliot’s Tiresias sits fishing somewhere, or some “I” sits there anyway, near the ruins of the Great Past, as Sanskrit invocations echo like thunder, ending the poem with blessings from the Upanishads: Shantih, Shantih. As Blau ruminates over the ruins of the sixties, he also arrives at a concept from the Upanishads: “Over the global village falls the veil of Maya. Amazement sits upon the brow” (Blooded, 50). To make this theological turn expositorily specific, he begins the final chapter of Blooded Thought by emphasizing, not in italics but in capital letters, as, say, carved on tombstones, “I AM NOT AN ORTHODOX JEW, NOR EVEN VERY MUCH REFORMED” (138). So there. Following this expository ejaculation, the chapter proceeds through numbered sections (as in Eliot, as in Peggy Phelan’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing,” as here) that do seem, somehow, scriptural, or poetic, maybe (as in Phelan) more secularly Wallace Stevensy. The chapter title Page 26 →of this scriptural arrangement invokes Benjamin’s Angel of History: “Flights of Angels, Scattered Seeds.” The Angel rises to

“interstellar dimensions” (143) only to be brought back down to earth by Seeds. While, at least perhaps to a feminist author, these seeds and their scattering might seem orthodoxly Father Abrahamish, they are not! They reference “Ceres, goddess of grain” (144). Following the practice of Ceres’s fertile croppings, those capital letters from the beginning of the chapter scatter in order to head conceptual terms: “They called it Destiny and now we call it Structure” (144), which, apparently, are not really the “Same” (145), especially when interrupted by the Reality Principle (144). But, although even the seeds transcend into universalist meanings, they find themselves “coming back to earth, like Gravity’s Rainbow,” where the “Blitz and the Bomb” presciently run like “higher-mileage cars” (148) and then “permutate the hybrids” (163). And here, though I am not gluten intolerant, I must confess that I become lost amid Ceres’s scatterings, even though I do prefer goddesses over Father ghosts seeking Revenge. Again, the conclusion, this time of the book, crescendos in an incantatory style. VI. The Audience (which Blau opens with Virginia Woolf’s “No audience”). At the intersection of Blau and Woolf, I take up my own reception of this body of work. Moving toward concluding this study with my own Angels and Seeds, I transform Blau into Herb, a Father of my own, with Ruby Cohn (to whom Take Up The Bodies is dedicated) as Mother. She, who highly disdained critical theory, a Close Reader, or even a New Critic, was Herb’s office mate at San Francisco State, his faithful audience always, a colleague at CalArts, a friend. They were married in their obsessive attachment to Beckett and contemporary theater and divorced by their approach to its interpretation. As my progenitors (Elin Diamond once said they were gods to us), my earliest teachers, and lifelong supporters, although both eschewing feminism, Herb and Ruby always made gender appear to me in their differences. Lest this turn seem simply self-indulgent, let me point out that it was in that troubled and vibrant decade of the 1980s that Herb published the majority of his critical work, and it is impossible for me to encounter it now without dusting off some fragments of that historical context by casting the concepts-as-characters because, like Herb, I was “there.” While Herb published Take Up the Bodies, The Eye of Prey, and Blooded Thought, Ruby published Just Play: Beckett’s Theater and worked to completion New American Dramatists, 1960–1990. Where Blau theorized, Cohn described; where Blau extended, Cohn capsulated; where Blau made Theater Thought, Cohn made it intent and plot; where Blau discussed his own work, Cohn made no reference to herself. More generally, the opposition seemed to be critical abstraction versus careful detailed description and Page 27 →an easy, self-referential brilliance versus a modest industry. Elizabeth Bruss described the 1980s as Suddenly, An Age of Theory, capturing the sudden way in which the wave of French thought broke over those unsuspecting close readers. Even though Ruby and Herb were both fluent in French theater, Ruby fought the French theory (to her own detriment) while Herb embraced it. This divide shook the entire field to its core. As a student, I saw a faculty member at San Francisco State throw a chair across the room and resign on the spot because critical theory was displacing the close reading of “original” texts. He was only one of an entire generation that either walked away or were simply left behind, as it seemed. At a conference, after Elin Diamond presented a critical reading of Beckett, a distinguished scholar publicly corrected her by saying “read Beckett not theory!” Those who considered critical theory to be the wave of the future embraced Herb’s books. He became the mentor of a generation. Aided by his texts and his example, theater critics morphed into critical theorists. How, then, is this difference, embodied by Herb and Ruby, gendered? Not by person, but also not not by person. I remember the distinguished historian Caroll Smith-Rosenberg showing an image of the US Congress, of men, as she pointed out, and a feminist called out that she was an essentialist. Some of us were split down our critical middles by that difference. By early feminists’ theory, women were socially constructed, historically, to signify the material, and men the ideal. So it seemed “natural” that it was the Fathers who formed a great chain of theorists, from Derrida and Lacan through Foucault and Baudrillard, and that the best feminists could do would be to hold their coats, while sometimes successfully grumbling about it through, say, Cixous and Irigaray, or, more generally, feminist theory. (Think Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Following on that historical division of material/ideal by gender, and borrowing colloquially from Lacan, it seemed to some that men succeeded in the public realm by “phallic display,” and women, well, they didn’t succeed in that arena unless through a “masquerade” of masculinity (Joan Riviere). So, again, it appeared “natural” that Herb would be

regarded as a celebrity and Ruby as a competent housekeeper, cleaning up Beckett’s disjecta (the title of a book Ruby edited of Beckett’s same). As a Daughter, I learned to drive from Herb’s deft integration of theory to theater, while still insisting on the housekeeping work of the close reading of theory, observing strict citational practices, and paying careful attention to the exigencies of style. In other words, the continuing-thoughdeconstructing tradition of idealism (marked by the elements of universalism in Herb’s work) as the province of men, and the materialist tradition of women’s detailed, secondary critical work seemed to proceed from my academic progenitors. Page 28 →Voila!, as the French have sometimes said, this very reception of Herb’s very work is a close reading of his theory through a study of vocabulary, patterns, grammatical structures, punctuation, symbolism, and so on. Ruby still matters. VII. But will the very thought of Herbert Blau continue to matter among twenty-first-century readers? The extended, or distended, existential plain may be too broad, too furrowed for the quick, hurried, attenuated steps of texting rather than textual practices; it may be precisely Blau’s style that fails to invite the twenty-firstcentury reader. Other changes in contemporary critical assumptions may seem to make the work less than useful. a. Existentialism and postexistentialism have been upgraded into phenomenology and finally queered (Sara Ahmed). b. While the grammar of Blau’s thought is extended, it does not extend globally, beyond the traditional Euro-American frame, or even out into the rich genealogies of specifically ethnic cultural creations. c. Although, reportedly, gender issues did inform some of the rehearsals, “in an emerging feminist context, what were we to make of it? I mean Apollo’s defense: the male chauvinist mystery of the immaculate conception of Athena out of her father’s skullВ .В .В . вЂborn unnurtured in the dark of the womb’—and thereby denying mother-right” (Take Up, 102). Notions of gender coding do not succeed in “bloodying” the generally masculinist traditions within which the work operates. The seemingly unmarked works to which it alludes now seem marked. Heterosexuality is a completely stable assumption. d. Obsessed with taking up bodies and the vicissitudes of what defines their existence, even though situated in a society of surveillance, Blau does not speak to the techno-hybridity of bodies themselves and especially the stages on which they appear. In the 1980s, the grammar of the digital had not yet replaced Structure with Code (Lawrence Lessig). e. Even Theater, which Blau holds to be the center of his ruminations, of “life” and the “future,” has been displaced by performance, displaced again by the performative. The apparatus of imitation has dissolved into a fusive dew of the traditions of the social (Butler’s “iterative power of codes”) with the transgressive. f. “There is, however, a self-evident logicВ .В .В . that says the theatre’s future is in remaining theatre, and making the most of that illusion.В .В .В . When the theatre looks to the future, it always comes back to that. There may be Page 29 →more desirable states of being than that obscured by that duplicity, but in imitating nature—as the theatre irreparably does—the theatre is the illusion of what appears to be left of life.” (Blooded, 166) However, unlike many of his colleagues, Blau still may join the Ruby Cohns, Martin Esslins, John Willetts, Eric Bentleys, Helen Chinoys, Rosemary Curbs, and others who seemed, once, to define the study of theater criticism but were slowly abandoned as the decade of the 1980s wore on. VIII. Nothing in Itself: Complexities of Fashion, 1999 Of course, Herb has already conceived the conclusion that would follow the changes in scholarly fashions mentioned in section VII. The title of his book on fashion, though not its project, is accurate in its nomination. Rereading his works now, following decades of subsequent critical theory, makes available the changing fashions

of discourse that, in their truth-telling insistences, naturalize their presumptions, while, in their presumptions and style, they unveil the Janus face of Truth (cynical capitalization here). Critical theory has abandoned the playful, self-critical writing style of the 1980s, which, as Blau illustrates, used semiotic, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic strategies to undercut, while sustaining, the delivery of meaning. More contemporary theory may describe the tenuous quality of, say, archiving meaning, but it does so in a stable, referential style. Take again, for example, Sara Ahmed. The question of history can only be posed partially: it is a question that allows us to think about how the relationship between particular encounters and more general processes requires an impure or failed theory. That is, although the relationship between the particular and the general may be determined, it is not fully determined, which means that we must give up the assumption that it can be translated into a meta-discourse (such as History). (Strange Encounters, 9) The critical strategies of the 1980s remain but not the writing style. Poststructuralist as it may seem, the style does not seem to question the authority of the structure of grammar, although Ahmed often, like Blau, moves easily between the first-person singular, thus identifying her perspective, and the more “objective” claims of critical thought. To designate this difference in discourse as a change in “fashion” is rhetorical, in the sense of persuasive. To denigrate the difference in critical practices as fashion is to emphasize or reveal the untested assumptions that make one approach seem “dated” or uninformed, particularly in style, while another seems more temporally relevant. To ask why this change Page 30 →has occurred, why semiotic play has been abandoned in contemporary discursive delivery practices, is beyond the scope of this project, but the ramifications do seem to reveal the metameanings of style. Along with styles of critical theory, the classics also come and go. I remember, when serving as editor of Theatre Journal, I pleaded, “Please do not submit another article on Sam Shepard!” This would not be a problem today, although then he seemed to have “arrived” in the category of a classic. One would be hard pressed to find a chapter in a current dissertation on one of the playwrights in Blau’s coterie of those who “mattered, ” like the queer Genet, for instance, or even, in many, on a playwright. In the 1980s, modern drama was one specialization in the field, while today contemporary works seem to define the field, and fashion is a key word in many of the studies. So, while reading Blau may not be assigned in future seminars, the elision brings basic considerations of the goals and practices of the field to the fore. So even when Blau’s work no longer matters, it matters.

References Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Print. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Print. Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Print. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Print. Sartre, Jean Paul. L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Print.

Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. Paris: Plain Edition, 1931. Print. Stein, Gertrude. “Rooms; Poetry and Grammar; Saving the Sentence: A Special APR Supplement.” American Poetry Review 36.1 (2007): 25–33. Web.

Re: Blau: Theorizing, Resignifying, Mirroring Page 31 →Elin Diamond We want continuity and we deny continuity.В .В .В . The past needs blood donors. The theater is a means of transfusion. (Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies) PerformanceВ .В .В . is always under suspicion. Seeming is seminal. (Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies)

Blau and the “re” After The Impossible Theater (1964), Herbert Blau wrote his major theoretical texts during the flush of poststructuralist theory and postmodern performance, both perfect foils for his modernist skepticism. In 1982 he published Take Up the Bodies and a volume of essays, Blooded Thought, partially to demonstrate that his 1970s performance group KRAKEN, while sharing a broad terrain with the Performance Garage, the Open Theater, and other groups of that decade, never sought to collapse art and life or resolve the dualities “tangled in the language by which they are named: mind/body, self/substance, spirit/matter, surface/depth, being/becoming” (Blooded, 78). If, in rehearsal, KRAKEN explored the slippage implicit in “process,” writes Blau, “it went against the grain of my own nature, which was bored by easy indeterminacies, distrusted the aleatory, and sought closure” (79). If the radical antifoundationalism of postmodernism, with its vertiginous displacement of sign, concept, identity, and history, seduced Blau, it was because he found these features first at the theater. KRAKEN was “throwing off meaning(s) at each stage,” generating a “structural web of indeterminate relations which seemed like a gesture toward wholeness by the denial of wholeness” (79, my italics). This paradox, modernist to the core, derived from Blau’s lifelong dialogue with Shakespeare, Freud, Beckett, Brecht, and the politics of the Left. Those commitments never changed but rather deepened as Blau read, just after the KRAKEN years, the theory of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, all of whom became new interlocutors for his experimentation. As he later explained, “What appealed to me in poststructuralist thought was that it seemed to be theorizing what we were doing” (Sails, 69). Page 32 →In its deconstruction of signification, postmodern theory (what poststructuralism came to be called) nevertheless embraced the “re”—that is, the mirrored doubling within the sign that displaces its unitary authority. In the 1990s that “re” came to suggest temporality, history, and politics; the “re” marked a desire to reconfigure, reinscribe, and resignify the law (cultural, social, linguistic) even as we carry out its operations. In Judith Butler’s work, for example, gender identity moved beyond its provenance as a “construction” in social theory. Gender, Butler argued, exists only in the doing, as “a stylized repetition of acts” that conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition (Gender Trouble, 12). Given her feminist politics, Butler imagined that in reiterating or “citing” these conventions we may also resignify—somehow change or displace—them. Moreover, to the extent that the “law” of gender and sex is knowable only in its citations, we may understand this law not as substance but as the “appearance of substance” while no less coercive for being so. Meditations on appearance, repetition, bodily texts, temporality, history, and the illusory and elusive workings of power are central to Blau’s theater theory. Where, he asks, are the specular boundaries of performance? How, at the vanishing point of spectatorial desire, does seeming slip into being? Blau might wonder about the desire lurking in the “re”—the desire for resignification (which nevertheless acknowledges the law’s durability), especially when it materializes onstage as performance. For Blau performance promises nothing more or less than a riddling of Horatio’s anxious question concerning Hamlet’s ghost: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” “If it doesn’t,” Blau comments in his Hamlet-haunted Take Up the Bodies, “the play is obviously in trouble. And if it does, can we really believe it? If we ask too many questions

the subject is likely to disappear, like the dream of love, into the questions, so that the questioner is left with the dreaming. And the fear that it might be theater” (94). This “thing” that precipitates theater, that which is not theater, may turn out, we fear, to be theater too, “with all [its] indeterminacies of illusion and resistances to illusion, including the illusion of resistance” (Take Up, 94). The theater itself tells us that nothing is irreducible or foundational. What appears to be foundational is an effect pretending to be foundational—theater’s oldest preoccupation. “Seeming is seminal,” says Blau (94), and in worrying the problem of appearances, he takes us closer to understanding how, in what contexts, and with what investments of desire, the “re” of resignifying happens. Paraphrasing Blau, we might say that resignification “needs blood donors [and that] the theater is a means of transfusion” (8–9). This doesn’t mean, though, that we escape the derisory horror of seeming. When, as we’ll see, Susan Sontag resignifies Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993, a site rife with blood donors, Page 33 →we will need to recall Blau’s caution—that our desire to see the “re” produces it, whether or not “it” appears. Can we stage the “re”? Can we submit the coercions of the law (phallic, social, cultural, tribal), or, rather, its reinscription, to theater’s hypervisual apparatus? For theater-phobic theorists, a staging of the “re” is unthinkable; audiences may mistake embodiments for an endorsement of representation, that is, humanism and foundationalism by other means. As Blau has taught us, this view of performance is striking for what it ignores. It ignores the obsession in performance literature—particularly in Greek tragedy and Renaissance and Jacobean plays—with ghostly power effects traced into the actions of dramatic worlds. It ignores the hysteria disavowed in Ibsen’s perspectival drawing rooms, the “notВ .В .В . but” in Brecht’s theory and plays where the disavowed is faintly readable in the gesture of the Gestus. It disregards the fascistic rigors in Genet’s scenarios, as well as the mockery of the performer’s will in Beckett’s theater. In the power regime theater emulates, “seeming is seminal”; that is, resistance to the law in the form of reinscription is duplicitous at best, and in the end “impossible.” Derrida, who has written beautifully on Artaud, nevertheless forgets theater’s illusionism, albeit in a different way. In “Signature, Event, Context,” Derrida chides J. L. Austin for insisting that performative utterances (words that enact what they say) require a conventional or “happy” context in order to be successful. Derrida argues that because utterances are made of signs, and signs, in order to be signs, are iterable (repeatable), regardless of context, Austin’s performative utterance cannot be hemmed in by the speaker’s intention or a “saturable and constraining context,” for this would commit the logocentric fallacy of equating speech with presence. Austin’s saying/doing performative, precisely because it is a speech act, is already a citation, can be “put between quotation marks” and thus lifted from one context to another, “engender[ing] infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). While he incorporates what Austin rejects—the “nonserious” citation on the stage, in a poem, or in a soliloquy—and while he asks that we not set up an “opposition between citational statements and singular statement-events,” Derrida reifies the context of theatrical iteration and sets up his own opposition between the “absolute anchoring” of context and “the essential drifting” of iteration. The event drifts, the theatrical context sits. But why not put “context” into play? Why not understand theater’s locations, bodies, desires, readings, the sites of citing, as equally allergic to unitary self-identity? Put another way, if, as Derrida argues, every event is characterized by a “structural unconscious” (327), might the event’s unconscious be its context, an assemblage of history, materiality, and mimetic energy that, in aggregate, reveals the “essential dehiscence” of iteration (326)? Page 34 →Derrida mocks Austin’s “exhaustively determinable context” which requires “the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject for the totality of his locutory act” (“Signature, ” 322). Although Blau describes the best performance as “totalled by thought” (Take Up, 17), although he proposes that consciousness is perhaps a “universal of performance,” he does not mean intentionality in Derrida’s sense. Given “the dissipation of theater into the theatricalization of everyday life” (12), perception in/of performance is always reflexive, divided, never wholly a function of what one desires or sees. Moreover, Derrida’s formula for context—“a set of presences which organize the moment of

inscription” (“Signature,” 317)—receives a further torqueing in Blau, for whom “presence” organizes nothing. In Take Up the Bodies, presence is painfully participial: “presencing” marks the move from thought to theater, from thinking to showing, which is always a “mediation,” a shifting of appearances—a drift. For Blau, presence in performance instantiates no first time, no originary event, only “recurrence and reproduction” (Take Up, 171). Derrida thinks that recurrence or citationality breaks up the meaning-making context and destroys presence. Blau thinks citationality is embedded in context; like différance, it’s what theater is already doing before the lights come up, and “presencing” is what shows us that.

Identification, Mirroring The “re” has to happen in time, but what kind of time? The 1980s and 1990s brought attention to identification—for Freud, the aggressive, rivalrous mimesis that is part of the child’s psychic makeup (“a little boyВ .В .В . would like toВ .В .В . be like [his father] and take his place everywhere” [Group Psychology, 37]), and for Lacan the infant’s identification with its coherent image in the mirror which, in contrast to its unsteady body, sets up a self-division within the psyche and a futile, “asymptotic” yearning for wholeness throughout later life. In her dialogue with Lacan in Bodies That Matter, Butler proposes that the “regulatory schemas” that produce the body’s morphological possibilities are not “timeless structures” but rather structures that remain in place precisely because we cite them, through identification, repetitively. For that reason these structures can be resignified—not because we intend to alter them but rather because, in citing/identifying with the ideal, we fail to reproduce it completely (14). In To All Appearances (1992), Blau finds a similar attrition of effect in the structures of power: “[T]here is no perfect hegemony” but neither is there (as in the “re”) a “mere incessant displacement of power” (29). Rather, with a suspicion of human agency no less profound than Derrida’s or Butler’s, Blau asserts with Adornian pungency, “What moves the structure is the struggle to sustain it” (30). Blau made some interesting remarks on identification, primarily in relation to acting theory and transformation, but Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” gets scant notice,Page 35 → except insofar as Blau works steadily on the problem of the mirror, writing, “No performance can occur outside the disposition of mirrors” (Appearances, 53) and “Mirrors are unbreakable” (52). For Blau the psychological process of identification is a subset of the operation of illusion. Yet, against Althusser, who called identification a “false problem” always already subsumed in ideology, Blau insists that the “false problem” is one that “keeps recurring in all its falsehood as something very real” (71). Again the theater proves this: “What you see is what you want to see. That is also there” (Take Up, 13). Brecht worked to eliminate all but the most instructive identifications from spectatorial perception, but Blau argues that alienation effects are themselves illusory. While some illusions may be exposed by devices of Alienation, others are held with such deep force of long conviction that, however they may have been produced, they are now filling other needs or have becomeВ .В .В . necessary fictionsВ .В .В . [namely, the ability] to live with some conviction among questionable truths. (Appearances, 223) In this sense Blau hearkens back to Freud’s pessimism in The Future of an Illusion (1927), in which illusions of religious salvation—the legacy of both the renunciation of instinct and human wishes—can never be dispelled by rational principles. However, Freud, in this pre-Nazi text, draws the line at science (“our science is no illusion,” 56); it alone will replace the long-vanished protective tribal father. In Blau the protective father has transmogrified into the presiding Hamletic Ghost who unfolds a tale of “dazzling paradoxes” in which evidence is appearance and the fullness of identity an illusion that will not “stay.” All we can do is know “where we are in the topography of illusion” (Take Up, 95). There may be a “promising appearance” in every ideological formation, but it dissipates and recongeals into other promises in the mirror play of ideology (Appearances, 30). If, Blau writes, “at some intersection of history with the eternity of the unconscious, [an ideological promise/formation] may move against impossibility with extraordinary power,” it “doesn’t mean that it overcomes the impossible, which never changes” (30). Samuel Beckett supplies the poetry that moves Blau’s thought. Vladimir: “The essential doesn’t change.” The wish for a political sphere

of contestation and debate rasps into silence and failure. Estragon: “Nothing to be done.”

Godot’s Impossible Reinscriptions To insert Samuel Beckett into a discourse on identification, power, and politics seems counterintuitive. Beckett is the great apolitical high modernist whose texts transcend the banalities of gender regulation, the specificities of historicalPage 36 → crisis. Yet, as Blau notes, canonical drama is the “historical textualization of performance” (Appearances, 197), providing in the rhythm of gesture, the repetition of line, a culture’s illusions of continuity. In Beckett’s drama, one “feels the almost unabating intensity with which the theater has always questioned what it fetishizes, distrusting the very appearances from which it is made” (197). There is in Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and all of Beckett’s drama a reflexive practice of very Blau-like distrust. For Godot’s four near-amnesiacs in bowler hats, in a diminishing world of tree, road, and “no lack of void,” the law of normative identity is constantly mocked, along with that familiar existential conundrum, the meaning of being. In Godot, being redounds to “nothing to be done” or, modifying Butler’s phrase, a “stylized repetition of [ostentatiously meaningless] acts”—putting on boots, urinating, eating a carrot, inspecting hats, doing yoga—intercalated with music-hall stichomythia that stutters into repetition, punctuated by silences devoid of comforting subtext. Anticipating Derrida (as he anticipates so much poststructuralist thought), Beckett gives us a monstrous version of citationality in which “context” is ever slipping away: “And all that was yesterday?” “Yes of course it was yesterday” (67). Ontological ground, the support for context, is laughably ungrounded. All that is left is citationality—performance: “We could start all over again perhaps” ( 70). Pushing up through these performances, like Gogo’s toes through his boot, is the utter futility of meaning making, of waiting for Godot. There are two jokes here. The existential joke is the tramps keeping their appointment though Godot never comes. The tramps produce the ground of their own torture: by showing up, by demanding cultural legibility (“You did see us, didn’t you?,” 34), they resignify the very waiting that oppresses them. The second joke is crueler, closer perhaps to what Blau called the “destructive” spirit at the heart of Godot (Impossible, 240). For, while Beckett voids the possibility of meaning, he demands the quest—the performance—and saturates it with punishment (recall the play’s many references to beatings, prohibitions, humiliation, and hunger). If the tramps are “inexhaustible”—“We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? ” (Godot, 44)—Blau and others have found that performing Godot is “just plain exhausting” (Impossible, 231). Punishment enfolds the tramps. The theater demands that the tramps play, the audience demands something to be done (even if it’s nothing), and the play forces acknowledgment of that demand in the “rustle” of breathing heard during the play’s repetitive silences. Is it possible that the tramps’—especially Vladimir’s—hunger for meaningful context feeds the hunger for meaningful context on the part of those who produce the play? When Blau first directed Waiting for Godot he was “almost convinced that this very European play, written by an expatriate Irishman, was Page 37 →by some miracle of cultural diffusion meant expressly for Americans” (Impossible, 235). In 1957, five years after it premiered in Paris, Godot was staged by Blau at San Quentin, northern California’s state penitentiary, and according to testimonies summed up by Martin Esslin, inmates identified with the play’s bleak references to a shrinking world, its survivor humor, its invocation of paralysis and desperation. Godot also presents a parable on the lures of identification: those who produce it cannot resist assimilating it, reinscribing it, to fit their own desires. If the prisoners at San Quentin understood the feeling of waiting, so, Susan Sontag insists, did the suffering people of Sarajevo. In July 1993, Sontag went to Sarajevo to direct Waiting for Godot. Under constant threat of shelling she rehearsed her nine actors (Vladimir and Estragon were triple cast) for four weeks by candlelight until the play’s matinee opening on August 17. During the third performance, after the long silence following the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot wasn’t coming today but would surely come tomorrow, the sound of sniper fire filled the theater. On returning to the United States Sontag wrote a long article for The New York Review of Books (October 21, 1993) in which, unwittingly echoing Blau, she opined that Waiting for Godot, “written over forty years ago, seem[ed to be] written for, and about, Sarajevo.” During rehearsals that coincided with some of the

worst Serbian shelling, she and her actors made more specific identifications: waiting for Godot became a reference to “waiting for Clinton” (53). Moreover, despite Beckett’s suggestions that the play be staged in a quasi-vaudevillian fashion, Godot, Sontag felt, was a “supremely realistic play” (54). She closed her article condemning the “absence of political will” of NATO leaders to end the strife in Bosnia. She then made the rather amazing confession that while Sarajevans mourned their formerly beautiful, prosperous, and ethnically tolerant city, and compared their embattled existence to “science fiction” and “living in the Middle Ages,” she, Sontag, found Sarajevo “the most real place in the world” (59). The “most real place in the world” sounds decidedly unreal, like a hall of mirrors fantasy that converts a horrific battlefield into an identificatory ideal. Beckett’s old friend Kay Boyle fell into a similar trap when she read Waiting for Godot as an allegory about fascism, to which Beckett gently but firmly demurred. Beckett’s rejection of a political interpretation, however, does not mean he wasn’t seriously engaged in exploring the politics of seeming. For Lacan, the subject’s future identifications are a delusional replay of an idealizing, self-alienating imaginary relation characterized by extreme oscillations of love and hate, which in turn produce dichotomous social relations—good versus evil, victim versus victimizer, those who are healthy versus those who sicken the body politic and must be destroyed. Politics operates not in spite of but through the imaginary; it is always a politics of images, of seeming, and no Page 38 →less—arguably more—enraged and vengeful for being so. Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” was published in 1949, the same year in which Beckett completed Waiting for Godot and just four years after both men, along with the populations of most of the globe, had witnessed the most brutal violations of the civil contract. Beckett’s rejection of political attribution in Waiting for Godot and the ignoring of that rejection by Kay Boyle, Susan Sontag, and countless others is not, then, about their misunderstanding of his high-modernist, supposedly apolitical stance. They are reading Beckett right but saying it wrong. What is political in Godot is not the real suffering it mirrors but the oppressive effects of identification’s mirror relations. For Beckett politics is not unaesthetic; it’s impossible. Underpinning the discourse of rights and reason, the foundation of western politics, Beckett reveals the worst aspects of identificatory rivalries: my demand that the other be like me, be captured in my image, and if not, be cast from me, expelled, annihilated. As Genet well knew, politics becomes not a forum but a theater in which misrecognitions and the aggressions they breed are dissimulated, smoothed over, and rationalized into false certainties. Blau, commenting on his direction of Genet’s The Balcony, describes this misrecognition as constitutive of Genet and all theater, which breeds “a hegemony of illusion” (Programming, 144). In Waiting for Godot Beckett makes comedy out of his tramps’ misrecognitions, but the slave-owning Pozzo, on announcing himself (“I am Pozzo! [Silence] Pozzo!,” [Godot, 15]), soon sets up the identificatory relation with the tramps. POZZO: Yes, gentlemen, I cannot go for long without the society of my likes (he puts on his glasses and looks at the two likes), even when the likeness is an imperfect one. (He takes off his glasses). (17) In the stage directions, Gogo and Didi are “the two likes” (“les deux semblables”), reflections of the grand Pozzo, albeit imperfect ones. That Pozzo recognizes them as “human beings like [himself]” precipitates the tramps’ worst behavior: they become increasingly rivalrous; they collude in the oppression of Lucky; and, in the second act, they fall into the dirt with Pozzo and his slave. Yet reacting to Lucky prompts the only moment of political self-consciousness, albeit a long-winded one. VLADIMIR: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! .В .В .В Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us.В .В .В . It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to Page 39 →our species. The tiger bounds to the help of its congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. (51)

As self-appointed representatives they “weigh the pros and cons” by considering contrasting examples: “The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion”—instinctive action based on species identification, hence an act without reflection—“or else he slinks away into the depths of his thicket, ” that is, withdraws into disillusionment. These, for Beckett, are the only choices politics makes available, and each is a form of violence and alienation. So Didi exchanges politics, a discourse of power relations, for metaphysical reflection: “What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed . . . to know the answer . . . we are waiting for Godot to come—.” This is Beckett’s darkly ironic te deum to the idea of efficacious politics. In relation to the tiger’s bounding or slinking, waiting for Godot is the human alternative—and a typically pointless one at that. After he directed Godot, Blau asked Beckett about the play’s gestures toward the political, and Beckett replied that “political solutions to social problems are like going from one insane asylum to another” (Sails, 5).

Inhabiting the Mirror: Blau directing Endgame In Beckett we are always looking at what, perhaps, should not be looked at. (Herbert Blau, Eye; Sails). Endgame, Ruby Cohn wrote, “is swathed in pain” (Back to Beckett, xx). It is certainly not swathed in politics, not even a politics of seeming. Yet in 1959, true to his synthetic theatrical thinking at the Actor’s Workshop, Blau considered the play’s political implications: “Few characters are more savagely solitary and dreadfully engaged than those Beckett has created for this play. Old endgame, lost of old, every move a crisis—the term taken from chess, the emotions from the world of Buchenwald and Lidice and Hiroshima; extinction a datum, its possibility a commonplace, something we learn to live with. Absurd” (Programming, 103). From Godot to Endgame, “from the politics to the appalling,” he noted later, the Workshop absorbed the “unnegotiable anxieties and immediate trepidations” of the Cold War (As If, 187). However, in directing Endgame in the spring of 1959, Blau encountered a text that Beckett himself described as having “the power to claw, more inhuman than Godot” (quoted in As If, 247). Certainly Endgame clawed into Blau’s mind, and, directing it, he was changed. Throughout his oeuvre, he quotes from the play, especially Hamm’s line, “Use Page 40 →your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” (Beckett, Endgame, 68). Blau spent four months directing Endgame literally underground, in the Encore Theater’s narrow basement with its low ceiling and platform stage. He experienced, as only a director can, the play’s “immaculate concentration of nerve and mind” (Programming, 103), often taking four hours for a run-through. The production was, he felt, “probably one of the most richly conceived in American theater” (Sails, 70). In his reflections on the nerve and mind of Beckett, Blau fell in love with materiality, precisely the “context” for Beckett’s words that Derrida neglected in his love of citationality’s drift. Beckett describes the walls in Hamm’s shelter as “gray,” but Blau writes paragraphs on Robert LaVigne’s ambiguously textured walls. What Bob did over the weeks of rehearsal was to accumulate a mound of junk, tin, broken porcelain, rusty and fresh nails in front of the stage, and various fabrics, gauze, brocade, velour, lace. Out of all this he composed, as we rehearsed, an assemblage of gray that was precisely what I’d asked for, a cultural history in reverse, by no means literalized, but shadowy, suggestive, articulated by dispersion in the matrix of gray.В .В .В . The walls were in a sense encrusted with history but, unless you were alert to their visual nuances, nothing more than gray. (Sails, 71) In LaVigne’s design, gray is resignified as “cultural history in reverse,” a visual epilogue to civilization’s detritus. Costuming was equally bold: Hamm’s (Robert Symonds) hands were painted and furred, and Clov (Tom Rosqui) was sewn up in leather strips with a tight leather cowl, reflecting Blau’s sense of Clov’s anal rage for order. Wanting his San Francisco audiences to feel Clov’s reluctance to unveil Hamm and thus recommence their horrendous game of living, Blau made time passing physically and emotionally

painful by prolonging the unveiling to fifteen minutes, an eternity in the theater. And because Blau decided to dispense with theEncore’s curtain, Symonds had to be in his chair, “suffocating, claustrophobic” under his sheet, before the audience came in and through the long minutes before Clov unveiled him (Sails, 72). Endgame’s actors, in Blau’s production, were, like the play itself, “swathed in pain.” But materiality is only half the story. Theater and theory have the same root in theasthai, “to watch, contemplate.” “In the act of seeing, there is already theory” (Take Up, 1), already reflection and desire, already seeming and illusion. Beckett once referred to his “eye of flesh” in a letter to Blau (Sails, 12–13), who re-cited the phrase, along with his modification: “eye of flesh, eye of prey, subject closing upon object, hunter and hunted, mirror upon mirror mirroring the Page 41 →bloody show” (90). At the birth of his youngest child, Blau was thinking about Beckett. The “eye of prey” became the title of a volume of essays in 1987, with Endgame once again offering Blau the means of reimagining the hunting eye and even the bloody show. All the preying ramifications of perception in Beckett’s are variations on the blindness that came to focus in the image of Hamm: the blindness ofВ .В .В . the solipsistic subject, hooded, and supplied with a stancher for emblooded eyes. The consciousness of Hamm is like a camera obscura. The lens, however, is blocked off to our sight, so that what we experience as he looks darkly toward us is ourselves looking at what only meets the eyes but does not, if his eyes are sealed, look back. (Eye, 79; Sails, 90). Amid the puns on mechanical and bodily lenses and holes, what Blau sees in Endgame is an eye of prey that cannot prey, a hunting that will not be confirmed by the hunted: “So there we are doubly looking, picking up the obscurity on which our eyes seem to rest, un-enlightened” (italics in text, 90). Many thousands of words, a small proportion of which have been quoted in this essay, have been lavished by Blau to explain this theatrical quagmire. If theater “resembles consciousness itself,” theater’s illusions, its conversion of seeing into seeming, shows us that what seems to be true and enlightening is also the projective desire of the eye of prey, which sees what’s there and what it wants to be there. Before his books were written, Blau experienced this lonely seeing while directing Endgame in the Encore Theater in 1959. I know this because I visited the Actor’s Workshop archive at the Billy Rose Theater Collection at Lincoln Center when it was still uncataloged. In one of many cartons of Actor’s Workshop memorabilia (programs, photos of rehearsals, letters, memos) I found something that shocked me: four black-andwhite, 8x11 photographs of Endgame rehearsals in the Encore in 1959. Unlike every other rehearsal photo in the Actor’s Workshop archive, where the camera focuses on actors, scenes, or sets, here the focus is on Blau, viewed from behind the chair of Robert Symonds’ seated Hamm. The camera captures the back of Symonds’ toque-wearing head, and so shows, in effect, Hamm’s point of view. Hamm is looking at Blau, Blau returning his gaze from behind a long black table. These are not candid photos. Herb ran a tight ship. He knew the pictures were being taken. He set up these shots. Clearly he wanted his watching watched. Is he offering an image of Cold War paranoia? The eye of prey is not beneficent, and though I haven’t mentioned it here, Blau never balked at linking theater to surveillance. Or maybe Herb used photography the way we all do, because he wanted to remember himself there, with Endgame, a play that drives its four humans Page 42 →to the limit of our ability to think about them. Sitting behind a long director’s table, Blau, in the photographs, is unsmiling, seems lostВ .В .В . lost in thought? Is he acting? Is he theorizing? Is he hoping to freeze in time his own skepticism, his own compulsion to see past behind those “emblooded” eyesВ .В .В . or rather to get those hidden eyes to see him? Such questions, we now know, form the warp and weft of his theory. And Beckett, especially Endgame, has long since become for Blau “virtually a habit of mind” (Sails, 2). (Sadly, when the Actor’s Workshop materials were properly catalogued, the photos went missing. Despite repeated efforts by the Billy Rose Theatre Division staff and me, the photos were never found. I ask the reader to trust her eye of prey and see what she can imagine from my description. The head shot of Herb (Fig. 6) is also from an Endgame rehearsal, but on a different day. The glasses and Herb’s expression are similar, but the photo is not the same. Herb would enjoy this: what we desire is

never what we see.) Fig. 6. Herb directing Endgame at the Actor’s Workshop.В Blau loved Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum, the wounding detail of a photo that pricks, bruises, and makes the image personal for the viewer. In the Endgame rehearsal photographs, the black frames of Blau’s glasses are one punctum, reflecting light away from eyes that are “looking at what, perhaps, should not be looked at” (Sails, 89). Blau’s oddly long director’s table, another punctum, barely contains Blau’s raw desire, a desire he delighted in revealing Page 43 →and concealing in the parataxis, asides, and looping digressions of his prose. In my essay, the “re” has stood for the resignifying labors of postmodern theory that Blau both enjoyed and contested. But its conventional meaning, as an abbreviation for “regarding, ” is also apt. As we contemplate theater’s history and history of ideas since the 1950s, we will, in all senses of the word, be regarding Herbert Blau.

References Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Print. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame . New York: Grove, 1958. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. Print. Blau, Herbert. As If: An Autobiography. Vol 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Print. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Print. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. Print. Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Print. Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater. New York: Collier, 1964. Print. Blau, Herbert. Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco. London: Routledge, 2013. Print. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Print. Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, Event, Context.” In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Print.

Diamond, Elin. “In Memory [of Herbert Blau].” The Drama Review (TDR) 57.4 (2013): 8–9. Print. Diamond, Elin. “Re: Blau, Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming.” The Drama Review (TDR) 44.4 (Winter 2000): 31–43. Print. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by James Stratchey. New York: Norton, [1927] 1961. Print. Page 44 →Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Stratchey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company [1922] 1959. Print. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage.” In Ecrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1977. Print. Sontag, Susan. “Godot Comes to Sarajevo.” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993, 53–59. Print. This essay contains material from two previously published essays, along with new material.

“Who the Hell Is Herbert Blau?”: The “Dark Energy” of an American Cruel Theater Page 45 →S. E. Gontarski Herbert Blau’s rejection of a theater of representation, his decision that collaboration with actors, the performance of simulations, the staging of illusions, what he called, after Beckett, “just play,” the whole bloody mimetic show, could go no further and that playing in theatrical space was far less imaginative and less creative than playing in what AndrГ© Breton called the “theater of mind,” which was a richer and more resonant chamber than any external or material space, was something of a milestone in the development of performance and performance theory. Blau’s shift of venues was certainly precipitated by an engagement with critical theory that launched or paralleled or confirmed his quest for the sources of performance, that everreceding ghost of a wellhead. What Blau abandoned at first was mimetic or illusionistic theater, even in its nonmimetic, avant-garde guise, to pursue the traces of theatrical thought back through the laminations of the performing subconscious to the primal force that generated theater itself—a quest, in short, for what Blau calls “the non-representational origin of performance” (Eye, 166–67). Much of Blau’s theoretics was already at the fore in his earliest productions, however, intuited at the nerve ends. In an unsigned program note to the Actor’s Workshop’s 1957 production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot called “Who is Godot?,”1 Blau (unmistakably he, even as the workshop was founded on ensemble principles) first dismisses the question, then turns it inward: “But if you must have questions, there are better ones. Who am I? What am I doing here? вЂYou do see me, don’t you,’ cries [Vladimir], one of Beckett’s heroes to Godot’s angelic messenger. вЂYou’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me to-morrow that you never saw me!’” (Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 59, cited in Sails, 21). In Alan Schneider’s second staging of Waiting for Godot, after its 1955 Miami Page 46 →fiasco, the director, who would become Beckett’s principal theatrical director in the United States, asked to use Blau’s original Godot program note for his own 1959 revival at Nina Vance’s Alley Theater in Houston, and Blau reprised the note again for his own Godot redux in 1962, some five years after his original 1957 production, with an added proviso: “The performance changes, the avant-garde play becomes a classic, the dilemma remains” (Sails, 16). The “dilemma” would haunt Blau for the whole of his career on both stage and page. Recalling the first cold reading of Godot with his tentative cast in his San Francisco home, at Frederick and Clayton in the Haight, Blau notes in the first volume of his autobiography, As If, “Many years later, with the figure in the urn of Play—вЂall this,’ and enduring pain, could it have been вЂjust play? ’—there’s that вЂclosing repeat’ without closure: вЂAm I as much as being seen?’ Being seen or seen as being: either way, no being without being seen” (225). This is a theater, To All Appearances, as he titled his 1992 critique, subtitling it with the overt declaration of his critical dossier, “Ideology and Performance,” in that order. That is, as early as The Impossible Theater (1964), particularly the “Notes from the Underground” chapter on his first encounters with Beckett and his critique of theater and the Cold War,2 Blau was thus already fully immersed theoretically, thinking through theory and ideology, not only through Freud and Stanislavski, performance “as if for the first time” (As If, 227), but through and beyond Artaud: “In my own theater, under the influence of Artaud, we have experimented with a Theater of Cruelty” (Impossible, 21). That experiment endured, became, finally, a lifelong preoccupation, in relation to which he saw Beckett as well: According to Beckett (though, of what I know of Blin [Beckett’s first French director], this is not quite accurate), Blin considered himself a disciple of Artaud, who—having observed that Western actors have forgotten how to scream—denounced the theater as we know it because it could never be cruel enough. Whether or not it was sufficient became a subject of disagreement between the twoВ .В .В . when Blin later directed Endgame.В .В .В . Certainly Blin admired Artaud, and so did Beckett, though he didn’t approve of the enraptured ethic of ritual violence, with its sacrificial actor signaling through the flames, as if the apotheosis of theater—its naked, sonorous, streaming realization, reimagined from the Orphic mysteries—were nothing but a scream. (Sails, 14)

Such a scream is how Blau saw Beckett as he quotes an anecdote from Beckett’s meeting with Harold Pinter, as Beckett told the English playwright about a visit to a cancer ward and a man dying from throat cancer: “I could hear his screams Page 47 →continually in the night.В .В .В . That’s the only kind of form my work has” (14), and that apparently is sufficient. By 1982 in the “Foreword” to his collection of essays, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater, Stanislavski well behind him, Blau outlines the failures of traditional theater and the ideology that sustains it: “I will not have much to say of the old social occasions of theater when people gathered (so we are told) as a community to remember, through the enactment of a dramatic narrative, the maybe half-forgotten signals of a common set of values and the venerable features of a collective fate” (Blooded, xi). Blooded Thought was a book that signaled overtly Blau’s shift to the performing self on the mise-en-scГЁne of the page. The shift of playing space from the boards to what Blau calls “the chamber drama of the mise en scГЁne of the unconscious” (180) was driven by his assessment that “there is no contemporary theater of any consequence which is conceived for the gathering of an audience with such expectations,” that is, “of a common set of values andВ .В .В . of a collective fate” (xi). From Roland Barthes, then, Blau adapted the notion of writing as performance, and from Jacques Derrida he adopted the paradigm of the intertextual weave of discourse laminated so deeply in the subconscious and manifest in traces that remain perpetually at their vanishing points, originless specters of specters, ghosts of thought. In his 1987 essay collection, The Eye of Prey, Blau detailed his original attractions as a practical theater man to Derridean theory: I began to realize that in the very difficulty of his writing he [Derrida] was theorizing the theaterwork which I had been doing in the seventies. That might be described as a deviation from Brecht to Beckett into a highly allusive, refractory, intensely self-reflexive, ideographically charged process in which we were trying to understand, to think through, at the very quick of thought—words, words, words, unspeakably in the body—the metabolism of perception in the (de)materialization of the text. There was also in that process—as there is in the art of acting: how do I do it? where does it come from? what is IT?—something of an obsession with the indeterminacy of origin, and the impact of volition on origin, and whether the thought of it comes before it does, whatever it is, or whether it couldn’t be thought without it. (xxv) Blau’s model for theater had generally been psychoanalytic, theater as “that peculiar construct of reflected thought,” but his pursuit of the Derridean trace to “the very quick of thought” led to a self-reflexivity that eroded the distance between actor and character, and that the very impossibility of the pursuit Page 48 →of origination led to a paralysis, something of a solipsistic impasse. That assault against mimesis in the name of desublimated sixties activism, a projection of Artaud’s desire to eliminate the remnants of the membrane separating art from life, the elimination, in short, of representation, realized for a time—we thought—by groups like The Living Theatre, led, according to Blau, to a theatricalization of culture and “the diffusion of theater into fashion, therapy, politics, education and everyday life” (xvii). In his quest for “Universals in Performance,” Blau notes, “The central figure of this critique, as in the most important theatrical experiments of the last generation, is Artaud, whose Theater of Cruelty is not a form of New Theater waiting to be born, but a primordial and juridical power whose urge, as Derrida shows, is the abolition of representation” (166). That is, not only “No More Masterpieces,” but no more simulations, no more play. In Blau’s assessment of theater history, sixties activism, that most powerful exemplum of street theater, has enjoyed a resurgence in the theater of theory. He notes: What I am suggesting, too, is that when the radical activism of the sixties abated or went underground it surfaced again in theory as a new erotics of discourse. [And here Blau is thinking through at least Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text.] The lifestyle desires and the polymorphous perversity which were celebrated at Woodstock and seemed to be savaged at Altamont also went under, retreating across the Atlantic, and entered the high intellectual traditions of continental thought, given the ideology they were charged with not having in the sixties, and are being recycled, biodegradably, as an assault on the phallogocentric structure of bourgeois power, with its invisible

ideology. (7)

In the theater of theory, Blau finally found the space for his theatricalized pursuit of self, the self as subject and object of its own reflections (in both senses of that term). But in The Eye of Prey, an image derived from Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, Blau situates himself somewhere beyond (or behind) Artaud’s assault on representation and also somewhere beyond the theorists’ “apotheosis of play” (xviii) to reassert the very primacy of representation, if only amid the intricacies of language. Blau came to performance theory (or the performance of theory) through a distinguished—if tempestuous—thirty-year theatrical career that included his cofounding and codirecting with Jules Irving, from 1952 to 1964, the theatrical collective they called the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, which introduced at least West Coast audiences, and often American audiences, to much of what has since become canonical modernism: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Jean Page 49 →Genet, Boris Vian, and Bertolt Brecht. The Actor’s Workshop, along with Blau’s manifesto for the decentralization of American theater, The Impossible Theater, published in 1964, led to a brief stint as codirector (again with Jules Irving) of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in 1965, where he tried, among other futile tasks, to bring an antiwar consciousness to New York bankers (i.e., the chairman of the Repertory Theater Board was Robert L. Hoguet, Jr., vice-president of the First National City Bank of New York); as Blau notes in The Impossible Theater, “I would say that the purpose of the Workshop was to save the world” (181), and that was the sensibility he brought to New York in the early years of establishing an American national theater, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, as heir to director Elia Kazan and producer Robert Whitehead’s initial version at ANTA Washington Square, “the only subsidized theater in America,” as Blau noted in the Saturday Review (see also Take Up 31–32). By 1967, after the abrupt cancellation of Blau’s multimedia production of Wilford Leach’s In Three Zones, a production designed to inaugurate the new, smaller Forum Theater at the Vivian Beaumont for the theater’s second season, the bankers appeared to have won, the issue as much economics as ideology; Blau had apparently spent the entire year’s budget on that one production, and so he resigned to begin teaching at the City College of New York before his return to Los Angeles as dean of the California Institute of the Arts, that Disney-funded institution now popularly called CalArts. The transcontinental move may have been foredoomed, anticipated by Theodore Hoffman’s piece on American regional theater for Show: The Magazine of the Arts, in April 1965, provocatively entitled “Who The Hell Is Herbert Blau? The Road May Be Dead, but Regional Theater Is a Lively Business,” in which Hoffman noted, “[T]hey’ll [i.e., Irving and Blau, rather now Blau and Irving] attract plenty of violent partisans, make lots of provocative copy for the Sunday drama sections and probably drive the board of directors to as many secret discussions as the last regime [Elia Kazan among them]” (39). Blau would launch his next theatrical phase with the touring theater group KRAKEN in 1971, a period when he was still concerned with the training of actors and whose protracted periods of rehearsals seemed to grow out of Blau’s work on Endgame: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (Beckett, Endgame, 1), which, according to Blau, “became the methodological grounding of the KRAKEN group, where the work was not finished until it was finished, or we’d exhausted everything we could think about it—which usually took more than a year” (As If, 249). The details of this work with KRAKEN make up much of the text of his second book, Take Up The Bodies (1982). With KRAKEN, text became a performative pretext, but Blau’s emphasis was still on psychological acting, even as the grounding of that method, a Page 50 →coherent, stable, knowable ego, was disintegrating in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. What Blau finally objected to in his repudiation of psychological acting was “the disguise of performanceВ .В .В . which pretends that it is not performing” (Eye, 181). The sixties’ desublimation of theater coincided with the theatricalization of politics, and so the decade’s great drama was the Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968 and the conspiracy trial of the Chicago 8 in the fall of 1969, events of such theatrical magnitude that they dwarfed stage play, even—or especially—re-

presentations or simulations of such events. Theater had indeed broken down the walls of its privileged playing space, as theater audiences often found more theater once they left the music halls and confronted the polymorphous play on the streets of Broadway and 42nd Street. Artaud had apparently won. One response to such theatricalization of culture was the detheatricalization of theater itself, versions of something like antidrama, as in the minimalism of Samuel Beckett’s late work and the serialism and inarticulation of some of the Mabou Mines experiments, like Send Receive Send, remnants of what Walter Gropius called Total Theater, the theater he planned for Erwin Piscator in Berlin in the mid-1920s. That concept of theater, a director’s theater in which the entire theatrical experience took precedence over anything like a (pre)text, was then developed in post–World War II France by the likes of Jean-Louis Barrault, who had two theatrical models on display at the entrance to his Theatre du Rond-Point: Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. American versions of Total Theater develop, according to Blau, both “the desire for more theater and the desire for less theater” (Eye, 162); that is, both the lessness of minimalist theater and that exaltation of pure play in the antiverbal experiments of the sixties dubbed “image theater” or what Blau saw as an excess of theater. What began to suggest itself as futile to Blau as a theatrical director was the precise determination, the origin of voice, thought, and authentic being in the performance. Who speaks in the theater: the playwright, the director, the actor, history, or simply—or not so simply—text, that is, language itself, inscribed on the page or in the body? Much theatrical squabbling derives, we know, from the internecine battles of apportionment of credit for the voice of theatrical thought, and the conflict is institutionalized in the foundation of “playwright’s theaters,” in contrast to, say, “actor’s theaters (or workshops),” as opposed to “director’s theaters”—each asserting its own hegemony. Once we assume that language itself (and I take language here in its broadest, semiotic, psychoanalytic, theatrical sense to suggest all the sign systems operating in theater, or what Blau calls, borrowing from Brecht, “the social gestus”) or voice (which is decidedly not what we have traditionally called “character”) speaks, theater becomes the Page 51 →performative mode of discourse, and performance is equally possible on the page and stage. The enigma of staging, for Blau, validated a Derridean theory of discourse, as Blau noted: [It was] the precise indeterminacy of the thing in all its semantic ghostliness which gave us a method we called ghosting. It was an idea of performance concerned, like Derridean theory, with appearance and disappearance [i.e., Theater at the Vanishing Point] and the following of a trace which is the origin of memory through which it appears. (Eye, xxvi) If theatrical character and theatrical thought are then spectral, and the performers likewise, where can the quest for authentic theater go but into theoretical dialectics of difference? For Blau, “The substance of the theatrical in the idea of performance is the critical question in the act of performance” (166). In The Eye of Prey, however, Blau is examining not versions of but Subversions of the Postmodern, which is, in some senses, Blau’s exploration of the limits of theory, and his entrГ©e into the topic is through a reassessment of the sixties. “[I]t is the unfinished agenda of the sixties,” he notes, “which infuses the state of mind not only of these essays but of the newer critical thought” (Eye, xv). The nature of Blau’s “Subversion of the Postmodern” is a return to the inevitability of representation, in theater manifest most essentially in that consciousness of performance itself in both performer and audience. Such consciousness of repeated or repeating action and the self-consciousness of performance is the essence of representation. This selfconsciousness of one’s actions—which suggests that one’s gestures are always re-presentations—is what makes theater theater, performance performance, even according to Derrida in his essays on Artaud. Blau is now refreshingly skeptical of what he calls Grotowski’s “paratheatrical enterprise”—“the somewhat utopian desire to replace the illusions of Total Theater with the promise of Total Life” (Eye, 162; see also the film, My Dinner with AndrГ©, for AndrГ© Gregory’s extended critique of this issue). Even the studies of performance in primitive cultures, the emphasis on what Richard Schechner calls “actuals,” Blau finds misdirected and suspect since, “In the studies of aboriginal cultures, we have been made aware of the accretions of everyday life which become, with inflexions of ceremony but no clear demarcation from just living,

occasions of performance” (163); for Blau, then, the members of that culture are “performing those functions of just living,” and, finally, “what makes theater theater is our ability to discern it as such.” Current performance theory, for Blau, too often “obscures the ontological gap between the actuality of everyday life and the actuality of performance” (162), a position of which Page 52 →Schechner is far less suspicious. The difference in theater is between “just being or being someone, the presentation [or representation] of a self.” There is always that split, that doubling in theater, a repetition, a seeming to be. “There is nothing more illusory in performance,” notes Blau, “than the illusion of the unmediated. It can be a very powerful illusion in the theater, but it is theater, it is theater, the truth of illusion, which haunts all performance whether or not it occurs in the theater” (164–65). Blau’s rethinking of postmodern performance is not so much a reversal or reaction to developments in his earlier work and thought as a swerve, which is not a call for a return to logocentric discourse, to the dominance of the text in theater, to the rebirth of the author, or to the ego in character but a reassertion of the dialectics of betweenness. Blau still nods assent to Derridean dialectics where “Representation mingles with what it represents.” But he finds that “There is something in the theater itself which recoils from its own image as appropriating the world and insists, at the uttermost extremity of performance, when it seems to be overtaking or overtaken by life, upon remaining the illusion which it is, as theater, which is only inseparable from theory (they share a lexical root) when it sustains its critical and alienating (originary) distance from life” (Eye, 7–8). In The Eye of Prey Blau then takes something of a stand against Artaud, whose theater “is not a representation”; on the other hand, Blau is equally dissatisfied with the “pure play” of literary or performance theory and what he calls “the solipsism and domesticated shamanism of postmodern performance” (178), that is, “just play.” He may have found something of a balance, rather not an equilibrium but a fluctuating betweenness, with Gilles Deleuze, or rather with the work of Deleuze and his collaborator FГ©lix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, which appeared in English in 1977. This is the point at which my own line of flight intersected with, sometimes collided with, Blau’s in his 1981 National Endowment for the Humanities–sponsored seminar “Drama in Performance” at New York University, during which he was working on and lecturing from his subversions (rather subversions) of the postmodern, what became, six years later, The Eye of Prey. There was play in the anti-Freudianism of Anti-Oedipus, but not just play, with Blau picking up from the doubleness (in all senses of that term, as he was fond of saying) of Deleuze and Guattari their critique “of the aura of deconstruction and its behavioral implications.” The fact that Deleuze and Guattari “are particularly suspicious of what is most attractive: the apotheosis of play” (xviii): there was play, of course, but as process, thought as performance (to follow up Barthes’s writing as performance) and toward revolutionary goals of constant becoming, and so Deleuze and Guattari would emphasize an ontological play rather than solely a linguistic play. Page 53 →Blau saw Beckett amid such theorizing of play as well, and so, “Outside ideology, and a marginal figure in the evolution of the modernВ .В .В . Beckett surfaced in the fifties when the modern seemed to be running out of desireВ .В .В .and entropically winding downВ .В .В .В ; he was a touchstone after the sixties, with the Movement disillusioned and the projects incomplete, for releasing into the postmodern the flowproducing aporias of unfinished forms” (Eye, xix). For me this was not my introduction to Blau or his thought, as I had been following his work ever since I read the opening of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd and its critique of the San Quentin Godot, but it was my introduction to a Blau inflected by Deleuze and Guattari. It was an Artaudian moment for me, an infection with Blau’s thought, with which I have been wrestling ever since.3 As early as 1964, a suspicion of play was already evident in the piece Blau wrote for the Saturday Review entitled “I Don’t Wanna Play.” “The sixties,” after all, as Blau saw those years amid the political disillusionment of New York, “led through the licensing of Love’s Body to the apotheosis in theory of the inflated currency of play” (12). Much of Blau’s suspicion in the 1980s that “play” was just not enough for theater is thus not news: “No performance,” he notes, “is either all happening or all appearance.” What is worthy of reflection, however, is Blau’s discussion of theatrical universals, especially the possibility that theater is always a repetition that entails the absence or impossibility of origin; that is, there is no first time to the action or thought represented, even as theater creates the illusion, like any good

lover, that this is all happening for the first time. Little wonder then of Blau’s sustained attraction to, even preoccupation with, Samuel Beckett’s metatheatrical masterpiece Endgame, in which the voice we first hear, which we call Clov, is ventriloquized by Hamm: “Grain upon Grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (Endgame, 1). “It was with Endgame, however,” Blau notes, “that I started asking that series of questions, act how, act why, act where? And what do we mean by acting?” (As If, 249). Yes, this is warmed-over Stanislavski but refocused, reemphasized: “But like no other play we’d done, the issue of subjectivity in the art of the actor seemed to be there in the bloodstream, with doubt in the marrow bone” (251). And it was that subjectivity, being dissolved as it was accessed or approached, receding at each approach, recovering with each uncovering, or “unveiling,” as Beckett termed the opening dumb show of Endgame, being become becoming, a shift in thought that would sustain Blau for the remainder of his career, but, in place of the stage, on the mise-en-scГЁne of the page. Blau’s recollections and insights on the shifting emphasis of his thought form a good part of the final chapter, “Dark Energy,” of the first volume of his autobiography. His production of Endgame in particular was a punishing, cruel, nearly four-hour epic of such “dark energy” that it seemed to horrify even Beckett: Page 54 →“When I told him about it in Paris, he had to measure his disturbance against the Endgame pictures I’d sent, not at all what he’d imaginedВ .В .В . though he was clearly quite impressed” (As If, 250). It was such cruelty, mediated more often than not through Artaud, that Blau brought to San Francisco, to New York, to university faculties, and to classrooms, and, although it was often unsustainable (as in New York, say), Blau’s thought was nourished by such tensions as he managed to sustain his “dark energy” through to his own endgame.

References Artaud, Antonin. “No More Masterpieces.” In The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards.New York:Grove Press, 1958, 74–83. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove, 1958. Blau, Herbert. “The Actors Workshop.” In An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, edited by by Todd London. New York: Theater Communications Group, 2013, 385–406. Blau, Herbert. As If: An Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of the Theater. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Blau, Herbert. “вЂI Don’t Wanna Play’: The American Theater ’64, Its Problems and Promise.”Saturday Review, February 22, 1964, 32, 39. Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Blau, Herbert. “Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame.” In On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, edited by S. E. Gontarski. Anthem Studies in Theater and Performance. London: Anthem, 2012, 189–208. Blau, Herbert. Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco. London: Routledge, 2013. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Deleuze, Gilles and FГ©lix Guattari.Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane.New York:Viking Press (A Richard Seaver Book), 1977. Diamond, Elin. “Re: Blau, Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming.” The Drama Review (TDR)44.4 (winter 2000): 31–43. Esslin, Martin.The Theatre of the Absurd.Garden City, New York:Doubleday, 1961. Hoffmann, Theodore. “Who the Hell Is Herbert Blau? The Road May Be Dead, but Regional Theater Is a Lively Business.” Show: The Magazine of the Arts, April 1965. London, Todd. “The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Centre, Founded 1965: Jules Irving.” In An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, edited by Todd London. New York: Theater Communications Group, 2013, 340–41. Page 55 →Lowry, W. McNeil. “The Ford Foundation Program in the Humanities and the Arts.” In An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, edited by Todd London.New York: Theater Communications Group, 2013, 355–60. Martin, Douglas. “Herbert Blau, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 87.” New York Times, May 7, 2013, A20. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/theater/herbert-blau-iconoclastic-theater-director-dies-at-87.html?_r=0 Zarrilli, Philip B. “Acting вЂat the Nerve Ends’: Beckett, Blau, and the Necessary.” Theater Topics 7.2 (1997): 103–16. Zeigler, Joseph Wesley. Regional Theater: A Revolutionary Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Notes 1. “Who is Godot?” is collected as the opening chapter in Sails, 21–22. 2. “Throughout the book, I shall be using theater as an image of the Cold War and the Cold War as an image of the theater” (Impossible, 21). 3. Witness, most recently, my Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Learning to Think Page 56 →Linda Gregerson Twice in my life I’ve been convinced I’d suddenly learned what it felt like to think. The first time I was sixteen, and my high school English teacher, in a show of how expansive literary analysis could be, how available to multiple interpretations, decided to read aloud to us two contrasting answers from a recent exam. The question: How do you account for the difference between representational modes in Aeschylus and Ibsen? Answer one: The Greek audience was more naive and hadn’t yet learned to be skeptical about a god being cranked onstage by a machine. Answer two: The Greek audience was more sophisticated and expected to collaborate on the project of theatrical illusion. Answer two happened to be the one I had submitted, and, hearing it again somehow, in another voice, I thought Yes. That’s what I really think. That’s what thinking feels like. The second time I was twenty-two, sitting on the perimeter of a performing space with Julie Taymor, Bill Irwin, David Chandler (then Suehsdorf), and others, trying to make sense of the gap between months of improvisation and the script we had recently been handed by our director, Herbert Blau. Those months of training and improvisation had been both rich and increasingly directionless, or so it had seemed: where was this all going? The Seeds of Atreus—Herb’s adaptation of The Oresteia—was reassuringly concrete but also something of a baffling non sequitur: what had become of all the material we had so painstakingly generated in those months of prior work? And, more immediately, what were we to make of this perimeter—no radical innovation at the time but a conundrum nevertheless. How to make the link between perimeter function and the scenes in which we appeared “in character”? How to construe the relationship of this perimeter to the one from which we had for Page 58 →months observed, and emerged into, improvisation? As far as I can recall, Herb gave us no general instructions about “reabsorption into the choral function” or “cognitive commute” or anything of the kind, but he had—very quickly—supplemented the primary text with an intricate “scoring” for the Aeschylean chorus, distributing lines and part-lines among us. Sometimes a single member of the company was assigned a fragment of the choral ode—as small a unit as a single word. Sometimes lines and part-lines were meant to be spoken by two or six or more of us. And it came to me all at once one day, and almost as a bodily apprehension, as I sat on the perimeter with my script, that the gaps and non sequiturs were precisely the point: the path from here to there, from speaking “in character” to speaking “in chorus,” was ours to discover, each of us on his or her own and each of us—crucially—as part of the collective. And for the first time in months I knew exactly what I had to do. I put the play together, my part of it, my part in the whole, piece by piece. I learned, week by week and hour by hour of rehearsal time, what a through-line really was and how utterly independent of “subject position” or psychological “motive” it could be. I learned something about the elemental building blocks of performance. Page 57 → Fig. 7. Linda Gregerson in a KRAKEN rehearsal, 1973. (Photo by Christopher Thomas) I realize now that these discoveries, six years apart, were in fact a single thought, that perhaps I’ve only ever had a single thought in my life. When, some years later, I saw Robert Wilson’s work for the first time (the German section of The Civil Wars) and more recently when I saw Katie Mitchell’s . . . some trace of her, I’ve felt intensely that this was the gold standard Herbert Blau taught me to long for. I might almost call it layered performance, or layered viewing: a plenitude or surfeit of visual/auditory/conceptual input that requires both performer and spectator to actively choose a path, minute by minute, through the performance. The gift here is that of intense, irreducibly collaborative shaping. The gift is also that of being-in-the-present-tense, the radically mortal here-and-now. When I joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1987, I discovered that Herb had been invited that fall to speak in Ann Arbor. The context, I believe, was a conference on theater, and a question arose, as it so often does, about foundational definitions: What distinguishes the theater from other art forms? In the theater, ventured someone in the audience, a performance is never fixed: something can always go awry, the actor could die before your very eyes. No, said Herb, the actor is always dying before your very eyes. His point was not merely the transience of the living moment; he meant, I think, to assert first principles: theater was for him an art form of the

highest possible stakes. I want to live forever, he told me more than once, and he did not mean he wanted to be remembered or to establish a legacy. He meant that he, Herbert Page 59 →Blau, wanted to live in this body, this mind, this world, forever. Making theater was the way he raged against death. For many years, I thought I had turned in an antithetical direction when I turned from theater to poetry: from collaborative to solitary labor, from expansiveness to distillation, from movement to stillness. But in this, as in all my transitions, I was deceiving myself. So long as I imagined the heart of poetry to be a sort of distillate “capture”—in an image, in a phrase, in an emotional revelation—I was doomed to write wretchedly. It was only when I learned to trust the momentums of syntax, and the syncopated oppositions of lineation and vocal interruption, that I began to discover how poetry actually works. And works in the first instance as an instrument of discovery, as though those lengthy periods of improvisation with my fellow performers in KRAKEN had been conflated with the rigors of sonic and spatial scoring that constitute the bedrock of performance. Like theater, poetry is an art of embodiment, with this difference: the actor/writer has to be the lighting designer and dialect coach and movement director as well. Make a gesture; fill it; find another to which it leads. Then scrap it all and start again. Like theater, the poem is an irreducibly social art. Language proposes a linkage: one who speaks and one who hears. We call that rhetoric: the who’s speaking to whom part, which gives words the breath of life. The lesson we were all too young and, in my own case at least, too callow to learn from Herb back in the early KRAKEN days was the lesson about the primacy of the civic unit. Discovering the source of action in the self—and often the source of guilt—seemed to us to be the meaningful discovery. It made us feel profound. I remember Herb’s frustration when he spoke about this bias toward inwardness in our improvisations. It may be that we were also too young to really believe in history. Greek theater was a civic art, an embodied—incorporate—enactment that rehearsed for the city its history and its destiny. In the performance of the drama, the polis demonstrated to itself that it was a polis, a foundational unit of meaning and enactment. I have come to believe that community is also the essential challenge and aptitude of the paradoxical private/public performance we call the lyric poem. The lyric is a form of social speech. Herb spoke often about his teacher Yvor Winters, “who loved me like a son.” Herb loved him back, as did so many who fell under that formidable spell. But Winters considered theater a fallen art and never once made the trip from Palo Alto to see Herb’s productions at the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. I’ve always thought it infinitely to Winters’s credit that he nurtured in his bosom quite an honor roll of faithful defectors. (Thom Gunn, Phil Levine, Robert Pinsky,Page 60 → and Robert Hass were Winters students too.) Herb learned from a master. Which is to say, his own considerable influence must be measured not only by those who continued to work on the stage but also by those who turned in other directions. And I think he knew better than Winters the continuities between the drama that Winters distrusted and the poetry that Winters so revered.

Dividing the Audience Page 61 →Julia Jarcho and Martin Harries JJ and MH, theater scholars and critical theory enthusiasts, have just taken their seats at the theater and are perusing their programs. The performance is a world premiere of Wretched Nobody by the up-and-coming downtown company Kangaroos of Reason. Our protagonists have arrived early, with a lot of time to spare. MH: Did you read the Director’s Note? JJ: No, I can’t stand those. MH: It’s not so bad, just a couple of quotations. JJ (reads): “By demanding that a work of art exert a direct impact, the prevailing aesthetics demand an impact that bridges all social and other differences between individuals.В .В .В . NonAristotelian dramatic writingВ .В .В . is not interested in creating such a collective. It divides its audience.” Bertolt Brecht.1 MH: And: “There is no theater without separation.” Herbert Blau.2 Fancy that. The lights change suddenly: a cool, reflective atmosphere. MH: You know, this idea that theater separates or divides us. I wonder: don’t we assume that the individual is divided, from the start? What is there left for theater to divide? Is it that the audience simultaneously knows and doesn’t know, that it needs to be reminded that it is made of individual cells that are constitutively divided? JJ: I do think something like that is what Blau has in mind. So then the naive reply to his remark would be: But isn’t there no anything without separation? What exactly is theater’s claim to fame here? And then a first answer might be that theater has traditionally been good at making us suspend the assumption that separation is inevitable—making us feel we’ve all finally come together. Page 62 →This aptitude would put theater in a relatively privileged position for deflating that fantasy and leading us back to the experience of separation. So even while Blau criticizes the enshrinement of “participation,” or communion, as theater’s highest aim, he also notes— She rummages in her purse and whips out a copy of Blau’s The Audience. “The intimacy of participation may preface or entail, however, a more radical separation; that is, interpenetration and exclusion may be played dialectically against each other.” And then as examples of this dialectic, he cites Grotowski’s work and his own.3 I mean, we do seem to need constant reminders of our own dividedness, even if we do “already know” it. How can I really believe that I’m divided? Sure, I keep pretending not to believe in my own integrity, sovereignty, etc., I’m a good posthumanist, but in fact—in practice—everything that isn’t my ego seems completely foreign to me, which means that for me it usually doesn’t feel like I’m divided at all. It usually feels like the division is between me and the rest of the world. But presumably the pain that often attends this fantasy is a coded acknowledgment of the interior separation that I am still bearing, which is to say that a part of me was left outside me (outside the I) and I really am still living that wound. The problem is that whatever my psychoanalytic “knowledge” of this situation, the knowledge can’t ever really be adequate to the situation itself—a structural inadequacy. And I think Blau’s idea is that in the face of this inadequacy, theater can do something theory can’t: it can make me experience the inner division. Which

would be, if nothing else, a kind of respite from the work my mind is constantly doing in order to keep that experience inaccessible to me. If we’re thinking about audiences, though, it might be useful to distinguish between two different kinds of division: division within the subject and division between subjects. Even if we accept that the first, psychic or psychoanalytic dividedness is always lurking in the second, the social division—and especially in the desire to overcome it—we can at least imagine thinking about the two kinds of division separately, or differently. And there might be theaters that have a lot at stake in the second kind of division, regardless of what happens with the first. MH: Sure. I would only add what may seem an obvious codicil: what motivates the desire to divide—or to be divided, for that matter—changes over time. There are moments when Blau’s statements about theater seem to knowingly, brazenly elide the historical. For instance— Page 63 →MH grabs JJ’s copy of The Audience and thumbs through it furiously, then reads: “What Aristotle spoke of as the spectacle was already, in archaic times, not so much the affirmation of community but—in a drama already predisposed to/by fracture—the mark of separation, born of the loss of unity. When the theater appears to bring us together it is, out of essential isolation, with the remembrance of this loss.”4 The unity that Blau imagines the audience desires is a psychic wholeness that precedes individuation: he imagines isolation as “essential” because for him it is the product of an inevitable moment in everybody’s psychic history—the “wound” you just mentioned. But Blau concludes this thought by making a surprising turn to “the spectacle,” which he means very much in Guy Debord’s sense: the media dazzle that capitalism throws up to advertise itself. The spectacle, he writes, does what theater does, only more so: “It does with a dividend of alienation, far more efficiently, what the theater has always done: it brings us together as alienated.”5 This seems awfully quick to me, even as summary: an “essential isolation” thought in Freudian terms has suddenly become an alienation thought in Marxian ones. If isolation is an all but inevitable moment in psychic life, then of course we are occupying that moment from the start. But I’m not ready myself to think of isolation in this way. Or, maybe better: I am content with understanding isolation along with Freud if we can also grant, along with Marx, that alienation is historical, that it takes different forms, and that one of these forms is a sensation of isolation that is itself not essential. This is also to say that Aristotle could not have been writing about the theater or spectacle of which we are the makers or the audience or the critics. JJ: Well, I think Blau would say that both Freud and Marx have purchase here: modern alienation refragments, in a particular way, the already fragmented subject; capitalist spectacle builds a certain kind of theater for a subject who comes to it already primed for some kind of theater. But of course even this description of alienation as a particular exacerbation of a prior and universal, or “essential,” separation won’t satisfy you, because it assumes a psychoanalytic truth that would obtain “before” capitalism’s intervention. As if we could simply excavate the situation in strata and find the theater “underneath” the TV set. Your current work on “theater after film” undermines this kind of assumption and shows ways in which since World War II “theater itself” has, on the contrary, been constituted on the basis of certain anxieties about mass media.6 These might be “separation anxieties,” in the sense that TV seems to atomize us, whereas live theater promises a kind of togetherness—the promise Blau wants to resist. But as the term mass media implies, there’s also a reverse threat: theater might be like those media in homogenizing us, forcing Page 64 →us to have the same experience—and in the same place at the same time, no less. And it’s here that the modernist interest in, on the contrary, dividing the audience, in theater as different because divisive, would seem to emerge. This is where Brecht’s vision seems to come into play.

JJ brandishes the program note. MH: But can it really come into play? If we’re going to acknowledge that what motivates the desire to divide changes over time, then we also need to ask whether Brecht’s take on the audience still has force today. Or is it now part of a modernism that is no longer current because, at bottom, it assumes the possibility of producing enlightened collectives in the theater? JJ: I really want to talk about this question of currency. But first: I’m not sure Brecht believes in the possibility of producing enlightened collectives in the theater. To take one example, in 1931 he’s discussing how the use of screens could bring about a theater “full of experts, just as you have sporting arenas full of experts.”7 Or much later in the “Short Organon,” this thoroughgoing insistence that the spectators are already the “children of a scientific age.”8 This is one reason why I’m skeptical when Jacques RanciГЁre in The Emancipated Spectator lumps Brecht in with the pedagogical logic of theater that he’s critiquing: “The first thing it teaches [the student/spectator] is her own inability.”9 It seems to me that, on the contrary, Brecht mostly imagines his task as getting the medium (theater), not the audience, up to speed. MH: But what about that moment in Walter Benjamin’s account of his conversations with Brecht where he describes the wooden donkey Brecht kept on his desk, with a sign around its neck reading, “Even I must understand it”?10 Maybe my reading has been naive, but I’ll admit I’ve always thought of that as a rather nasty, blunt allegory of Brecht’s attitude toward his audience. Or, more generously, Brecht imagines that the great popular audience he desires is already expert about sports or accidents on the street, but not yet about politics or the economy: the know-how they do possess needs to be a model for a political knowledge still to come. JJ: That donkey has always bugged me too. It reminds me of Henry James complaining that a playwright has to write for “the biggest ass” that the audience “may conceivably contain.”11 I guess I think the donkey reflects a certain self-irony on Brecht’s part about his own commitment to making theater “accessible” (as we’d say today). But I also think it’s important that a donkey who understands the play is still a donkey—so it’s not about turning an audience of asses into something better by teaching, enlightening, transforming them; but it’s about making sure the play can reach them all as they are, so that they can embrace or reject what it offers. And those alternatives mark out the divisionPage 65 → he wants to activate, which will be a historical division: the subjects of the present versus subjects of the past, who will manifest not their stupidity but their obsolescence by not having fun at Brecht’s plays. There will probably be donkeys on both sides of this divide. The problem is that if you purge this diachronic division of its reference to class, it’s just the logic of every TV commercial. But I wonder if there isn’t something worthwhile about this idea that art should reward not the non-asinine but those who are most willing to let go of the old forms—and maybe punish those who cling to them. MH: It will not surprise you if I zero in on the contrast with television and its audiences. If I understand your point, you’re countering a common understanding of television as simply a medium that unites audiences, indeed as the exemplar of such a unifying, homogenizing medium: the commercial offers an imaginary solution to a real problem, or a real solution to an unreal problem, and the huddled masses yearning to consume take it all in, unquestioning. (“I’d like to teach the world to sing.”) But such a picture imagines television as a much simpler medium than it is, and doesn’t acknowledge the ways television, too, divides its audiences, or works inside divisions it doesn’t create but may well help to maintain. But to say even this may be to assume too much. Do television and theater do things to audiences? And does this doing have anything to do with the making or dissolution of collectives? As for Brecht: does he get away from the phantasm of education? What about those utterly Aristotelian moments

where he celebrates the pleasure in learning? I grant the ambivalence, and Brecht’s respect for kinds of expertise, but I am not sure that he anticipates RanciГЁre in picturing so thorough an equality of intelligences. JJ: It’s true that for Brecht much of the time there seems to be a right choice and a wrong choice: “the militants know where they stand in the battle.”12 But there’s also something like a general commitment to dialectics or determinate negation, where the goal is to maximize the degree to which we can experience everything as being what it is instead of a concrete something else—the famous “not, but” he puts at the center of the epic performer’s task: “Whatever he does not do must be contained and conserved in what he does.”13 It seems to me that this could lead to a pretty wild experience—shadows swelling, possible worlds proliferating. The point here is exactly not to just lop off the “wrong choice” like the bad half of an apple, though you might have to Take those Measures laterВ .В .В . I mean for sure there are losers in the Brechtian theater, as there are in TV commercials (the poor sucker who chose the wrong, old-style car insurance/laptop /burger—that’s really all I meant). But obviously, the old burg(h)er is there mostly to help us identify with the newer, Page 66 →better thing we’d all rather be. That’s really still the “common understanding of television” you’re talking about, right? Brainwashing? And if there’s a parallel with Brecht’s pedagogical project here, then that’s also the point where the “vulgar” or “instrumentalist” Brecht shows up and threatens to look like just another salesman—as he sometimes does look to critics like Theodor Adorno. The thing is, I think I basically do subscribe to that knee-jerk model of media culture as homogenizing. And I think both of us are drawn to certain modernist visions of theater that want it to resist—that think maybe it can in some special way resist—what seems to be a fundamentally homogenizing tendency of mass culture. At the same time, your commitment to historicizing would also make us interrogate that “homogenizing” assumption, since what mass media “are” (let alone “is”) is always shifting. But there are other problems with the “homogenizing” model too, some of which I find it’s no picnic to acknowledge. How would you feel if I put on my “theater-maker” hat now and launched into a confessional monologue? MH (gallantly): By all means. JJ: OK. So: I want theater to be a haven for singularity, which brings people together in order to let them be different. This ideal has been articulated by a number of people; one place I come back to a lot is Hans-Thies Lehmann’s vision of postdramatic theater as a space for “a common contact of different singularities who do not melt their respective perspectives into a whole.”14 I find this vision very appealing, personally, and it corresponds to my own deepest sense of what I want the theater I make to be like. Especially with laughter: usually at my plays I can’t predict what lines will get laughs on a given night, and that’s partly to do with the variations in performance of course but also, I hope, because my collaborators and I are managing to create a structure with enough spaciousness and indeterminacy inside it that the audience’s minds will necessarily creep off to different nooks. And in practice this really does seem to involve a negative procedure, that is, sort of battering away at the forms of pop-cultural sense making in order to make them relax their coercive hold on us. As someone who watches a lot of television, I do think that most of our lived experience—and not only when we’re “just watching”—is rationally managed in a way that calibrates it for exchange. But especially in my lifetime, these calibrations have gotten more sophisticated and variable, so that it seems there are almost no desires that don’t find increasingly “visible” possibilities of satisfaction already available for purchase. We actually are better consumers and producers as “singularities”—well, pseudosingularities. I know this is old news. But in this country anyway, it seems we’re coming to the end of the period in which one generation’s

counterculture is the next generation’s corporate culture (the punk rock dialectic) Page 67 →and arriving at a stage where the very concept of counterculture is basically senseless because no one really experiences official culture as monolithic or oppressive. Anyway, I think this is true for my students. Which is not to say that they don’t confront horrendous, crushing bigotry in their immediate environments. But to the extent that they have access to global information systems, they can find images that will valorize their difference courtesy of capital. All this is very confusing for poor me, since I seem to have been built for a constant pursuit of againstness that now seems not just mystified but incoherent; and it’s the only way I know how to think, feel, want, talk, or make anything.15 So my interest in revisiting Brecht’s—and Blau’s—insistence on division is motivated partly by this real urgent sense of disquietude I feel, and really, a desire for someone to show me that there is (“today”) a noncompliant aspect to divisions of the kind that theater—certain kinds of theater, maybe modernist theater—is able to provide for. A moment of eeriness. MH: Your interest in revisiting? Did you write this program note? JJ: You’re the one listed in “special thanks,” not me. They look at each other quizzically. But anyway, as you point out, Blau’s “no theater without separation” refers to a separation that is supposed to be ineliminable from subjectivity, rather than a contingent, “subversive” division, so in this sense he seems to be farther away from what I’m after than Brecht. Though it’s also the case that Brecht himself, the world he is able to see, is often unbearably far from where we are. MH: I share your sense that these are urgent questions: Has theater become residual by continuing to resist a past structure of hegemony? We agree that the theater that matters to us has been the theater that participates in the countering of the culture industry. But is the culture industry intact, if, indeed, it ever was the behemoth that Adorno and Horkheimer and just about every other postwar intellectual imagined it to be? Well, I’m tempted to insist that official culture now is just as oppressive as ever, even if it’s less monolithic. I remember being surprised, five years ago, to find that my undergraduates thought the argument of the culture industry chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment accurately described their world, today’s world, or the world of five years ago anyway. I expected them to possess that savvy postideological sense of mass culture you describe: they didn’t. JJ: Thank god. MH: So I am skeptical enough about claims regarding revolutionary changes Page 68 →to the superstructure that I am quite willing to assert that there is still a basic official culture for theater to resist. Venues for expression multiply, on certain platforms anyway, and inequality, paradoxically or otherwise, grows more or less in direct proportion to this proliferation. This is partly what Benjamin meant by the aestheticization of politics: the substitution of expressive opportunities in the form of mass rallies and so on for any genuine alteration of property rights. The current state of affairs may represent yet another triumph of such wholesale technologically mediated aestheticization. Still, it’s important to acknowledge that our sense of mass culture as the enemy—and of the artist as the one who resists this culture—is the product of a particular postwar moment. Blau, for all his savvy, tends to take this picture of mass culture as, simply, true. Take this sentence.

MH reads, yet again, from The Audience. “The social ideal is unitary, desiring fusion, while the perceiving subject moves, desiring, into the collective representation.”16 So what we have is a split subject again and again encountering a social world that always desires one thing, fusion; a social world that the subject invests with the potential to suture her own psychic divisions. Maybe theater can interrupt the subject’s attachment to that fantasy, allow her to see, in theater’s difference from “the social,” that there are ways of imagining collectivity that don’t fantasize about fusion. Again and again, this is one of Blau’s themes. And again and again, too, Blau invests the solitary and separate with a kind of heroism that likewise seems to me a product of his long Cold War moment. Like here, on the penultimate page (reading again): “I can see the immaculate conception of an idea of performance in a lone man walking a tautened rope between the twin towers of advanced capitalism, not unlike the Platonic Ideas that Artaud saw in the strange figures crossing high over an abyss in The Daughters of Lot.”17 And then here— MH takes a wad of notes from his coat pocket. This is from a 1993 essay: When the French equilibrist Philippe Petit stretched a line in the middle of the night and, virtually without an audience, walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center, it was as if he had lifted to its meridian dispossession itself, the notion of a “public solitude” (Stanislavski’s term) that had receded with unstable identity and the costliness of space and production into the meditative or solipsistic element of “solo performance.” Up there in the awesome draft, what you would have seen if you saw was a body so Page 69 →adept it hardly seemed carnal; it was more like an ideograph of the mind aloft at its extremity. And while we hardly see such theater every day, it is very close, I think, to the solitary discipline and rigor of desire that (with a certain feeling for gravity) materializes culture, high culture, in the vertigo of a theater space.18 Thinking about what we’re thinking about, I zero in on that phrase: “virtually without an audience.” I don’t know whether Blau means that very few people saw it—and I don’t think this is true: see Man on Wire—or whether he means that because of the distance between Petit and those who witnessed his performance the astounding adeptness of the body was available only after the fact, in photographs. But this passage seems to me a fair demonstration of something worth noting about Blau as a writer—his habit of revising in public—and, more important, his insistence on the solitary and on risk. For Blau what makes art in Petit’s exemplary and unrepeatable performance is its heroic separateness from its public, but that distance is rarely large enough to satisfy the demand for the truly extreme: what we want is the splendor of “solitary discipline”; what we get, more often than not, is immersion in the “solipsistic element” typical of the “solo performance,” from which Blau distances Petit with those suspicious quotation marks. JJ: I’m glad to see you’re carrying pages of Blau around too. I thought I was the only one. MH: Never leave home without ’em. JJ: So much for my heroic individualism! But what you call Blau’s “insistence on the solitary” is particularly meaningful in the context of a theater discourse that most often seems to want to celebrate the overcoming of solitude: copresence, communication, witnessing, or even just “dialogue.” It’s tempting to think, too, about the ways Blau continually performs a certain resistance to the reader in his prose—or maybe even something analogous to the past conditional of Petit’s performance: what you would have read if you’d been able to read thisВ .В .В . maybe I’m just wondering if Blau’s writing is “virtually without an audience” in the

way Petit’s act was, or—since you raise the question—vice versa. And this is not just about the ways Blau’s writing is hard to get copresent with, but also the way its particular difficulty seems to call forth a certain self-division in the reader. It’s a little cheesy but inevitable, I guess, to keep pointing out that Blau’s writing is “like” theater, or like the theater he likes. But: here he’s in league with Brecht, who also suggests that theater can make the individual experience herself as internally split: “imagine a man standing in a valley and making a speech in which he occasionally changes his opinion or simply utters Page 70 →sentences that contradict one another, so that the accompanying echo brings them into confrontation.”19 MH: Did you just quote the “Short Organon” from memory? JJ: No, it’s tattooed in the crook of my elbow—see? Evidently Brecht is saying that this internal self-difference is conducive to the more obviously political mode of breakup, into classes. Bringing this back to Blau’s psychoanalytic frame, we might say that the fact that each of us enters the theater as a big heap of parts pathetically clinging to its own fantasmatic wholeness seems in itself to imply at least a possible vulnerability, hence availability, to more exciting, contingent, socially significant modes of division. Which would be great, right? I’m incredibly relieved that your students recognize the culture industry. But it might be that even in the last few years our students, real experts in metropolitan living (not to mention global capitalism), have gotten savvier at finding what they want in the matrix, hence more optimistic about its inclusiveness. They already know that every “difference” is recuperable as exchange value. So what kind of fractiousness do they—do we—still need? MH: I persist in thinking that there remain differences that official culture can’t do anything with—at any rate, differences for which there is no translation into exchange value. There’s a lot of talk of the absolute subsumption of culture into capital at this moment, and I don’t buy it. The situation of some of the art I care about is horrific, but it’s not utterly scorched earth. JJ: But isn’t the feeling of scorched earth—of wretchedness or catastrophe—one of the things that lets you know some such difference must be possible? Around them, an impatient rustling: when is the show going to begin? Our protagonists lower their voices and pick up the pace. MH: Maybe we are moving away from Brecht and toward Beckett. If anyone embodies the attempt to inhabit, through staging or writing—and however tentatively—that scorched terrain, it would be Beckett, no? The late works—say, “Imagination Dead Imagine”—are so precise in their delineation of these spaces. I wonder if part of the point of these increasingly impossible spaces isn’t to divide the audience from its very empathy, from its confidence that it might have some idea of what it is to inhabit that space, that sort of space. What determinate negation follows from this cul-de-sac? Somehow, after all, some utopia? JJ: So if Beckett in a piece like “Imagination Dead Imagine” is trying to create an uninhabitable space (which we’ll experience as uninhabitable because the piece is sort of explicitly an exercise in trying to inhabit it), then the division that’s taking place is no longer between those who can go the distance to revolutionPage 71 → and those who can’t, as in Brecht. With Beckett, none of us are getting there. One could be a good Brechtian but not a good Beckettian. MH surreptitiously pulls the cuff of his sleeve down, covering up the “It’s a rare thing not to have been

bonny—once” tattoo on his left wrist.20 Any identification with what’s happening onstage serves mostly as a point for the work to pivot away from. The truth is, I never really feel like talking about Beckett’s late work; it seems to throw up little walls around me, making me potentially suspicious of and grouchy toward my peers. You don’t feel this way (about that work) I guess? MH: Throwing up little walls: that’s what it does! When does the late work begin? I suppose, whenever it begins, that period would have to include Ohio Impromptu, What Where, and Catastrophe. When I was a college student, an evening of those three plays together in September 1983 at the Harold Clurman Theater on 42nd Street, with a cast that included David Warrilow, who was just stunning—that evening made me think about Beckett and about theater differently. And I feel that I have been working toward being able to write about the experience of that evening for some time. Part of the shock of that evening had to do with what we’ve been talking about: with the experience of a division that is very hard to describe. Those plays exclude the audience in a way I had not experienced. I was used to the kinds of divisions through distinction implicit in a lot of theater and of course in a lot of the other kinds of art I took in. But the address to the audience, the formal derangement of Beckett’s plays, was something different, and differently divisive. For Blau that kind of formal derangement had everything to do with an essential link between performance and mortality: think of his famous claim that the “person you see performing in front of you is dying in front of your eyes,” which comes (of course, at least in one of its iterations) from an interview called “Remembering Beckett.”21 But I resist this line of thought: I don’t think that the divide between performance and everything else is that performance as such makes us more aware of mortality. I’m also really not sure what it means to say that the performer “is dying in front of your eyes.” Very likely that person is doing a whole lot of other things there as well. JJ: Yeah, but isn’t there some particular way in which, when I watch a play, my imago gets enlivened and hence imperiled? The thing onstage isn’t an image, it withholds itself, it moves. It leaves, maybe forever; it reappears, definitely not forever. Doesn’t that give theater a kind of special relationship to the death drive? MH: Blau also suggests something like that: “There is something in the theater, I’ve said, which resists being theater, as if the factitious energy of appearances—whatPage 72 → is most entertaining, beguiling, seductive about it—were the recursive fascination of the death drive itself.”22 The word factitious overloads this sentence with a Platonic suspicion of the power of the image as such: it’s not that the images themselves are factitious; their energy itself is somehow bogus. This “factitious energy,” however, represents, for Blau, a salutary antitheatrical impulse inside the theater: like the disappearing and reappearing toy in Freud’s scenario, the image, empty and unimportant in itself, acts “as if” it were—what?—a fascination that belongs to the death drive. But I also want to ask: why the death drive? I don’t see why theater is, now, an especially apt venue for going beyond the pleasure principle. Yes, I suppose those we see onstage are dying in front of us, but an encounter with mortality is not necessarily a confrontation with the death drive: on the contrary. JJ: But Fr— MH: Yes, Freud links the death drive to tragedy, but he discovers it in the fort/da game and not in Hamlet—not there at first, at any rate.23 Blau wants the theater to be the place of a certain knowledge, and this is the knowledge for which philosophy has long claimed to train us—knowledge about death. Small wonder, given all it was asked to do, that the theater remained, for Blau (and others), “impossible.” I find myself thinking of that very sympathetic moment in Derrida’s last interview when he claims always to have resisted that calling, failed at learning how to die.24 At the very least I would want to put the brakes on the idea that “the” theater has

pursued some transhistorical project, wants to do something to its audiences. What does theater want? That’s not a question that will get us anywhere, I don’t think. Or let me rephrase that: thinking of theater in this way has gotten people very far, and there is no denying the alluring challenge in, for instance, Blau’s ongoing construction of a dialogue between Beckett and Greek tragedy. But there are histories of death and histories of theater, and I find myself wanting to know more about the peculiar interactions of these histories, about the historical situations of cities of the dead. JJ: Couldn’t we set out just a few cans of hemlock at the theater bar, between the glasses of wine and the damp little sandwiches? MH: Hmm. And in Britain you could order your hemlock in advance, just in case you really, really want to leave at the intermission. But I want to think about the division of the audience from another point of view. I have in mind a wonderful passage from the chapter on double plots in William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. The passage begins with an account of the Elizabethan power of sympathy, and this leads Empson not to some account of communion but to a broadly suggestive account of how plays, in our terms, divide their audiences, or, more exactly, play to audiences Page 73 →already divided. For Empson, this division begins with questions of character: “This fulness in the audience clearly allowed of complex character-building; one need not put hero and villain in black and white; though not everybody in the audience understood such a character they did not object when they understood only partial conflicting interpretations of it.”25 This would seem banal, maybe, were it only for the characterization of hero and villain. Empson, however, implies that there was no single operation of sympathy in the Elizabethan theater. It’s unclear to me if he means to imply that the audience knew that its understanding amounted to only “partial conflicting interpretations,” and that this partial interpretation was enough for it. In any case, Empson grants that almost everyone would have understood a certain complexity: “few people in the audience would get it in only one way, and few in all. And even the man who saw the full interpretation would still use the partial ones; both because he was in contact with the audience the play assumed and because he needed crude as well as delicate means of interpreting it quickly on the stage.”26 From Elizabethan theater, Empson moves backward to Greece, and he offers this generalization: The whole point was to play one part of the audience against the other, and yet this made a superb “complete play” for the critic who felt what was being felt in the whole audience. The total aesthetic effect would not be “in the play” if it was only a clever secret attack. But the plays are not addressed only to the few; the choruses are straightforward religious poetry; all shades of opinion were to be fused by the infection of the theatre into a unity of experience, under sufficiently different forms to avoid riots. On a smaller scale I think this is usual in the theatre.27 The “partial conflicting interpretations” resulting from this ambiguity are, Empson I think implies, all partial, yes, but they are also all correct. The “complete play,” indeed, is the sum of these partial interpretations—and Empson means “conflicting” in the strong sense of contradictory, irreconcilable. This isn’t a milquetoast celebration of the possibility or likelihood of ambiguity but an assertion of the way plays positively, by design, “play one part of the audience against the other.” Empson’s play on play here is pretty cool, no? As if the play of plays were itself essentially a mode of dividing the audience. What strikes me as so important here is that Empson, very different from Blau, is pointing toward the historicity of the divided audience. Despite this emphasis on the dividing of the audience into parts, Empson also insists on the wholeness of these plays. This insistence culminates in this really mind-boggling formulation: “all shades of opinion were to be fused by Page 74 →the infection of the theatre into a unity of experience, under

sufficiently different forms to avoid riots.” Is the “unity of experience” itself something that takes these “different forms”? Empson at once uses a Nietzschean language of theater’s power of contagion, and imagines this contagion as controlled by the diversity of interpretations that it includes. What Empson seems to have in mind is some common consciousness of theater’s fusion of contradictions; an audience knows it is divided, and doesn’t riot. But why should it, why might it riot? JJ: The audiences I’ve been in were never going to riot. Like, no way. But it’s true: Empson, Brecht, Nietzsche, Artaud all sensed the theatrical audience as a potential riotous mass. Even Blau, who faced down the fear of riot in his famous San Quentin production of Waiting for Godot, imagines something like a riot when he starts his first book, The Impossible Theater, by proclaiming, “The purpose of this book is to talk up a revolution. Where there are rumblings already, I want to cheer them on. I intend to be incendiary and subversive.” Of course that kind of riot-theater—the salutary, world-changing, all-around kick-ass-awesome kind—seems to be the dream that keeps the “impossible” (as you’ve already noted) lodged in Blau’s title. And what’s more, the first-person singular pronoun keeps proliferating throughout those first paragraphs (“I feel like the lunatic LearВ .В .В . I respect and despiseВ .В .В . I wantВ .В .В . I wantВ .В .В .”), as if to anticipate the insistence on inevitable separation that The Audience will bring into focus a quarter of a century later. For Blau, theater isn’t where I get to dissolve into the riotous mob; in fact, in that earlier moment, it’s the site at which I can affirm my self, my very singularity (“My friends, wanting to spare me my murderous impulsesВ .В .В . tell me to calm down”) as He Who Desires the Riot most strongly.28 Beckett’s own imaginary relationship with the theatrical mob is another story. “Estragon: Beat me? Certainly they beat me!”29 Beckett, that is, always seems to position himself as the potential victim of that mob, perhaps like Empson and Brecht.В .В .В . I was going to say “and perhaps unlike Nietzsche and Artaud,” but given their intense ecstatic masochism, I don’t think I want to say that actually. MH: You can add me to the list: one day I want to be inside a Dionysian throng. Is that too much to ask? JJ: Maybe not, since Empson’s “unity of experience” seems to propose that we actually do have radically different responses to a work and yet we experience those different responses as the same response. And we’re not necessarily making a mistake: the differences themselves are maybe what we all experience, not instead of the work, but woven throughout it and, oddly, giving it its cohesiveness. But—forgive me—isn’t that basically the fantasy of every Page 75 →teen movie? The Breakfast Club: we’re all so different, but we can totally come together when it matters. Still, the idea that theater can be an occasion for us to come together as separate, and thus to experience the fact that we don’t need to annihilate our differences in order to come together, would be the basis for the idea of theater as a training ground for nontotalitarian social solidarity. And I take it that this is the implication in accounts like Lehmann’s, which I quoted before: “a common contact of different singularities who do not melt their respective perspectives into a whole.” I guess we could also phrase this as a respite from competition and domination—although, again, it’s not at all clear to me that we don’t find that respite within capital culture too. I think what made the tightrope walker such a compelling figure for Blau’s theater is that this act, and the forms of solitude it harbors, was difficult—phenomenologically difficult, hard to inhabit at all. And I do think this is the point of aesthetic practice, to discover a mode of experience that is almost not experience because it’s incompatible with the frameworks within which modern experience takes place. Like the daredevil on

the wire, this practice always risks falling into nothingness because the structures of our subjectivity might just completely fail to support it. And then my question would be: If this is the challenge of the aesthetic, then can we even use the vocabulary of individuality to discuss it? I mean, can the figure of the individual, the solitary, still be meaningful for describing this possibility? MH: I think the point is that art can try to address us differently—in a different way or with a different urgency than the kinds of hailing to which we’re usually subject. And what addresses us makes us. Identify, disidentify, oscillate between identification and disidentification: it’s not that we get to choose, but we all differently experience ourselves as subjected to what speaks to us, what speaks us. That’s where we are. We see stuff, we miss stuff, that’s okay. These forms of address are elaborately classed, racialized, coded in so many ways: that’s another, crucially important ongoing conversation. The phenomenological and medial situations of address—the scenes of address—have changed radically over the past century. Thoroughly to trace Blau’s responses to these changes might well require producing an encyclopedic account of his work. A truism, yes—but maybe because these apparatuses (radio, movies, TV, and so on down the line to video games like World of Warcraft) are so obviously fundamental to the restructuring of experience that we are still catching up with what changes in the apparatuses of address mean for where and what and how we are. I am reluctant to say that “the” theater does this or that or the other thing, but I’ll get over this reluctance—for the moment anyway, for this moment—and say that this restructured landscape of address has changed Page 76 →the role and importance of theatrical address. May I risk a summary? Here: theater divides its audience from a second nature built on technologically mediated modes of address. JJ: So then, would we want to say that something theater can do is hold my self, and the world, open? How about that? MH is about to reply when the house lights finally bump to black and the real play begins.

Notes 1. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Mother” [1933], in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, trans. Jack Davis et al. 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 92 (hereafter Brecht on Theatre). 2. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 10. 3. Ibid., 149. 4. Ibid., 124. 5. Ibid. 6. See Martin Harries, “Theater after Film, or Dismediation,” in Medium: Essays from the English Institute, special issue of ELH 83.2 (Summer 2016): 345–61. 7. Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Threepenny Opera” [1931], in Brecht on Theatre, 72. 8. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organon for the Theatre” [1949], in Brecht on Theatre, 235. 9. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 9. 10. Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” trans. Anya Bostock, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 89. 11. Quoted in Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1985), 85. 12. Bertolt Brecht, The Decision [1931], trans. John Willett, in Brecht: Collected Plays, Three, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1997), 89. 13. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting That Produces a Verfremdung Effect” [1940], in Brecht on Theatre, 185. 14. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 83. 15. For what I think is a related discussion, see the articles in Queer Theory without Antinormativity, in

differences 26.1 (2015). 16. Blau, Audience, 10. 17. Ibid., 382. 18. Herbert Blau, “Spacing Out in the American Theater,” in The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 51–52. Blau had previously published a version of this passage, with significant differences, in “Spacing Out in the American Theater,” Revue franГ§aise d’études amГ©ricaines 36 (April 1988): 210. 19. Brecht, “Short Organon,” 241. Page 77 →20. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 42. 21. Herbert Blau, “Remembering Beckett: An Interview,” in Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 158. 22. Herbert Blau, “Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art,” in Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 176. 23. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 17. 24. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007). 25. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral [1935] (London: Hogarth, 1986), 64. 26. Ibid., 64–65. 27. Ibid., 65. 28. Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 3. 29. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot [1954] (New York: Grove, 2011), 2.

“One Man Dancing”: Remembering Herbert Blau Page 78 →Bill Irwin When you work in the theater you rack up a lot of training, you absorb a lot of theory. You have many directors, and many mentors. You’re always shedding skins, growing new ones. So what is it that keeps the work we did with Herbert Blau, some 40 years ago, still so central—still so present—in my mind? I was part of the group KRAKEN that Herb directed from early 1972 to late 1974 at Oberlin College. We created and rehearsed—and then toured—two main pieces: first, The Seeds of Atreus, Herb’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy, and then The Donner Party, Its Crossing, devised from research into the famous 1848 pioneer party’s journey. My memory of performing these pieces, and what they consisted of, is hazy. I’m sure they were a mixed bag. What’s vivid, though, is my memory of working on them—of being in the room with Herb and the company he’d assembled. It was a distant, pre-digital youth—but some of these memories are intensely present after all the passage of years. I owe Herb Blau greatly. Memories, not quite random: —Working on the Aeschylus piece one night, Herb said, “The question for humans has always been вЂWhy are we not gods?’” He said it smoothly, calmly, like a literary anthropologist. But then he grabbed his sweatshirt and he said, “I mean, I ask, вЂWHY THE FUCK AM I NOT A GOD’? That’s the question.” He said it with that sudden Blau-ian ferocity which risked being comic in its size and intensity. Some of us did laugh—a small balding man clutching his clothing and reddening in the face. I may have laughed, too, I’m not sure. But I nodded in Page 80 →recognition—I remember looking at Michael O’Connor and at Julie Taymor, and they were both smiling, but their eyes were wide. It was such a potent image of strength and weakness in the same moment—it was both skillful and guileless—it was a Greek play. It was Herb, talking the way he did, about human history, about the theater. I will never forget it. Page 79 → Fig. 8. Bill Irwin in The Donner Party, Its Crossing, 1974. (Photo by Christopher Thomas) Herb was not a scholar as he grabbed his shirt; he was a theater man, almost a man-child, in the moment—there was erudition, but also anger at nature. And such odd strength. That moment amounted to a revelation of limit, but, paradoxically, it was, for me, one of those tiny steps toward the confidence to take on a Greek play, the confidence actors need to take on a text that is much greater than themselves. To embark on something beyond normal scale—and to know that one’s best hope is to be a tiny but ferocious human being inside it. A gift I got partly from Herb, I think. —David Suehsdorf did something one night as we worked on the DONNOR PARTY. He’d put scraps from a butcher shop under his clothes and he riffed a bizarre tirade while pulling bloody chunks out of himself—he spoke in a German accent, as Lewis Keseberg, one of the Donner party who was first accused of cannibalism. It was inspired and wild—he ranted and he pulled out more guts. We all laughed (even Tyran Russell laughed, and this was a rare gift). But Herb laughed like you couldn’t imagine—it hit some sweet spot of sensibility for him—guts, blood, text, heightened language, schtick—I’ve rarely seen anyone so enjoy a performance. —Two Herb Blau talking points: “Thought can be action on a stage” and “The intellect is visceral.” These things struck me when I first heard them. I knew immediately that there was something important for me in these words, even though I couldn’t entirely say what it was that

he meant by them.

Looking back, I realize, from this vantage, that, for most people who are drawn to work in the theater, the realization—the claim—that intellectual pursuits are not wimpy, not effete, is very important. I think it’s part of what helped set me up for physical work in the theater. —Something else Herb said had real impact, and has great meaning still (though I can never quite define or explain it to anyone beyond quoting it). It was this odd maxim of his: “A performance is always about itself.” I think I remember talking with Linda Gregerson about this—circling endlessly, but staying with the question. Page 81 →But there’s a way that phrase, now—whatever it quite means—can help me lock in as a performer. It seems to help me combine intensity and relaxation, and it also seems to hold some key to what I want to draw on—and what I’m trying to reach beyond—in playing to an audience. —Herb would also often say about the theater, especially about his earlier days in San Francisco, that things were going on in other art forms that were far more interesting than what was happening in theater. It was a theme of his. It vaguely affronted me then—I remember debating it with Wes Sanders and with Sharon Ott—but I so thoroughly get it, now. Was it true? Is it true? It’s a provocative question for theater people—worth asking forever. —On the further notion of godhead, Herb quoted (I think more than once) Melville’s description of Ahab as a “godless, god-like man.” In this case, Herb said this not as a charged invocation—more a simple quotation—and I think maybe it was with a touch of wistfulness.I remember feeling, by odd instinct, that Herb might like those words said about him, someday. Or at least I tucked them away, and thought about them as something that might be said in looking back. There’s poignancy here in Melville’s quote because the phrase would never really fit Herb—he was too sweet natured, too generous—he was sometimes oblivious but always too kind, in the final analysis (and, in the best of ways, maybe too earthbound)—for such a phrase to fit him. But I cite it in his memory to honor the wistfulness I thought I might be hearing as he said it. There’s actually another quoted phrase that I connect even more with Herb (David Newman and I used to say it should be the title of a biography—and we said this with the mixture of reverence and sarcasm that you hold toward a mentor/boss.) This is how we first heard it: There was an intensely shy custodian in charge of Warner Gym where we worked at Oberlin—a wonderful man—his name was Milt, and he walked with a kind of biblical limp. He was oddly protective of us and the long hours we kept. A guard asked one night whether the gym was empty, and whether he could lock up. Milt looked in and saw Herb practicing Tai Chi. He shook his head, “Still one man dancing,” he said. Herbert Blau—his deep theater energy, his restless thinking, his profound and sometimes goofy sense of aspiration—all of him—will be a part of me, always.

You are Living in Your Breathing. You are Dying in Your Breathing: Bardo, Dream-Yoga, and Theater in the Work of Herbert Blau Page 82 →Anthony Kubiak To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. —Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus

Sipe Bardo/Becoming I was asked in 2004 to write an article for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism that gave summary and overview to Herbert Blau’s work. That article, daunting as it was to write, finally settled on this observation: “In [Blau’s] theater,” I wrote then, “the disappearing act is epitome.”1 But the disappearing act, for Blau—though he was loathe to admit it—was, finally, the death masque, and this was central, I asserted then, to his experience of theater. Indeed, “the actor,” he would say, “is dying right in front of you.” But this simple observation went quite a bit further than it might at first seem. For Blau, the inscrutable fact of death was the ghost haunting all performance and theater, although the maskings of that fact—the fact of death—were many and polyvalent and included a host of ghostings, mirrorings, presences, and missing persons, all adumbrated in the maddening ellipses of his writing. The approach here, ghosting Blau in his manifold stagings (and now in his passing), is the gist of what appears again tonight—glossing what I wrote then, in the shadow of what has come and its refraction in a mirrored presence—death as the Blauian subject deflected, reabsorbed, and aspirated into a theatrical now—this very “Stay, Illusion!”2 But what is that theatrical now? The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt notwithstanding,Page 83 → how do we move the mind past its endless preoccupations with everything that is other than mere presence, just now? Indeed, and arguably, the mind exists most often in past and future, in memory and anticipation, in an ontologically illusory flux that gives it a deep discomfort with presentness. Also, and also arguably, death and theater are modes that can only truly exist in the present. This is in part a very old idea: in his letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus, writing some twenty-four hundred years ago, tells us that “Death, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”3 More recently Wittgenstein writes, “For life in the present, there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Our life is endless” (Tractatus 6.431–6.4312).4 If death (and theater) are both radical habitations of this now, if presence is what delimits and defines both death and theater as events that can only occur in the now, how do we approach the performance of death without simply adumbrating it into mere representation yet again? What is the state within which we bridge lived experience and the final release of experience into death? I propose that the intermediate performance space of dream might be a place to begin, but dream seen in a very different frame of reference than what we have become accustomed to, dream as death-state, or, in the Shakespearian mode, deathas-dream state—what the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism would call Bardo, the interval, and, I will argue here, what we might also call theater, a “primordial space for the existence of something other than God” (Take Up, 133).

Now, Blau’s well-known, playful proclamations that he would “live forever” notwithstanding, how might we understand the deep and troubled relationship between death and theater that I believe haunts his work? Even though Blau’s aspirations to immortality were couched in sly humor, what does that impulse suggest about his work, its self-reflexive nature, its refusal to release the endless oscillations of seeing, and seeing the seeing, self in life, self in death, death in life, life in dream, dream dying to consciousness, consciousness haunted by dream’s Unheimlich and final disappearance, the falling curtain of sleep, of death? For Blau, I think, it was death’s fort-da, its hide-and-seek in the theater, that gave his work—both performative and theoretical—its power and resonance.

Kyene Bardo/Living In that same article mentioned above, I also wrote this. Herbert Blau’s work hasВ .В .В . taken the study of theater and presented it as the nearly limitless possibility of mind (and in the work itself, seeing limitless Page 84 →possibility as Impossibility itself). And before the facile response that Blau is merely taking it all as theater, simply reiterating Donne’s “the whole frame of the world is theater,” Blau himself states the matter in a decidedly more elliptical manner, asking the question “If life is a dream, what is the theater?” (“Impossible Seductions,” 109) In trying to locate the relationship, first of all, between theater and dream, and later between dream and death, death and theater, it is perhaps important to locate the origin of dream-thought itself in the modern (and post) period. Ironically, this locus is itself dreamlike, an aboriginal dream-time that we locate within the modern, specifically in Freud (and, I would argue, secondarily Jung) as its most important point of departure. Before this moment, dream analysis was the province of mediums and spiritualists and was not taken seriously by science or medicine as anything more than the refuse of a fevered brain.5 But then, in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams appeared, the dream’s navel, so to speak, of interpretive strategy and counterstrategy in dream interpretation, what would become, in Blau’s theory, the place “that was dreamed for us before we dreamed.”6 Although psychoanalytic dream theory has evolved quite a lot since Freud’s seminal work, and much of what has emerged departs from Freud’s work in important ways, psychoanalytic figures as diverse as Jacques Lacan, Jean LaPlanche, and Melanie Klein have, like Freud, approached dream as a hidden cipher, a text to be decrypted along largely linguistic or structural lines. And, although other cultures partially approach dream in similar fashion, it is unique, I think, in the Freudian tradition to approach dream primarily as a cipher—that it is dream’s linguistic inscrutability itself that is its power, its meaning. Others, however, have taken a decidedly different tack, seeing in dream something like pure experience in the present. The post-Jungian James Hillman, for example, offers us a unique take on dream-space/time, likening it to the Dionysian theater and suggesting that, in order to understand the nature of dream, we should perhaps employ “theatrical logic” because in dream the “nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific Dionysian form.” This Dionysian form, writes Hillman, “means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience and thus always involved.”7 But still, militating against this somewhat aberrant directive and hewing to the original Freudian line, we see within other disciplines a similar impulse to “read” dream in a peculiarly analytic way as a kind of decryption of these letters from the interior. Even contemporary neuroscience, in its sometimes complete rejection of Freudian dream theory, uses (ironically perhaps) the template of narrative intelligibilityPage 85 → as the rubric for its dismissal of dream experience—dreams, we often hear from neuroscientists, are meaningless.8 But neuroscience often forgets that the incoherent content of dream, the result of the random release of energy stored within neuronal structures in the brain, is nonetheless somehow captured by other unnamed, distributed mechanisms within the brain and turned into something resembling a story—a story that, many neuroscientists would say, has no intrinsic meaning at all. The absurdity of a story with no meaning (that, e.g., a story with no meaning is itself meaningful in its seeming incongruity), or conversely that any story has or can have an essential, intrinsic “meaning,” is usually lost on these types of researchers.9 The subtler ways in which text and mind collude to produce meaning, to produce

the world, is beyond the ken of those who study neurophysics in these more or less mechanistic and reductive ways. Other neurophilosophers and scientists (David Chalmers comes to mind here) have more subtle and nuanced understandings of the relationship between dream and meaning, understandings that play an interesting if unglossed and distantly peripheral role in the present study.10 For Blau, however, like Hillman, and like dreamyoga (which I will discuss at length shortly), dream is the very fact of its own intransigence. The dream is the manifestation of our resistance to it. “Our dreams,” Blau writes, “retort to our denials: we are being dreamed. The Enemy is doing the dreaming” (Take Up, 133). Now, it is also important to note that throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud himself often seems to downplay imaginary dream-meaning in favor of something like an intrinsic meaning in the dream story itself, seeing the manifest content of dream as a relatively stable narrative with a particular meaning. Freud seems to assume that the dream’s sense, arrived at through analysis, is reliable because the manifest content of the dream is comparatively stable. This assumed reliability never seems to be much of an issue in Freud. However, in the work of more recent critics such as Roland Barthes, the notion of stable, intrinsic meaning intentionally created by an “author” has been deeply problematized and is not really sustainable as an empirical “fact” of any narrative.11 Moreover, Freud doesn’t really engage with the possibility that it is analysis itself that might continuously reinvent the seeming manifest content through the telling. In other words, even if the manifest content of dream is to be trusted, which I believe it never can be, its interpretation is always and forever open to interpretation. In other words, it is all, including the interpretation, dream-story. Pedro CalderГіn, writing out his own oneirocriticism nearly four hundred years ago in Life Is a Dream, describes this theater of dream dreaming itself quite powerfully: “for all life is a dream,” he writes, “and even dreams are but dreams.” And their interpretations, it would seem, are as well. Similarly, David Loy, writing within a different disposition (on the ontologiesPage 86 → of Buddhism) sees dream within the wider context of storytelling, with both dream and story as manifestations of mind’s capacity to create its own sense of the real. “Stories,” writes Loy, “are not just stories”; rather they “teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible. Without stories there is no way to engage with the world because there is no world, and no one to engage with it because there is no self.” And later, to clarify and perhaps mute charges of idealism or even nihilism, Loy notes that it “is not to deny (or assert) that there is a world apart from our stories, only that we cannot understand anything without storying. To understand is to story.” Loy also quotes Shakespeare’s parting words from The Tempest, “[W]e are such stuff as dreams are made on,” by following them with his own Blauian discord: “[B]ut what stuff,” Loy asks, “are dreams made on?” (emphasis mine). 12 Within these interpretive aporia, and ghosting them in Freud (or CalderГіn, for that matter), is also the muffled and partially suppressed perception that the meaning of dream is somehow deeply and inextricably linked to the feeling of the dream, its Unheimlich—its strangeness, its resistance to meaning—clear or cryptic. This hippocampal ghostedness is crucial to the dream’s impact and ultimately to its perceived meaning. In Freud this strangeness points to that which is, or was, hidden (resisted or repressed) and now stands to be discovered in a kind of Aristotelian anagnoresis. The threatened revelation or recognition of what was previously unrevealed is the hallmark of dream-consciousness—the impact of dream, its Unheimlich, resides directly in the fear of revelation that dream experience creates and not necessarily in the substance of that revelation. This displaced fear is, perhaps, what Freud meant by suggesting that dream content is not what is central, but, rather, the secondary revision, the telling of the dream to an Other, which, in a real sense, turns the dream into the dream of the Other. Telling the dream effectively re-creates, reifies, and hypostatizes both the dream and the mind that is narrating it as something other than what it is (or was). But the creation of a story leaves out the recognition that it is not the secondary revision itself that is important either—the narrative “product” of analysis—but, rather, the process of telling itself. Dream, like the mind that produces it, is constantly changing and insubstantial. As the mind dreams the dream, it also creates the story (the dream) of “the mind” dreaming it. “[I]f I am in the dream, who is doing the dreaming?,” Blau would sometimes ask. Dream is not, then, secondary to the quotidian mind but is also productive of “normal” consciousness. Dream is the locus of the mind that dreams it and is the producer of the theater

that gestures toward them both. This is all another, perhaps more complicated, way of saying that everyday experience is composed of neurophenomena produced by similar neural Page 87 →mechanisms in the brain that produce dream, and thus, just as all dream is inflected by experience, so all experience is inflected by dream; all we experience is, the Tibetan dream-yoga teachers might say, a species of dream and each dream a species of experience. Moreover, the degree to which the dream is real, or the real simply dreamed, is impossible to know. This uncertainty is the threat of the dream’s Unheimlich that theater approaches. It is what we are terrified of seeing, this unreality of life. It is what spooked dramatists like CalderГіn and Shakespeare and many playwrights who came after—the realization that theater is, in fact, the liminal space within which the sameness of dream-consciousness and “unaltered” everyday mind become indistinguishable. And, especially in theater, there is no effective difference between the Imaginal world of dream and the imagined world of the real,13 and thus there is no de facto difference between dream and life in the present of the theater. And beyond this, that there is no way to tell the difference between the one and the other, even if a difference existed; there is no place in consciousness within which one can stand and say with certainty “this is not a dream,” what Deleuze meant by the “actual” standing in challenge to “the Real,” or theater/dream in relation to life, what Blau might call “that dreamwork within a dream which rejects its interpretation” (Take Up, 146). We might think of this superpositioning of dream/theater and life as the means of gaining a different perspective on consciousness and its manifestations, a perspective that, I think, can help us realize a deeper understanding of human suffering. Suffering, Buddhist thinkers like Loy tell us, is deeply tied to the stories we tell about it—and indeed to storying itself—and the ways in which those stories may help us to recognize the propensity we have to perpetuate our own miseries through our inability to recognize their storyness. And this problem, the problem of life’s inherent but unrecognized storyness, deeply embedded in and unseen by most of us, is fundamental: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction,” writes the poet Wallace Stevens, “which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”14 Or in Blau’s somewhat more tempered theatrical framing, it is “to perform the possibility of a belief, teaching oneself to believe it, if at all, so that whatever one believes it feels enactable” (Take Up, 297).

Tingdzin Bardo/Becoming Aware For Jung, contra Freud, the strata of dream reach far deeper archaeologically than the personal Unconscious. For Jung the Unconscious itself opens out into a vast, shared pool of mind-stuff that he calls the Collective Unconscious. This Page 88 →virtuality contains the memories not only of individuals but of cultures, species, and perhaps sentience itself. This recognition entails the realization that the form that truth takes within this frame is not empirical. According to Hillman, reading Jung, dream does not speak in genetic terms, nor “biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysus’ own art-form, theatrical poetics” (Healing 37). 15 This interpretation is a poetics of transformation, a poetics that locates itself specifically in the in-between, in the as-if,16 in the Becoming-Other. This is a mode of being in which multiplicity of identities is the ground of truth, in which “the self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located,” where “authenticity is in the illusion.” This is the mode of diffusion, contagion, of endless permeabilities, in which “we have all dispersed consciousness through all our body parts,” and beyond this, that consciousness spills over these Imaginal bodies-without-organs into the world, into the natural order, seeing at once that consciousness does not originate in us, but inhabits us, as would Dionysius himself (Hillman, 39). What is of interest to us here are those points of Jungian theory that elide with the permeable membrane of life and sentience that we meet in animist thought. These strata of Jung’s thought lead us toward broader possibilities of human experience beyond the narrow self-interest of Freudian, materialist, and evolutionary theory and into an understanding of sentience as compassion itself. Compassion here means far more than simple empathy or sympathy. It moves beyond the emotion one might feel for the suffering of another, and even beyond the simply ethical response to that suffering. Compassion is more akin to what some call “witnessing,” the ability to stand in silence outside the emotional dyad and simply receive the suffering of the other—to suffer, as

the word’s etymology suggests, alongside, to become one with the Other through his or her suffering, even though that suffering may, at the same time, be inaccessible to us. Awareness of suffering in the other seems a capacity born of the very structures of consciousness, of Becoming-Other. For Blau, the functions of theater are both less than this and more: “a psychic space in the very center of indifference, where action occurs not as if foreordained, recorded, and available for reenactment, but as it were dreamed into being on the margins of its impossibility in a cloud of unknowing” (Take Up, 247), while opening, some Tibetans Buddhists might claim, infinite possibilities within the very site of this impossibility, this psychic space—or sunyata, “emptiness.” Compassion, when it has not been thwarted, may be inscribed deeply within the human psyche, within the human brain itself, in what are called “spindle cells” or von Economo neurons. These neurons are, neurophysiologists surmise, the cells that promote empathy by helping humans experience and recognize Page 89 →the subtle shifts and intonations in the Other that give rise to the “theory of mind”—the awareness that an Other has a mind—and consequently our experience of self-consciousness. The experience of selfconsciousness can in turn foreground our likeness to the Other in the mutual recognition of awareness. These neurons, as a result, play an important part in promoting cooperation and trust. They are, it is said, crucial to social interaction and are found not only in humans but also the great apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants—all animals noted for their propensity to form family groups and develop complex modes of social interaction and communication. But what is most tantalizing, perhaps, is not that these spindle cells might be the locus within which we might find the roots of compassion or empathy, but that they may demand, “from every brain cell even more thought,” as Blau noted, “seeing with the utmost compassion, at the limit of endurance, what we’d mostly rather not” (Reality, 207). Indeed, these cells are the locus within which, Zen-like, the bottom falls from the water bucket holding the moon.17 Spindling and mirroring are not moments of mimetic meaning in and of themselves; they are not simply representations but indicative pointings-to or Becomings-of the Real or Actual, which is always displaced in the Other. Spindle cells are what allow for the recognition within the brain that the real is always as-if, always elsewhere—not locatable in the mirror, or even beyond the mirror, but beyond the Other and the Thou, in the reflection itself. What the thrill of mirroring or spindling reveals is that our kinship with others is grasped quite precisely through alienation, displacement, and the impossibility of self-identification with the Other. We realize our filiation, in other words, through separation, through suffering, through the recognition that, as I said above, we might never know the suffering of the Other as the Other experiences it. In experience, these cells might seem instrumental in developing the kinds of deep empathy productive of spiritual consciousness—an empathy predicated on giving up false hope and its concomitant fears through, in part, the polyvalent embrace of theater and the performative, which can make manifest the very structures of alienation and displacement. These cells in fact might mark the very spindle in the mind around which these perceptions whirl—the spindle of dream, the spindle of mind, the spindle of theatrical mise-en-scГЁne, and mise-en-abyme, of death. Finally, in a kind of epistemological irony, we may come to experience in the very nature of thought the recognition that this Otherness, the Unheimlich, is precisely and only a fabrication of the mind, a story—and that the Other is always and only a character within my own mind. The Other that, in Lacan, gives delineation to ego, to me, is predicated on an illusion—there is no Other Page 90 →and never has been. And, finally and most important, the Other is what I create to sustain my own suffering because my suffering is what convinces me I exist. This, perhaps, is why we dream, why we do theater, why we seem to die.

Milam Bardo/Dreaming Now, reading this, we seem to know that the dream world is false. This is the world that exists. That is the world of illusion, delusion, and hallucination. But in the world of dream, while we are dreaming, that is the real world, while this is the world, awake, we are in as we later tell the story. That is the world we are in when the story happens; this is the world of “secondary revision,” the space/time within which we relate the narrative.18 Moreover, we usually don’t think, within the dream world, about the strangeness of it all, just as we don’t often think this wakening world is fundamentally strange or illusory when we are experiencing it. The

oddness of dream, its Unheimlich, only comes later, when we discover dream experience from the yawing crow’s nest of this, the arguably awakened world of seeming linguistic structure. As Hillman has it, “At night, the dream has me, but in the morning I say, I had a dream,”19 or Blau, writing again of theater as “activity of consciousness in which origins disappear” (Take Up, 147), a space, in other words, in which the ego as generator of dreams dissolves into dream experience itself. In dream-yoga practice, we don’t simply think about these things, though; we plunge into them experientially. Here are instructions from one Tibetan teacher, Tenzin Wangyal, a Bonpo lama who teaches dream yoga. “Upon waking in the morning, think to yourself вЂI am awake in a dream.’ When you enter the kitchen, recognize it as a dream kitchen. Pour dream milk into dream coffee. вЂIt’s all a dream,’ you think to yourself, this is a dream.’”20 Right now, reading these words, look up from the page for a moment. Forget your reasoning and drop into your experience and memory of what dream feels like, and say it: “This is a dream. It is all a dream.” Feel for a moment that you are on the verge of waking up in your bed, after having had the most extraordinary dream about reading about dreams. This, right now, is the dream you are having. It is possible, developing this dream technique throughout the day to later attain awareness in the dream that one is dreaming in the night—to experience what is called a “lucid dream.” Lucid dreams are typically quite vivid and detailed. They often show vibrant colors and a powerful sensation of awareness—greater, even, than our sense of awareness in the waking state. Lucid dreams can be cultivated through dream-yoga and, through cultivation, can be used to investigate the felt experience of both dreamed and seeming quotidian reality. This investigation may lead us to radically question the insular, solid, and Page 91 →material sense of the world we normally inhabit and open up experience to a more permeable, cross-pollinated sensibility. This is the goal of dream-yoga, a goal that also prepares us, as we shall see, for the experience of death. The moment of lucidity, refracted back through quotidian consciousness, reminds me of Blau’s famous dictum, speaking of theater work as “the dissolution of ego and the release of consciousness into structure, becoming an image of ultimate subtraction, the death of self, which—as it materializes—is refused” (Take Up, 163). Thus dream-yoga practice is not, like ordinary lucid dream practice, simply a way to control and navigate dream states, nor merely to entertain the ways in which dream and waking are similar or congruent states. It is, rather, to become increasingly aware, as I have discussed above, that one creates or “stories” the waking world just as one creates one’s experience of dream. In recognizing this fact, one becomes aware that we can reframe our own suffering as simply a self-created mind-state, an illusion from which we can awaken. This is not to say that the world is pure Idea, or that the world does not exist, or that pain is escapable. In Buddhist ontology the world is actual—but we can know nothing about it for certain except that it (or something) exists. Any statement about the nature of the world, reality, or identity is fully conditioned by prior experience, memory, culture, family, beliefs—what Buddhists call karma or in other contexts samsara: the confused stories we construct that cause us suffering. These stories turn the simple experience of pain into a long narrative about its reasons, causes, origins and, as such, often do nothing to alleviate pain, and in fact may continue to keep it in mind and accentuate its effects on us. But just as one becomes lucid in dream, and experiences dreaming while dreaming, or becomes aware in the theater that one is merely watching a play and not life, one may also, the Buddhist teachers tell us, become lucid in life. One might thus realize the depth of our storying and so “awaken,” as it were, from the dream-state of illusion and self-delusion and its concomitant suffering. This awakening, this recognition of the illusory nature of things hitherto unrealized, is congruent in many ways with Freud’s Unheimlich and, along a somewhat different axis, with the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, the recognition, within the illusion of dream and theater, of the illusions of mind and history that appear before us as “truth”—illusions from which we might awaken, an awakening that also helps us realize deeply that the story of awakening itself is just that, a story. Dream-yoga is also different from other lucid-dreaming practices in that lucid dreaming per se is usually concerned with the oddness and exhilaration of the experience of becoming lucid in dream, implicitly supporting the assumption that the quotidian mind (if such a thing could exist) is a baseline state that can be attained in dream. For dream-yoga practitioners, the outcomes are quite Page 92 →different: to realize that the seeming

lucidity of the wakened state is itself a species of dream within which we dream our own unhappiness. To become aware within dream is simply to realize that we are always in some sort of dream-state, some state of delusion, some permutation of theater. In this sense, dream-yoga practice is resonant with the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—the desire to wake up and understand the deeper impulses of culture and mind that drive behavior in order to instigate corrective, and presumably compassionate, action. When we watch a play we very often become aware of the ways in which characters inflict unnecessary suffering on themselves and each other through the abysmal stories they tell. In dream-yoga, the spindling mise-en-abyme, the emptiness or sunyata, is the space of transition between the illusions of dream and the wakeful world and the recognition of these illusions.21 This inarticulate space is, to shift cultural contexts a bit, not unlike the Japanese space of ma, the empty place out of which gods and spirits arise, as the Butoh masters tell us, like dream arising within the brain.22 Here in the Butoh dance, dream, and life meld into synonymy. But this melding is merely the rhetorical configuration of simpler, though far more profound, oscillations of becoming, of tendrel,23 in the words of Tantric thought. Tendrel is central to the practice of dream-yoga and, in its most basic meaning, refers to the fact that all phenomena owe their existence to other phenomena with which they interact—in other words, that all phenomena arise purely relationally through becoming. At its more complex level, tendrel refers to what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing,” the recognition that all things are causally connected at their deepest levels. Although the idea of “dependent coarising” may seem a bit foreign to western sensibilities, we see a similar idea recently adumbrated in the writing of Isabelle Stengers as “mutual capture.” In Stengers, “mutual capture” refers to ways in which perception is never simply an apprehension of one thing by another. Rather, perception is an ongoing, self-modifying process or feedback loop in which the thing perceived changes the perceptual stance of its perceivers (and, indeed, the perceivers themselves), who then see something other than what they saw originally. At the same time, the thing perceived, in being seen, may itself shift its own perceptual stance through a kind of dance of perception, each percept becoming captured by the other. In the theatrical context, this dance speaks clearly, I think, to the subtle and complex interactions between actors and audience and also to the even more deeply subtle interactions among actors in performance, interactions that are often homogenized into the bland term focus. The Buddhist notion of tendrel takes these interactions quite a bit further, however. In tendrel, the oscillations of perceptions, the spindling of mind and Page 93 →its theaters, are continuous and without limit or end. What I perceive gives rise to the image of the perceived within the mind, which changes as I perceive it, and so changing, changes me, the perceiver. This dual oscillation is continuous, as I said, and mercurial: oscillations in perception may happen countless times in a single moment, changing me, changing what I see, changing me again, and on and on. The world is created within the hum of these mental fluctuations, as is my own identity and thus my own conception of “mind.” This is “coarising,” in which the world and the one experiencing it come into being together, continuously changing, continuously transforming each other. This effect, of course, echoes a very different tendrel, the tendrils of the Deleuzean rhizome, in which Becomings, like interbeings, spread like fibrous mats of interconnecting and infinite causalities and conditions. Unlike Stengers’s understanding of mutual capture, though, in this continuous process of coarising, world and identity can never be possessed, can never be stable. It is very like a chaotic system in which the tiniest fluctuation, the slightest ingress of new information, shifts the timbre and frame of oscillation, and so shifts identity and the perceptual world, indeed, the world itself. Moreover, this perceptual oscillation is woven into countless others, in an interconnected web of perceptual arisings and fallings away. Stengers’s capture becomes, in Buddhist thought, a continuous series of interconnected Becomings. Thus the world arises and fades rather precisely like the images in a dream. Like dream, like theater, we create the world in mind as it creates us, and in this circular, spindling whorl, we might wonder if it is possible to wake up at all, to find, once and for all, some mind-state that is stable, some mode of consciousness that is not inflected with the endless, changing complexions of fear and desire. Theater, in its very manifestation, tells us we will not. Artaud tells us we will not. “And the sky can still fall on our heads.

And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.” But while I believe Blau saw the wisdom in Artaud’s vision here, he had a more polyvalent view of theater’s possibilities: the warning clarion of the catastrophic to be sure, but also theater’s function as an opening, or, as I have suggested, as a meditative space, as attention, a breach into an impossible possibility. The situation of engagement with illusion is thus similar in both theater and dream. When we experience a performance, lost in its sights and sounds and more or less oblivious to the context of our experience, we are immersed in the theater of it all; we are, to paraphrase Brecht, being “theatered down.” But when we become aware of the Verfremdungseffekt, we shift contexts and begin to think about what we are seeing as a play—“this is a play, not real life, what does this play really mean, what is it asking me?”—but this is still dreamed within the theater. Page 94 →This awareness of awareness is like dreaming that we are dreaming, like the Freudian analysis, “What is the meaning of this dream that has happened?” Lucidity, in the context of theater, occurs when we begin to think about the phenomenon of theater in a wider context. “Why are these particular people in this room right now? What is this thing called вЂtheater’ and why do we so obsessively engage in it? What, exactly, is happening here? I am in a theater right now. What does that mean? What would happen if I stood up and stopped the performance and asked the people here these questions?” These are all first-order impulses, very much like the impulse in the first lucidity of dreaming, “I am dreaming. I can do anything because this is a dream. I can fly right now.” But in order to really understand lucidity in either case, we must go beyond this initial understanding: “What is it in my mind that makes this particular moment occur to me as dream, or as theater?” It is different from “real life,” from rehearsal, from film, or even from a recollection of the moment of performance. What is the switch in mind that turns a moment into theater, or that switches, in an instant, a dream into a lucid experience? It is not simple Brechtian recognition. Or even recognition of recognition. It is a deeper and, I would argue, more powerful impulse toward seeing the nature of consciousness itself as pure, empty lucidity. And it is the nature of the mind that generates that consciousness as the same—it is not simply recognition, but awareness, not “this is a dream,” but experiencing dream right now. Not “this is a play, ” but experiencing consciousness as theater at this moment. Not, finally, “this is death,” but experiencing my own dying right now—unmediated by language, even discursive thought. Indeed, in the Tibetan yogas of dying and death, we encounter a praxis very similar in its outline to dream-yoga. In each case the reframing of consciousness as a species of theater is key.

Chikhe Bardo/Dying According to the famous Bardo Thodol—The Tibetan Book of the Dead—humans, indeed all sentient beings, move through a unique stage of consciousness between death and rebirth.24 As I said earlier, this stage or gap is called Bardo, but Bardo, as I also suggested, has a broader range of meanings than just the interlude between death and rebirth. It also connotes the unending series of different kinds of intervals that constitute life—the interval of life between birth and death, the interval of dream, the space of meditation, the cycle of breath. In fact, each moment is a minuscule interval, or Bardo, in which one breath ends and another begins, one thought dies and another is born. This fleeting, regenerative gap is at the heart of the unending cycle of change and transformation Page 95 →and is, like tendrel, at the center of much Buddhist thought and intimately tied to the Tibetan Buddhist belief in rebirth and reincarnation. The space of transformation following death, however, the Chikhe Bardo, is particularly notable not only for its existential weight and the terror that this entails but also for the spectacular experiences of vision and insight that are said to arise during it—indeed, an actual theater of death. Initially, we are told, following the dissolution of the body in death, there arises in mind a brilliant blue light brought about by the coalescing of energetic forces descending from the crown chakra—locus of mind—and rising from the heart chakra—locus of compassion.25 The manifestation of this light, which is of the nature of both consciousness and cosmos—empty and clear—is the first opportunity given for liberation: the mind-stream simply gives full attention to this brilliant deep blue light, releases into it, and is absorbed into the energy of cosmic virtuality. If, for some reason, this initial opportunity is lost, a second opportunity arises when the bright white light of primordial clarity and

emptiness appears before the mind-stream and one is again given the opportunity to release all attachments to ego and merge with it. Following this, the opportunities become more and more attenuated, until the mind-stream begins to enter more and more chaotic realms, first of the deities, both peaceful and wrathful, and then finally other, increasingly more confused spaces of mind, as mind begins to dissolve, moving finally to images of delusion, illusion, and various phantasmagorical copulations that attract the wandering, dissolute mind-energy and lead it into the illusions of life again. Depending on the mind-habits and imprints of past actions—both good and bad—one will be led to particular kinds of rebirth and may find oneself in a new human life, animal life, or a number of other possible realms. While many westerners find the initial stages of the Bardo interesting and even amenable to belief—merging with the light is resonant, for example, with documented near-death experiences—the later stages often present greater problems. Moving through realms of deities and wrathful beings and finding passage back to an emergent human life in rebirth stretch credulity for most of us. Indeed, the very process seems exceedingly, even excessively cinematic or, rooted in actual experience, theatrical. The whole notion of Bardo as the interval or stage of rebirth has a deeply theatrical feel, with characters and entities entering spaces of imagination, transforming themselves, and then leaving. So what, at a more profound level, is happening within these narratives? Although the particulars of the yogic Bardo or death practice are embedded in a Tibetan cultural context, these particulars are, I would argue, not what is of central importance to us here. The experience of intense and disorientingPage 96 → light, the arrival of peaceful and wrathful visions of deities, the movement into increasing levels of chaos and fear as the refusal to embrace light/extinction continues—these are of less consequence than the recognition that it is the Blauian theater of mind, that “release of consciousness into structure,” that generates them, these structures, these visions, the roles written and played by a generative, storytelling consciousness that wants, above all else, to frame things as narrative, as theater, but a theater that also erases, once and for all, its own proscenium.26 The outcome of all of this is not simply to present us with a scenario or miseen-scГЁne that in any way represents or reflects a literal or actual experience of death but rather one suggesting that the actual experience of death is an experience that is “not anything” at all, as Guildenstern says in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, “the absence of presenceВ .В .В . a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound” (124). 27 Indeed, Stoppard’s play, like Hamlet itself, is a long teaching that points us to the Unheimlich of death and the Bardo: a death that, like theater, is not about its own content (it has none) but about the very nature of the way mind manifests itself and its reality. Evan Thompson, writing on the Bardo experience, wrestles throughout his work with the nature of those narratives about death. Is what the Tibetan lamas say about the passage beyond death to be taken as literal truth? Are they “just” stories (bearing in mind, of course, everything we have been saying about stories) or is there some fundamental truth being pointed to within the fabric of those stories? He arrives at this conclusion. It would be a mistakeВ .В .В . to think that the Tibetan Buddhist account of death must be either literally true or false. Instead, we can see it as a script for enacting certain states of consciousness as one dies. In this way, it is more performative and prescriptive than descriptive.В .В .В . That doesn’t so much present a phenomenological description of death as rehearse and enact a phenomenology of death as ritual performance. (291) 28 This “ritual performance” is theater first, of course. But more important, to return to what we acknowledged at the outset, what, exactly, are we rehearsing if the fact of death is so ungraspable? But that is the precise point of this play of emptiness, a Becoming-of, what Blau called, “the bloody show,” glossing, near the time it was written, both the death of his mother and birth of his daughter. This unknowingness with regard to death is fundamental to the Tibetan text. The words to the newly dead in the Bardo Thodol begin “That which is called death has now arrived” (36, emphasis mine). 29 The implication is that “that which is called death” is qualitatively different from what you are experiencing in the moment

it is happening, what “has now arrived,” that all that has Page 97 →been said, written, and explained about death is not death, is not what you are experiencing. That is the recognition. That is death’s Unheimlich—that death does not exist but also does, ineluctably, undeniably, but only as pure absence and disappearance. This description of death, coming from the ancient texts and practices, is also perhaps the best description of Blau’s theater: “God in exile from God, then the self fallen away from the self, reserving a void for the idea of strangeness, and the thing which embodies it” (Take Up, 133). But what might this description of death, of theater, mean exactly? We cannot rehearse what does not exist, and death does not exist. And yet theater so often brings us relentlessly and obsessively and repetitively to this stated conclusion. Why? Why state over and over again what we claim—in the very statement itself—cannot be said? The repetition compulsion is at play, I suppose, but something more powerful than this: in the rehearsal for death we are in fact preparing, conditioning the mind to generate the theater necessary to bring us to death with equanimity, ecstasy, even joy. But is the conditioning—the rehearsal—a rehearsal of the false? Is the Bardo practice—or the theater rehearsing a death it can never present—simply a lie? Or is it the perfect confluence of Imaginal and obdurate fact—the brutal actuality of death in an embrace with the ephemeral disappearances of theater, dissolving in union, deity and consort, mind recognizing it all as illusion (including the recognizing mind), the hallucinations of death but knowing in that moment that that is the final radiance, it has all been real, real play, actual dance, factual illusion—nothing more (nothing less). And in the nothing more, ma, the space of angels and demons, the resonant emptiness of sound, and, if we have learned through practice to pay attention, the awareness of dissolution itself—all the images fading, the lights dimming, sound dissipating and melding with that same Nothingness, the Nothingness of pure potential, and finally, letting go. The instruction of both theater and Bardo practice is just this: pay attention. Learn to pay attention, or as Blau would say, “take time.” Learn to see how the mind creates it all, illusion, including the Grand Illusion, death. We should recognize that not only is the Bardo a kind of theater but that theater—in its myriad transformational states of suspended becomings—is the Bardo. Am I suggesting that Herbert Blau entertained these ideas of death, dream, and theater when he lived? Likely not. Blau was fiercely secular, although he allowed wide acceptance to a range of different sorts of believers. What I am suggesting is this: that even though Blau’s thought is not even remotely “spiritual,” it allows for an extraordinarily wide and rich inquiry.30 Although Blau seldom tried to redirect his readers away from beliefs or systems of thought he did not share, his own disposition was never inclined to what we might call “the mystical.” And yet his thought allows for it, and allows for an extraordinarily Page 98 →wide range of approaches and interventions into the nature of consciousness as manifested within the particular mode of performance called theater. I suspect, in the final analysis, that if such analysis were possible in the shadow of such a no-thing as death, that Blau’s own thought might have run closer to Guildenstern’s late in Stoppard’s play. [Y]ou can’t act death.В .В .В . It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all—now you see him, now you don’t, that’s the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back—an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.В .В .В . But no one gets up after death—there is no applause—there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that’s—death. 31 Yet even here, in this relentless darkness, we can’t seem to top talking about it. Talking, thinking, turning to the dull lights of the Bardo enticing us from the simple, brilliant emptiness of nothing more to say. As Blau would say to his actors, inducing the meditative mind behind all of his work: You are living in your breathing. Stop. Think. You are dying in your breathing. Stop. Think. You are living in your breathing. You are dying in your breathing. You are living in your dying, dying in your living. (Take time, breathing.) Stop. Show. The doing without the showing is merely experience. The showing is critical, what makes it theater. What makes it show (by nothing but breathing) is the

radiance of inner conviction. (Take Up, 86)

As instruction, as admonition, I hear Blau instructing his actors in the living of life, in living life through theater, in realizing theater through the endless rehearsals of dying. Preparing for death is, it has been said, the best way to learn to live fully. As I lie awake these nights, I imagine that radiance. Perhaps in sleep I will dream it.

References Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Blackwood, Michael. Director. Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Michael Blackwood, 2006. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Page 99 →Blau, Herbert. The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Blau, Herbert. Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1992. Corbin, Henri. “Towards a Chart of the Imaginal.” In Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran (5th ed.). Translated by Nancy Pearson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Dzogchen, Ponlop. Mind beyond Death. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2006. Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Erickson, Jon. The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Hillman, James. Healing Fiction. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1998. Kubiak, Anthony. “Impossible Seductions: The Work of Herbert Blau.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol. XIX, No. 1 (Fall 2004). Loy, David R. The World Is Made of Stories. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2010. Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove, 1967. Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated with commentary by Francesca Freemantle and Chogyam Trungpa. Boston: Shambala, 1975.

Trungpa, Chogyam and Francesca Freemantle. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing In The Bardo. Boulder: Shamabala Press, 2000. Wangyal, Tenzin, Rinpoche. The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Press, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Accessed August 31, 2015. http://www.tractatuslogicophilosophicus.com/#expanded

Notes 1. Anthony Kubiak, “Impossible Seductions: The Work of Herbert Blau,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol. XIX, No. 1(Fall 2004): 101–14. 2. In the present work, I am again focusing on Blau’s “first book,” Take Up the Bodies (actually his second, after Impossible, written in 1964) because it is written closer to his engagement with his own theater work and so, perhaps, written closer to dream. Take Up the Bodies has for me always been the book closest, I believe, to Blau’s real concerns, and so I am returning to it once again, especially now, in reflection on his passing. 3. Epicurus, accessed August 17, 2015, http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html Page 100 →4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/#expanded 5. See Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 6. Blau, Take Up, 133. 7. James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1998), 37. 8. I am thinking, for example, of Allan Hobson’s well-known comment that dreams are nothing more than the “brainstem’s bumblings.” 9. We should note that the “meaninglessness of dream story” is itself a story. 10. Indeed, this exclusive emphasis on material analysis has larger implications. It occludes, for example, the ways in which materiality is itself a dream and renders materiality’s avatar Kapital a primary hallucination born of insomniac hypercriticality—what Stengers and Pignarre call “capitalist sorcery.” I will be suggesting here that dream consciousness, in its return through neuroscience, the multithreaded venues of new media, the Rave and electronica scene, and the other technologies of consciousness (which I will not in each case address here), and specifically Tibetan dream and Bardo (death)-yoga (which I will), should be repositioned within the context of this new understanding: dream no longer represents simply an “alternate” or “Unheimlich” space of sleeping consciousness, nor a specialized repository of unconscious elements or even archaic auguries (although all these may be partially the case ) but a more pertinent realization that consciousness itself is elastic, polyvalent, continuously shifting and inherently fluid, like the plastic brain that gives it birth. As such, dream-state does not so much represent the contents of an unconscious, nor an “alternate” state of consciousness, as it does a space within which the alien and its alien-nation can be better understood as a fundamental aspect of mind and awareness. This recognition—that there is no place in thought that one can stand that is not ghosted by the strangeness and hallucinatory truth of dream/theater—stands in opposition to Freud’s implicit assumption that there exists a “rational” mind that stands superior to dream-mind and is capable of analyzing and thus containing and “taming” it. 11. See, for example, Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author”; or Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” 12. David R. Loy, The World is Made of Stories (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2010), 35. 13. I am following Henri Corbin’s notion of the Imaginal (with caps) to denote a cognition that is a “purely spiritual faculty independent of the physical organism and thus surviving it.” Obviously, this is not a Freudian notion. Henri Corbin, “Towards a Chart of the Imaginal,” in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran (5th ed.). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), X. 14. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose (New York: Vintage, 1966), 187.

15. James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1998), 37. 16. This, of course, is the title of Blau’s unfinished autobiography, but is also the title of an important work of philosophy written by Hans Vaihinger in 1925, Philosophie des Als Ob or in English The Philosophy of “As If”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated into English most recently by David G. Payne (NP: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), and lastly the title of an essay I wrote in 2001 entitled “As-If: Blocking the Cartesian Stage,” in Psychoanalysis and Performance, edited by Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge 2001), 34–46. All references are intended. Page 101 →17. I am reminded here of Blau’s late theater meditation “The Cell,” discussed in Take Up the Bodies. 18. The relationship between primary process and secondary revision in Freud has corollaries in other dream theory—John Allan Hobson’s activation-synthesis hypothesis, for example, or Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison’s reverse learning theory. Both posit a kind of superpositioning of narrative structure onto a chaotic substrata of dream content that Freud postulated in his theory of primary process. In each case, there is a clear privileging of grammatical structure over primary content as the avenue to meaning in both dream and larger experience. The implications of this linguistic privileging are beyond the scope of the present study, but they are obviously quite significant. 19. James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 98. 20. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Press, 1998), 90–91. 21. Interestingly, spindling also refers to the peculiar brain signal given off when one begins to enter the dream-state in sleep. 22. While we should also realize that the idea of mind itself might exist simply as another dream. Akaji Moro talks of Ma as “the space between. An interval. Spatial or temporal.В .В .В . It is here,” he says, “where spirits and gods dwell. In this space in between.” Quoted from the film Butoh Body on the Edge of Crisis, dir. Michael Blackwood, 2006. 23. In Tibetan this is a shortened form of ten-ching drelwar jungwa or “dependent coarising,” variously translated as “dependent arising, dependent coorigination, interdependence, relativity, auspicious coincidence.” 24. More accurately it is “the interval of the liberation through hearing.” Although there are a few different translations generally available, I have chosen to use The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated with commentary by Francesca Freemantle and Chogyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambala, 1975). 25. Chakra is a Sanskrit term meaning “wheel” (also khorlo, or “wheel,” in Tibetan) that designates one of a series of energetic loci in the body associated with organs and/or the endocrine system but not identical to them. Chakras are energetic, not physical, and are part of what is sometimes referred to as the “subtle body.” Chakras are accessed using breathing and visualization techniques, as well as through specific yogic practices. 26. This of course is Jon Erickson’s brilliant meditation in his book The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 27. Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 2017), 124. 28. Even Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 291. 29. Chogyam Trungpa and Francesca Freemantle, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing In The Bardo (Boulder: Shamabala Press, 2000), 36. 30. Although, as I suggested at the outset, in all of his work, but especially in Take Up the Bodies, Blau, for all of his dismissal of things spiritual, spends a good deal of time discussing Rilke, Tai Chi, Buddhism, Kaballah, and even God. 31. Stoppard, 123.

Rehearsing the Promised End Page 102 →Daniel Listoe Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee. —William Shakespeare, King Lear It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both, A seeing and unseeing in the eye. —Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” [I]f he chances to take a historical subject, he is none the less a poet. —Aristotle, Poetics History saturates the thought of Herbert Blau. History is in the fine-grained production notes he crafted for the Actor’s Workshop plays of the 1950s–60s and then, later, at Lincoln Center in New York. History serves as a means of orientation through a nearly half century of critical writings, beyond even Blau’s autobiographical As If and his reflections in Programming Theater History. It became a constant within his work precisely because it was necessary for thinking theater. The attempt to identify and describe the ever-elusive nucleus of what is actually happening, or perceived to be happening, on a stage—or, where they are separate, in performance—required that he keep history at hand. It is tempting to posit history as the reality principle against which the illusions of theater appear, or out of which theater emerges. We would then call history the whetstone of Blau’s persistent questioning of theater’s essence. A thinking that moves over and against some crucial resistance in swift, rigorous passings certainly captures the spirit of Blau’s thought. But that metaphor of a whetstone suggests something solid, steady, unyielding. In Blau, however, there is never a singular and stable sense of the past. For as he conceives it, that which Page 103 →history names is necessarily multiform and variable, vast in scope and scale, and to the degree that it is the name for the real, that reality has departed and left us only with troubled thought. In this way, his perspective is not that much different than the operating assumptions of historians like Fernand Braudel—he of the expansive temporal vistas of the Annales school—or Carlo Ginzburg, associated with much more discrete explorations. Ask Braudel “What is history?” and he will tell you it is a “fleeting spectacle” (On History, 10) that in its wake leaves gossamers of entangled traces. Pose the question to Ginzburg and he will say that history is the product of the historian, who as careful curator of those faint traces and scattered clues, must be the author of rhetorical proofs (History, 50). Both would argue for their own version of the historian’s interpretive method and through each the determination of what we know about the past. Blau was obviously not a historian bound by disciplinary limits. Nor was he prone to insisting on rhetoric’s weakening effect on facts. In response to the supposedly demystifying assertion that history is never available outside a discourse, Blau asks, incredulous, “to what degree is that a revelation?” For “even the most recidivist empiricist would acknowledge that as the past is experienced, thought through, felt, then re-examined, not even cliometrics or microhistory can keep out subjectivity, or the encroachment of language on how history is conceived” (“Thinking History,” 257). The problem that history poses and the opportunity it affords are, for Blau, of the same faulted conception. Blau’s inaugural address at the conference “Performance and History: What History?” emphasized the

question of history so as to unseat a habit, within performance and theater studies, of turning to the “historical” as if that alone would settle more complex matters. The scholarly use of history as a tool to tamp down other questions had become, in Blau’s view, limited and predictable and that if the worst of these gestures were hubristic with ideological conceit, most uses of history for the sake of critical “incursion” (Reality, 239) had simply lost much of their supposed force. Such assaults on the art object might be at times suitably disruptive and sometimes necessary, but they eclipsed opportunities to understand better the respective aesthetics of theater and history, as well as their aesthetic and intellectual relation—their shared dynamic of disappearance and bloody, bodily remnant. Blau’s suggestion for those he gathered at that conference was to think through the confounding idea of history. And to think history they would need to go beyond the selected and mobilized theories currently on the disciplinary scene. They would need to find, through more creative, relentless inquiries, the proper place of the aesthetic in history and theater both. There is, for Blau, no other way to think about theater than to think it with history in mind. He thus closed his remarks to the assembled participants with the imploring command Page 104 →to conjure the idea of history within the real of theatrical time: “Think now. Think now” (Reality, 242). In whatever ways one might conceive of history, history poses the same vexing problem: how to engage, within thought, the proliferating possibilities born of absence and imagined presence. The critical approach of a Ginzburg, a Braudel, any historian working at that disciplinary task, is forged within the struggle to imagine, to know, to prove what was. Blau, who is always thinking about theater, and therefore attempting to critically imagine it, to know it, to persuade us about what is on the stage, shows that we should recognize history more through our process of apprehension rather than strictly through the interpretive product. As the internal command “Think now. Think now” recurs, history is there only in the space of interpretation; to be imagined and rehearsed. However, even when it is present in that space of imagination, there is always the risk that one will become overwhelmed by history’s “brutal burden” (Reality, 241). In other words, we cannot be sure we will have the fortitude to ever take its honest measure. But there is a responsibility, Blau insists, to reckon with that burden. It may be impossible. If so, there is all the more need for a requisite “moral rigor, demanding from every brain cell even more thought, acceding to the indisputable when it’s there, though it’s not very likely to be, and seeing with the utmost compassion, at the limit of endurance, what we’d most rather not” (206–7). Theater instructs him here. One of Blau’s talismanic moments of drama comes with the opening of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: the Watchman emerges, exhausted, waiting on signals in the sky indicating that the war in Troy has ended. As for the history of Argos during Agamemnon’s long absence, what can be told? The Watchman says he can tell only those who already understand; for those who fail, “I have already forgotten” (38). Blau emphasizes the combination of a necessary forgetting and the fragility of the signs. Indeed, as the tragedy unfolds, Clytemnestra’s justice is dispensed in an economy of prophecy, dream, wish, fear, fretful imaginings, and entrenched doubt. When the Chorus asks Clytemnestra for evidence that Agamemnon is truly returning, she describes the relay of lights along a courier chain: signifying arcs leaping one after another across the immense distance until the last one is registered by the Watchman’s weary eye. This, she calls “such proof and such symbol” (315). The Chorus can only question, “If this be real / who knows?” (477–78). Blau stresses that even prophetic Cassandra’s clearest articulations are ever uncertain. In what sounds like something from the opening vigil of Hamlet, she screams, “No, no, see there! What is that thing that shows? ” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1114). The command that others see gives way to her own question of what appears to her. “The cry of Cassandra,” Blau writes, “is the curse Page 105 →of interpretation.” Thus to the question “What is history?” Blau—still thinking theater and finding the absent past and troubled illusions at its heart—replies that history is “these shifting indeterminacies of language playing through the interpretations and laminated further by other disappearing voices in the dream of time” (Blooded, 32). Blau’s sense of shifting indeterminacies tells us why his use of the word history changes again and again the substance of the term. What shapes each appearance of history is some chain of signification; proof and symbol

both. And when reading Blau we, too, end up on the alert for the shifting indeterminacies that play through his interpretations, which are multiple and multiplying. Like the Chorus in Agamemnon, we chase after what Blau sees when he delves into “the extremist density of history,” which is less bedrock than “quicksilver to the mind” (Take Up, 179). One can get lost in the profusion of possible exegeses and emotions, all subject to reexamination. Accounting for that profusion, however, is part of the required process of understanding theater and history both. “Certainly it’s confusing,” Blau writes, “why shouldn’t it be? It’s also what moves us” (“Theatre,” 12). Working through the immense collection of Blau’s criticism, the references to theater’s history are often clear enough. He highlights the technical and ideological evolutions of staging a play or performance, whether it was the advent of the proscenium or curtain, or, as he instituted in his own productions, electronic music as score. He addresses the ways different dramatic modes, like realism or the absurd, in different times ascend as theatrical standards. However, from such considerations Blau can take the importance of a single element, like costumes, as the basis for an exhaustive inquiry into the moving folds of fashion more generally, finding tucked in its wrinkles of appearance something far more than our anticipation of commodity fetishism (Nothing in Itself, 1999). Such a view of fashion and its theatricality might be fittingly discrete, but the look of history can be expanded too, and to degrees far exceeding Braudel’s Mediterranean or even Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system. Defined by time, history can be read through the heavens, as with the Watchman’s stare into the “grand processionals of all the stars” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 4). Whether Blau is appraising the supple aesthetic movements of textiles or the seemingly ungraspable universe measured in light years, there is in his work an attempt to take in all we can imaginatively grasp. For how we view the heavens and our place within that vast entity’s entropy, not to mention imagine its promised end, is indeed related to how we think when our considerations are, in scale and significance, much more earthbound. Whatever it is we don’t know about Deep History, let alone Big History, we can be certain that the crude material Page 106 →of existence is not merely “a matter of discourse.” Yet for all the evidence of reality before our very eyes, we might not be certain of what it is we see. Blau writes, “[W]hen, radically widening the episteme, we try to imagine human historyВ .В .В . in astronomical terms, in that infinitely expanding universe that, as Einstein saw it, is in the curvature of the cosmos turning back on itself,” we understandably come back down to Earth, crashing into a “retroflexive pattern of reality and appearance” (“Thinking History,” 255). No matter, then, if the object is the seemingly static and frozen flares of gas and light measured in billions of years or the ways a disciplined cutting and construction of cloth can create, in its movement, “the parabola of a gown or the declension of a cloak” (Nothing, 116). In principle, the reality to be apprehended can only be found in the mind’s replaying (of what it thinks the eye might have seen). Whichever the space and time, what will matter most, Blau tells us, begins with how we think about how we see. Between the historical poles of clothing and the cosmos, his invocations of history include references that sometimes seem very much the stuff of a grand procession. The historic events fall into place like dominoes of cause and effect. The references to these events are often fresh from the press, signs of the New York Times that Blau’s father (who was ritually devoted to the Daily News) taught him to seek out each morning (As If, 2). Elsewhere, Blau is attendant to the more precessional impact of the epiphenomenon, almost imperceptible but nonetheless shaping our sense of the inhabited world. “In life, in theater, in theory,” he writes, listing the realms so as to stress their overlap, “we forget how thoroughly improvisation is coded.” The overlap of life and its representation through play, then, is the thing to remember as one tries to think about life or theater in theory. Blau’s work indeed prompts us to remember that our seemingly new critical gestures or creative ways of knowing are haunted. Such is the power of what has come before, or what he calls our inherited “agglomerate of old reflexes” (Blooded, 74). When Blau’s mood is metaphysical, he tends to ground the abstraction of history with concrete metaphors. History becomes an archive or a vast and singular book with pages to be filled or, with Freud in mind, a waxy tablet of inscription from which we try to account for the internal energies of the inaccessible but potent unconscious: a site, Blau writes, of such valuable “knowledge, inseparable as it is from the earliest signs of

history, which seem indelibly there, like the scars of child abuse” (Audience, 125). In that sense, history signs its presence in wounds and symptoms. But it also operates like a conspiratorial agent, troubling the etiological traces as if to screen us off from the very knowledge we think we crave. When “the conditional has been pushed toward the actual by current events,” one is left vulnerable with doubt because all one Page 107 →can know for certain, Blau asserts, is that “History collaborates with illusion” (“Theatre,” 12). At other moments, sounding more like Herder than Hegel, Blau asks us to imagine the confluences that define the spirit of an age. Where the temptation is dialectical, he insists we keep in mind that the lineages of history are imperfect and the excesses ripe. We are, otherwise, likely to hold tight to an all too singular vision of the past. When and if we turn back the pages of history, we usually stop at the place that confirms where we are or where we’d like to be, what we have to prove. Not only will history prove the opposite if we look further, but it’s perfectly logical that it should.В .В .В . It contains all the possibilities that have been imagined, usually in impure states with the contradictions side by side. We are always looking for the nuclear event, the remotest particle of memory, that happening, a dromenon, whether to root a doctrine or to authenticate the Plot. (11) When Blau’s own perspective seems to collapse the contradictions, it is likely in order to produce a view akin to the one that afflicted Walter Benjamin’s angel of history who, blown backward into the future, could only face the past and watch with mouth agape the single, swelling catastrophe. For Blau, to share the angel’s Saturnine stare—with eyes fixed on what has been wrought by history, the mind seemingly imagining still worse than even that—means absorbing the image of horror while being unable to confound, whatever one’s desperate desire to do so, civilization’s barbaric “progress” (Benjamin, “Theses,” 257–58). In contrast, Blau will also present history less as a storm than a faint and raspy echo that comes as inscrutable message, like those uncertain signs above Argos. Sometimes we hear history’s murmur as if it were an inner voice, or the scratching claws of the mind’s scuttling movement. And, for all that, he will nonetheless invoke some spatial construct far greater than such interior passages: a vast, silent volume to be sounded. If we somehow managed to hear the truth of history, would it not enounce like the babble of Melville’s Pip? Pip, recall, was “carried down alive to the wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes.” There “the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad” (Moby-Dick, 414, emphasis added). Indeed, for Blau we should always be forced to account for the warp of our desiring perceptions. And as for the rational evidence that Page 108 →comes from that which is spoke, so much of the language, he insists, is faltering, failing to capture the depths of the real and the reality of the depths. Waves of competing representations batter away at certainty. If this be real, who knows? Writing of the period marked by Vietnam’s carnage, Nixon and Watergate, and the Church Committee’s exposure of domestic spying and foreign assassinations by the CIA, Blau touches the wound of betrayed public trust with two quick lines: “Credibility wobbles in the illusions of power. We are at a loss for words” (Take Up, 6). Perhaps all these dimensions of history alive in Blau’s work suggest why he liked very much—calling on it repeatedly—another of Benjamin’s vivid images: the “disconsolate” history of German tragic drama, described as seeds scattered on the ground (Take Up, 92). For that idea of seeds signifies something ruptured, fragmented, and yet, as inseminating remnant, “a remembrance of things to come” (138). But if the shape of that future is dependent on the forms of remembrance, the scale of the scattered past—with so much lost and out of mind’s reach—means that the multitudinous kernels of potential both invite and betray our attempts at their cultivation. If we must tend to a history that we cannot wholly know, we are back to the fact that our ways of perceiving make the matter, at least when the question is how we think historically. And our way of looking will have its history, too, since we have learned to look (or not) through the course of millennia or under the duress of a decade’s defining politics. As for the influence of the particular political and cultural dynamics at a point in history, Blau demonstrates how

his own theater work was shaped by them. Take, for instance, his commentary on the Actor’s Workshop’s 1960 presentation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Blau writes that when Pinter directed his own work, the cast was likely to be as confused as the audience about the playwright’s intentions. The bewilderment was telling, however. For Pinter was an exemplar of a patterned response to his age, crafting a “dramatic strategy” of antidrama, wherein “run-down heroes behaving like atomic particles” emerged “upon the modern theater with all the muted energy of an underground explosion” (Programming, 148, emphasis added). In the postwar age, bewilderment becomes a given when explanations falter and all the facts and statistics “add up with precision to more doubt.” When “Terror walks in smiling, or creeps in through the cracks,” Blau writes, it can make the ordinary absurdly funny but all the more alarming. Blau says that such “alarm in the presence of certainty is not so much avant-garde as elemental—it is a way of seeing the same old unpredictable world anew; and it is based on a feeling, documented by history, that a good part of life is puzzling to the point of hallucination” (149). As Blau appraised the American scene for what became The Impossible TheaterPage 109 → (1964), he continued to borrow the governing rhetoric of the Cold War. With a flight-pattern weave of nuclear-armed warships overhead, and with Hiroshima as mere hint of the possible, a world with atomic dust had, Blau asserted, changed the economy of history by making it consubstantial with “the biological cycle” (As If, 27). Psychically, as Beckett’s Hamm in Endgame might also declare, there was no cure for that. And so in a time when language seemed tired or inadequate, Blau worked to always account for the period’s “tone” or its “rhythm of mind” (Impossible, 135). He tried to name more and more of that which dispersed the existential dread, spread uncertainty, bred skepticism, fostered mistrust, fed a rightful paranoia, and made the times primed, for those willing to face it: the all too absurd, all too real, and all too terrifying. In other words, if much was documented, much more was felt. Whether it was the Balance of Terror, The Age of Illusion, the Big Lie, or Nuclear Fallout, the result was, for Blau, the Lonely Crowd and the Silent Generation. It was this sensitivity that pushed Blau to argue for the primacy of Beckett in 1957. The absurdist aesthetic of Beckett was absolutely foreign to the American experience of theater up to that time. But Blau saw that in the ominous atmosphere of possible annihilation, with existentialism established on the ground and San Francisco and Berkeley beginning to percolate what would become the movements for peace, civil rights, and free speech (much of the political thrust of the 1960s), Waiting for Godot was the most pertinent political play of the day (Programming, 68). In the substance of Endgame, however, Blau found the historical vision even more comprehensive, essential, and therefore challenging. As if indeed weighing it in terms of a nuclear blast, his program note for Endgame emphasized its essential “magnitude.” Blau tracked the reverberations radiating from the play’s “remorseless memory” and—even if the “it” is evocatively inexact in terms of its time and place—the conjured feelings of “Buchenwald and Lidice and Hiroshima” (Sails, 24). He saw these as passing straight through the nervature of those who would dare to engage it with requisite care. Several years after the production, he described it this way: [W]hatever one thinks, Endgame puts it to the test. The title taken from chess—the crucial, deadly terminus of the game—one has the sense of looking back through thousands of years of cultural history at almost every instant. One feelsВ .В .В . the dark encroachment of old catastrophe. History dank and stagnantВ .В .В . the characters forget nothing. (Impossible, 241) The audience for Endgame was told that they would need an “eternal patience, fevered and fierce” (Sails, 25). History dank and stagnant certainly suggests endurance in a torture chamber. How many could stand up to such an assault? Page 110 →An obvious way to endure such a sense of history was to keep one’s eyes on the text with a scrupulous safeguarding. Such was the case with Maynard Mack, who in 1964 delivered three lectures in Berkeley called “King Lear in Our Time.” In those lectures Mack sought to defend Shakespeare’s play from that which time might impose, or that which might be imposed by directors like Peter Brook and Blau, whose

respective productions he highlighted as examples of indulgent “directorial subjectivity” (King Lear, 33). Mack argued that the director who emphasizes a subtext, or plays up an interpretative frame, inappropriately competes with, if not destroys outright, the words of the classic. While the details of Blau’s supposed transgression can wait, for now it can be said that in Mack’s eyes Blau effectively drowned Shakespeare and swallowed him whole (as if a predatory KRAKEN had emerged from the depths). As Blau saw it, Mack’s resistance to exploration and revision was sustained by a particularly generic view of history, a view captured in Mack’s reference to “a human history we all share” (King Lear, 70). Such an outlook would not compel Mack to acknowledge that just outside the hall in which he lectured the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were loudly demanding something more than mere revision of a classic. Blau saw such protest and the ferment of resistance as history on the move and, therefore, as something that must be accounted for. The students’ articulations, demands, and demonstrations—if at times inchoate—meant that the humanities and the ideas of tradition needed a rightful interrogation. In 1969, therefore, Blau writes, “All outrage admitted, what the students have done beyond reproach is to make us question the wholeness and accuracy of our teaching and to measure our precious values not dispassionately against one another but in reallife situations, urgently, against ourselves” (As If, 26–27). If Mack was passionate, it was nonetheless wholly in the name of sustaining the values of the classic. A much more refined sense of history was one that would try to analyze what Blau called the “unruly symbiosis between the social and the poetic” (Dubious, 281–82). And indeed new historicism, also emanating from Berkeley, emerged as a corrective to traditional humanist work like Mack’s. Focusing with great purpose on the cultural matrix within which any text operates or any individual performs his or her self-fashioning, new historicism meant to sharpen our appreciation for the discursive construction of power (and thus history). The result left the “classic” and the tragic form as mere artifacts of that power (and thus mystifications of history). A new historicist response to a character like Shylock might well seek to expose the structural contradictions of an age. Blau takes issue with this seemingly comprehensive critical view because it Page 111 →cannot help but truncate the analysis. There is more to Shylock, Blau reasons, than that which is “historically constructed, encoded, or textualized.” The corporeal facts of the body are a counterweight to that textualization. The fact of the body is perhaps more obvious when there is an actor inhabiting the stage, but should be no less true when the theater is in the illimitable mind of an attentive reading. Blau thus asserts that when we tend more carefully to the bodily dimensions of Shylock—stressing his most famous line, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—we may in fact be “a little closer to history” (Appearances, 118), which, precisely because it is more than just one more code among others, earned all too well its reputation as the thing that “hurts” (Jameson, Political, 102). According to Blau, “While there is a quite understandable historical expediency in modalities of performance that deny it, forget it, or deflect attention from it, the deepest conceivable performance still occurs in the order of that body, the essential body, over the unnerving prospect of an ontological fault” (Appearances, 118, emphasis added). As suggested by the examples of Mack and new historicism—and the introductory remarks of “Performance and History: What History?”—the targets running through Blau’s critique of literary theory were those constricted visions of history that perhaps stopped short of what was truly and rightfully unnerving. Mack’s inability to reckon with the cultural changes beyond the fortress of his scholarship and new historicism’s strict focus beyond the textual contradictions of literary language both miss the pervasive and elusive qualities of history. While Mack saw within Shakespeare an eternal world of shared human history, new historicist critics were trying to parse the cultural particulars of power outside any inherent contradictions of the text. “If paradox and ambiguity are out,” Blau writes, something has to happen to the fluidities and contradictions. And what seems to have happened in the wake of Foucault is that they have become a matrix of revelations about the insidious workings of power or—in the cryptic cellarage of negotiation and exchange, where nothing is

transparent—elliptical signs of subversion; in either case, predictably folded into the service of the ideological commitment, and when they don’t fit excluded. (Dubious, 285)

Blau, recalling the more radical implications of a rejected New Criticism that was never so simple (as his own dissertation work under the withering eye of Yvor Winters proved), remained ever attentive to those exclusions, which only seemed to expand as literary theory stretched the repertoires of possible response. Page 112 →Blau’s own decided turn to criticism in the late 1970s indeed overlapped the rise of French theory, which emerged on the American scene in the wake of the 1960s. With his life split between Paris and Milwaukee—where the Center for Twentieth Century Studies became one of the hubs of the French theoretical integration—Blau was at the forefront of the convergence. Consistently engaging those expansions and shifts in aesthetic and intellectual orientation, his work engaged while resisting the rise of dominant doxa: forms of critique that attempted to trade ideology for truth, myth for history, and blindness for insight, or even to suggest that when reading, only by means of a “peculiar” and particular blindness can insight be achieved (De Man, Rhetoric, 106). As for the latter, and what Blau called the “generic futility of poststructuralist thought” (Audience, 285), he sensed a tantalizing half-measure. As we deconstruct the stage or change environments or play in the round, the sightlines are probably ineradicable because indelibly in the mind. Perspective is troubling. We thought we could expose the ideological recessions, the hidden motives of time, by developing techniques.В .В .В . We’d back off to see better or simply take things apart, to see how they really work. But when we looked another time, every exposure was a secretion. The form is ghosted, as we are, by the mental habits of the form, which encrust our habits of perception. (74) Such ghosted forms are an expression of history. Our habits of perception—which, however they try, cannot “stay” the illusion, as Hamlet lamented (1.1.130)—is the very thing that Blau is thinking as he thinks history. And in the limature of his readings, Blau shows how unnerving the task of thinking history can be. While a full accounting of Blau’s relation to even a few select critics would be an essay in its own right, two instances of how he responded to and built off others stand out as particularly significant for understanding his thought. In both cases we can say that Blau finds the most value—within the various theories that advanced from the 1960s onward—in moments where the thought all but breaks down and falters when trying to account for history. The first example is Blau’s response to Louis Althusser’s 1962 essay “The вЂPiccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” There Althusser explores how an audience—itself trapped by ideology—might critically identify that ideology when it is presented to them through the drama on the stage. If the audience and the characters are both in a position from which they feel no sense of history as change, imagine no forward progress for their lives, and instead dwell in Page 113 →an immiserated state of the “timeless,” will the audience see the conditions that create such a state? Or will they be caught in the mirror of ideological identification? Althusser argues that the audience, inhabiting together the space of the performance, will see the action on the stage and inevitably feel cursed by “the same prostration before a time unmoved by any History.В .В .В . The same horrible blindness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths.” Amassed, he says, “we skirt the same abysses: our unconsciousness” (150). Althusser attempts to plot out how a knowing, critical dramaturg like Brecht anticipates this entrapment of ideological self-recognition and creates the dramatic conditions for its disruption. The drama (and audience) will have to do something to that ensnaring mirror of identification. Althusser asks: Will it exhaust itself in the dialectic of consciousness of self, deepening its myths without ever escaping from them? Will it put this infinite mirror at the center of the action? Or will it rather displace it, put it to one side, find it and lose it, leave it, return to it, expose it from afar to forces which are external—and so drawn out—that like those wine-glasses broken at a distance by a

physical resonance, it comes to a sudden end as a heap of splinters on the floor. (150)

I believe that Blau was taken with this critical moment because it is precisely as Althusser tries to secure the critical recognition of history that the process of apprehension quicksilvers in the mind. The mirror of identification is imagined, in scattering succession, as displaced, marginalized, found, lost, picked up. Only once that mirror of identification has been truly recognized as ideology is it finally shattered and left as a heap of splinters on the floor. That sudden rejection of what had been a spontaneously lived ideology is projected as a moment of triumph: intellectual, political, and historical. If there is indeed triumph, then after the performance has ended there will be “a new consciousness in the spectator” through “distance achieved” (Althusser, “Piccolo,” 151). We cannot help but see, however, that when Althusser runs through the series of questions meant to lead us to a firming sense of history, the final, culminating question mark is missing. Where readers expect a posed possibility that will allow them to affirm the sudden end of spontaneously lived ideology, there is instead an unexpected and disorienting claim. It is as if the very idea that the ideological illusions can truly be broken to bits will always to be haunted by the question that wasn’t asked, or worse, haunted by the suspicion that one cannot even pose the question. Where the question would have produced affirmation, the assertion feels like a desperate leap of faith. Blau calls this moment in Althusser a “wobbling pivot” Page 114 →of equivocation (Appearances, 51). For Blau, that suspended state in the face of an impossible question is indeed a moment of “critical poignancy.” He writes: The unanswerable question bears upon the completion that begins where the performance ends. Hasn’t a large part of the labor gone into perceiving where, in the spontaneously lived ideology of any lives, the performance actually ends? or if it ends at all? The recurrent question of theater, mirrored in representation, is no less a question in life, which may be separate but, masked as it is in behavior and suffused with ideology, continues to look like theater. (Audience, 279) The recurrence of this entanglement of theater and life, and their respective limits and boundaries, helps explain why Blau so seizes on a kindred moment in Derrida who, like Althusser, demonstrates thought run aground at a point of impossibility. There is little doubt, I’m sure, that Blau would willingly trade all of Derrida’s remarkable corpus for the singular formulation that closes the essay on Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.” In that essay, Derrida works through Artaud’s quest for a theater that is not representational but rather a full, forceful presence (i.e., “life”)—singular actions creating an experience that permeates the (dramatic) space. For Derrida, Artaud’s want of such a theater in place of mimetic representation is historic, radical, and absolute. The desire for a theater of life, of cruelty, goes beyond the wish to obliterate the strictures of traditional theater and asserts an undoing of all our representational structures: in Derrida’s words, the entire “culture of the West (its philosophies, religions, politics)” (234) or “God, Being, Dialectics” (245). Required for that project of undoing is nothing less than “a rigorous, painstaking, patient, and implacable sobriety in the work of destruction, and an economical acuity aiming at the master parts of a still quite solid machine” (244). Outside that project, the only escape from structures of representation is death. And thus, bringing down the curtain on representation and fulfilling Artaud’s schema for the theater of cruelty is indeed impossible if life is to continue. We are fated to it. “What is tragic,” writes Derrida, “is not the impossibility but the necessity of repetition” (248). When one imagines a closure of representation, then, one does not imagine its desired end—no more than, as Beckett said, one can imagine the death of imagination. Closure becomes enclosure. Within that system of repetition and representation we are compelled to echo lost origins, hear the murmurs of history, indeed dwell with sonorous substance of existence as if in some Beckettian chamber. Derrida thus turns away from Artaud and the theater of cruelty Page 115 →and back to our tragic fate, a “fate of representation. Its gratuitous and baseless necessity” (“Theater,” 250). What Blau calls the “plaintive” tenor here is that, as much as Derrida may wish to emphasize the play within the confines of representation, his reckoning has led him to the

irrepressible, unjustified excess that is inescapable. Derrida has taken seriously enough—through Artaud—the stakes of theater and shows the willingness to follow the implications straight into its gratuitous and baseless heart. Thus, where Althusser, with whatever uncertainty, proffered an image of one leaving the theater to enter the world anew, free of the mirror of ideology, here we are reminded, by Blau—through Derrida—that “even the shattered mirror sustains, in its myriad of replications, all scenarios ending in death, the appalling truth of a cruelty requiring in the beginning and refusing to end its own representation” (Dubious, x). How are we to think with and through that appalling truth? It is hard not to recall Aeschylus and the curse of interpretation that vibrates through Cassandra’s vision of her most certain fate, a vision of death that arrives in fragments of sign and symbol until it is fulfilled by a bloody end, an end that in itself is gratuitous and baseless and yet tragically necessary. Blau argues that Derrida’s “stark conclusion” was never “wholly absorbed, as reality principle, by the desiring machines of cultural critique, or performativity” (Dubious 321 n2). By “reality principle,” the name to which he gave his last major collection of essays, I take him to mean that the fatal seriousness of our entombment in representation would require a different approach to the historical substance of theater than our disciplinary conceptions of either history or theater allow for. Thus we are back to Blau’s insistence that we think both history and theater as created through the spectator’s thought-in-time. But Blau does not collapse theater and history as consubstantial. They are never melded or, in his calculations, indistinguishable. One is not the foundation of the other. Nor is one a lens through which to access and give meaning to the other. Blau’s means of facing down the reality principle of theater is indeed his strategic and consistent positioning of theater and history in a state of parallax: history’s occultation of theater, theater’s occultation of history. This persistence of the parallax is why history and theater appear in such an intimate and necessary relation throughout his work, each one shading or eclipsing the other into shadow with a mere flinch of perspective or, as with Wallace Stevens once more, “A seeing and unseeing in the eye” (“Notes,” 385). Where there is one, the other disappears, or seems to, even as it remains, while eclipsed, resistant to any absolute vanishing. Theater and history, however we may tend to them in isolation, thus become, in the sum of Blau’s work, much Page 116 →more like the Kantian thing-in-itself, which we take to exist even as it is accessible only as image (Karatani, Transcritique, 50). “Nothing but illusion,” Blau writes, “and all too actual” (“Theatre,” 14). Blau’s production of and meditation on King Lear illustrate well this parallactic relation of theater and history. Indeed, the whole of that play’s horror may be the necessary, blinking shift between nothing and the all too actual. “Nothing,” says Cordelia. “Nothing?” says Lear. “Nothing,” repeats Cordelia. “Nothing will come of nothing,” warns Lear (1.1.87–90) in an exchange that, as Blau says, “reverberates with all the paradoxes of the abyss” (Impossible, 278). Blau delves into the history-soaked motivations of the Actor’s Workshop production of Lear in the culminating chapter of The Impossible Theater, titled “The Clearest Gods.” Then he returns to the play and that production in a later essay, “вЂSet Me Where You Stand’: Revising the Abyss” (1998). The essay offers the critical distance without the pure profit of an advantageous perspective. “The work done on Lear” Blau writes, “receding now in memory over the space of many years, a matter of history itself, all the circumstances around it, no less what happened on stage, this night, that night, not easy to reconstruct. Whatever it is that makes history, I will be addressing what makes theater, with the liability that what I am saying is also revision” (Dubious, 287). That last sentence almost captures in its broad terms a whole career of thought. That earlier chapter, “The Clearest Gods,” in its proximity to the production, is within Blau’s catalog of criticism and reflection unusually searching in its fevered pursuits. In part this was because Blau was shaping his Lear in that Cold War context, or what he called “the age of capricious extinction.” If history meant the play was read and the production readied with some nuclear catastrophe in mind, so, too, was Blau calling on the Duras and Resnais film Hiroshima Mon Amour, as well as Camus and the question of rational suicide. There is also in that chapter the evocations of Kierkegaard and Augustine and what must be endured, beyond fear and trembling, to arrive at love (Impossible, 291). The references multiply and spread like signposts in some

“desperate therapy.” For Blau, the production became, in its vital pitch, “a model for the salutatory uses of hallucination” (289). Whatever infused the staging then, how Blau thought about the production later—far from Maynard Mack’s protests—emerged from the play itself. Given the depth of Blau’s own reconstruction of the play, here in closing it is enough to point out just one more of those talismanic moments of drama, a few pregnant lines to which he was prone to return for their capacity to command thought. Those lines belong not to Lear or Cordelia but come when Edgar, dispossessed and in disguise as poor, mad Tom, leads his stricken and eye-gouged father, Gloucester, who, anguished, seeks the cliffs of Dover from which he may Page 117 →“repair the misery” with a final plunge. If the storm on the heath was liable to drown some of Shakespeare’s language in horrific sound (a production gesture that appalled Mack), Edgar’s conjuring of that suicidal precipice must be done through words alone, and in the production Blau asserts that “the necessity” for the scene—another case of theater within the frame of theater—“is exactitude of language” (Impossible, 290). What Edgar does with his words is what the theater should rightly do: create and re-create a requisite vision. When Edgar pretends to lead his bloodied and blinded father to the cliffs, however, the words fail. The father sees the fiction and rejects the illusion, for he feels the real flatness of the field they are on, hears no ocean, senses rightly that the madman is not so mad, his language anything but poor. Pressing on verbally, Edgar extends the illusion: “Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still: how fearful / And dizzy вЂtis to cast one’s eyes so low. / The crows and choughs that wing the midway air / Show scarce so gross as beetles” (4.6.11–14). From this suggestion cobbled on a flat stage, Edgar creates, if not the verisimilitude that convinces, the greater depths of necessary feeling. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (4.6.17–24) Gloucester is thereby moved to “th’extreme verge” (4.6.26) by the very idea of a turned brain with inadequate eyes. Within the affective illusion, that which is supposedly there (th’unnumbered idle pebbles) cannot be fully accounted for, and the murmuring surge is made real by its absence of sound. What is absent, though hatched in the brain, convinces enough, by desperate need or hallucination, or both. The nothing has been doubled. (Nothing, all too actual, comes of nothing.) And from that comes the blind father’s last imperative, the words that confirm the reality of Edgar’s creation: “Set me where you stand” (4.6.24, emphasis added). The exiled son, suffering with the knowledge of life’s “strange mutations”—itself a fitting definition of history—places and positions the father on that imagined verge of the abyss. The father dives, which is a mere fall forward. When Gloucester rises after his meager collapse, Edgar tells him, “You stand. /В .В .В . impossibilities have preserved thee” (4.6.65). Page 118 →Blau’s weighing of history for the sake of an impossible theater was surely an element in his preservation of thinking in theater, or thought as theater, or theater as thought. Without a promised end, there is but an image of horror to rehearse in the mind. Emphasizing the need to hear what is beyond perception—those

unnumbered pebbles chafed by the infinite surf—kept Blau ever alert to the murmuring of history in the friction of theater’s illusions, the capacities of thought when trying to measure how nothing is translated into imagined presence. Edgar says of Gloucester’s momentary faith in the death-bringing heights: “Had he been where he thought, / By this had thought been past” (4.6.43–44). Blau, with Beckett at his back, reminds us that there is no promised end to the dark inquiry, an inquiry that the very presence of theater inaugurates, whatever the horrors that might await. The risk of such thought is that when the perspectives shift so suddenly, the brain might indeed turn. The reward of such thought is that by honoring the impossibilities, one perseveres. Reaching for the real of the theater, thought shifts continually along its necessary parallax with history, the illusory and the actual, the “particularity back to immensity” (Impossible, 290), shifts indicative of all that Blau himself does in the course of his critical work. By so strictly maintaining that parallax of theater and history with the moral rigor he demands, Blau refuses to domesticate history’s disruptive, constitutive force, nor its vertiginous depths. It can turn the brain. But the thinking of history is to be rehearsed all the way to the promised end, which is in truth, no end at all.

References Aeschylus. Agamemnon. In Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore, translated by David Grene, vol. 1, 1–60. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Althusser, Louis. “The вЂPiccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” In For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, 129–52. New York: Verso, 1996. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. In The Complete Dramatic Works, 89–134. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. “Imagination Dead Imagine.” In The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 182–85. New York: Grove, 1995. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York: Verso, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken, 1969. Blau, Herbert. As If: An Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Blau, Herbert. “Auto Archive.” In Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, 264–74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Page 119 →Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Blau, Herbert. “Ground Zero: The Original Vision (May 16, 2008).” In Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, 214–18. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Blau, Herbert. Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Blau, Herbert. Programming Theater History. New York: Routledge, 2013. Blau, Herbert. “Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude.” In Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, 23–43. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Blau, Herbert. “вЂSet Me Where You Stand’: Revising the Abyss.” In The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000, 281–306. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Blau, Herbert. “Theatre and History: A Conspiracy Theory.” Performing Arts Journal 5 (1980): 9–24. Blau, Herbert. “Thinking History, History Thinking.” Theatre Survey 45 (2004): 253–61. Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1992. Blau, Herbert. “Why вЂWHAT History’?” In Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, 236–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Braudel, Fernand. On History. Translated by Sarah Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 102–41. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.” In Writing and Difference, edited and translated by Alan Bass, 232–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Ginzburg, Carlo. History, Rhetoric, and Proof. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique. Translated by Sabu Kohso. Boston: MIT Press, 2005. Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Arden, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1978.

The Play of Thought: An Interview with Herbert Blau Page 120 →Conducted by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta MARRANCA: Let me begin by reading something to you from The Impossible Theater, which may be a good place for us to start. In that book, you said “The chief thing for us to do is to start creating real alternatives in popular theater to the community theaters and the shopping centers which reflect, not the spiritual power, but the moral stupor of our cultural explosion. I am thinking of regional centers, widely recruited audiences, in collaboration with scholars, churches, unions, industry, workshops, critiques, lectures, tours, youth conferences—a full public life growing around a substantial repertoire.” It’s almost twenty-eight years now since you wrote that [1964], in what was declared a manifesto. I’d like to set that in the context of where you are today, because obviously you’ve gone through many changes in your long career in the theater. This was a vision of theater rooted in Vilar and Copeau and the Little Theater movement in America that was still possible to dream of in the ’60s. Is that dream possible any longer? BLAU: No, I don’t really think so. There are actually two dreams folded in each other in that statement. One was the notion of a local energy, making the scene wherever you happened to be, part of which was realized in the ’60s. The other was attached to what still seems to me the major dream of this century, a dream with scale. I’d associate that with the movement of Theater Populaire in Europe, of which the Berliner Ensemble became the emblematic theater. Jean Vilar and Roger Planchon were the major practitioners in France, Joan Littlewood in England. All represent what we thought we were, or might become, when I was in San Francisco with the Actor’s Workshop. But the overall dream, the one with scale, was the marriage of socialism and surrealism, which remained the impelling promise of the century, as it was, Page 121 →say, on the barricades in Paris in 1968. When I came back from Europe, where I went in the late ’50s because there was next to nothing to be learned in the United States—it was this vision that I tried to bring back to San Francisco: a theater of some activist dimension, with an audience composed of workers, intellectuals, and students. I hadn’t seen anything like that occurring in American theater at the time. DASGUPTA: Was it because of the political situation in which Europe found itself after the two devastating wars that the dream could not be transplanted to this side of the ocean? BLAU: You have to back up half a century in order to see what we’re always contending with. When I started working in the theater, what dominated everything outside of New York was the notion of “Tributary Theater.” The old, yellow-covered Theater Arts magazine enunciated the idea, but the word tributary was always used in a double sense. On the one hand, New York was the fountainhead and source of all power in the theater, with minor channels and rivulets of possibility leaking out into the provinces. Then there was the second sense of the term: everything outside New York would be “paying tribute” to New York. I’m speaking now of the late ’40s and early ’50s. The problem was compounded by the fact that theater has always been a secondary or tertiary art in this country. If culture in the United States was secondary to begin with, theater was a shadow of that secondary culture, a shadow’s shadow. I’m not sure that we will ever be able to change the fact that people don’t grow up in any sort of tangible relationship to theater practice. MARRANCA: But it seems to me that you had, at least at the start of the Actor’s Workshop, very broad ideals for what theater could be: reflecting the life of the mind of society. Your ideals of the theater expressed in the manifesto and the writings on the Actor’s Workshop reflect the belief that theater encompassed civic participation. So the public would witness itself in a spectacle as a public. It seems to me that what you were getting at then, and which no one thinks about now, is theatergoing as a form of citizenship.

BLAU: Oh, yeah. I think that distinction is quite true. And that’s a distinction you also tried to make in your essay “Thinking about Interculturalism” in the recent PAJ [Performing Arts Journal] book on interculturalism [Interculturalism and Performance]. I think that you were also right there in making reference to Hannah Arendt. Her view of the city is a really quite different view of civic space than that which prevails in the theater as we know it. On the other hand, we have different cities. Our cities are deteriorating before our eyes. If they were always psychically polluted, as in Oedipus, they’re quite specifically polluted now, dangerous and forbidding in ways that they weren’t at that time, not in San Francisco. That was an accommodating city then, almost pristine, Page 122 →with a realizable space of possibility. At least that’s the way we looked at it. Still, there are a couple of things that should be qualified. There are certain subtexts all the way through The Impossible Theater. As vociferous a book as it may have been—because it was a manifesto—there were also things that were partially repressed, having to do with the attitudes of people in the theater toward its evolution as a theater with designs upon the city. There was not only considerable resistance to its more adventurous repertoire, but also a certain jaundice, a sense of our (my) being pretentious in talking about the theater as a social or political force, a significant civic space. If most of the actors were gradually won over, then there were other resistances. We were aspiring to be a civic theater, but the civic administration of San Francisco never really helped us out, and it wasn’t until we got good reviews in New York that the audience in San Francisco paid any serious attention to us. It wasn’t until we were invited to go to Lincoln Center that there was an immense civic uproar about the potential loss of the Actor’s Workshop. By the time we left San Francisco we had anywhere from three to five theaters playing simultaneously in miscellaneous spaces, but we never had an adequate theater, not even remotely like a European state theater. The city, from time to time, would promise to do something for us but never did. No sooner were we invited to go to New York than the city immediately promised to build us a theater. We told the city to go to hell and left. The status of a theater in this country, as you know, is simply a function of what’s said in the newspapers. And that’s true, by the way, not only of what we used to think of as commercial theater, but it’s equally true of experimental theater. MARRANCA: So actually, Hannah Arendt’s idea of the public realm has been perverted into the publicity realm. BLAU: The publicity realm, the media realm—it’s the mediascape that we’re actually talking about. MARRANCA: But, you know, a strong thread going through all of your work, and it certainly starts in The Impossible Theater, is the spiritual dimension, which really connects your ideals so much to modernism. I feel very strongly about the fact that postmodernism in its critique of modernism, has obliterated and distorted and written out this spiritual dimension that is behind so much of modernism. Even your so-called dream of socialism and surrealism has to do very much with this spiritual essence. Maybe we’ll come back to this, though I feel you’re more of a materialist than, say, someone who’s apt to fall into the spiritual realm, even though you might be attracted to that. But it’s the more messianic quality of the work that links it to modernism. I have the feeling from reading the work, that you regarded—and maybe still do—theater as a sacred institution. Page 123 →BLAU: I suppose I’ve always had a feeling for the sacred, though I’m not religious. I tend to resist amorphous and vague notions of the spiritual. But I do believe in energies and powers. And I have a very strong feeling for what, say, Milton suggests when he talks about princedoms and dominations and powers and authorities. I really do feel that there are constituted energies in the universe, and that they embody themselves from time to time. Sometimes I see these in what are now thought of suspiciously as canonical texts, and in the virtuosity and the intelligence of particular artists. And I’ve always felt that the theater, which we think of as a carnal form, a form that’s essentially embodied, acquires this power not so much from the simple material

presence of the human body performing, but even more materially from power of mind. That’s its real authority. A book that I recently published, The Audience, concludes with an image that combines the idea of authority, virtuosity, discipline, and power in a kind of suspension of the material world, above the material world, something like a Divine Idea. That’s the image of Philippe Petit walking on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. There you have a pure existentialist act which is contingent upon extraordinary physical prowess. It’s what one comes to understand through a spiritual discipline or the most admirable accomplishment in sports: that when the body is perfected to a certain limit, it almost becomes something like pure mind. As Vince Lombardi used to say, at that point it’s all mental. DASGUPTA: You sound neo-Platonic. BLAU: True, and not unlike what Artaud talks about in The Theater and Its Double, when he describes a painting called The Daughters of Lot, in which hieratic figures are walking across a deep crevasse, as if above the material world, very much like Platonic ideas. MARRANCA: But what intrigues me about some of the themes you bring up, and this seems to be a strong one in The Audience, is looking at the audience as constituted as a body of thought and desire—that the audience is what happens. That’s an interesting notion about perception. It’s not the play that happens, but the audience that happens. You take the emphasis from the play or the production onstage or the event to the mind of the audience. And also, I think, you go further than that by talking about the thing not happening until it is thought. So you get into the whole area that Gertrude Stein wrote so eloquently about: the difference between seeing and hearing, or how one understands what is going on in the theatrical performance—how you know what you know. BLAU: What you’re describing now comes out of a considerable shift in the object of attention. There’s a significant difference between trying to make theater and trying to make a theater with a large number of people, a tangible Page 124 →public institution, whether it achieves widespread public acceptance or not. I spent the early part of my career working (with my partner Jules Irving) to form a company, to get plays on, to be able to pay the actors, to raise money, and to run a repertoire, at the same time thinking about (I’ll bracket the word) the “nature” of theater, what it should be or might be. The distance, however, between the work done in San Francisco and the work that I did later with the KRAKEN group was considerable. In that work I was exceedingly attentive to, consumed with, the idea of theater itself: where did it come from? or was it always already there? I mean: in the beginning, if there was a beginning. It’s at that subjunctive point that theater intersects with theory, the emergence of a specular consciousness dwelling upon an origin, either refusing to accept the notion of a beginning, a source, or developing some trace-like relationship to the inauguration of a possibility, a prospect, so that the memory of what you’re seeking virtually creates it. What were the impulses of the theatrical act? How were these constituted? And how could we know when they materialized? Let me put it this way: when I began to theorize the work with KRAKEN, from which all my theoretical writing has been derived, I realized the degree to which I had been fascinated by the activity of consciousness itself as the primal scene of theater. That activity, reciprocated, is also what creates the audience. The audience does not exist until it is thought. Nor does the theater exist until it is precipitated from whatever it is it was not. What I’ve been increasingly interested in is a sort of ontological inquiry which addresses the old question of “what is theater?” but in terms of its materialization from whatever it is it was not. MARRANCA: It’s really the Pirandellian questionВ .В .В . speaking of which, tonight is the Halloween parade in the Village. BLAU: Yes. It’s the Pirandellian question. MARRANCA: But I want to point out one thing. You do agree that thinking is not the same as

consciousness. BLAU: No. You make an issue of thinking and, as you know, I wrote a book called Blooded Thought. I’ve always felt that Wallace Stevens’s phrase—“an abstraction blooded as a man by thought”—is a fine description of what most charges, initiates, incites a theater space. In recent years, what has incited my thought (in-site) is the most minimal prospect of theater. For example: the moment that I—my “self” precipitated at this table, right now—I look at you and you look at me. Whatever we were doing before this moment was occurring without consciousness of a relationship that has now been theatricalized. The theatricalizing occurs simply by looking, with that inflection of consciousness we now call “the gaze.” I’m very conscious that you’re there, you’re very conscious that I’m there, and Gautam is conscious that we have Page 125 →this relationship—different now than just before—and is observing us both, and we can now, of course, implicate Gautam, he has been implicated, in this precipitation of theater. How does the theatrical moment materialize, as if from nothing, its most minimal sensation—that’s what I’ve been trying to theorize in recent years. MARRANCA: But then you turn it into a taboo. BLAU: WellВ .В .В . MARRANCA: I mean, in some sense, you speak of theater being about the taboo of watching. You give it a spin into psychoanalysis. BLAU: Well, it was interesting to me, when I first called attention to the watching, that you slightly withdrew. MARRANCA: I’ve never liked being watched. BLAU: Well, that’s why one has to propose the possibility that there’s an operative taboo in the look. Which is to say, we are referring to issues of voyeurism and exhibitionism. At one and the same time, we in some sense want to be observed, we want to be recognized; and then there’s something in us that fundamentally resists it. Maybe even fears it. I had this experience not long ago with my daughter—well, it was when she was still a baby in the crib. I remember it quite distinctly—the first moment when I felt that she withdrew from my gaze. There I was looking at her with a kind of devotion or love, but that time, in the purity of my regard, there seemed to be a withdrawal. She simply turned away, gazing, from my gaze. Beckett actually talks about this as the “nesting stare,” as if the infant were looking back to a purer state, something other than the possession implicit in the gaze. DASGUPTA: Similar, in a sense, to the symbolist aesthetic of bridging the chasm between the spectator and the stage, the perceiver and that which is perceived. He who is spectated upon seeks ardently to enter a state in which he is a spectator, in the process dissolving the very distinction that gives birth to the idea of theater. BLAU: It seems to me that there are certain almost archetypal moments, even within the canonical drama, that address precisely this issue. And I’m not talking here about the kind of thing that’s involved in reception theory. I’m rather indifferent to that sort of treatment of the audience. As you know, The Audience hardly addresses at all the audiences I have known. And I have known over the years a lot of audiences. We’re all really aware that at some time tonight (or when night comes where they are) people will be gathering in spaces all over the world. That’s not, however, the audience I’m really talking about in the book. But let me see if I can explain, by drawing on a couple of things referred to Page 126 →in the book. It

may be some sort of poetic accident, or poetic justice of history, that in the only extant trilogy among all the Greek tragedies, the Oresteia, the first character to appear is called The Watchman. Try to reconstruct in your mind the festival of Dionysus at a theater in Athens, with 18,000 people observing at dawn this character who seems to appear as if from barbaric darkness, as if he’s awaking into the Platonic tradition of the western Enlightenment itself. He is waiting, as you remember, for the light to come across the mountaintops from Troy, as if, as I say, he were awaking into the dream of civilization itself as it’s been constructed by the West. That character, designated The Watchman, is watching and being watched. Remember: he situates himself in the universe, below all “the grand processionals of all the stars of night.” He operates at one and the same time in and out of the play, so to speak. Within the dramaturgy there’s a kind of paranoia: he’s worried about what Clytemnestra might do if he says too much, but yet he has to speak so that the play can get under way, to provide the others watching with exposition, to let us know what’s happening within the play. What’s always interested me especially is a line toward the end of his speech (however it’s translated), when he says, after setting up the ambiguous conditions under which the play will proceed: “I speak to those who understand, but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.” What is the audience? Those who understand. Now there the issue of taboo, and the issue of the sacred and the issue of perception and the reversal of theater, its inverted doubleness, seem to operate all at once. He speaks to those who understand, which implies that even before the play begins, you already know. Except that you don’t know that you know. So what would constitute a deal that would permit you to know what you already know? MARRANCA: Well, I can understand why you chose that, because of your way of thinking about theater as remembrance and as memory. But it’s also interesting that in The Audience you turn around the terms of the notion of audience—the auditory—by expressing your interest in the audience as a figure of speech. Could you elaborate on that? BLAU: I think that comes about at the other end of the play, with the arrival of Athena, that bisexual rhetorical figure. But let me shift to another context: “Who’s there?” That’s the opening line of Hamlet. Already there’s an ontological reversal: the wrong guys, as you recall, say it. And the response is, “Nay, stand and unfold yourself.” Now there you have a case in which the text, which seems to be in command of expression, is so to speak addressing the untexted, those out there. And saying, you’re going to get nothing from me unless you speak up. Right? “Stand and unfold yourself.” Which is to say, at some level the audience has to identify itself by a kind of counteraddress. Page 127 →It has to be recognized and it has to respond. The beginning of Hamlet—you see it in Pirandello too—is the prototype of those moments in the drama that seem to break the sound barrier between the perceiver and the perceived. It ups the ante on perception itself, making the demand, requiring the spectator in some sense to speak. With the Oresteia, we may be conscious in the beginning of the taboo that inhibits speech: I speak to those who understand, but if they fail, I don’t remember anything. What’s remembered, however, is not exactly easy to understand. Which is why it seems to open up the entire history of interpretation. As you make your way through the Oresteia, you may look to the Chorus for guidance, only to find it exceedingly conscious of the play of appearances and the impermeability, even the opacity, of appearance. Or dis-appearance, like “the oar-blade’s fading footprint.” They keep asking the gods to “grant meaning” to the appearances. They address Zeus, or whatever name he might have, because it’s not even clear what names should be used for the indeterminable powers who may be watching, presiding over these things. But whoever it is, whatever power it is, is petitioned for meaning. Now, for me, that is the great mission of theater: to grant meaning to appearances, the appearances in which we commonly live, the feeling that we have about whatever constitutes reality, that we’re

always in the immanence of theater, that we may be perceiving at any moment—even amongst the three of us now—merely the appearances of what should be transparencies. Which is to say, you ought to be what you appear to be. But at some limit of our knowledge of each other, there is always the sensation that somehow we’re not seeing it, or each other, truly. Through the entire history of the canonical drama, we appear to be dealing with some essential rupture that even love can’t heal, a fundamental wound that prevents us somehow from being precisely what we are, and to be perceived as what we are. DASGUPTA: Doesn’t this rupture come about because of language? In some sense what you’re asking for is the purity of theater, that point at which theater truly precipitates into pure theater, into the idea of theater. That obviously happens in a soliloquy. I mean, when someone retires, becomes entirely separate, draws the curtain, what he is essentially saying is: Listen, I deny spectatorship. Or else it happens in a play such as Oedipus, where he chooses to blind himself. At that point, Oedipus does become pure theater, because then he can’t reciprocate your gaze, he can’t engage in a certain duplicity with his audience. That’s entirely introverted, as it were, through his blindness. The entire world only exists in his mind. It doesn’t exist as exteriority. So what you’re asking for then is that theater as we know it, to meet the demands that you wish to place upon theater, will have to deny certain basic characteristics of the form Page 128 →in which one enters into a relational duplicitous system of discourse. So one has to deny language, one has to deny the gaze. Are you talking about some sort of a closet drama of the mind? BLAU: I’m not necessarily talking at this point about a construct of theater that I would like to see occur. I’m simply trying to understand my experience of theater and my reading of plays, regardless of what any of us might want the theater to be. It’s as if the theater, the social institution, has its own closet drama, leaving us with this question: why is it that the theater is—in every culture that I have known—troubled by the nature of theater? The canonical drama of the West seems to me to be pervaded by a ludic resistance to the idea of theater itself. When we went through the period, in the ’60s, when the texts were disappearing, it’s as if the drama was phasing itself out historically, almost scared to death by its essential content. Its essential content was that we live in a world of appearances and we’re not known to each other. All the great plays in one way or another are concerned with that, as well as the incapacity of perception itself. Look at what’s happening in a play like Troilus and Cressida: when Troilus, for example, is watching Cressida being seduced by or seducing Diomedes, the appalling effect on Troilus is such that even the extraordinarily acute capacities of Shakespeare’s language can’t exactly describe the demoralizing difference between the Cressida that was and the Cressida that he sees before him, the seeing itself being part of the problem, to which there appears to be no solution. MARRANCA: What strikes me in thinking about your work is how utterly Freudian it is. You write so much about theater and the primal scene, and repression as an activity of perception—the impossibility of viewing theater as anything but repression. In that respect, you seem to be going between the two poles of Norman O. Brown, whom I was glad to see you brought into the discussion of the audience in your recent book, and the schizo-culture theory of Deleuze and Guattari. I’m not certain where you stand, because you seem not to be able to go all the way with Brown into the spiritual transformation that he speaks about. BLAU: In reference to the tantrism at the end, mysticism. MARRANCA: Into the “om.” But on the other hand, there’s an intriguing term that he uses in Love’s Body in which he calls for an end to repression—“body mysticism.” I think we’re seeing more of this now, more than thirty years since Brown wrote about it. There seems to be a body mysticism in French continental theory—and it all circles around Artaud. BLAU: In The Eye of Prey there is an essay in which I try to explain how that comes about. If you

look at what generally passes under the rubric of deconstruction, and take the major figures that came to our attention during the Page 129 →’70s—Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, and Lacan—you can ask the same question that Freud asked about women: what do they want? Well, essentially I think they want what students wanted in the ’60s in this country. As I try to explain in The Eye of Prey, when the countercultural movement receded here and began to go underground in its most volatile form, say in the image of the Weathermen, totally underground, by that time it had already gone abroad with acid rock, blue jeans, pop culture. A lot of the tendencies of the ’60s—the “polymorphous perverse” tendencies of the period, the addiction to body language, valorization of the body, the feeling that the body had a fundamental truth that was an unrecognized truth—had already gone to Europe. There, as opposed to what happened in America, it immediately entered the high intellectual structures of European thought, was intensely theorized, and came back to America doubly sublimated: reified in theory, repressed in behavior—and then was taught in the schools. What does this theory fundamentally want? It wants alternative institutions, it wants a return of the repressed. It wants to deal with what seems to me a major issue in the conception of a public space and, thus, a civic theater: the degree to which a culture can make allowance for what has at some level to be repressed if we’re to have a culture at all. I am speaking of primary narcissism. There are somewhat different versions of it in the libidinal economy of Lyotard or the desiring machines of Deleuze, a pure libidinal play of surfaces in which there would be, in some sense, pure expenditure, no risk, no cost. We would be able in that economy to recover all the libidinal energy that has been traumatized and arrested, and reinvest it in the body. It would become wholly available to us, and we would be a kind of purified body in Brown’s most extreme sense, love’s body. All of that was the more utopian promise of French theory, French Freud, but such ideas also circulated, in quite other terms, including Brown’s, through the counterculture of the ’60s. DASGUPTA: Still, this is obviously something that also happened much earlier in France. You’re saying it started here, but in some sense it starts with de Sade and Rousseau. So then are you against the idea of, or the practice of, theater because it is the consequence of conscious thought as opposed to pure presence? Does the nature/culture debate—if we can rename the two cultures debate—concern you very much? BLAU: Certainly the nature/culture debate is a way of formulating the question of “where does it come from?” And “what comes first”? As you know, most theater departments and most theater history books to this day will say that theater is derived from ritual. And the implication is a kind of a priori: ritual comes first, theater comes second. But it may be the other way around. DASGUPTA: But some would say that theater begins with play, that theater is Page 130 →predicated on the very idea of play, play itself is really its literal energies, and therefore there is a certain purity of play. BLAU: Yes, I’ve written various essays about the idea of play, which, along with the body, was also valorized during the ’60s and has persisted as a highly charged, coded term within recent critical theory. But I’ve also written an essay in Blooded Thought (which you published) called “The Remission of Play.” I meant remission in a double sense: there’s a point at which you want to say, “Now look, stop playing. Everybody stop playing around.” There is also a sense in which you want to redirect the energy of play. Beckett understood that play is deadly. The idea has always been latent in the theater. Let me explain by going back to the issue of the body. In the play of presence and absence, the body is obviously central, though we may have a sense of its presence even when the body is absent. Beckett understood this too in that little piece he called Breath. A human presence in a vacated space. Insofar as the theater materializes around the human body, there is this one simple, elemental, undeniable fact: he or she who is performing there—and this is what differentiates the theater from any other form we know—is dying in front of your eyes.

Right there. Now it seems to me that everything else in the theater, its entire apparatus of revelation and disguise, develops around that idea. All of the theater’s conventions are designed either to intensify your awareness of it or to deflect it, or to cover up your anxiety by appearing to celebrate it. MARRANCA: What you seem to be doing is embracing the concept of repression, or death in life, which is actually precisely the thing that Norman O. Brown was talking about, that it would make us freer if we got rid of this death anxiety. You seem to be embracing it almost as a way of perceiving theater. BLAU: I’m not necessarily embracing it—although perhaps I am. That may be also a matter of temperament. But what I think I’m addressing is the evidence of my experience of theater. I say, Look, what are the things that I respond to in theater? What are the things that I’ve seen? Or read? Or even heard about the theater? Or what has happened—after all, I’ve spent almost thirty-eight years rehearsing theater—sitting there in the dark, watching people do things up there on the stage in this strange, phantasmic form in which we have, as we commonly say, a play of appearance. Or we create illusions, or we create realities of illusion, or the illusions of reality, and all the mutations and crisscrossings of those two ideas. I read texts, I go to plays, I try to think seriously about them. But if I take them seriously, it’s hard to divest myself of the idea that repression is not only operative in human experience, it’s possibly unavoidable. I can think of no social order that’s not contingent upon it. And the unconscious, as Freud told us, is constituted by repression. One of the most moving things in all of Page 131 →Freud came at the end of a long clinical career when he wrote, almost against his wishes—after all, he wanted to heal, cure, relieve people of repression—Civilization and Its Discontents. It ends like a tragedy. After trying with all his genius to think his way around it, he had to concede, finally, that repression may be the price we have to pay for civilization. Now, the big dream of the ’60s was the undoing of repression. That was an essential part of its participatory mystique, a recurrent mystique, still alive—at least residually—in the anthropological or ethnopoetic approach to performance, and to the analysis of multiculturalism and interculturalism. I still think it may be a very energizing mystique at certain historical moments. Yet there’s an affinity in all that to the wish-fulfilling fantasy that we’re going to be redeemed by collectivity, whether in the festival or the carnival or what-have-you, which will liberate us from repression and restore to us the arrested libidinal energy. Freud is saying, this is a great dream, but it’s not going to happen. Not if we’re going to have a civilization, or maybe even stay alive. MARRANCA: But you call yourself a postmodernist and yet you don’t accept one of the cardinal principlesВ .В .В .— BLAU: I don’t call myself a postmodernist. I never called myself a postmodernist. I wouldn’t dream of thatВ .В .В . MARRANCA: That’s right, you’re dreaming of surrealism. Well, let’s say you choose postmodern strategies or postmodern subject matter. Personally, I think you’re a lapsed modernist. BLAU: As a matter of fact, I think I am a lapsed modernist. But The Eye of Prey’s subtitle is Subversions of the Postmodern, again with a double meaning: subversive of, and a sub version. In either case, quite clearly, in my theater work, in my interests outside the theater, in my collaborations with various artists, I’ve always been engaged with experimental forms. MARRANCA: But the point I wanted to make is that your skepticism—and I share this, too—with the whole idea of communitas, in a sense goes against one of the main features of what is considered postmodernism, which is the erasure of the boundary between the spectacle and the

spectator. And one of the things that you do valorize is a preference for the solitariness, the aloneness of the performer and the audience member. Yet throughout your writings you take issue with Strasberg’s “private moment” and what that’s degenerated into for the performer. BLAU: I have ambivalent feelings about Strasberg’s particular notion of the private moment. We know it led to certain excesses in practice in the theater. On the other hand, the notion of the private moment, as when Gautam was talking about the soliloquy a moment ago, has always had great appeal to me. The work I did with KRAKEN was both specifically directed to the allure, Page 132 →the temptation of solipsism, and to its danger. Stanislavski’s notion of “public solitude” has also been very meaningful to me. So, too, Brecht’s notion of the “splendid isolation of the actor” and the “splendid isolation of the spectator.” MARRANCA: What I had in mind when I called you a lapsed modernistВ .В .В . BLAU: I’m not even lapsed. DASGUPTA: Not done yet. Ah, to begin again. MARRANCA: I think it’s so clear in your writings—the attraction to a rigorous intellectual attitude toward an artwork, the sense of contemplation of a tableau, epic structure, the separation of the audience and event. You really are, in some sense, connected to the Brechtian-Diderot Enlightenment project, moving toward the notion of a philosophical theater. BLAU: And also from the beginning I’ve had a kind of Yeatsian feeling for what’s most difficult. I’ve never really entirely bought the idea that complex ideas can be simply said. In other words, I think complexity warrants complexity. Brecht himself wobbles on this issue: sometimes he speaks one way, so that, as he says, the ass will understand. But then you begin to understand with Brecht that there are asses and asses. Sometimes he is very complex indeed, and when you read through, say, The Short Organum, the best parts are the parts that are virtually opaque. It very often strikes me that people are most interesting at the point in which they don’t quite understand what they’re saying. That, for me, is the great appeal of Artaud. Artaud is most interesting at the exfoliating or fibrillating nerveends of thought, where you have the feeling that thought is escaping thought. I mean, don’t you have that feeling when you write sometimes, like you’re really on the edge of something and you know that your best idea is just escaping you? MARRANCA: Of course, sometimes you put things in an essay that you know you haven’t quite figured out or you hope you might not get caught for. BLAU: But you know that very often, there, you are on the edge of something. I used to say of my writing or when I was working in the theater, “You know, I can’t understand why anyone else in the world but me would be interested in this.” There, of course, is the danger of the solipsistic as well. It’s not that I didn’t care that anybody else was interested, but I couldn’t imagine why anybody would get so obsessed with this particular issue at that limit of thought, so attached to it as I was. I may not have understood at the moment why it was of great importance to me, but I knew it was. It felt that way when I was doing theater, and now I do my best writing and my best thinking, I think, at the moment where thought escapes me. How did this come about? I’m not sure, though it’s by now a matter of principle, or obsession, becoming style. About the time I went into the theater, one of the writers I was reading with some intensity—for a paper I had to Page 133 →write—was Henry James. You know how students go to the library, they look up the author and he may have written twenty or thirty books, right, but there are only three or four on the shelf, so I happened to pick up The Golden Bowl. They used to speak of early James, middle James, and darkest James, and there I was with The Golden Bowl, the darkest. I couldn’t figure out what that book was doing. But it was to me immensely

fascinating. And among the things that made it fascinating were the long interlocutory, parenthetical, diversionary, deferred sentences in which I had the feeling—which I may not have been able to articulate, but I can now—that to say it another way would be not to say it at all, or to say it in an unfaceted way, without sufficient nuance or qualification, as if the only way to say it were to say it all at once, like spatially. Even when I’m speaking to you right now, I can’t say all the things that I want to say, temporally, one word after another, except inadequately. It’s like I want to push all that I want to say, all that I want to understand myself, in saying it, up onto one plane at once so that you can see it all at once. And it seems to me that Jamesian language, with all its ellipses and interventions, was something like that. It always had to qualify itself, it always had to say something else, it always had to interject something. And it was a mode of thought which constituted itself by a kind of maximum density. MARRANCA: James is the person between you and another critic that I admire. I’ve always thought that your work is to the theater what William Gass is to literary criticism. And you’re both linked by the Jamesian line. I think that the two of you elaborate a particular kind of sentence. DASGUPTA: Of course, in some sense, your philosophical commitment visГ -vis the theater also displays a certain antitheatricalism on your part. That stems a lot from Yvor Winters, who was also one of your teachers, doesn’t it? BLAU: It’s really hard to siphon that in or siphon it out, which is to say, there may be some truth in that. Winters, of course, had an antitheatrical prejudice, which I didn’t entirely understand when I was working with him. He thought my going into the theater was a waste of time, and given some aspects of theater practice I sometimes felt that way myself. The only thing that Winters and Ezra Pound ever really agreed upon was that the theater is “a form of third-rate intensity.” I can’t speak for all directors, but I have certainly known some, and we’ve all read about others, who at critical points in their careers really understood that, at some level, to do theater you have to also hate it. There are ontological grounds for that, as I’ve been suggesting. And the nature of the profession, especially here in America, doesn’t help. Speaking of appearances or duplicity, preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet. You know the issue that’s defined by the Greek name for the actor: hypocrisy. Still, the ontological question is complicated: why does one act? It’s a rather perverse notion Page 134 →when an actor says, “Well I act because I want to know myself.” Why would anybody want to know himself by becoming something other than himself? Or herself? The issue is further complicated today with the insistence on controlling representation by means of masquerade. Eric Bentley asked many years ago, “What is theater?”—and in The Impossible Theater I commented on that. I said I meant the word impossible in every conceivable sense, from the visionary to the material. Artaud’s theater is impossible, so was Gordon Craig’s. But I also meant the word as when you say it with your teeth clenched: “It’s impossible!” Like people who are contemptible, the organism is awful, you can’t raise money for it, the audience stinks, the city won’t support it, everything that surrounds itВ .В .В . DASGUPTA: Let me ask you now about the nature of artifice. Because what you are saying, obviously, appertains not just to theater, but to all art. Whether it’s fiction, poetry, painting, film—art is involved in both the transcendental quest, the ontological sense of purity, and, at the same time, it is negated by that very quest, by the very procedure that it has to employ to approximate its goals. If that’s the case, then what is art? And why do we need it? If we’re not willing to accept the artifice of art, not willing to accept its liabilities, then why are we drawn to art for sustenance, or for spiritual growth? BLAU: Over the years, I’ve had varying responses, if not answers, to that question. But the question about theater has often been—a big issue in the art world during the period of minimalism

and conceptualism—is it art? DASGUPTA: That may well have to do with a historical inability to see the theater as being comprised of anything other than words. Once language itself is discredited as the sole means of attaining ontological purity, and if theater is seen as predicated on language only, then theater has little to defend itself on that score. As the medium becomes less dependent on words, and more visual in nature, the question of theater’s ontological essence does become relevant and problematical at the same time. Look at Wittgenstein, for instance, who seeks refuge from the ambiguity of language in the world of the visual, in his particular case, film. BLAU: Film as a sort of maternal embrace. Art has never represented anything like that for me. Art is what happens when I think better of myself. To the degree that there’s any purity in that, it accounts for the discrepancy between what I am and what I’d like to be. I can at some level, even when I fail in art, respect myself there more than I can in reality. Which is to say, I’m known to myself more acutely in art than I am known to myself outside it. This is not all egocentric. Art for me has always been the means by which I become more available to myself, and thus more responsible. Insofar as there was anything Page 135 →messianic, what Bonnie talked about earlier, that I wrote in The Impossible Theater, I was in the theater to save the world. The world, of course, doesn’t always want to be saved. MARRANCA: If what you say you understand from art—the kind of knowledge you perceive or is put on you from your experience of art—what do you find, or what are you looking for, in criticism, then, as an enterprise? BLAU: See, I don’t think I write criticism. MARRANCA: OK, let’s say writing then. BLAU: Very much the same kind of thing that I used to look for when I was doing theater. Yet I’m quite well aware of the material difference. When the work that I was doing with the KRAKEN group ended, as I say in Take Up the Bodies, what I was trying to do in that book was to transfer the energies of the theatrical inquiry, insofar as they were translatable, to the page. As it happened, I wrote that book at a time when performance was the honorific term in criticism itself. People began to think of writing as a kind of performative activity. So in some sense it was more legitimized, ideologically, if not in practice. Now, I’m interested in ideology, but I’ve never had an ideological program, nor what they now call in critical theory a “subject position” that is easily definable. You know that from reading me. What I’m really interested in might be defined by something like “catastrophe theory,” those threshold moments when something transforms without our perceiving it. One of the things I’m dealing with, moreover, in the book I just finished—on ideology and performance—is the limiting conditions of any set of ideas, as if there were a statute of limitations on the best of ideas. Surely there is on the worst, but then they may be testifying to some historical necessity. I may find contemptible what Jesse Helms represents or what Ronald Reagan represented, or the Moral Majority, but when a phenomenon like that manifests itself in a culture, like the emergence now of David Duke, a person of liberal or leftist disposition has to think it through. Simply to mock it, dismiss it, or cite it as a clear and present danger is not enough, for it’s also an index of unrecognized need and desire. All aversion registered, the bigots and know-nothings denounced, there may still be something else at stake. But when we shift to the radical voices that are, to begin with, more like our own, there is another present danger that may not be so clear. So when I write, what I’m trying to understand are those limiting conditions in the activity of thought where something that I may have thought myself

becomes other than what it appeared to be. The harder thing to deal with is the thing we believe that in the course of history goes wrong, or exhausts itself. We know that there have been all kinds of liberating ideas in this century, good Page 136 →ideas, powerful ideas, the most admirable idealisms that at some limit of their emancipatory function warp and become lethal. It was why, when I came to Lincoln Center, the first play I chose was Danton’s Death. DASGUPTA: Your interest in implicating yourself in these moments of rupture or slippage in terms of various epistemologies that are at work in any given time suggests to me that you, as a writer and thinker, situate yourself on a bed of shifting sands. But if that is your authorial agenda, as it were, then how does that measure up to this very Platonic stability, in some sense, of form that is unchanging? BLAU: These two things operate at once. Let me see if I can address that in terms of theater, as I do in Take Up the Bodies. Theater is a temporal form. It passes. Shakespeare addressed that in Prospero’s notion of the insubstantial pageant fading. All drama addresses that. The East addresses it in another way: the One and the Many, the Many changing paths. One can celebrate that, one can lament it, one can create dithyrambic odes about it. But it’s the very temporality of the form which is alluring, and exasperating, and at some critical limit the source of the desperation which is dramatized in the greatest works of theater. It ends, it passes, it disappears, it’s not there, while we dream of an Eternal Return. Of what? Whatever “it” is. It’s sort of like a director saying, “Do it again.” Even when I used to say to the actor “Do it again,” there was always the second thought: “What вЂit’ are we talking about? And do we really want it?” For that would be merely repetition. “It all, it all,” says the woman in Beckett’s Footfalls, which also implies the repetition you don’t quite want to repeat. So do it again, but not that. Here, then, you have this temporal form, this impossible form: everything passes, it slips, it changes, it’s an insubstantial pageant. I’ve always wanted to create a theater that would be, as I say in Take Up the Bodies, like Picasso’s sculptured “Death’s Head.” So dense it would be almost like a black hole, the gravity so great it would warp back into itself and come out the other side. And yet, it would be like that sculpture, impacted, dense, or as if set in stone. I’ve always wanted to create a theater even that had such mass and spatial power, such density in its passing that it would be virtually absolute. Like Plato’s Cave, always questionable, but simply there. Let me move this onto the plane of speech, which also disappears, words flying up, body remaining below. We did a piece some years ago, which was in fact derived from the Oresteia. It was called Seeds of Atreus. Whatever it is that we did or didn’t do, the KRAKEN group was probably more committed to speech, and to text, than most groups of that nonverbal or antiverbal period. Almost from the beginning, in our very methodology, there was a kind of superabundance of language. So it was with Seeds of Atreus as it developed,Page 137 → a massive textuality. We also did things that were very intricate chorally, very complicated. Across forty feet of space, the actors would be speaking at exceedingly high speed, dropping or raising pitch, splitting syllables. But it was meant to be intelligible, the words legible, at high velocity or in pulsating masses of sound. When the murder of Agamemnon took place, Clytemnestra putting the net over him in the bath, there was a choral effect in which the language, massed, seemed to be coming at the audience like axe blows. There was, as I’m suggesting, a torrent of language, but I remember saying to the actors at the end of one rehearsal of these very intricate masses of words: “You know, if we do this thing right”—this is the modernist coming out—”this should sound as if we have only spoken one word.” One word. Now, as I say, I’m not religious, and I have only very shaky affinities with the sacred, but that’s sort of like the word within a Word unable to speak a word of T. S. Eliot’s poem. Which is swallowed in darkness. A word which is the revelatory Word, the sacramental Word. There, you might say, are my affinities with Winters, too. When I first began to be interested in literature, I

was fundamentally interested in poetry. And those were the days in which we thought of poetry as sacramental, we really treasured words. I still fundamentally feel that about language. While I engage in a postmodern project that has to do with slippery signifiers and all that, I still feel with the high modernists that the invention of language was one of the great achievements of civilization. Words have powers, they release power. As Emerson said, they’re forms of fossil poetry, they contain ancient wisdom. They are what keeps us in history. The signifiers may slip, but you want them to slip responsibly, with precision next to godliness. MARRANCA: Since we’re talking about writing and the word, one of the things I feel is going on in your work, as part of its philosophical dimension, is that there is a certain sense of the performance of the text and the actor as writer. In this constant decentering of yourself, the representing of many different positions, you set up a cast of voices. It seems that for you writing is a kind of acoustic mask. There are a series of acoustic masks that are voices. In the beginning, when you wrote The Impossible Theater, you had a great vision of who an audience was. You could see an audience. But now it’s as if the work echoes the Beckettian voice: “Who’s there?” You’re writing now for an audience you don’t know of, for a theater that perhaps might not exist; or perhaps the one you want doesn’t have an audience. BLAU: Beckett was one of the voices that had a major influence upon my own ideas in the theater, and the growth of the Actor’s Workshop. At that time, two major presences were on the scene, along with Genet, Beckett, and Brecht. And if there was a line of inquiry in our theater, it was defined by the Brecht-BeckettPage 138 → dialectic. There was that part of me that was committed to the notion of popular theater, public theater, political theater—what we talked about earlier. But at the level of temperament, taste, it was the Beckettian mode that always had for me the deepest appeal. From the very beginning there was a kind of contradiction in it, a disturbing but seductive contradiction. Beckett once said to me, “I’m writing into the void.” There’s nobody there. So then they always ask: “Why do you do it?” DASGUPTA: I always thought the overwhelming theatrical episode in your life, if I can read into your life for a moment, was when your daughter Jessamyn was born. I still recall vividly an essay in which you wrote about seeing someone who didn’t want to be there. Someone who was forced, for all intents and purposes, from one void into another void, at least for that moment. BLAU: You’re talking about “The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey.” I don’t know. That may be true. Of course, I’ve had three other children. Certainly it was a moment, Jessamyn’s birth, at which I was able to define, as if it were an epiphany, what I was already thinking about. After the bloody show, when we went to the hospital, it looked as if it was going to happen very quickly, that Kathy wouldn’t labor much. The doctor thought it would take three or four hours at the most. But then, as Kathy said, she didn’t want to push down. Jessamyn wouldn’t come out, and they eventually had to put on those big cusps of surgical steel, the forceps—“the gravedigger puts on the forceps.” No question, Beckett has been ubiquitous in my thinking. When you were talking before about the solipsistic image of Oedipus, the sealed-off eyes, it occurred to me that the emblematic character between the modern and the postmodern is Hamm. “There’s something dripping in my head.” Don’t you always feel that? And if it would only cease. Thoughts going around like mad. Who wants to think like that when a child is born.В .В .В . Well, about writing into the void: why? Why do people climb Everest? Because it’s there, right? I write for the void because the void is there. MARRANCA: Your formative years in the theater were shaped by such major figures as Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pirandello. Today there is no group of playwrights of the same intellectual order to articulate the idea of theater. Certainly we can take the notion of performance to write about, or theatricality, or society as spectacle. But if you look at recent decades, or project to the near future, there’s not the same kind of engagement with dramatic literature that you experienced early in

your career. Imagine art criticism without important paintings to speak of. Ironically, we now have in the United States the most highly intellectual criticism of any time in the twentieth century. BLAU: I think that there are more substantial young people writing about theater today than there were when I was first working in the theater. When Bob Page 139 →Corrigan started The [Tulane] Drama Review, trying to set new standards for the theater, and keep it up to date, there were very few people who could write for it in this country. The first articles that I ever published, even before The Drama Review, were in the Educational Theater journal. And then for about twelve years I refused to write for it, because it was so vapid. There was really no discourse at all. Whatever one thinks of the newer theory, or the writing that’s now being done on issues of performance or spectacle, it’s also led to the fact that more intelligent people are writing about the drama too. There are good young scholars writing about British drama or feminist playwrights or the butchfemme aesthetic over at the WOW CafГ©. Where it will lead I don’t know. Meanwhile, the social institution has to be reassessed. Look: there are over 250 regional theaters in the country now. When we were out in San Francisco, there were less than a handful, struggling to come into existence. Until the Ford Foundation came on the scene, at the end of the ’50s, I didn’t know very much about the Arena Theater or the Alley Theater or the Seattle Repertory Theater, nor did they know much about the Actor’s Workshop. We were the first four theaters that Ford gave any money to, and before that—people forget this—there was simply no money on the scene: no grants to apply for, no NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], nothing. Now we do have the regional theater network, for better or worse. It’s subject to boards and bottom lines, of course, and without the intellectual matrix that exists in other countries. In France, for instance, there was a powerful institutionalized framework out of which, through the ideological struggles of the ’60s, the Maisons de la Culture could develop. Major writers, artists, intellectuals care about the theater; Sartre and Camus wrote for it, Duras today; ChГ©reau collaborates with Boulez. That’s not true here. Our best artists and writers couldn’t, for the most part, care less about the theater. Then there’s also the power of the ComГ©die FranГ§aise, the national theater against which everything is defined. The dynamic in the French theater has been, traditionally, that somebody out of the underground rises to the attack: “The ComГ©die?—merde! Desecrate it, blow it up!” Ten years later that person ends up directing it. We still don’t have anything like that going on here. Lee Breuer should have had a theater by this time. Richard Foreman should have had a theater by this time. All right, now JoAnne [Akalaitis] is running the Public. She’s obviously an intelligent woman, and it may be that it will set some sort of pattern, so that in time people with innovative capacities will take over one or another of our regional theaters. We hoped that would be the model when, in the ’60s, we went to Lincoln Center in New York, which we thought might be the focus of a national theater. One could say that was simply a desire for power, even a Page 140 →selfbetrayal, since I had been the most polemical voice on behalf of decentralization of theater in America. In Take Up the Bodies I tried to explain or rationalize that move, and I won’t elaborate here. But right in the middle of the Vietnam War, there we were with the biggest public soapbox in the country. We really had some access to power, we thought it might be exemplary. Well, it didn’t work then, and the idea of a national theater was always an untenable notion, the merest vanity now. Meanwhile the theater will still suffer competitive abrasions from the media. Plus the fact that younger people aren’t interested. My very best students—as you know, I don’t teach in a theater department—have next to no interest in the theater. The form doesn’t really compel them. They are interested, however, when you talk about things like body art, or Twin Peaks, on which they can write brilliantly. DASGUPTA: But doesn’t that itself augur for the demise, in some sense, of the canonical line of theater? Whether it’s conceptual or body art, and performance, or even this minimalist prospect

of theater you were talking about before, that you, as a writer and thinker, value so highly. BLAU: I’ve always had a feeling for scale. I’ve always oscillated. From that minimalist thing to what I talked about years ago as “risking the baroque.” In fact, I don’t think you can talk seriously about the idea of a civic theater unless you address the issue of scale. That was not an issue for me, however, with the KRAKEN group. That work was in part a sort of historical necessity, in part, for me, a psychological necessity. Which is to say, when I left Lincoln Center, in 1968, I was trying to rethink what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was right in the middle of a period when there was this intense critique of all our social institutions. It seemed to me interesting to say, well, yeah, let’s address the problem of developing a collective form, articulating theater value not by a single vision, but in a participatory process. That was in the spirit of the times, but I still think it may be the most valuable experimental project in the theater—as it seemed then, too, in education. I had worked over the years with various superb, well-known actors, but it was apparent that this had to be done with younger, probably untrained people whom I’d have to train myself. That was the major reason I went to CalArts, but one of the things that attracted me was the opportunity—everybody wanted it at the time—to rethink education from the ground up. Now, at CalArts we were trying to address almost every problem on the public agenda, but most immediately the old problem of what should an artist learn, other than what an artist wants to do. What should an artist study other than the making of art? We took that on in the conception of the School of Critical Studies, where the focus was not so Page 141 →much on criticism—there was that, too—but on what was critical at the time, critical to know and think about. It was also a matter of interest and need. We said, look, students today are concerned with the Vietnam War, drugs, the opening of new sexual possibilities, alternative lifestyles, etc. So we tried to get first-rate scholars, orthodox and unorthodox, to engage them on these issues. Classes were conceived, pedagogically and performatively, in response to interests. Now you can only do that, obviously, with very motivated students to whom you can virtually say create your own curriculum. There were dead ends and excesses, sure, but I don’t anticipate in my lifetime I’ll ever encounter anything as productive as the two or three years I was at CalArts, just in terms of sheer creative energy in an environment where one could learn what one wanted to learn. MARRANCA: Do you think that schools now are equipped to accommodate the incredible amount of new knowledge that’s available to us, to bring into each of our subjects? BLAU: No. Schools are not addressing that, except maybe in multicultural terms. Also, the time scheme of learning inhibits the ready acquisition of knowledge. MARRANCA: To move briefly from pedagogy, say, to ideology, when we were in Berlin last year together, it was just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and you were in the process of writing, or perhaps finishing, the book on ideology. How has this historical turn of events, plus your now divided time between the U.S. and Paris, influenced the direction that the latter part of the ideology book took? BLAU: I rewrote quite a lot. When I was in Paris, I thought I would finish the book in a month. All this stuff was taking place in Eastern Europe, the Gulf War came, I had to rethink parts of it. Not because I was committed to the ideology that seemed to be failing, but because what was happening simply verified what I wrote. That is, ideologies had caused immense disaster during the twentieth century, and yet our institutions required, still, ideological analysis. Then there was the paradox of an insurgence of ideological thought in our universities, and in the arts, when ideologies were on the ropes all over the world. As for myself, I’d learned a lot from Marx, though I’m not a Marxist. I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where there were a lot of socialists, and I had that in my background. I should add, by the way, that my interest in Marx has to do also with the way he writes. Not quite like Henry James, but closer than you’d think, with a nineteenth-century

rhetoric at the selvedge of thought, a kind of threshold at which he can’t quite keep track of the ideas. There are aspects of Capital which are simply opaque. That’s when I find him most interesting. My book is called To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance.Page 142 → I say in the preface that when the book appears to be about ideology it’s really about performance, and when it appears to be about performance it’s really about ideology. Actually, you can blame that wobbling effect on Marx. He didn’t really define ideology all that extensively, not like fetishism or surplus value. Now, it’s possible to speak about ideology in a doctrinal sense. It’s possible to speak of it in terms of certain displacements of value, or in the metaphors of displacement by means of which Freud defines the unconscious. The image of ideology most germane to the book is Marx’s notion of the camera obscura, and the inversion of value that comes about as a reflection of social relations that are already inverted. What we’re dealing with, then, is a double inversion. All of this—as in Althusser, who was influenced by Lacan—returns to Marx’s view of ideology as phantoms in the brain. Which is to say, ideology as theater. All that one might say about ideology, aside from the doctrinal, seems to me to describe the theatrical. A reality that is constituted by appearances, like the phantom, now you see it now you don’t. DASGUPTA: Let me ask you, Herb, since you’re so immersed in this quicksand of shifting perspectives—theatricalist, ideological, etc.: Do you sense that there is a certain danger in pursuing a line of philosophical thought that can lead to a virtual dismantling of the social fabric of a nation or of a culture? It seems as if something has to be said for stability. Eternal verities can always be put under a question mark, but to implicate this kind of interpretive dance as the basis for understanding the world, do you at all see this as a dangerous enterprise? BLAU: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I acknowledge that the temptation of the solipsistic is an aspect of it. On the other hand, if you look through all the books I’ve written, you’ll see that there’s a threshold at which I’ll say that, if I’m committed to anything, it is to that in the theater which resists its being totally theater. Which refuses in some way to give itself over simply to slippage. That, in fact, is the value of art, the artifice which resists. That’s the Brechtian part of me, I suppose, the desire to construct an image in the shape of history, even if it be an image of maximum slippage. DASGUPTA: Is that not the very pivot on which turns the postmodernist enterprise, the desire or need to construct, knowing full well in advance that what is being constructed partakes willfully of ideological and/or historical ambiguity and cultural relativism? BLAU: As I said earlier, when I used the subtitle Subversions of the Postmodern I had a certain duplicity or doubleness in mind. Which is to say, my writings have a certain sympathy, or identification, with the tendencies of postmodern or poststructuralist thought—the two are not always the same—and at the Page 143 →same time I’m subverting it. The Audience, Take Up the Bodies, The Eye of Prey, are fundamentally a critique of the extremities of poststructuralist thought. But it’s a critique as if from the inside. MARRANCA: I think you’re describing yourself as a Laudisi: it is so, if you think it is. A kind of raisonneur figure. BLAU: No, that’s a little different, although Laudisi could be played very close to what I’m describing. Which is to say, the right kinds of subversion occur from within. Let’s get it straight: when critical theory came on the scene, as an aspect of postmodern thought, there was every reason for it. There was a critical necessity. As I suggested before, however, there’s a threshold to any emancipatory dispensation of thought. Various aspects of postmodern critique have reached that threshold, are merely spinning wheels. In other respects, though, it’s changing direction, going back over neglected terrain. Actually, certain rejected ideas are being refocused in that critique,

including issues of authority, order, and ethics. There were issues that had to be opened up. They were urgent: questions of race, sexuality, class inequity, the canon, multiculturalism. Other things were displaced, phenomenologically bracketed. Now they’re coming back, as the repressed always does. What’s distressing, of course, is the repression that occurs on behalf of liberation. DASGUPTA: You’re talking about the right subversions of identity. Who is to know if the enterprise you are engaged in is right? You’re just telling me so. In the work itself, you are of course always placing that within a destabilizing context. BLAU: Yes, exactly so. But it’s as if I’m trying to create in writing a theatrical version of what, in fact, needs to be felt and perceived, so that you can know if you’re going to take issue with it, and what in fact you’re taking issue with. It’s like the problem that you have with students who, for example, describe postmodern effects, and have a lot of sympathy for postmodern tendencies. I keep telling them, you keep describing it, but few of you are willing to take the risks of what, in fact, you’re admiring. You write the same old square essays that you’ve always written, like every other essay, just like the essays that I used to see on old academic subjects. You’re now writing these about postmodernism, although what you’re describing implies that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. Now, I realize that the other kind of writing suffers at some limit from what my old teacher, Yvor Winters, would call the fallacy of imitative form. But I still think that there’s a critical and important difference between warding off something and understanding it by moving in its rhythm. Still, what is to say that you should take my word for this? DASGUPTA: Yes. Do you believe in truth? BLAU: I don’t believe in truth. Let me correct that. I may even believe in Page 144 →absolute truth, as Milton talks about it, for example, when he speaks of Psyche trying to cull the seeds. In other words, one is engaged in a limitless project of trying to ascertain what it is. I may believe in its absoluteness, but I’m not in any way entirely confident that I’m going to be able to see that. The issue, however, seems to me not so much one of truth, but as it might be understood in conventional dramaturgy, a matter of credibility and authenticity. Both of which, particularly authenticity, are very much discredited by new critical theory, with its ethos of suspicion. How do we know anything, then, with any reliability? All intelligence fails. The issue in writing is to make it as credible as possible, with intelligence as the measure, before it fails. DASGUPTA: I understand what you’re saying, that one has to be inside the rhythm. But at the same time, there has to be a sense of apartness, something that Brecht was trying to get at. At some point, you’ve got to get outside the rhythm, you’ve got to be inauthentic. To be credible, at some point, you have to counterpoint that with the incredulous. If there is no way of understanding, of always destabilizing both the credible and the incredulous, the authentic and the inauthentic, if they all start partaking in this game of shifting signifiers, then it’s impossible to truly stand apart from it. Is there a way of standing apart? It’s like the Archimedes thing—I forget exactly what he said—give me a lever and I can move the world. That obviously suggests that there has to be a certain fixity and a certain permanence in this relationship between the world and the observer. BLAU: Let me use the lever to make a distinction. There is an immense difference between the game of signifiers and the reality of slippage. Which is to say, as I look at the world it slips. It’s not anything I want for the world. I want permanence. I honestly value it. I value continuity. I care about people being credible. I treasure authenticity, or at least what appears to be authenticity. And for me, the measure of any friend is whether you can trust that person in a crisis. Take another criterion of the postmodern: the fetishism of play. As I’ve said, I never overvalue play. The discourse on play has never really interested me. Nor the forms of theater, during the 60s, that made a big thing of play. That was a difference I had with Richard [Schechner] during those years. Relative to that scene,

I’m a formalist. Bonnie is quite right when she says I’m a modernist, though as I think it over I’m not quite sure whether lapsed or prelapsarian. I spoke before, like Yeats or Eliot, of the fascination of what’s most difficult. That isn’t play. Still, intelligence curves, and there were things happening in the ’60s, within the ethos of play, that captured attention, even mine, like the Halloween parade downstairs. Look, the ’60s hardly need Page 145 →defending, so far as it was a period that questioned inauthentic power, by making things livelier as well. MARRANCA: At the end of Life after Death, Norman O. Brown talks about the fact that the greatest social problem facing us is when political leaders realize that people want happiness, not power. That’s interesting. BLAU: People are willing to give up a lot of power if they can live a reasonably decent life. They’re perfectly prepared to let others do the job of running things. It takes nothing away from the accomplishments of feminism to observe that many women today, even with the awareness of other options, are willing to relinquish a lot to patriarchal authority in order to preserve the family. It’s one of the reasons why the abortion issue is as complicated as it is. As for censorship, that’s far more complicated in a pluralistic society—where even your worst enemies have the vote—than you’d gather from the Village Voice. I think the art community to this day is really pretty sappy in its attitudes about what went on in the NEA with the Mapplethorpe thing. That issue was, once the iron was in the fire, relatively simple: you either have the NEA or you don’t, and it’s always been pretty anomalous to expect the extremist forms of dissidence to be endowed. That some of the know-nothings make this the basis of their argument doesn’t reduce the anomaly, which is a historical matter—a legacy of the avant-garde, unhappily not so dispossessed, with or without grants, as it once was. It would be nice to think the government would finance the most advanced research in the arts, as in the sciences, but that analogy fails as well, since it’s a lot harder to see where and how the sciences are obscene, outrageous, subversive, though they may very well be. The NEA is peanuts compared to the huge public subsidies abroad for theaters or artists that we respect, but let’s face it, Peter Stein and Patrice ChГ©reau, or even Peymann—who was fired at Stuttgart for running a benefit performance for the Baader-Meinhof group—are conducting their critique of the social order that supports them within institutional structures that are like public utilities. There’s no question of money for that, it’s there. Even Manfred Rommel, the mayor of Stuttgart, who protected Peymann before, couldn’t protect him when he stepped over the line. Peymann is now at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he’s getting a lot of flak for his dissidence, and he may or may not survive. The institution will. If our institutions, the orchestras, ballets, and regional theaters, get the lion’s share that’s only to be expected. What we still can’t expect, however, is that we’ll have anybody of Peymann’s distinction, or Stein’s, running our regional theaters. That bothers me more than whether or not Karen Finley was denied a grant. As for Frohnmayer, he was just about what one might have expected Page 146 →in that job, a decent man who wobbled, as one will in the whirlwind that hit him right away, his instincts being—when confronted with an impossible politics—to keep the bloody thing alive. Do you think if he hadn’t buckled the budget would have been approved? MARRANCA: Yes, the arts community easily got involved around a sexy issue rather than long-term cultural policy and the real politics of arts funding. Speaking of the NEA controversy and some of the issues that haven’t been aired out, but just glossed over in the censorship debate, maybe the next big threshold, and the kind of issue that should be addressed, is the politics of multiculturalism. With regard to theater, it is an implicit attack, I think, on the avant-garde and formalism, as opposed to the notion of people’s theater, or populism. Political correctness can be just as censorious as official culture. BLAU: This issue would take us back to the Brecht-LukГЎcs debates, though Brecht’s populism

was a formalism, and LukГЎcs’s realism was in the big leagues, in the spirit of Balzac and Tolstoy, requiring the highest consciousness. There was, of course, a populist strain in the avantgarde, more or less strained by confusion of classes, those out to shock the bourgeoisie not exactly card-carrying members of the proletariat. Where they tried to become that, in the early days of the Soviet Union, there was reason to believe that formalism could become a populism, as in the suprematism of Malevich or the cubo-futurism of Popova or the constructivism of Meyerhold. Even Trotsky’s critique of futurism assumes that art under the revolution will be a matter of the highest intelligence. The new populism is nothing like that, whatever other justifications there may be for multiculturalism in the theater or the arts or education. One needn’t put it down as a new tribalism to be disturbed, nevertheless, by an ideology of difference rejecting the melting pot and sustaining ethnic identities, if not divisions. You both make good distinctions in the essays you wrote for the interculturalism book, particularly in shifting attention from the Far East back to Europe, reminding us that you have to be careful of thinking the Eurocentric when Europe itself is so ethnically divided. Yet there are lessons for us in Eastern Europe. Again, it’s a matter of historicizing, or keeping a temporal dimension in mind, the limited longevity of any value. In this country, for the time being, ethnicity may be good; elsewhere, in the dissevered Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia, ethnicity may be regressive, reactionary, even barbarous—even when certain of its claims are legitimate. The thing about differences is that we want it and we don’t want it. People’s theater? Popular theater? The idea I had in mind when I returned from Europe in 1960—with the practice of Vilar, Planchon, the Berliner Ensemble as exemplary—is a far cry from what passes for such theater today. Page 147 →Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t pass. There is certainly historical justification at the Mexican border for the work done by Guillermo GГіmez-PeГ±a. Move it to BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], as he did recently, and that’s quite another matter. I was brought up not far from there, down Atlantic Avenue into the heart of darkness, and if you could get the people who now live in Ocean Hill—Brownsville to come to BAM, you’d have a working proposition. MARRANCA: One of the difficulties with the discourse on multiculturalism is its tendency toward ghettoization, and its attack on European culture. A true recognition of the diversity of cultures would lead one to a more far-ranging cosmopolitanism. It’s easy to make proclamations about global consciousness, but rather difficult to cultivate worldliness. But, to follow up your last point, what concerns me is the widespread withdrawal of support by funding sources, critics, artists, and institutions for work that does not in some way deal with a circumscribed politics of victimhood or the marginal. One strategy of postmodernism is to make modernism seem conservative because it’s formalist, as opposed to postmodernism, which is deemed pluralistic. It’s a specious version of the high/low culture debate. BLAU: The pluralism of art is not the pluralism of politics, particularly when the low culture of the Right comes into the picture, and even the populists get on their high horse about the inalienable rights of Art. By the way, the attack on formalism in the art world, which started in the ’60s, persists till this day with an intensity to which there is nothing comparable in the theater. Read the journals, Artforum or October, they’re still clobbering Clement Greenberg. But who, really, would theater people clobber of comparable status? And what was there in the American theater that, as the aesthetic site of domination and power, the target of attack, would have had anything like the substance of abstract expressionism? But the problem with the critique of modernism, particularly by younger people to whom it is now a reflex, is that the object being deconstructed is not sufficiently rich, invested with its historical power, what it earned from history. The modernist object is accorded all the critical substance of an empty sign, its essential radicalism ignored on the grounds that it’s essentialist. I find with my students

that they’re putting down works they’ve hardly read or never seen. It’s like the conferences they used to have, “Beyond Freud,” or like one I attended several years back, “Beyond Beckett.” Beyond what??? What does it mean to go beyond work that is itself so complicated and ambiguous that it is virtually inexhaustible? MARRANCA: Yes, I find the same tendency in the university, and among artists and critics: a desire to be identified as postmodern, while having no clear sense of the philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues that created the idea Page 148 →of modernism. In theater this debate is exacerbated by the fact that postmodernism elaborated a critique of modernism with no input from the history of theater, but rather architecture and literature. For example, postmodern claims centered in issues of purity, of pastiche, of popular culture, of textuality, of representation, as they are used to distinguish it from modernism, were articulated decades ago in modern and avant-garde theater practice. Any number of influential theater minds call into question the definition of postmodernism—for a start, Jarry, Yeats, Pirandello, Cocteau, Stein, Marinetti, Meyerhold, Brecht. In addition, what has been overlooked is that modernism in the performing arts—music, dance, theater—drew heavily on folk motifs and popular entertainments, frequently mixing the classic with the most contemporary. DASGUPTA: Be that as it may, the term postmodern is here to stay, its varied inflections employed for ideological purposes by theorists of the Left and the Right alike. On the sociopolitical front, however, postmodernism and its attributes have been tied to a “progressive” agenda, as defined by conservatives during and since the Reagan presidency, while its cultural implications have been viewed as anathema. Liberal thinkers, who concede the first point to the conservatives, nonetheless find the second disturbing and problematical. If in the first grouping, I would place someone such as Fukuyama, in the second group the figure of Habermas looms large. What I am trying to get at is whether postmodernism signals a triumph of conservative thinking in our time. BLAU: If I follow you, and you’re making, say, multiculturalism an aspect of postmodernism, then I’m not sure it has been embraced by conservatives on the political level. No doubt, most conservatives will concede the rights of women and minorities, but actions here speak louder than words, and even the words indicate that they don’t like monkeying around with the curriculum, say, to assure alternative readings of history with an altered reading list. Your question separates politics and culture, but it’s an insupportable separation now, which is why the currency in theory of the term cultural politics. As for postmodernism, it’s a pretty big umbrella, but it may be better to distribute its sins in the plural: there are various postmodernisms like various feminisms, etc. DASGUPTA: What it finally all boils down to is appearances, I guess. MARRANCA: Trick or treat. Let’s watch the parade—it’s starting. DASGUPTA: We never know what is appearance and what is reality. Or at least to all appearances we don’t. BLAU: I wouldn’t swear by it, but so it seems. The words are slipping again, or somebody’s playing around. For the time being, even with this relatively genialPage 149 → setting, music from the parade, I’m saying things and I’m wonderingВ .В .В . the words are slipping. The words fly up, the body remains below, always bereft, always feeling there’s some kind of inadequacy to what I just said. At that moment, yes, it’s nothing but appearance. Still, I assume that if you were in trouble and you called my name, I would recognize it. Originally published as “The Play of Thought: An Interview with Herbert Blau,” Performing Arts Journal 42 (September 1992): 1–32.

The Essential Herbert Blau: (Rereading his play of thought) Page 150 →Bonnie Marranca

Editing Matters February 18, 1992 Dear Herb: Please find enclosed an edited version of our interview. I think it’s very good, and I hope you will not be offended by the cuts—we had to cut something! .В .В .В It’s only gone through three reads so far.В .В .В . Once you look at it—and please don’t re-edit it—I will go through it and trim the piece until Gautam [Dasgupta] and I are satisfied that the interview is as tight as possible.В .В .В . The interview is very fluid for a long time, but the last few pages seem to wander and need to be pointed more.В .В .В . I hope you are pleased with it. I think it will be one of the best interviews we’ve ever published in the journal—and it may have the added bonus of making your work more comprehensible to readers who want to understand it at another level!! All best, Bonnie March 6, 1992 Dear Bonnie: As I said on the phone last night, the pages began to look like some document obtained by the right to access law from the CIA, with all the blackings out. Adding to what you already did, I blacked out more, getting Page 151 →rid of the more distracting garble, a word, a phrase, which is a considerable reduction in itself. Actually, it took only slight deletions and/or insertions to make the ideas emerge more clearly, and if you felt it was a good interview before, it’s now a lot better. I kept the changes to a minimum, a phrase here, maybe a sentence there, though I had to retype some pages because of cuts, to splice things together. Or some were so marked up, scrawled over. I had an aversion to them on aesthetic grounds.В .В .В . Give me a quick call to let me know that you’ve received it. Or if any questions. I leave here for Japan on the 12th, back on the 23rd. Yours, Herb

The Opacity of the Sentence Around the same time Herb went into the theater he discovered the writing of Henry James, which was to have a lasting influence on him in the long, diversionary, dialogic, deferred sentence construction that defines his own writing style. Herb starts out with an idea or observation, then moves in several parenthetical directions to gather into the sentence more and more possible points of view, everything he can think of to say, suspending the conclusion until the last possible moment. The process of thought, the process of writing are always present in what can only be a frustrated attempt to bring all thought to language, yet never to come to an end of thought even though the sentence itself must end somewhere. Herb revels in language like a ravishing lover. He admits to having a spatial conception of the sentence (a body of thought), and indeed his wandering Jew style of writing can be seen as the earliest example of a truly globalized reflexivity (a geography of learning)—of ideas, politics, artists, literature, cities, history—by anyone writing in the theater profession. What he does is to transform the page into a field of composition where, like Merce Cunningham’s points in space, everywhere is a center.

A philosopher who willfully rejects any system, Herb refuses to be fixed in any point of view, always turning to see another side of an issue, delaying as long as possible the arrival at any conclusion, deconstructing the sentence, and even when a period must be put in place, giving it all up to the inevitable slippage. His commas function as veritable ellipses. Herb’s curtained prose performances play out his own identity themes, namely, a fierce resistance to being known, cornered, defined. Adapting his beloved model of the actor (the player), Herb acts out a range of readings of whatever subject is at hand, never settling into a stabilized role. In an essay on him, “The Virtual Theatre of Herbert Blau,” Page 152 →which I wrote in 1994, I described his strategy as one of developing “acoustic masks,” and again in this Performing Arts Journal (PAJ) conversation I allude to the same concept. Pirandello surfaces a number of times in our conversation, in which at one point I refer to Herb as a raisonneur figure, like Laudisi. Herb even concedes that Laudisi can be played in the manner in which he performs his critiques of poststructuralist thought. I would go so far as to say that what best describes Herb is his belief that it is so if you think it is, it may be necessary to think it is, but it also may not at times be so. Likewise, poststructuralist theories appealed to him as a “play of thought,” and slippage as rhetorical strategy, even though he is a humanist at heart. Finally, you live a life not a theory. One of my favorite passages in our conversation is the exchange in which I refer to him as a “postmodernist,” a characterization to which he indignantly replies, “I never called myself a postmodernist. I wouldn’t dream of thatВ .В .В .” Then I tell him he is a “lapsed modernist.” He accepts that epithet now but comes back later to say, “I’m not quite sure whether lapsed or prelapsarian.”

Thinking Theater That “the audience does not exist until it is thought” strikes me as one of Herb’s most complex positions on the theater. In other words, for Herb the theater does not exist if it isn’t grasped by the consciousness of the audience. Furthermore, an obsession with the transformative moment underscores his belief that the theater does not exist until it materializes from whatever it previously was not—from, say, mere event or activity to a theatrical experience—in the understanding of the audience. The pivotal scene illuminating Herb’s idea is with The Watchman in the Oresteia. “I speak to those who understand, but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.” Thus for Herb an audience is made up of those individuals whose activity of mind leads them to theater. (None of the sentimental communitas for him—you have to earn the honor of attaining audiencehood.) Of course, what they understand and how they understand are open to interpretation. Spectatorship is essentially an act of criticism within this worldview. Moreover, it is linked to Herb’s earlier comments in which we speak about Hannah Arendt’s idea of theatergoing as a form of citizenship, which animated the Actor’s Workshop days. Herb’s main subject was always “What is theater?” and he regarded theater’s mission to bring meaning to appearances (which are always becoming disappearances). For him it was a question of understanding and knowledge, in contrast to theater’s function today as experience and sensation. In some sense, this antiscopic perspective can be compared to Duchamp’s Page 153 →antiretinal view of art whereby it is the spectator who completes the work. On the level of theater, his is a Brechtian position.

The Fragrance of Mind Herb in a subjunctive mood: “Art is what happens when I think better of myself. To the degree that there’s any purity in that, it accounts for the discrepancy between what I am and what I’d like to be. I can at some level, even when I fail in art, respect myself there more than I can in reality. Which is to say, I’m known to myself more acutely in art than I am known to myself outside it. This is not all egocentric. Art for me has always been the means by which I become more available to myself, and thus more responsible.” Another paradox: Blau the materialist, the scientist, the essentialist is most at home in artifice, which is more real to him than everyday life. This is the spiritual, messianic side of Herb, not a religious man but one with a feeling for the sacred, who believed in certain energies in the universe embodying themselves from time to time. Herb’s use of the image of Philippe Petit walking on a high wire between the World Trade Center towers to describe the value of certain ideas and objects invested with authority, power, and virtuosity, as floating about the material world, like a Divine Idea, marvelously distinguishes his metaphysics. This revelation underscores the spiritual dimension of Herb’s artistic thought and practice, which I share: spiritual discipline is pure mind.

Remains of That Day 1. At the beginning of our conversation Herb speaks of the “marriage of socialism and surrealism, which remained the impelling promise of the century.” That vision is rooted in May 1968 in Paris, the model for an activist theater Herb had hoped to bring to San Francisco, imagining an audience of workers, intellectuals, and students. I’ve tried to find more references to this political construct, which is also mentioned in To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance, published the same year as the PAJ discussion. Apparently, Herb is confirming the ideals of surrealism that Louis Aragon wrote about in his LES LETTRES franГ§aises commentary on Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance, which he saw in Paris in 1971, conceived as an open letter to his (deceased) friend AndrГ© Breton. “It is what we others, who fathered surrealism, dreamed it might become after us, beyond us,” the old poet exulted. Coincidentally, the original Aragon text appeared in the first issue of PAJ (May 1976). This is one of the few topics that I regret not pursuing further with Herb. Was his interest in surrealismPage 154 → related to the idea of repression? Release from his insistent thought? Or, simply, his Artaud side pulling against Brecht’s materialism and Beckett’s void? 2. Well into our discussion of what kind of theater he envisions, Herb speaks of the Brechtian part of him having “the desire to construct an image in the shape of history.” Most people consider the novel as a document of social history, but many great writers understood theater as a form of history—for example, Heiner MГјller, Brecht’s successor. Herb’s understanding of the world is grounded in a strong historical consciousness, even while he is subverting its versions in his poststructuralist gestus. What image would he have considered “the shape of history” in the early 1990s, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Oddly, this is not a topic here.

Correspondence Course July 12, 2011 Dear Herb: It was good to catch up with you the other day and I look forward to some time together in Chicago. I think you will be interested in Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains volume. It’s very erudite if written in a convoluted way. But I am not sure how much I am interested in the idea of reenactment, except for some arguments against it. I am certainly not interested in the performance studies approach to Civil War enactments, which form a considerable part of her argument. The discussion on liveness, disappearance, the parsing of Schechner is more fascinating. I’ve been sending a few more PAJ 100 invitations out now that I can relax somewhat, having gotten the artists, curators, presenters off the ground. You should really respond since you are a longtime PAJ contrib. editor and have published so much in the journal. All best, Bonnie July 14, 2011 Hi Bonnie: I’d actually ordered Performing Remains, & took a quick look. Seems like an ambitious undertaking, though the notion of remaining was always implicit in the transference of terms, like the appearance of reality to the reality of appearance.Page 155 → As for my own concern, it was always with the appearance of (dis)appearance, or the materialization of theater from whatever it is it is “not.” Or, as I’ve said, there is no future but the future of illusion, & we live in a world of appearance (no such thing as perfect transparency), what is “not” theater. But I could go on, & have through various booksВ .В .В . All best, Herb

August 2015

Renewing the Ado: An Adieu to Blau Page 156 →Peggy Phelan

Catching Mistakes When I first began reading Herbert Blau’s prose, I was reminded of the rhythms of Philip Glass’s music. Blau’s long mazelike sentences amplify the sound of thought plunging forward on the velocity of breath. Just as Glass employs repetition, accumulation, and fierce focus on short patterns of tone change to drive his scores, Blau’s prose persuades by cavalcades of clauses closing in on logic. I once asked Blau if he wrote to music, and he told me that he read his writing aloud as he composed it. His best writing moves between the ear and the eye and addresses each simultaneously. The subjects—or should we say the objects?—of Blau’s writing have ranged across topics as apparently diverse as fashion and death. Elin Diamond offers an impressive summary of his critical project: Meditations on appearance, repetition, bodily texts, temporality, history, and the illusory and elusive workings of power have been at the core of Herbert Blau’s theater theory for at least four decades. In life-long dialogue with modernism, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, the politics of the left, and, since the 1970s, deconstruction, Blau has probed and troped on the sublimations and displacements of postmodern performance practice, including his own 35 years of theatermaking.В .В .В . Blau’s writerly discourse explores and enacts the slippage of seeming into being at the “vanishing point” of spectatorial desire. (“Re: Blau,” 32) The slippage and seepage of Blau’s arguments often have the quality of a photographic print emerging from the chemical bath, developing from a thicketed Page 157 →blur to a sharply pointed image. This method allows both the effective and the affective force of the argument to accumulate into something rather more than critical style. This more makes Blau’s work on the so-called minimalist Beckett especially riveting. Before turning to the significance of Blau’s encounter with Beckett, I want to pause briefly over the general theory of performance that he sketched in “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play.” First published in 1983 and reprinted widely thereafter, “Universals” is rightly regarded as one of the richest essays in the field of performance studies.1 The essay moves between claims that seem utterly clear, albeit sobering—“Someone is dying in front of your eyes. That is another universal of performance”—to dense asides that force one to stop and retrace pronouns, unsaid implications, and diffuse references (156). Reading Blau, in other words, often means rereading him, and this going back and forth mimics something central to thought’s own oscillating movement between precision and rumination. Here and there Blau’s attempt to balance these different impulses produces an unsettling set of claims that risk becoming too absolute. Take, for example, these assertions: “All performance moves between expectancy and observance, between attentiveness to what happens and astonishment at what appears. The performances of a given culture may stress one more than the other, but no performance is either all happening or all appearance. And there is no way of resolving which comes first, the happening or the appearance” (“Universals,” 153). I find this passage difficult to parse, but I am interested in the appetite for the absolute—note the temerity of Blau’s thrice-repeated all and the blunt surety of the two nos. Since these claims come at the end of a discussion that includes a dizzying parenthetical remark, the question of the absolute is apposite: (I remember being present at a Eucharist, as an observer, when the communicants went up to receive the wafer and the wine, and the priest reciting the liturgy reversed the order of the offering in the repetition of the words. I believe I was the only one who heard it, maybe not even the priest and the woman before him when it happened, who was going to be ordained and with whom, I had reason to suspect, he was having an affair. It is interesting to speculate about the nature of that performance if I hadn’t been there and—in what appeared to be a “perfect ceremony of love’s rite” (Son., 23.6)—nobody had heard it, though my separating presence might have induced it by already

theatricalizing the event.) (151–52)

Quite apart from its effect on the original event, Blau’s “separating presence” transforms the usual conventions of critical prose. In the first paragraph of Page 158 →“Universals,” Blau cites both Henry James and Sigmund Freud, suggesting that James’s definition of drama as an ado, a word whose brevity offers “an almost molecular view of performance” (140), has much in common with Freud’s focus on the dense performances of everyday life, the much ado we do routinely. Thus we might consider Blau’s vignette one illustration of the ado of the theater of psychoanalysis, or as “an almost molecular view” of What Maisie Knew. Blau, attending the sacrament of the Eucharist “as an observer,” notes that the priest says, “The blood and body of Christ,” rather than “The body and blood of Christ,” when he offers communion to a woman with whom the priest, Blau suspects, is having an affair. You don’t have to be a Freudian to realize the astonishing force of that slip. But Blau’s prose forces the reader to rustle through the folds of the robe a bit to grasp the error. The priest is akin to the speaker-lover of Shakespeare’s sonnet 23, the imperfect actor on the stage who fumbles his lines because of the greatness of his love. Blau’s “attentiveness to what happens” when the priest reverses the order of the liturgical phrase resonates in two directions. Blau believes that he is the only one to notice the priest’s slip, but his prose counts him among that band of brothers, those happy few, who “hear with eyes belong[ing] to love’s fine wit” (sonnet 23). In other words, it is the priest’s mistake that confirms Blau’s belief: not that he is the single observer but that his suspicion about the affair is correct. Thus he now takes up the position of the observer who is in on the secret and therefore, as James’s novels make so painfully clear, implicated in it. Blau’s account aims not to affirm the affair (although that affirmation might be, appropriately perhaps, something to the side) but to give witness to the force of the live, to the heartrending and therefore heart-affirming mistake that so often complicates our purported desire for (too) perfect ceremony. Mistakes are often infectious, something you catch more than something you make or do. The ado of Blau’s long sentence made me wonder if perhaps he was encouraging me to mistake the subject of the ordination. I kept reading that the priest, not the woman, was going to be ordained. I even wondered if perhaps there were two priests, the one offering the Eucharist and the one about to be ordained. Women were rarely ordained in the early 1980s, and it seems odd that Blau does not remark it. Thus the scene that Blau paints here is queer in several ways: for Blau, the priest says more than he intends, while my own “separating presence” as a reader leads me to wonder why Blau says less. Blau’s attention to his potentially distorting presence as a spectator reminds us how often we downplay the effect of our own presence, for good or for ill, in the arena of the live. Such acknowledgment does not require abandoning the effort to comment evenhandedly on an event. Rather, it obliges us to account for ourselves as often as we can, even if that means acknowledging that Page 159 →our separating presence cannot be fully known. Such acknowledgment must be made without displacing our attention from the event to our own egos. Blau’s parenthetical account of the priest’s error, much ado about something, reminds us that love, like the performance event, requires a confident witness. “If we ask too many questions the subject is likely to disappear, like the dream of love, into the questions, so that the questioner is left with the dreaming” (Take Up, 94). Blau’s critical writing is often a lover’s discourse, a performance that enlists “attentiveness to what happens and astonishment at what appears.”

Beckett and Blau, Godot and Endgame Blau’s best work combines a seriousness of purpose with a refreshing intimacy of address. His intimacy with Beckett came from his early association with Godot. Blau’s staging of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin, the maximum-security prison, in 1957 (just four years after the play opened in Paris) provided the touchstone for Martin Esslin’s influential study The Theater of the Absurd (1961). The production, helped by Esslin’s commentary, soon took on the quality of myth. To his great credit, however, Blau continually hewed to the facts. As late as 2003 he reminded us that Beckett’s text had been chosen for the San Quentin production in lieu of

Blau’s first choice, a play of his own that had been rejected because it had parts for women. Godot got in because it left women out. Call it absurd, but it is from these calculations that history is made. The arduous textual work that directing Beckett requires—precise tutelage with the playwright’s impeccably chiseled dialogue, coupled with a concern for putting that dialogue not only “on its feet” but also in the netted vibrant space between actor and observer—informs all of Blau’s writing on Beckett. Indeed, Blau’s discourse on and with Beckett provides a model for the revered but rarely achieved merger of creative and critical thinking. For me, Blau’s work on Beckett constitutes his most significant contribution to performance and theater studies. While Blau’s production of Godot has been justifiably lauded from the start, his reading of Endgame, the play Beckett “disliked least,” compels me most. Concentrating on Hamm’s enigmatic pronouncement that “something is taking its course,” Blau suggests that Beckett stages thought in the act of thinking. What I referred to earlier as thought’s oscillating movement between precision and rumination becomes the setting for a rhythmic external and internal dialogue that keeps us transfixed, even as it provokes dreams of fleeing. The torturous but inexhaustible gait of Clov, described by Blau as “constipated,” serves as a prologue for Blau’s production, a twelve-to-fifteen-minute mime that offsets the ensuing score in which Hamm strives to take center stage: “Don’t leave me Page 160 →there! .В .В .В Am I right in the center?” Continually repositioning himself in response to the dialogue, Hamm can neither cease to move nor generate movement on his own. More bitterly, he cannot think on his own. His thought, that often enigmatic something that takes its course only through dialogue, requires call-and-response. Barking like a mad father, a failed god, a bastard son, Hamm compresses prayer, pun, and plea: “Use your head, can’t you, use your head. You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.” For Blau, Hamm’s restless search for the center centers Endgame in the rough terrain of poststructuralist thought avant la lettre. To Hamm’s question “Am I right in the center?” Blau answers bluntly: More or less, a push here, a push there. Am I in the center? An indifferent push. In the center! But we well know there is no center. We are talking deconstruction, no? There is no center, no origin. So where do you put him? If you care about these things, if you care about thoughtВ .В .В . and if you don’t, no matter, it’s just a laugh. But that ain’t Beckett. There may not be a center, but the desire for it—the source of his unerring poignancy amid the facile parody of the postmodern—determines the way the thing looks, and sounds, its soundings, the way the body moves, the way one thinks. Think! (Sails, 76) Written by an artist-thinker who reminds us that to care about thinking requires us to care about image, sound, and body, as well as the imperative and the exclamation point, Blau’s encounter with Beckett, on the page, on the stage, and in Paris cafГ©s, was his way of renewing the ado that theater continually stages.

Coda 1 Herb was one of the first white men of his generation to welcome women into the profession. He did it without fanfare, without claiming any kind of advanced enlightenment. He sustained a long dialogue with some of the most influential feminist performance theorists of the 1980s and 1990s—I am thinking in particular of Sue-Ellen Case, Janelle Reinelt, Elin Diamond, and Vicki Patraka—and he welcomed my own early work with generosity and interest. I was never lucky enough to be his student in the customary sense, but in addition to all the things I learned from him as his reader, he taught me two important lessons face-to-face. In March 2003, Herb and I were speaking at a conference held at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I gave a paper on Ronald Reagan, concentrating primarily on the assassination attempt and its aftermath. I showed a videotape of Nancy Reagan speaking with Barbara Walters. During Page 161 →the question-and-answer period that followed my talk, the dialogue took on a somewhat meanspirited tone in relation to Nancy. Herb intervened, saying sternly, even perhaps with a hint of moral disgust, that we were overlooking Nancy’s genuine grief. He asked us to imagine how we would feel if the person we had loved for decades had been almost killed by a stranger. As Herb chided

us, I began to hear the dialogue between Nancy Reagan and Barbara Walters in a different key. Herb’s empathy and compassion were simultaneously retrospective and prospective. He was actively recalling Nancy’s fear and anxiety and responding to it by reminding us of the complexity of grief. He was also challenging us to imagine how we would feel and act if we had to face such a grim event ourselves, on camera for the world stage. Herb’s remarks were chastening because they allowed me to hear a faint but definite misogyny at work in our derision of Nancy, something I myself had been infected by, unwittingly. To be a feminist does not mean one has escaped the vast reach of misogyny; Herb’s intervention made my work and my heart bigger. Shortly after I had agreed to come to the “Performance and History: What History?” conference in Seattle, I adopted a beautiful daughter, Laura, then three years old. She received many welcoming presents in those first disorienting days, including a book called Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon.2 The book was packaged with a mutable green plastic dragon, and Laura liked to bend the dragon every which way. (She gave the book itself “an indifferent push.”) When we arrived at the lunch during the conference, I introduced her to Herb, and she looked at me, eyes wide, and asked, “The dragon?” With the wit and delight of a three-year-old, Herb threw himself into the part she had named, and the two of them were off. His willingness to become a dragon to delight a frightened young girl remains one of my most cherished gifts, an enactment of love across vast chasms of age, gender, race, and species. That he did it so rapidly, so openly, was a great illustration of Herb’s dedication to the enlivening capacity of life and love. Having utterly no history with her, he took her question “The dragon?” and became it for her with expansive joy. Smiling widely, he growled and clawed and let her run to and from him like Freud’s spool. Here and gone. Man and dragon. Friend and (faux) foe. Fear and fun. Laura and Herb are also linked for me because of their peculiarly Beckettian sensibilities. Herb has written well about the childlike tug of the dialogue in Godot, a play that has more than a little in common with both hide-andseek and fort-da. But it was not until I had fallen in love with Laura’s dialogue that I heard anew what both Blau and Beckett had sounded out before. Very soon into our habits, I would pick Laura up from preschool; secure her in her car seat, that Freudian couch par excellence; climb back in behind the wheel; and resume our daily dialogue. Page 162 →P: What did you do in school today, honey? L: Nothing. P: Who was there? L: Nobody. P: What did you learn? L: Nothing. And so I drove on, through the San Francisco fog, listening to Laura teach me how to renew my reading of Beckett and Blau. The awareness of the everyday ado, the secret passion of parenting, drove Blau to restage Beckett, on the stage and on the page. Laura and I don’t go to Paris cafГ©s, or at least not yet, but we do keep reading books with Herb’s name in them. Rereading renews the heart’s ado even when nothing happens and nobody comes and we can do nothing more than hum. Call it life, call it love, but keep calling it all.

Coda 2: A Second Take on Mistakes “It very often strikes me that people are most interesting at the point in which they don’t quite understand what they are saying” (Blau, “Play,” 14). Blau’s tolerance for doubt, uncertainty, and ambiguity was at one with his passion for precision, conceptual

rigor, and saying it right. When I look at the field of performance studies today, I see a fulsome embrace of the latter and less acceptance of the former. Incomprehension is perhaps an odd thing to pine for in a scholarly field, and yet, as Blau reminds us, the act of (critical) thinking is often more interesting than the logical coherence for which it usually strives. Indeed, thinking that perches on the ledge of, rather than firmly within, what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the prison house of language,”3 has an important role in the expanded field of performance studies. Cavorting on this ledge allows us to view the closets, the wiring, and the hallways often hidden within the majestic rooms dedicated to scholarly production. The first part of my essay makes much of Blau’s ado, the molecular view of performance that he attributed to Henry James. But his attribution puzzles. Let’s return to the opening sentences of Blau’s “Universal”: Henry James, whose struggle with the theater left performative traces in the consciousness of his prose, wrote succinctly in one of his prefaces of the drama as an ado. There is in the brevity of the word an almost molecular view of performance. (140). While it is certainly true that James wrote, without commercial or critical success, for the stage, the novelist did not refer to drama as an ado in any of his Page 163 →prefaces. James employs the word ado in only one preface, in the 1908 edition of Portrait of a Lady. The novel, which had originally been published in serialized form in 1880–88, had been criticized for the apparent disjuncture between its great length and its putative “trivial” plot, the romantic quest of Isabel Archer. In the 1908 preface, James defends the novel: The novel is of its very nature an “ado,” an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for—for positively organizing an ado about Isabel Archer. (James: “Preface”) Pace Blau then; James claims the novel, not the drama, is “of its very nature an вЂado.’” Why might it be that Blau does not “quite understand” what James is saying? Perhaps Blau is caught in a Bloomian “misprision,” a generative misreading that allows Blau a way to clear the field for his own work (Bloom: Anxiety). For by both invoking the authority of James and misstating his claim, Blau can develop a “molecular view” of his own performance. Moreover, just as Freud, Blau’s other authority in the opening paragraph of “Universals,” viewed his psyche as the template for a universal psychic subject, Blau’s own molecular view is in service of discovering “universals of performance.” And his first claim is: What is universal in performanceВ .В .В . are the marks of punctuation which are inflections (or economic indices) of consciousness even in performance which, like autistic play, speaking in tongues, or Sufi whirling, seems to occur without it. (“Universals,” 140) Here we enter a peculiar kind of subjunctive sense, an “as if” that suggests that performance occurs, universally, within quotation marks. Therefore, the invocation of consciousness that one is participating in a performance must take place for an event to be a performance. This claim continues to surprise me even now, after all the times taught, all the pages written, read, and cited, after all the dead gone and buried or burnt, after all the students alive and searching, after all the prose unwritten and rewritten, all the poems spoken and sung, all the hymns hummed, after all the love found and lost, after the artists became entrepreneurs, after the universal itself lay vanquished and rejected, after the last comma turned into an emoji and texted itself into a phoneless sky. My surprise occurs as Blau moves from the singular verb form employed in the clause “what is universal” to the plural form of the same verb, “are the marks of punctuation,” later in the sentence. While this is not the place to debate nominalism’s argument with the term universal (Benjamin’s The Plural Event does Page 164 →that well), I will note in passing that the slender s appended to that noun does not bottle the spillage of the philosophical debate about the category. Thus, perhaps we should refer to categories of universals or propose that universal be regarded as an uncountable noun, philosophically and performatively, if not grammatically. If designated an uncountable noun, universal would not take a plural form and there would be no need to delineate

universals. This is all probably too much luggage, too much baggage—to employ two more uncountable nouns—for a mere coda, even this second one. And yet I prefer not to delete it because I think there is something, not nothing, at stake in the difference between the uncountable and the countable. Punctuating No-Commas In the section of James’s preface to his Portrait that interests Blau (“The novel is of its very nature an вЂado,’ an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for—for positively organizing an ado about Isabel Archer”), James places quotation marks around ado and offsets the word consciously with two commas. The quotation marks function as a nod to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and the novelist evokes that comic drama as a way to distinguish his own approach to the marriage plot. Suggesting that the light touch and brevity of Shakespeare’s play simplifies the “ado” of love by rendering it an illusionary “nothing,” James insists that his Portrait, and novels in general, are in service of the often subtle but consequential “somethings” that love performs and provokes. Therefore, one can perhaps conclude that Blau’s contention that James mentions drama as an ado in one of his prefaces is the understandable result of Blau “just” conflating Shakespeare’s dramatic ado with James’s. Why, then, does Blau bother invoking James at all? He could have simply attributed the conceptual force of the “ado” to Shakespeare and have left James out of it altogether. Why is James crucial to Blau’s argument? In addition to the quotation marks around ado, James nestles the word consciously within two commas. (“Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for”) Since Blau’s first universal argues that performance gets to be performance through consciousness that one is participating in one, an awareness activated by punctuation marks, his allusion to James’s preface makes more sense. However, a gap between the meaning of the words on the page and the recognition of the point emerges. The words say that James calls drama an ado, which he does not do. But his preface does more than it says, at least for Blau, and it is this more that allows us to see how generative mistakes can be. James belongs in Blau’s argument but not because he argues that drama is an ado. Rather, the work James does in Blau’s argument derives from the very Page 165 →apparatus, the doing, of the novelist’s prefaces. The New York edition of James’s novels contains both prefaces and newly edited versions of the novels. The vast majority of the edits James made involved adding and deleting punctuation marks, especially commas. Spurred by the opportunity to republish his novels, James undertakes the act of revision in precisely the manner Blau describes: “What is universal in performanceВ .В .В . are the marks of punctuation which are inflections of consciousness.” And the consciousness that James calls his reader to summon in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady is the something, rather than the nothing, at stake in love. James’s Portrait traces the complexity and serious repercussions of Isabel Archer’s romantic quest. While Shakespeare’s dramatic comedy has encouraged readers to assume that love’s (initial) confusions constitute much ado about nothing, James’s novelistic Portrait insists that these confusions constitute much ado about something that writers (and readers) are wrong to overlook. And because James wrote all his prefaces after rewriting his novels to alter their punctuation, Blau’s “(re)doing” of James argument calls our attention to the act of adding and eliminating punctuation as a way to register the difference between the “something” that constitutes the labor of lost writing and the “nothing” that registers for most readers in the difference between multiple editions of the “same” work. Thus, the punctuation marks Blau asks us explicitly to notice render writing itself as a complex “doing,” an act of conscious performance. Critical writing in performance studies requires more than stating an argument or describing an event; it requires attention to the mechanics of syntax, the echoing rhythm between the words written and the punctuation marks that conduct the appearance and disappearance of words and of themselves. James wrote the prefaces for the New York edition of his novels in 1906–8. He took that opportunity to revise his novels and he made, as I’ve noted, a particular effort to alter his comma use. James’s signature style,

the reason he retains his hold on our imaginations well after the particulars of his plots fade away, is because he creates a-doing that pivots in the swiveling curve of the comma itself.4 In a 1914 letter to his agent, J. B. Pinker, James grants permission for the publication of a new edition of his very popular novella The Turn of the Screw “on the distinct understanding, please, that [the new edition] conform literatim and punctuation to the [New York edition] text—to the last comma or rather, more essentially, no-comma” (quoted in Sheppard, 254). James’s “no-comma” punctuation, in other words, pivots between Shakespeare’s dramatic “nothing” and his own novelistic “something.” And it is this remarkable reflexive consciousness that Blau captures in the second paragraph of his own “Universals”: Page 166 →Nothing may come of nothing, but it would also be precise to think of that replicated nothing as a substantive ado. For there is a crucial particle of difference—especially where nothing is concerned—between that and just doing, between just breathing eating sleeping loving and performing those functions of just living; that is, with more or less deliberation, doing the act of breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, like Didi / Gogo do the tree in Godot. It is a difference as distinct as the presence or absence of punctuation in the previous sentence. (140, emphasis in the original) While Blau is incorrect to say that James called drama an ado in his preface, he is absolutely right to invoke James as an authority on the ado of punctuation, especially in relation to the presence and absence of commas. This is not so much a matter of counting commas as they enter and exit the mise-en-page of James’s novels but rather a matter of noticing the consciousness that makes something of their performance. Prepositions and Propositions This essay theatricalizes something of my thinking about, toward, with, for Herbert Blau. And if the proliferating prepositions of that last clause—about, toward, with, for—echo the grammar drills the nuns who flung me toward writing made me recite daily, that seems only appropriate in an essay that also alludes to the secrets of priests. (The nuns who taught me had been beset with the echoing force of all too many Phelans gazing up at them expecting math; all seven of us were destined for finance, but two of us escaped into the expanse of uncountable nouns.) Giving punctuation marks pride of place in his taxonomy of universals of performance, Blau reminds us how deeply connected the “points of contact” between anthropology and grammar were in the early formation of performance studies. In addition to the widely discussed distinction between the “as if” of performance’s subjunctive mood and the “this is” of the real’s indicative, anthropologists such as Victor Turner were arguing that social relations were best understood as prepositional phrases tasked with expressing the complexity of attachment and distance: Members of our species are peculiarly festooned with prepositions, with relational and functional connectives. If we are, visibly, islands, we are genetically and culturally linked by ties of love and hate, by the pleasure bond, by the pain bond, by the duty chain, by noblesse oblige, or by innate or induced needs for dominance and submission. We are for, with, against, toward, above, below, against, within, outside or without one another. (Turner: “Liminality and Performative Genres”: 19) Page 167 →Grammar, then, stages the drama of relationality, proximity and attachment, and thus prepositional phrases, quotation marks, and commas are always already about more than trafficking in syntax. And in my view, performance studies still needs to foster consciousness of those operations that structure the writing in (and against) the field as written discourse. (And here my parenthetical “against” finds a place for Turner’s repetition of it in his list of prepositional phrases quoted above. He knew all too well what he was, and we are, up against in thinking of attachment as a matter of grammar.) These days I read a lot of critical writing in performance studies that is deeply dedicated to understanding a vast array of events but generally uninterested in the distractions, mistakes, and double readings that are vital to performance itself. Blau’s writing is an homage to the thinking that theater creates and the thinking that writing composes.

Without a-doing, writing about performance risks becoming “just” thought, that which exists before and after the two enterprises that shaped Blau’s work: science, first, and critical writing later. If Blau finds more drama in James’s ado than the novelist himself claimed, then it may be worth recalling that Blau’s original ambition was to be a scientist and chart “a molecular view” of the world’s mysteries through chemistry. His experimental habit of mind in the theater was indebted to the habits of the lab. Blau’s work as a director, especially of Beckett and Genet, the genius inquisitors of the line/s between appearance and illusion, informed not only what he wrote but how he wrote. Indeed, Blau’s later turn to critical writing (after largely leaving theater) might best be seen as his attempt to animate thinking beyond the limits of theatrical space-time and mortal human bodies and toward the uncountable itself. Performance studies today might consider falling a bit more for misunderstandings and misreadings of the sort Blau performed. Otherwise it risks becoming a mode of philosophy, a discipline devoted fundamentally to rational knowing. When I first became enthralled with performance studies I was eager to read and write prose that risked not knowing because I wanted to be close to that which exceeds the logical.5 For as with Blau, I believe that both fields and “people are most interesting at the point in which they don’t quite understand what they are saying” (Blau, “Play,” 14). Sound Escapes What makes live art interesting to me is the unexpected, unscripted mistake, for this is precisely where the liveness of live art emerges. For example, the live broadcast of the 2016 Grammy Awards, on CBS, was rife with errors: bad sound, awkward starts and stops (the show’s beginning was announced prematurely, twice), cutoff speeches, and the usual miscues and jokes that fell flat. The mistake I cherished most occurred during Adele’s performance. Famous Page 168 →for her flawless voice during live performances, it quickly became clear that her performance was not going to be among her best. The so-called safety microphone, the back-up microphone used if the first microphone fails, fell into the piano during the set change that preceded her appearance. As Adele’s pianist, Miles Robertson, began playing “All I Ask,” the piano strings sounded like a guitar. When the sound engineers heard the problem, they tried to fix it. They muted Adele’s voice instead of the errantly amplified piano strings. Clearly flustered, Adele kept singing, although she sounded alternately pitchy and flat for the first moment or so of the song. The engineers were able to fix the sound in the hall, though not in the mix for broadcast. Adele told Ellen DeGeneres a few days later that the technical problems “put the whole thing off.”6 While the performance was going on, however, people on Twitter began to speculate that Justin Bieber, who would be the next to perform, was rehearsing on an acoustic guitar too close to the stage. Others, who clearly dislike Adele, argued that the bad performance was proving them right and she was now revealed to be the “overrated” singer they believed her to be all along. Still others, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson of Modern Family, wondered if perhaps a tambourine was caught in the piano. Immediately after the broadcast, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) president Neil Portnow went to the press room and explained the technical issues and praised Adele for overcoming them: “All credit to her for the professional that she is. The show must go on. She did a great job. We certainly don’t like when those things happen, but those things happen sometimes.” This was a bit more long-winded than Adele’s own tweet, sent shortly after her performance: “The piano mics fell on to the piano strings, that’s what the guitar sound was. It made it sound out of tune. Shit happens. X” The mistake-filled Adele performance that aired on CBS was quite different from the performance heard live in the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Many recorded Adele’s performance on their cell phones and later uploaded it to the Web. The difference reveals, once more, the enormous chasm between live events and events broadcast live. In the Staples Center, the song sounded great. This raises many interesting questions about a phrase such as “Adele’s performance on the 2016 Grammy Awards.” Is it correct to say that she performed once but the reception of the performance operated in two registers? Or should we explicitly acknowledge that the distinction between the audio in the broadcast and the audio in the hall marks the effects of intermedia common to all broadcasts of live music and sound art?7 Or perhaps it makes sense to declare that Adele created two

performances of the same song, one for those in the hall and another for those listening to the live broadcast. For this declaration to hold, however, one must consider whether Adele is the artist responsible for Page 169 →both creations. No matter which choice one makes, the dependent clause will matter: “Adele’s performance, as broadcast on the 2016 Grammy Awards, was marred by technical difficulties.” The addition of the clause offset by commas creates a hinge between the live event in the hall and the broadcasting of it.8 I worry that performance studies scholars sometimes hurry over these hinges though, or simply fail to hear them. If the vitality of live performance resides in the mistake, it seems odd to have built a critical discourse so devoted to getting it right. Cunning methodologies and sophisticated theories can only take us so far. Scholarship must hew to the facts as we know them; the best critical writing, though, is more than a recitation of who did what when, where, and why. As Blau’s writing makes clear, thinking itself is the performance we still need to become conscious of. Commas are the pivots that hinge our not always certain thoughts. And their choreography on the page hints at the potency of failure and mistakes, the going forward and retreating that give thinking’s ado its vitality. For sure, Henry Sayre made many blunders when he wrote The Object of Performance and Kristine Stiles had every right to correct the historical record and point out the mistakes of both fact and theory that Sayre made. Nonetheless, after reading Stiles’s review I wanted to destroy all the writing I had done in preparation for the publication of my first book, Unmarked. Reading Stiles, I knew, deeply, that I knew much less than she. As I read, I heard the echo of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing: “O mischief strangely thwarting!” I was absolutely sure that my still nascent book would be a riot of error and mistake; before I read Stiles’s review, however, I had assumed that I would be the only one aware of these secrets. So consumed had I been with the task of writing that I had somehow forgotten that books are read. After a period of paralysis I grew discontent with my response. Never publishing would be a capitulation to silence, the place women are often assigned in discourse. Letting my fear and ego dictate that I remain hidden seemed to endorse the very structure I wanted to deconstruct in Unmarked. Moreover, I truly loved teaching, and I recognized that if I wanted to keep my job I had to publish. I also felt that the field itself, still so young, should be given room to try things out as it fumbled its way toward clarity. It was in this spirit that I wrote “Note on Hope: for my students,” a chapter in Unmarked that tried to outline why we might actively welcome, rather than live in dread of, misunderstandings and mistakes. This was somewhat of a blind gesture; I did not understand then how much Blau had preceded me in valuing the generative force of failure, misfires, and mistakes. Perhaps both of us learned the value of these acts through our encounters with Beckett and Genet. No matter the source of these lessons, critical writing in performance studies learns most from its intimacy Page 170 →with mistakes. And now that he is gone, I want to give witness to this aspect of Blau’s important teaching. There may not be a center, but the desire for itВ .В .В . determines the way the thing looks, and sounds, its soundings, the way the body moves, the way one thinks. Think! (Sails, 76) It is the sound of that imperative exclamation point that I miss most now. I hope this second coda helps renew its soundings.

References Auslander, Philip. “At the Listening Post; or, Do Machines Perform? International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 1.1 (2005): 5–20. Blau, Herbert. “The Play of Thought: An Interview with Bonnie Marranca and Gautum Dasgupta.” Performing Arts Journal 14.3: 1992: 1–32. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Blau, Herbert. “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play.” Sub/stance 11.4 (1983): 140–61.

Behler, Ernst. “Translating Nietzsche in the United States: Critical Observations on The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche.” In Translating Literatures, Translating Cultures, edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer and Michael Irmscher, 125–48. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Benjamin, Andrew. The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger. New York: Routledge, 1993. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Diamond, Elin. “Re: Blau, Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming.” Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 32. Heller, Erich. “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Thoughts.” Encounter (September 1959): 40–47. Holmes, James. “The Dean Scream: An Oral History.” Esquire, January 29, 2016. http://www.esquire.com /news-politics/a41615/the-dean-scream-oral-history/ James, Henry. “Preface to The Portrait of a Lady” (1908). Accessed January 2016. http://www.onlineliterature.com/henry_james/portrait_lady/0/ Jameson, Frederic. The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Sheppard, E. A. Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw.” Auckland, NZ: University of Auckland Press, 1974. Page 171 →Stiles, Kristine. “Art and Its Objects.” Arts, November 1990, 35–47. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Performative Genres.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, edited by John J. MacAloon, 19–41. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. Pages 156–62 of this essay were originally published as “Renewing the Ado: Blau and Beckett,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (xxx): 11.

Notes 1. Herbert Blau, “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play,” Sub/stance 11, no. 4 (1983): 140–61 (hereafter “Universals”). 2. Jules Bass, Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon, illustrated by Debbie Harter (Cambridge, MA: Barefoot, 2005). 3. The phrase “prison house of language” has been dominant in US contexts since Fredric Jameson’s 1972 book of that name appeared. The phrase itself comes from Erich Heller’s translation of Nietzsche in his essay “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Thoughts” (Encounter, September 1959, 40–47), 46. Jameson modifies Heller’s “prisonhouse” to “prison house” and does not cite Heller’s translation. Heller’s translation is a poetic rendering of Nietzsche’s sprachlichen Zwang, which comes from aphorism 522 (unpublished during his lifetime) in Der Wille zur Macht. Walter Kauffmann and R. J. Hollingdale provide a more literal rendering in their translation of the same phrase in Nietzsche’s Will to Power: “the constraints of language” (283). Constraints came be overcome by style, puns, and irony, while a prison house, as Ernst Behler argues

“conveys a sinister finality” (Behler: 142). 4. Blau told Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta about his experience reading James’s The Golden Bowl in college: “I couldn’t figure out what that book was doing. But it was to me immensely fascinating. And among the things that made it fascinating were the long interlocutory, parenthetical, diversionary, deferred sentences in which I had the feeling—which I may not have been able to articulate, but I can now—that to say it another way would be not to say it at all, or to say it in an unfaceted way, without sufficient nuance or qualification, as if the only way to say it were to say it all at once, like spatially” (Blau, “Play,” 16, emphasis in the original). 5. Some of this aspiration was outlined in my Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially in “Afterword: Notes on Hope” (167–80), where I argue for the value of misunderstandings and suggest that performance navigates the “rackety bridge” between corporeality and thinking and the ethical drama between self and other. The metaphor of “the rackety bridge” has been taken up (and deconstructed) by Fred Moten in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). It has resonance with the ledge that abuts the prison house of language described here. 6. Adele, speaking on The Ellen Show, broadcast February 18, 2016. The episode, “The Amazing Adele, ” began with the singer performing “All I Ask.” Ellen then asked Adele to talk about the difficulty of the Grammy performance and assured her that it was great to “get back on the horse again,” by reperforming it on her show. Adele said that the thing she regretted was that she “could not make the disaster my own” by “busting a Page 172 →joke” and starting again. She felt that she could not because it was live television. Having endured the Grammy broadcast performance, she said she had resolved that if another mistake of that sort happened on live television, she would simply stop and say that it was not working for her and if there was time to fix it she would start again, but “if not, bye.” To which Ellen said, gleefully, “I hope it happens!” A mistake, in other words, may have more appeal than a flawless performance. 7. Dick Higgins argued that Fluxus performances, which often moved between theater and painting, for example, were best described as intermedia works. For a fuller discussion of machines, performance, and sound, see Auslander. 8. Presidential candidate Howard Dean’s scream into an isolating microphone in 2004 during a political rally in Iowa also reveals the enormous gap between the live event and the broadcast of it. Reporters covering Dean live in the hall did not notice anything unusual about his scream, but it soon went viral, and some pundits believe that it led directly to his defeat. See Holmes 2016.

Blau’s Shakespeare: The Makeup of Memory Page 173 →Joseph Roach Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born. —William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale In chapter 7 of The Eye of Prey, “The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent,” Herbert Blau writes about the death of his mother. An open casket sets the scene, which displays her face as a made-up mask, behind which appears to him an apparently infinite recess, the imagined perspective vista of a life remembered. “As I recall the memorial makeup on my mother’s face, that testamentary lifemask of the funeral home, ” he reminisces, “it occurs to me that it is only by virtue of imagination that, coming of age, all the remembered promises narrowed down, the prospects seem more limitless than they were before. That’s because the bottomless source of the future is the inexhaustible past” (140). This harrowing, funny essay, equally lucid in its retrospection and its prediction of death, loss, and the qualified consolations of late middle age, begins with an extraordinary stage direction, a Proustian gestus, looking back on Brooklyn in the 1940s and forward to the “impossible theater” of the 1960s and beyond: “My mother wore lipstick until the day she died. She also wore it into the grave” (135). As its title demonstrates by its derivation from the opening lines of Richard III, this chapter of Blau’s most intimately autobiographical book (outside of his autobiographies) leans heavily on Shakespeare. That is partly so because quotations from the plays and sonnets always came easily to him. But it is also because as a director, as well as a critical reader, Blau plumbs the depths of the way Shakespeare doubles his characters by means of verbal and behavioral cross-referencing, psychological echoes, and parallel predicaments. In one sense, this is a commonplace: Henry IV, part 1, features two determined young men coming into their own at the same time; Hamlet crowds three bereaved sons into one play; Much Ado About Nothing shows two couples and their entourages Page 174 →put asunder by a false report; and so forth. In another sense, Blau takes this interpretation of Shakespearean characterization much further than anyone else has done. The intensity of his commitment can be seen best in his account of his production of King Lear at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco in 1961, making the all-encompassing phenomenon of multiple doublings his own as a directorial strategy and critical approach. The whole play was conceived as a phantasmagoria of identity, behavior passing from one character to another. The Fool wants to be King, the King a Fool. The three daughters compose the absent Mother, but when you anatomize Regan you find Lear. In the clotted web of associations, the Fool has become a surrogate for Cordelia. He was not present at the ceremony, but he turns up when she is banished, by psychic need; as he disappears by psychic exhaustion, when she is about to return. (Impossible, 288–89) Let this “clotted web of association,” which is a dynamic process, not a map or territory, be summed up by the word surrogation. What does it mean? Into social and psychological vacancies created by the withdrawals, departures, derelictions, and deaths of incumbents, survivors attempt to fit alternates—surrogates—often but not always consisting of themselves or other loved (or hated) ones. That the survivors almost always fail does not keep them from trying. Blau’s Shakespeare, and much else besides in his capacious thought, abounds with such doubles and doublings. At the same time, Shakespeare employs the trope of memory as masquerade more frequently in The Winter’s Tale than in any other play, while Blau, in the most searingly autobiographical of his critical essays, one charged throughout with Shakespearean allusions, stakes the story of his life on just that kind of performance. His insights into the makeup of memory speak to what is at emotional stake in The Winter’s Tale, even though he neither directed it nor wrote about it. As a thought experiment, therefore, let his theories and critical principles be tested against this late romance, especially the bittersweet illusions of recuperation, including the notion that in the winter of our discontent, “the bottomless source of the future is the inexhaustible past.”

Summoning his (photographic) memory of his mother, Blau quotes the pertinent book by Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida, a devastated Barthes likewise mourns the death of his mother, which occurred shortly before his own death and may have hastened it. For Barthes, the studium of any photo entails its multiple contextual meanings, replete with intentions, while the punctum, which is not present in the same way for everyone and need not be present at all for anyone, wounds the eye of the especially vulnerable beholder with its Page 175 →sharp point of intimate longing.1 No blinkered iconophile, Blau solaces his grief also with the literary high-water marks of the senescent sublime: the very late work of Yeats and Stevens as well as Proust. But his web of allusion establishes that it is, after all, the momentary but vivid images of performance that endow memory with a sense of continuity in the restless ebb and flow of time. Such remembrances of scenes past remain more alive in his mind than those evoked by any picture. He holds these deathless souvenirs of his mother closely but not in his hands: “Her hair thinned and grayed for all the brushing, but as I look at her image now it’s only the photographs that age” (The Eye of Prey, 139). Blau grieves as he lived, with an artist’s imagination for ephemerality’s constant ambient pressure, like the weight of air, on good days, or of water, deep down under, otherwise. As so often elsewhere in his richly allusive writings, Blau paraphrases Shakespeare in order to blood his thought. In the scene of writing where poststructuralists wonder about the evanescence of the trace, he finds the boldest of strokes, as Romeo did in the face of Juliet, making unsubstantial death amorous: “There was a bright penumbra of crimson on her lips and a lurid swath of rouge upon her cheeks” (The Eye of Prey, 135). Even in the tomb, Juliet is still alive when Romeo, grieving with the defiant denial of a rival lover, conjures the life-indeath image of her face. Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath, Hath no power yet upon thy beauty: Thou art not conquer’d, beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there. (Romeo and Juliet 5.3.92–96) Every sentence Blau writes is, at some level, deep. This very profundity, however, begins with his uncanny directorial eye for surface appearances whereby “the look” of performance precipitates the very thought of it. Indeed, his homage to “the look” requires a volume of its own: Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (1999) lovingly details the erotic complications of materials, body parts, and skins. The memory of those surfaces, unembarrassed by the gaudy charms of fetishization, not only resists the effacements of time but also stands in positively for its losses. Surface appearances are the deeply expressive stuff of theatrical memory itself: its startling gestures, its soul-searing turns—not just its memory but also its makeup. Blau elucidates in personal terms the experience of historians who try to write about the past of a form that dies every night as a condition of its iteration. He knows, as they do, that the highly selective vividnessPage 176 → of performance in memory is assured by the speed of its disappearance, like the afterglow that the retina retains after the candle has been snuffed out. Arranging the personal symmetries of The Eye of Prey, Blau balances the death of his mother with the birth of his daughter. He similarly recounts his physical presence at this scene. Chapter 4, “The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey,” ostensibly features various plays by Samuel Beckett, especially Not I and Waiting for Godot. But it begins with a trenchant explanation of the first part of its title: a “bloody show” refers to the discharge of blood or blood-tinged mucus that heralds the dilation of the cervix, or, as Blau puts it, taking the delivery room for a stage, “the unclotting preface to labor” that reminds him of “the spastic phrases out of the Mouth in Not I” (65). The phrase “the eye of prey” comes from Beckett’s prose text Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), which, appositely, ponders the experience of bodily confinement in a cylinder. Blau entwines

Beckettian with Derridean imagery as witness to the birthing scene. As his daughter’s head crowns, beginning to emerge bit by bit with each contraction, he confesses, “I took the skull for the placenta, as if the show had grown egregious and the appearance were reversed” (69). Citing Artaud, he continues his account of his child emerging from the birth canal as if he mourns the loss of each appendage as it appears: “It is a sign of the original bloody show in the ritual drama, the loss of precious parts of ourselves that are only re-membered in dreams” (80). He echoes but does not quote the passage from Waiting for Godot that conflates the end of life with its beginnings: “Astride the grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.” But it is Shakespeare who finally gives Blau the occasion to look up from the scene of his daughter’s birth by looking beyond it to the kind of memory it will become: “Despite Othello’s lust for ocular proof, seeing is not necessarily believing” (78). To have the general experience of his experiences, “interpretation” (memory) must have its way with him, whatever the evidence of his lying eyes. Birth or death, womb or mouth, daughter or mother; “in the act of seeing,” as he says elsewhere, “there is already theory” (Take Up, 1). In the penultimate movement that begins the restorative denouement of The Winter’s Tale, the faithful courtier Camillo comforts the exiled lovers, Florizel and Perdita, with the hopeful prospect of (as he puts it): A course more promising Than a wild dedication of yourselves To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, most certain To miseries enough; no hope to help you. (4.4.565–68) Page 177 →This offer of escape from imperiled banishment to a long-deferred but now imminent restitution requires the continued assumption of disguises: the alternate, exchanged, or otherwise vicarious identities in which a Bohemian prince and a Sicilian princess appear as swain and shepherdess. Like so many other moments in Shakespeare, particularly in his late romances, the more promising course for characters facing the wildly uncertain future of “unpath’d waters, undream’d shores” is the intervening truth of an artifice—call it performance—that will test their identities and actions at a safe distance from their nominal selves. Such a performance of stand-ins intensifies the inducements for the spectators to identify with the characters as imaginary stand-ins for themselves. It can offer them, if they are young, the vicarious experience of precisely those experiences that they most desire or dread to have; alternatively, if they are not so young, it can offer them the experiences they desire or dread to remember, the ones they most regret never having had, or, even more poignantly, the ones they would most like to remember but cannot. Speaking on behalf of romance, still not fully aware of her true identity, Perdita sweetly addresses one segment of the latter audience when she tactfully distributes her floral bounty. These are flow’rs Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age. (4.4.106–8) Rarely recalled when these lovely lines are quoted, however, is the fact that Perdita also speaks (unknowingly) not only in the pastoral disguise of an assumed identity but also (knowingly) on behalf of the old shepherd’s wife, now deceased, whose well-established place as hostess she has assumed at the festive occasion of the sheepshearing. Inverting the action of her adoption, the daughter, whose birth is the end of the beginning of the play, takes up her surrogate mother’s role.

Perdita’s standing in for the missing person is but one of a number of intra- and intergenerational substitutions that predicate the action of The Winter’s Tale. They connect the two parts of its design, the “argument of Time” (4.1.29), across a gap of sixteen years. One important corollary to the play’s argument about time is that the consciousness of its passing—the mental theater that Blau calls “memory”—unfolds as the periodic intercession of performers in various guises and makeups: doubles, stand-ins, understudies, supernumeraries, and surrogates. In this regard, the notes made by The Winter’s Tale’s first critic, Simon Forman, merit extensive quotation. The noted astrologer and notorious lecher left theater historians an eyewitness account of a production at the Globe Page 178 →Theatre on May 15, 1611. His near-obsessive remarks illustrate Blau’s assertion that the theatrical audience “does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it” (Audience, 25). Shakespeare and the actors precipitate Forman’s self-conscious spectatorship. His diary entries unfold as repeated exhortations to memory, while they also conveniently reprise some of the surprising turns of Shakespeare’s tragicomic plot. Obserue ther [Forman reminds himself] howe Lyontes the kinge of Cicillia was overcome wth Ielosy of his wife [Hermione] with the kinge of Bohemia [Polixenes] his frind that came to see him, and howe he Contriued his death.В .В .В . Remember also howe [Leontes] sent to the Orakell of appollo & the Aunswer of apollo. that she was giltless. and that the king was Ielouse &c and howe [unless] the child was found Again that was loste the kinge should die wthout issue for the child was carried into bohemia & ther laid in a forrest & brought vp by a sheppard And the kinge of bohemia his sonn [Florizel] married that wentch [Perdita] & howe they fled into Cicillia to Leontes. (qtd. The Riverside Shakespeare, 1967–68) Thus far Forman reminds himself not to forget the main action of The Winter’s Tale, bringing the plot summary up to the moment of Camillo’s rescue of Florizel and Perdita. But then he appends a note to himself about one of Shakespeare’s most vivid subordinate characters, the thrice-disguised trickster Autolycus: “Remember also the Rog[ue] that cam in all tottered like a coll pixie / . and howe he feyned him sicke & to have bin Robbed of all that he had and howe he cosoned the por man of all his money. and after cam to the shep sher with a pedlers packe & ther cosoned them Again of all ther money And how he changed apparel wth the kinge of bohemia his sonn. and then howe he turned Courtiar &c” (1968). From this narrative, Forman extracts a cautionary nugget of proverbial advice: “Beware of trusting feined beggars or fawning fellouse” (1968). That is sensible counsel to take away from the performance of a play in which so little is what it seems to be and so many characters appear disguised. By remembering the theatrical actions and images as they impress themselves on the way he is thinking about the rest of his life, however, Forman finds a more subtle moral in Shakespeare’s play. He finds it in the practice that Blau, citing Proust, calls the discipline of “reading forward”: “What one hopes for, then, is not only the capacity to live life, but to have lived it, to have the experience of our experience” (The Eye of Prey, 148). Forman’s repeated deixical remonstrance, “Remember also,” characterizes a method of reading forward through performance even while looking back through its memory. Forman was astute. In The Winter’s Tale memory is self-reflexively staged. “A Page 179 →sad tale’s best for winter,” says the doomed prince Mamillius, in an onstage demonstration of how telling a story from the past summons the future by reading forward to the worry lines that it will produce on the face of memory (2.1.25). The tale and the telling are self-referentially featured, as in the history of the art form—drama—in which (and by which) the tale is told. In The Winter’s Tale the performance of memory is continuously evoked by the memory of performances, especially of ancient myths and pagan rites redolent of sacrifice. These Blau calls “the original bloody show” (The Eye of Prey, 80). Following Barthes, he confesses his “aversion to myth,” perhaps because it tends to turn history into nature, yet he cannot but find in an aging photograph of his mother, her image fixed forever in ageless youth, “something olderВ .В .В . maybe a mythic value” (137). In the “makeup of memory” that is theater, with its power over the construction of time, playwrights can, if they like, shake up the received myths, turning nature back into history. What history? Precisely the history—part anthropology, part archaeology—that Blau reviews and revises in The Dubious Spectacle (2002) when he deconstructs the supposed ritual origins of drama that he and others find

unproven but beguiling. The Winter’s Tale recaps much of what can be known or reasonably surmised about the historical emergence of theater in antiquity and then again in the late Middle Ages. Shakespeare’s introduction of the dancing satyrs into the tragicomic action seems to quote Aristotle’s history of the origins of tragedy and comedy in the rudest of revels. Shakespeare’s timely interjection of Apollo’s oracle to smite the hubristic protagonist likewise seems to cite the history of dramatic form: orthodox Sophoclean modulations of resonantly echoing discoveries and reversals rent by an impiously plangent shriek of Euripidean irony—Leontes’s showstopping “There’s no truth at all i’ th’ oracle” (3.2.140). The silences of The Winter’s Tale, particularly the one maintained by the penitent Leontes before the statue of Hermoine at the moment it is discovered, call forth thundering Aeschylus. Shakespeare’s highly allusive treatments of the mythic analogues to the action—Perdita’s heart-stoppingly placed apostrophe, “O Proserpina,” for instance—are staged in the midst of the sheepshearing scene (4.4.116), that pagan retention in Whitsuntide revelry. Such a juxtaposition anticipates the Cambridge ritualists’ explanations of the genesis of myth, propitiatory rites, and drama out of the primordial festivals of fertility and renewal. Moreover, Shakespeare’s gently playful send-up of the classical unities shows how historical theatrical parody must grow out of real understanding of prior performance conditions: when Father Time flouts the continuity of action with his sixteen-year gap and shifts the locale from Sicilia to Bohemia, he does so in the guise of “Chorus,” the convention of Greek theater that tended to encourage (by the continuous presence of the chorus members Page 180 →on stage from the beginning to the end of the play) a commonsense adherence to unity of time and place. Lightly touched on also is the transportation of the pastoral scene from Sicily, home of the eclogues and the Proserpina myth, to Bohemia, which is endowed with a seacoast for this amphibious purpose. But Shakespeare’s purposes, as Blau showed in his productions and commentaries, unfold in the depths as well as the shallows, and the apparent whimsy of the structure only partly conceals the profundity of its design, which is animated at each turn by the argument of Time. The temporal design of The Winter’s Tale depends on a three-sided relationship among memory, performance, and substitution. Through it Shakespeare shows how memory both reproduces and interrogates itself by surrogation. In comedy, typically, youth wins the argument of Time: scenes of surrogation are performed by the young people whose desires and plans to succeed their elders will be resisted through four acts but then ultimately accepted and even celebrated at the final curtain. In tragedy, typically, scenes of surrogation feature the entrance of those empowered to take up the bodies and take over the stage and the state: Creon, Orestes, Fortinbras, Malcolm, and Octavius fall into this class of late-arriving substitutes. In tragicomedy (the case at hand), the necessary but negotiable pressure exerted by the ritual expectancy for the removal of superannuated characters before the final curtain motivates one of the most famous and beloved stage directions in all theatrical history: “Exit pursued by a bear” (3.3.58). The same kind of expectancy, omnipresent in Blau’s writings on the death-in-life urgency of the theater, also brings about the great pivot line in The Winter’s Tale, when the shepherd, who has rescued the exposed infant Perdita, tells the clown, who has just witnessed simultaneous catastrophes—a shipwreck and the bear devouring Antigonus—“Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born” (3.3.113–14). Potential surrogates threaten as well as reassure. “Beware of trusting,” cautions Forman, talking about the slippery fingered coney-catcher who has changed clothes with a prince, one of the play’s many substitutions, successful and unsuccessful. This one is especially pointed, however, because Time, like Autoclycus, is a thief. A crisis of surrogation is likely to occur when the lineage or the destiny of the apparent successors may be ascribed to the alien vagaries of “unpath’d waters” and “undream’d shores.” At the heart of some of the longest-running mysteries of The Winter’s Tale—and not The Winter’s Tale alone—reside the threat and the promise of surrogation. The oft-cited lack of motivation for Leontes’s explosive jealousy in act 1, scene 2, for instance, takes on a different look in the uncanny, unnerving light of a surrogation crisis. Shakespeare forecasts the catastrophe in the straightforwardlyPage 181 → expositional prose of the opening scene between Archidamus, a lord of Bohemia, and Camillo, a lord of Sicilia and adviser to Leontes, when Archidamus points out the “great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia” (1.1.3–4). The difference is deep enough to construct the state visit of Polixenes as an embassy of encounter and exchange

between alien potentates, which necessitates reciprocity in the manner of the gift-trading “archaic societies” described by Marcel Mauss.2 But radical difference harbors within itself radical identity: somehow, in the contradictory but inexorable logic of a fairy tale, the alien kings were raised together as brothers, virtually as twins. Polixenes remembers their fraternity with a superficially charming but actually quite ominous sacrificial image: “We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun, / And bleat the one at th’ other” (1.2.67–68). Beneath the facade of these expositional pleasantries, a static charge of anxiety is building up. This is the dark emotion that Hermione accidentally releases when she opens her arms and invites the Bohemian twin to stand beside her and thus perforce to stand in for the Sicilian. I have spoke to th’ purpose twice: The one for ever earn’d a royal husband; Th’ other for some while a friend. [Gives her hand to Polixenes.] (1.2.106–8) This apparently innocuous prompt, which physically performs the symmetrical twinship of the two kings—on the one hand, Sicilia, but on the other, Bohemia, bookending the very pregnant Hermione between them—sends Leontes over the edge of a psychic, moral, familial, and bisocietal abyss: “[Aside] Too hot, too hot! / To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods” (1.2.108–9). What is enacted here, in the astonishing compression of Shakespearean stagecraft, is a fundamental tension present in any explicit or implicit surrogation: not the fear of difference, per se, but the fear that difference will stop being itself and become sameness—identity. Blau’s Shakespeare, whose dramatic economy is one of abundance as well as condensation, copiously multiplies the number of doublings in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes oscillates in a hall of mirrors of resemblances and substitutions akin to those Blau pointed to in his direction of the Actor’s Workshop’s King Lear. Seeing something too much like himself mirrored by the spider in the bottom of the cup, Leontes desperately displaces his jealous distraction from the intimate Bohemian stranger to his own son, Mamillius. As it often will in Page 182 →the balance of the play, the drama here turns on physical resemblance: “What? [hast] smutch’d thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine” (1.2.121–22). Mamillius will be sacrificed by the king and, ritually speaking, instead of the king. But an even more pronounced resemblance leads to an even more poignant drama. That is the absolutely eloquent resemblance of the infant Perdita to Leontes, the father who, doubting her paternity, has ordered her death by exposure, abused and apparently killed her mother, and caused the death of her brother. Paulina, the sympathetic but adamant caretaker of memory in the play, catalogs the details of physical resemblance feature by feature. Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father—eye, nose, lip, The trick of’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. (2.3.98–103)

In making such liaisons come alive in performance, the ancient theater, seemingly so much on Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote this play, could work with masks or doubling one of the three actors in an artful way—as Pentheus and his mother, Agave; in The Bacchae, for instance; or, in another theater-historical chestnut, wholly speculative but hard to resist, the tripling of Cassandra, Pylades, and Apollo by a single actor in the three plays of The Oresteia. The echo of memory in such a doubling would, in retrospect, sound like divine possession because the same voice, finally identified for sure as belonging to Apollo, speaks through all three masks at several climactic moments in the trilogy. In the absence of masks and the three-actor convention, however, Shakespeare had to rely primarily on words, clothes, and some presumably versatile boy actors. In the dramatization of human memory in The Winter’s Tale, one big payoff of the Leontes-Perdita resemblance, if it could be heightened by casting or suggestive demeanor, would come in the final scene of reconciliation, in which Hermione, as the statue miraculously come to life after a ritual death of sixteen-years duration, turns to pour out her words on her daughter, confessing that she has preserved herself “to see the issue” (5.3.128). The embrace of mother and child, reuniting a dissevered family at last and in the presence of the penitent king and father, would be all the more moving if Perdita’s true paternity were proclaimed on her face for all to see. Shakespeare prepares the audience for this very point with telling irony when earlier he has Leontes remark on the striking resemblance of Florizel to his father, Polixenes. Page 183 →Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one, Your father’s image is so hit in you (His very air) that I should call you brother. (5.1.124–28) This is an art of memory indeed, but one from which the marks of violence engendered by the convergence of identity and difference cannot be erased. Here Leontes is reminded by the appearance of Florizel and Perdita that he has sacrificed two children, a son and a daughter. His image of the child as “print” taken from an original links this speech to Paulina’s “although the print be little,” describing the infant Perdita, thus tying together the two scenes—and the two families—by verbal gesture. Complicating and deepening the pattern of doubles, Leontes’s resemblance to Polixenes leads to the catastrophe unleashed on Hermione: “You have mistook, my lady, / Polixenes for Leontes” (2.1.81–82). Whichever way he turns, it seems, Leontes must confront a spitting image of himself. In act 4 physical resemblance becomes outright surrogation when Polixenes stands in for Leontes as the tyrant king and father, seeing the spider in the cup at the otherwise festive sheepshearing and threatening his son despite the moderating counsel of Camillo. Indeed, the second scene of act 4 between Polixenes and Camillo mirrors exactly the first scene of the play, between Camillo and Archidamus: the turn to Florizel supplants the earlier turn to Mamillius as the imperiled son, the mirror image of his father and the sacrificial victim of his self-destructive wrath. “What is mirrored in memory,” notes Blau, aphoristically summarizing the makeup of memory, “is the mirror” (The Eye of Prey, 141). In the theater-historical repertoire of vivid but transitory effects, which stick in the mind because they are so fleeting, stage doubling yields a wealth of materials; at the same time, the play of resemblance in The Winter’s Tale makes it a particularly promising case study in doubling. Theatrical doubling patterns may be used to illustrate how surrogation functions not only in the drama but also and more generally in the experience of memory as a psychological and social performance. That is particularly evident in several of the most memorable productions of The Winter’s Tale, even though (or maybe because) they imposed some awkward choices on

this play of surrogated doubles. Beginning with Mary Anderson’s Lyceum production in 1887, a number of modern producers, including the directors of the 1969 and 1986 revivals by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), have succumbed to a strong but perverse temptation: casting the same performer not as Mamillius, the brother, and Perdita, the sister Page 184 →(as Shakespeare’s company most likely would have done), but as Hermione, the mother, and Perdita, the daughter. The attractions and difficulties of this doubling raise a number of issues relating to the overlapping bonds of the surrogates who make up the face of memory on the stage and off. In theatrical practice, the phrase to double itself has a double meaning. First, it means to act as a double or a substitute for another player. In this sense a stunt person or understudy doubles a part. Second, it means to play two parts in the same piece. This time-honored managerial economy, also dating from the Greeks, later engendered the flourishing theatrical career of “George Spelvin.” Each of these meanings denotes a surrogation, a duplication, a deliberate and purposive substitution. The first conjoins (two actors on one mask); the second bifurcates (two masks on one actor). Both meanings of the word double apply to the casting of one actress in the roles of Hermione and Perdita, which is therefore properly characterized as perverse. Since the characters appear together in the final scene, a stand-in must be arranged for Perdita sometime before Hermione’s statue begins to speak. This challenges the casting agent, the costumer, and, above all, the director, who must come up with a scheme to get Perdita’s double (in our first sense of a stand-in, stunt double, or body double) in place so that the single actress playing both parts (in our second sense of doubling) can substitute for the statue of herself in time to come alive. Pondering the statue with awe, Leontes wonders at the perfection of the artifice: Her natural posture! Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed Thou art Hermione. (5.3.23–25) As the actress changes roles to stand in for the effigy representing her own image, the producers have spun a web of substitution that Luigi Pirandello might envy but in which Shakespeare’s stipulations do not particularly rejoice. Flashy staging must rescue the producers from their own machinations. The 1969 production used a trick box, like a magician’s trunk, to discover the translated body of Judi Dench within. In 1986 Penny Downie’s stunt double as Perdita kept her back to the audience for much of the final scene, a blocking so artful that everyone remarked on it, which seems a focus of attention less edifying than the mother-daughter reunion. Moreover, when one actress plays the two parts, the director must find a way to make plausible Leontes’s failure to recognize his daughter, spitting image of his wife, in act 5, scene 1, when Florizel and Perdita return to the Sicilian court. The 1986 RSC production had Perdita veiled, a choice not particularly well supported by the servant’s description of her to Leontes as “the most peerless piece of earth, I think, / That e’er the sun Page 185 →shone bright on” (5.1.94–95). With so little to justify such awkward arrangements, what tempts modern producers to complicate an already difficult staging with an elaborate bed trick played on the audience? The cynic could perhaps imagine how an actress of sufficient maturity to play Hermione might secretly (or not so secretly) long to impersonate the “queen of curds and cream” (4.4.161). The metamorphosis thus enacted slides “o’er sixteen years” indeed (4.1.6). The cynic would then know the value of the doubling (pace Wilde) but not its price. The value of the doubling resides in its sledgehammer reinforcement of the theme of ritual death and surrogation. The 1986 RSC program solemnly quoted Erich Wellisch’s Isaac and Oedipus: A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Akedah (1954) on the regenerative powers of infanticide through exposure: dying, the child appeased the angry gods; surviving, it miraculously initiated a new epoch. The trope of magical restoration and renewal, so compellingly represented in the statue scene, has yet another change rung on it when we see Dench or Downie magically quicken the rhythms of her nervous impulses from stately queen mother to nubile shepherdess-daughter. It employs the actress’s breath-stopping virtuosity of illusion, the artifice of representation, to triumph over Time. It gives all of us inspiration to hope momentarily, or at least

for the two hours’ traffic of our stage. The problem is, however, that the makeup of memory in The Winter’s Tale is more complicated and realistic than such stage magic—the ingГ©nue ex machina—can encompass. In sixteen years even the statue has aged. Leontes: But yet Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing So aged as this seems. .В .В .В .В . Paulina: So much the more our carver’s excellence, Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her As she liv’d now. (5.3.27–32) We have just heard Paulina’s role reiterated in act 5, scene 1, where Leontes addresses her as a caretaker of memory, preparing the audience for the revelations to come. Leontes: Good Paulina, Who hast the memory of Hermione, I know, in honor, O, that ever I Had squar’d me to thy counsel! (5.1.49–52) Page 186 →Although this is the only time that the word memory appears in the play, the theme of memory animates the action at every crux. The makeup of memory in The Winter’s Tale is most pointedly marked by the statue itself, which seems to play the painted part of a prepared corpse—what Blau calls “that testamentary lifemask”—at a funeral. As Paulina warns Leontes: Good my lord, forbear. The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; You’ll mar it if you kiss it; stain your own With oily painting. (5.3.80–83) At first glance, Hermione’s statue appears to be made to pass through a generation impervious to Time, an effigy of imperishable materials (hence the temptation of the Hermione-Perdita doubling). On further examination, however, “the memory of Hermione” is made of flesh and blood; her effigy is vulnerable to Time, who, though he pleases some, tries all. This is the effigy whose flesh—once denounced unjustly as “Too hot, too hot”—now prompts Leontes’s astonished and reverent, “O, she’s warm!” (5.3.109). Under the aegis of a similar realism concerning human memory, mortality, and substitution, the old shepherd exhorts Perdita, his adoptive daughter, as hostess in the sheepshearing festival: Fie, daughter, when my old wife liv’d upon

This day she was both pantler, butler, cook, Both dame and servant; welcom’d all, serv’d all. (4.4.55–57) He remembers his old wife’s warmth and spontaneity—her performance of the rites of hospitality in the Whitsuntide revels—as if she were alive, or as if she might live again in the person of the child so miraculously snatched from death. But surrogation is necessarily imperfect—reprieved ingГ©nue or not. The stand-in reminds the old shepherd of who is missing. He reminds us that, even in plays, not all that is lost may be found. The doubling of Hermione and Perdita by one actress thus leaves out an important prerequisite for the operation of memory as dramatized by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale and echoed by Blau in “The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent.” That is the consciousness of forgetting. Under the effects of surrogation, where the trace of identity remains visible even or especially on the face of difference, the most persistent mode of forgetting is memory imperfectly deferred. This poignancy focuses attention on the makeup of memory in The Winter’s Tale as the reference point for calibrating the extent Page 187 →of loss even in a miraculous moment of apparent renewal. Blau writes painfully of Barthes’s ability to speak of “вЂthe figure of sovereign innocence’ which he perceived in a faded sepia print of his mother as a little girl” (Eye, 137). This sovereign innocence is unavailable either to Leontes before the statue of his wife or Blau before the painted face of his mother, dead at arms’ length but alive within him. Despite the makeup and because of it—like the undisguised specificity of the illusoriness of theater—the import of the image was always there, legible, laughable, emblematic, mortifyingly bare. She seemed, through the inexpungeable red gaudiness of the cover-up that made me blush, totally and infectiously exposed. Whatever my mother may have been when younger—and some early pictures show her as lovely and unguarded with no makeup at all—she seemed perfectly masked by what she had become, and all the more beguiling for that. (137) The absence of Mamillius in the final stage picture of atonement, reconciliation, and restoration is one of those subtle but powerful empty places in Shakespeare’s final tableaux (the nonappearance of Old Adam at the end of As You Like It is another): such vacancies might be explained away by doubling patterns, but they prompt reflection about attrition nonetheless. It could be argued that Shakespeare’s doubling of the boy actor as Mamillius and Perdita fills in this empty place in memory—a seamlessly perfect surrogation. But it might just as well heighten the absence: the presence of one fresh face insisting on the memory of another that is now unrecoverable, one “twinn’d lamb” found even as the other is lost forever. If so, then the final tableau can effect a partial surrogation only, whose suture marks appear in the aging face of the wronged queen and bereaved mother and, most tellingly, in the eloquent redress of her unremarked silence to Leontes. The last “age” of Jacques’s “seven ages of man” in As You Like It is not, as is sometimes supposed, death. It is oblivion, the erosion and final loss of memory—the experience of our experience—to thieving Time. Blau captures the tragicomedy of the moment just before that last age. “But there is also a perturbation of aging that comes,” he concludes, “just over the threshold of consciousness from want of consciousness, a last intimation of the life we’ve never lived because essentially unremembered, so that there is a sense of having suffered somehow an irreparable loss that, because not known, we cannot even mourn” (The Eye of Prey, 159). In the twilight of that loss, where what is mirrored in memory is the mirror, the painted mother doubles her extraordinary son.

Page 188 →References Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Blau, Herbert. The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. New York: Collier Books, 1964. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. 2nd ed., vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Wellisch, Erich. Isaac and Oedipus: A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Akedah. 1954: rpt. Milton Park: Routledge, 1999. Originally published as “Herbert Blau and the Makeup of Memory in The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (2009): 117–31.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason or Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 2000).

Herbert Blau Professor Artist Wordist Page 189 →Richard Schechner Summer 1963. From Tulane University, where I am a raw assistant professor and the editor of TDR for barely a year, I set out with a companion from New Orleans bound for San Francisco. We separate at the Grand Canyon. I drive on alone to San Francisco wanting to see the Golden Gate Bridge, hang out in Haight-Ashbury, touch brains with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, and talk to Herbert Blau, cofounder with Jules Irving of the pioneering, radical San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. I know that in 1957 Blau took the workshop’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to San Quentin prison; that his theater was in synch with the European postwar avant-garde; that he was someone I wanted as contributor to TDR. I had never seen a theater piece Blau directed, but I had read about him and knew some of his writings. When I call the workshop to ask if Blau would meet me, I was surprisingly invited to his home. As I drive to his house, I wonder what kind of person is this Blau? What does he really know? Will he continue to write for TDR? What will we talk about? I don’t remember the outside of his house, whether freestanding or part of a row. Deep memory brings me through an entry hall and into a spacious living room. Someone tells me to sit and wait. “Herbert will be with you in a moment.” Or something like that. I sit in a large wing-backed chair that comes up over my head and around my ears nestling me in its cobra’s hood. And then something truly weird happens. I decide I will never move again. When Herbert Blau enters, crosses the room, and offers his hand in greeting, I will not rise, acknowledge his presence, or even blink. For the rest of my life, nothing. I sink into this scenario; it swallows me. Then the real Herbert Blau enters the room, striding confidently, smiling. He is wearing big glasses. He offers his hand. For a fleeting instant, I don’t move. Then I rise, take his hand, and introduce myself. Page 190 →Of course, Herb never knew my secret. What meaning could my transient immobility have had then—and of what use is repeating it now, after Blau has been translated into immobility? I cannot answer these questions except to say that the conversation I had that day with this dynamic man of the theater changed me. I was face-to-face with a compact muscular man of action who was also a dynamo of intellect. Just the kind of person I intended to become. In 1960, before I met Blau, before I became editor of the Tulane Drama Review (later simply TDR), Robert W. Corrigan, the journal’s founder, published Blau’s long letter from Europe addressing members of the Actor’s Workshop. In his letter, after describing/praising/critiquing people he had met and the theater he saw—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, Barrault, Wagner, Vilar, Planchon, Blin, Littlewood, Delaney, Behan, and Arden, as well as MoliГЁre and Shakespeare—Blau exhorts and excoriates his colleagues. [D]espite part-time actors, defecting actors, Equity minimums, envy, backbiting, or the natural skepticism that will greet all I have said.В .В .В . I have seen nothing in those [European] theatersВ .В .В . that we cannot accomplish. We have the institution, the means, the city, the cultural drift, the historical occasion, and sufficient ability.В .В .В . We need the undeflected courage and tenacity of purpose that we have not always had together, or having, have let slip in the press of affairs. Some will say that this is the old idealism again. But let me remind you that idealism (if that is the word) is hard—rocks impregnable are not so stout. (“Meanwhile,” 97–98) Fifty-one years later, in As If, Blau remembers the origins of the Actor’s Workshop this way. The Actor’s Workshop started in a loft over a judo academy on Divisadero Street, with rat shit under the stairs that I’d clean out before rehearsals. That loft is now the vestry of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and thus properly hallowed.В .В .В . The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, evolving as it did from that impoverished site, with no real model before us, not in this country, became and perhaps remains the greatest single accomplishment, at the institutional level, in the history of the American theater. (142)

From rat shit to immortality, in his thinking and working, Blau was many light years ahead of the mainstream American theater. After his first appearance in TDR, Blau became a regular contributor as our professional lives continued to be entwined. In 1964, I invited him to join TDR’s Page 191 →Advisory Board. In 1965, Blau and Jules Irving left San Francisco to direct the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. After two years and eight productions, some savagely received, Blau resigned (Irving remained). His service on TDR’s board was brief—from 1964 (vol. 9, no. 2) to 1966 (vol. 11, no. 1). Blau resigned because we disagreed about his work at Lincoln Center. After Lincoln Center, Blau became the first provost of the California Institute of the Arts where Corrigan was president. What a team. Then in 1971 Blau moved from CalArts to Oberlin where he formed KRAKEN, an experimental theater group. In KRAKEN, Blau was able to fuse his professorial and artistic impulses. Act how? where? why? what for? for whom? under what circumstances? and—even after the antiideological revolutions in Eastern Europe—on what ideological grounds? With these questions in mind, I locked myself behind studio doors with young actors who were, without yet knowing it, asking similar questions, and after a year and a half emerged with the KRAKEN group. (Dubious, 175) It was a modest advance after the brutal defeat in New York. In 1974, he went to the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and in 1984 to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The year 2000 brought him to the University of Washington, Seattle, where he stayed until his passing in 2013. Blau was restless even when he was standing still. He never slowed down, never stopped doing, thinking, writing. His passion derived from wanting so much, from idealism, from his Brooklyn roots, from a fiery faith in progress, from an incredibly sharp mind and quick tongue. He was always a professor, even during the years when he wasn’t one formally. Blau wrote and overwrote: for him, excess was no sin. What others would condense to a sentence, Blau would explode into a paragraph. Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964) is a manifesto of 309 pages. Even The Communist Manifesto is only forty-five pages, and the first Dada Manifesto is less than one page. So what did Blau manifest? Not only in his impossible book, but in his other writings, his directing, his teaching—his beingin-the-world? I experience him here, now, in memory as someone who was hot, steamy with ideas, pressing forward toward whomever was listening (or not, as the case may be), demanding attention not to the person Blau but to the Blauvian idea, the blooded thought, the impossible theater he tried to make. He knew who he was. I’ve never been a theater scholar [though he had an MA and a PhD, both from Stanford]. Whatever research I did before a turn to theory was done in the theaterВ .В .В . always questioning, in some respect, what I was doing Page 192 →there and why I did it, and at certain critical moments why it shouldn’t be otherwise.В .В .В . Thinking ontologically, having asked such tenuous questions as what is it now, as it occurs, as it is, before the eye? even here, what is it, then, in the mind’s eye? in the confusions of eye, ear and the other senses? in the synesthesia of its perceiving and the being perceived, and though we overlook it, in the embodied theater, as here, now, breathing and being breathed? Or: to what does a performance refer except to itself, and what is the ontological status of that other thing, if what is there, whatever it is that escapes you, now you see it now you don’t, is not the thing itself? Those were questions I began to think about in the theater, which is why I’ve been given to say, even while working in it, that theater is theory, or a shadow of it. (Reality, 133) Or, again: Whatever the thing is, it lurks in the background of thought (as in the theaterwork I have done) as a sort of indeterminate data for testing of values.В .В .В . In performance, values are physiological, cutting to the brain, affects of power, freedom, ease, displeasure, exuberance, incapacity, pride, grief, the expression of sustaining or inhibited life, aspects of relief or self mortification, maybe even joy-

in-grief, which others proclaim though few of us experience it, more likely to feel exhaustion, pity, outrage, self-pity or a sense of relief, which runs like a spasm through our system of value—like Nietzsche’s thought. “Our most sacred convictions,” he writes, “the unchanging elements in our supreme values, are judgments of our muscles.” (Blooded, 27)

Who was Herbert Blau? A visionary and a shaman: a person who could magically move mountains (of ignorance), challenge the status quo (of culture), inspire the many students who came to his table, and shake-shape into existence what he dreamed: a theater of meaning, a life of passionate engaged scholarship. As I skim, scan, browse, almost waltz—1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3—through Blau’s books, I am his partner being led through the steps of a specific rhetoric. Herbert’s theater vision was more a fulfillment of the artistic-political Group Theater of the 1930s than the media-infused virtual art-life blurs of 21st century performance art. A vision, I think, we need a big chunk of today. In preparing to write this, I asked Joseph Roach what he hoped I would do. Roach replied (in an email): In my not-so-secret heart of hearts, I’m imagining you writing about Herb’s life/career as [a] performance.В .В .В . In my Hall of Manufactured Memories, I Page 193 →see a decisive moment in the ’60s, you in NOLA [New Orleans], subversively setting aside Genet and Gide, Herb in San Francisco and Lincoln Center, subversively taking them up. In the miraculous algebra of history, there are possible and impossible theaters on both sides of the equation. On my side of the equation was that young man who went to San Francisco to meet Herbert Blau. I sat in that wing-backed chair, almost ready to remain immobile. But, confronted by the other side of the equation, I took his hand. “There’s obviously more to be saidВ .В .В .” (Appearances, 149).

References Blau, Herbert. As If: An Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Blau, Herbert. Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Blau, Herbert. “Meanwhile, Follow the Bright Angels.” TDR 5.1 (1960): 89–101. Blau, Herbert. Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. London: Routledge, 1992.

Re: Herb Blau Page 194 →Morton Subotnick Herb seemed to “collect” young artists.1 One of the earliest was Robert (Bob) LaVigne, a painter in his early twenties and a prominent part of the Beat literary scene.2 In 1955, after seeing the Actor’s Workshop productions of Oedipus Rex and The Crucible, Lavigne went to meet Herb; he introduced himself and volunteered to participate as a painter, and Herb said, “Well, our restrooms need painting,” and Lavigne became one of the first of many young artists to work with the workshop. Later Bob wrote, in his The Artist’s Life As a Work in Progress, “Herbert Blau had waited four years to use me as a stage designer. He told me on the phone at the picture-framer’s, where I was then working, that he was preparing Endgame, by Samuel Beckett. вЂGet a copy and tell me what you think of the play; would you be interested to design for it?’ Of course, I jumped at the opportunity.” Herb loved what Bob was doing and asked him to become part of the creative team for the future production of King Lear. It was then that I met Herb, in 1959, while he was in the midst of preparing Endgame and looking for a composer to become part of the King Lear creative team, with himself and Bob. I was finishing my degree at Mills College and part of an active group of young San Francisco composers, including, among others, Ramon Sender, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. Herb came to meet me and described his thoughts/feelings about King Lear. He spoke with a cadence and intensity that drew me in, as if I were in the midst of Lear’s storm; this quote, from The Dubious Spectacle, may not be the exact words he spoke, but, reading them, it feels like what I heard that day, “[O]n stage we are dealing with suicidal rage and earth-shattering self-contempt: with a vengeance so awful it penetrated through chaos; and with the maddened clairvoyance of a pariah king whose sense of injustice is such that, defying representation, it seems to unhinge the universe” (319). Page 195 →I remember that, as Herb spoke, ideas of sound and music flashed through my mind; I couldn’t wait to work on it. I had wanted to use the new audio technology rising on the music horizon, and I sensed that creating something for a dramatic production with the scope and intention expressed by Herb would be a powerful way to get started. His view of King Lear seemed a perfect moment in which to create an audio score that would not be “incidental” music but, like the set, lighting, and costumes, would be integrated into the physicality of the action to inform the unfolding of the drama, as well as the larger meaningfulness of the production to which Herb was constantly alluding. I immediately focused on the storm scene in King Lear and, somehow, was determined to create a soundscape that would “seem to unhinge the universe,” an allusion about as large as they come. Without hesitation, I said yes to Herb’s invitation! The workshop offered a total commission fee of three hundred dollars, half to be paid on agreeing and the other half after the play opened. The first half of the commission fee was used to buy my first electronic equipment, a De Jur Grundig Portable Tape Recorder (one of the first home tape recorders).3 The day I met Herb was the day our many years of collaboration began; the day of the premiere of King Lear my life as an artist would be reinvented. Shortly after our first meeting, Herb, Bob, and I met. That first meeting was not a collaborative exchange of ideas; it was monologue, a lecture. Herb spoke nonstop; I’m sure it was at least an hour. He described the setting of the play, the mind of Lear and the daughters; he quoted phrases and occasionally read from the play. When he was done, we had a vast description of the setting and sound of the play, but it was entirely philosophic and theoretic; it was as if we experienced Lear through Herb’s mind. I wish I could remember what he said, but the phrases from The Dubious Spectacle—“defying representation,” “unhinge the universe,” and “penetrated through chaos”—give a sense of the evening’s prose. I had just met Bob for the first time, and neither of us spoke much at all that night, to Herb or to each other. We parted after setting up a second meeting for a few days later at which time Bob and I were to come back with some ideas for the set, costumes, and music. I needed to get specific about what I would create and how I would do it. We returned for our second meeting and this time the roles were reversed: Herb was prepared to listen to us. I described how I would make the music;

trumpet calls and such would be the sound of a primal instrument that was both the sound of all instruments and no instrument we have heard. We would hear a rich pluck of a string decaying, with the timbre of a French horn, not a single timbre but instead a complex, detuned mixture, like blurred layers of feathers. The storm was to be the storm in Lear’s head, and the sound of the storm would be made from the following: a recording of the voice of the actor playing Lear Page 196 →speaking the lines he would be delivering during the storm, the sound intensity of “a suicidal rage,” and the timbre of “earth-shaking self-contempt.” Bob described what he was planning, and the following is his description in The Artist’s Life: “King Lear was put together from Prehistoric-looking leftovers: hides, bones, tusks, feathers to create fearsome appearance, to display massive armed power in single personages by their costume. Abstracting the process of combining found objects into wearables, it was possible to make a setting out of rags put together by the same method, a unit set able to become architectural confines or large and open vistas, and with smaller details backing smaller scenes of action with pictorial interest.”4 Herb’s words had evoked a unified universe of sound and image. An exhilarating start! I think it was the next day that Herb called and asked if I had any ideas about how I might make sound for the upcoming production of Endgame. I got a copy of the play and read it; the three of us met, and Herb and Bob described the play and Bob’s set. Herb was almost as excited by the set as he was about the play. Shortly after the meeting, I described my idea, and Herb agreed to it. There would be no sound or music during the play; there would be a preperformance sound environment heard only before the audience was allowed to enter. It seemed fitting since, when the audience enters, the actors are on the stage, as if something had been unfolding forever, over and over, and will be forever unfolding after the audience has left the theater. I wanted a sound score of crashing, scraping, and screaming metal objects cascading erratically from left to right, as if thrown by an invisible force. I remember the opening night of Endgame. The audience had gathered in the foyer of the theater. Through the closed doors of the auditorium, they heard crashing, like pots, pans, knives, and metal platters flung wildly at the walls of a kitchen. This continued as more and more of the audience arrived. The truth is that theater was small, and smaller yet was the audience, probably not more than fifty. But the foyer space was very small, and it was an experience like nothing I had ever had and, from the reaction of the audience, it seemed they were equally intrigued and mystified. When the doors to the hall finally opened, the sound diminished quickly, so that by the time people were in their seats nothing could be heard. The silence was stunning; it seemed one could hear the sound of the man sitting on a chair (Hamm) framed by two garbage cans. A handkerchief covered his face, breathingВ .В .В . breathingВ .В .В . breathing. Another male figure could be made out in the dim light of the back corner of the stage. This figure (Clov) was finally revealed, as he slowly and methodically did his chores. Finally, Clov came to Hamm, who sits without moving; the only movement was the cloth over his face, slightly undulating up and down to the Page 197 →almost heard rhythm of his breathing. Clov removed the handkerchief from Hamm’s face, and Hamm said: “Me— (He yawns) ——to play.” And we went from there. “The words, it’s the words,” Herb would say. It became clear that Herb had a deep and driving visceral, philosophic sense; the word rage was not a symbol for rage, it was rage. His ecstatic, philosophical rants were some form of physical thinking, not cool rational thought but charged and real. Real but yet not real; these thoughts had little or no objective correlative, no sound you could hear, no image you could see, but you could feel the sound and sight. Clearly, Herb had infected us, Bob and myself, with his embodied thought, and we manifested the sound and image to hear and see.

When it came time to create the storm from the sound of Lear speaking on the stage, I would need to record Lear, the actor, delivering the text, as he would be actually delivering it in the production. The production of King Lear was still a long way off; I think it was more than a year away. No problem for Herb; he had already decided that Michael O’Sullivan, a twenty-seven-year-old actor, would play the role. In anticipation, Herb began working with Michael on the entire role in order for Michael to do something meaningful with the reading of the storm scene. This took time with Michael so that he would be ready to read the scene for me to record. They worked on it for what felt like a long time (I was eager to start) until Michael was ready for the recording session. Herb came to the session to coach Michael. Once presented, the acting was breathtaking, literally taking my breath away; Michael would instantly transform into a deranged humanlike creature, and Herb seemed to feed off it. They would go back and forth. Herb gave instructions, and Michael shape-shifted and delivered a phrase; each new utterance from Michael seemed to invoke another direction from Herb, and Michael again shape-shifted into a delivery, and Herb shouted new instructions, and MichaelВ .В .В . and Herb andВ .В .В . andВ .В .В . Looking back on it, I realize that it was not just the sounds and the images of King Lear that came to life through, in this case, Bob and me, but it was also the actors’ sound and their physical gestures that were influencing Herb’s “embodied thought” about the play itself; and this “embodied thought” was being regenerated with every realization. Soon after, I finally recorded the reading of the storm scene and began the long task of tearing it apart, manipulating and Page 198 →transforming the sound of Michael’s voice into a truly terrifying storm. It was during the months of working on this storm that there was an epiphany; I saw myself as performer/creator/audience. As a result, “Music as studio art” became the central metaphor that has driven me for forty-five years. And for Michael the 1961 role of Lear became the springboard for a spectacular career, a career that ended only ten years later with his death at the age of thirty-seven. The relationship between the “music” and King Lear was always more than the issue of “music.” When Lear finally went into rehearsal, I would bring the tape in at the moment that the relevant scene was going up for the first time. When the storm began, the sound was introduced quite early, partly because Michael had already worked with Herb and the sound was embedded in the delivery. I remember sitting next to Herb as Michael shouted above the cacophony of the altered sounds of his own voice. I asked Herb if he could find a way for Michael to somehow touch the ground for a split second. I would use that as a cue for the sound to stop, resuming when the touch left the floor; it would be a kind of grounding that would embody the notion that the storm truly emanated from Lear’s mind. Herb worked with Michael and maneuvered his already twisting body to somehow touch his knee to the ground as part of his gnarled physical gestures. These gestures so dramatically connected Lear to the storm that, at some point when the storm was subsiding, reading the play again (I can’t find where it was), Herb had Lear lying on his back breathing. I then went back to my studio, recorded my own breathing, and created a kind of breathing wind that heaved slowly up and down. Using this on the stage with Lear the next day, the undulation of the wind gradually transformed into his breath. Michael timed his breathing so that his chest went up and down with the rhythm of the recorded sound. I had the sound person manipulate the loudness so that by the end of the storm we imagined we were hearing Michael’s breathing everywhere in the hall. Here is Herb’s description of my “music” for the storm scene. Subotnick did a score for our production of King Lear, which was an experimental model of feasible integration, the actors’ voices embedded in the sound, rising over it, laminated, voice embracing sound, extended, random and concrete sounds suspended in the risible air, stage-struck, like visible signs, but cutting to the brain, the storm itself appearing (through multiple speakers strategically deployed) as a dimensionless sonic space, immense, the actual stage expanded, as if the music were in all its inexhaustible and exhausting amplitude the very breathing thought of Lear—who seemed at the apogee of defiance, in every syllable of his madness, locked into the sound. (Dubious, 123) Page 199 →When Herb first brought my music for King Lear to the theater for the actors to hear, he had asked if I would not be there. The result was what he had expected; they were dubious, even angry, and even as we began rehearsing some remained resistant. Herb’s intellectual fire, his demands, and a growing use of unorthodox sound, light, sets, and costumes, each introduced by the increasing number of young artists he was introducing to

the theater, must have been alarming to many of the actors. This uneasiness was put to rest, however, by the audience reaction to the play and the headline in the arts section of the paper, which read, “King Lear, a Triumph for the Actor’s Workshop” (San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 1961). Another example of this collaborative process with Herb was later to be seen in scene 6 of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. When Galileo was in Rome A cardinal asked him to his home. He wined and dined him as his guest And only made one small request. (Brecht’s instructions) “Cardinal Bellarmin’s house in Rome. Music is heard and the chatter of many guestsВ .В .В . a fewВ .В .В . standing with masks in their hands, are suddenly silent.В .В .В . Galileo looks at them. They applaud him politely and bow.” I was shown pictures of what the set of this play might look like; it was to be opulent. Hanging from the ceiling at the center of the stage would be a large and elegant crystal chandelier. Herb showed me the chandelier that had been found and stored for use in the scene. The stage would have the feel of a formal masked ball, a kind of ritualistic play at civility. He described men playing chess, seated at tables, other “guests” standing and politely whispering to each other. The music, made from the recorded sound of glass breaking,5 was to be an abstract version of slow, minuet-like music as played by church bells made of cracking crystal. I wanted it to slowly swirl and create a slight shift in amplitude and pitch as I moved the sound from left to right. I created this from the recordings of the breaking glass, using different speeds, mixed to get a kind of swirling, glittering sheen to the sound. It was quite strange and beautiful. Herb slowed all the stage movement down to match the music. The Cardinal slowly walks with Galileo through the room of men playing chess, leading him toward the desk on which rests the Copernican doctrine, which Galileo is asked (the “small request”) to officially refute. The movements on the stage began to seem like extensions of the sound and chandelier. After seeing the movement, I suggested a kind of trick that had been used in Lear’s storm scene where he bends Page 200 →and touches the floor with his knee so that, for one split second, the horrendous sound of the storm cuts to silence, as if Lear had grounded a universe of electric currents. For Galileo, we had the recording of the “chandelier minuet” stop twice, and with each stop all action on the stage would freeze for that silent moment; a chess piece hangs in the air, a head turn or body gesture held. Everyone frozen but the Cardinal and Galileo, as if they were walking slowly toward the doctrine through a still frame; they were in a different time dimension. For this production of Galileo, we didn’t get into the theater until about two or three days before opening night; it was only then that the scale of the media involved became clear. The amount of tech requiring installation was daunting; we worked a full three days and nights without sleep, worked continually, even in and out of blocking and rehearsal sessions. I knew Herb was working with several artists. There were Bob and myself, of course, but it turned out that there were more than twelve young artists creating each detail of the play, with each concentrating on the scenes to which they were assigned. None of us saw the whole picture, not even at dress rehearsals; we were working until the curtain came up on opening night. Looking back, with this production of Galileo it would seem that Herb was the only one who had a sense of the whole.

Herb had chosen well those involved in this production, and many of the artists he chose would go on to become important figures in the art world. But the way everything came together was a tribute not only to his choices but to his ability to guide the creation of all the individual efforts in such a way that, when put in place, they would seem to be of one voice. Part of that achievement was that, as I have noted, Herb’s own vision expanded as he experienced each artist’s realization of his words. And, as his own vision expanded, he would pass that on to those of us who were being guided by his words. It was “the words, always the words” that were blossoming. A few years later, in 1965, the company was invited to New York to become the resident theater for the opening of the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center. I was invited to join the move as music director of the company. I decided it was time to leave San Francisco, and I relocated to New York. The production that opened the theater was Georg BГјchner’s Danton’s Death. From the beginning of my time working with Herb, I had seen his use of media grow in importance, from Lear’s storm unhinging the universe to Galileo’s intellect and clearly informed observations that threatened to destabilize the confidence in the Church’s promise of a selfcentric universe. Danton’s Death seemed to demand an almost cinematic treatment, and we were in a theater that, if nothing else, promised advanced technological control of media. It was natural for Herb to rely heavily on the technology of the theater. He Page 201 →had grown accustomed to looking for the newest technologies, but none of us in San Francisco had access to technology that was anywhere near the sophistication of what was being installed in New York. In the past, we had created theatrical media out of everything around us (I made the explosive sounds of the revolution outside the brothel in Genet’s The Balcony from recordings of toilets flushing), and when something didn’t work, we somehow made it work. We worked endlessly and loved doing it. In New York, on the other hand, the technology was far more sophisticated, and the use of the technology was unionized. There were many obstacles that were frustrating to all of us, both political and mechanical. Using young San Francisco artists, Herb had become used to dream/thinking and getting quick results to which he could almost instantly react. We were told that the new lighting system at the Vivian Beaumont was the most advanced in the world. I have no reason to believe it wasn’t; it could do amazing things, even simultaneous different light dimming, focusing, and movements with a single push of a button. But all these things had to be programmed; this was a long and tedious job and not easily changed. This expectation of the lighting was not what we had been used to in the San Francisco art scene! Instead, the expectation here was that you would come to know exactly what you wanted and then have it programmed and executed. In addition, the newness of the installation required the expectation that things would go wrong, that there would be “bugs.” These issues were added to the already growing sense that we were facing opposition to our inhabiting the theater at all. Also we didn’t have a lot of time to try things out because the theater was not fully finished. On one preview night, it was discovered that the lights would not dim to black. Instead, there would be a kind of dim halo that would remain. The stage manager, Jose Sevilla, ended up running the entire preview show by hand, moving dimmers up and down manually. Herb had made use of everything for this production, including the heavy stage-firewalls; the traditional fire curtain had been designed as metal panels that were hydraulically powered. They could be individually brought down and up and, when used as a theatrical device, created stark dramatic imagery. Herb found a use for them even before they were operational; they were added to an already media-intense theatrical design. In the middle of another of the preview shows, a fire-barrier slab failed to go up, and a spotlight dramatically came up on the slab where the actor, unseen behind it, was supposed to be. The actor, having to crawl out from behind the slab in order to speak, was not lit and then had to crawl farther into the light because we were told, in the “notes” on the evening’s performance, “There was no light cue or instruction to move a light if something were to go wrong.” Page 202 →Everything was eventually fixed and mostly worked. I, and many others, thought it was, if nothing else, a stunning staging of BГјchner’s Danton’s Death. But, unlike the reviews of “triumph” in the San Francisco press for our King Lear, the New York press considered it less than a resounding success. In his book All in All: An Actor’s Life on and off the Stage, Stacey Keach sums it up: “Danton’s Death died

dismally, roundly panned by many critics.В .В .В . It cast a pall over the rest of the season” (38).6 I had thought that the electronic music I created for the play was quite beautiful and probably the best I had done up to that time. Flying back to San Francisco (I had not yet fully relocated), in the magazine holder of the plane I chose to read Time magazine where I found a review of Danton’s Death that called me “a tone-deaf mute”; I gathered up all the copies of Time and sat on them until I reached San Francisco. I resigned after that first season and, shortly afterward became the artistic director of the Electric Circus, commissioned to create Silver Apples of the Moon. Herb left Lincoln Center a year later. Herb and I remained close, but it was the creation of the California Institute of the Arts, in 1968, that drew us back together as a team. Robert Corrigan was to be the president of the university, and Corrigan brought in Herb to be dean of the theater school and provost of the institute. Herb, however, was more than a provost; he was the “dramaturg” of the development of the new institute. Herb invited me to join, and I agreed, though grudgingly at first (I had a hard time deciding to leave New York), to join the planning team as the associate dean of music, with Mel Powell as dean. At this point, Herb had gone on to a truly grand theatrical vision: a new kind of theater, a modular theater, that would allow any stage design that one might imagine. For this he enlisted Jules Fisher to join with Thornton Ladd, the architect of the building within which the Modular Theater would reside.7 I had agreed to be a part of this, with the condition that I could have a multimedia lab/studio set up by my own design. Herb asked Fisher to work with me on the design of my media lab. The floor of the Modular Theater was divided into 348 platforms, four-by-four-foot square, mounted on independent pneumatic pistons, and the walls were also segmented pieces that allowed for virtually limitless possibilities of design. Entrances were placed on all sides of the theater so that even the ways of entering the theater would be up to the director. The area itself was two stories high from floor to ceiling. There was no distinction between the stage area and the audience configuration, and the matrix of squares could be used to create any relationship between acting and viewing. It was designed with flexible catwalks for lighting, projection, and sound. Page 203 →The building, along with the theater, was not completed until the second academic year of operation. Herb’s tenure at CalArts was cut short in the late summer of 1969 before we were to enter the building (the reasons for this are not well documented, and hopefully proper attention to that will come to pass); as a result, he was never able to use the marvelous theater he had designed. However, many others did, and the following is a description of a 1980 production by Robert Benedetti, of Brave New World. The quandary that Brave New World envisions, ethical or not, has been addressed by Benedetti before. In 1980, to be exact, when he staged an environmental dramatization of the novel at CalArts, in one of the rare instances where Jules Fisher’s and Herbert Blau’s imaginative design of the school’s Modular Theater didn’t outstrip the imaginations of the artists working in it. The theater’s continuous use of rising and falling platforms, and the appearance and disappearance of rooms in which the audience found and lost itself, offered an unnerving counterpoint to any official decrees from an immutable state. The permanent became impermanent. Identity dissolved in the vertigo of protest and plaint. One’s assigned role led not to security but to despair, as in the case of Lenina Crown, for example, who knew only how to give pleasure, but wound up experiencing helplessness.8 In 1971, Herb continued on with his experimental group KRAKEN. With KRAKEN, he did what he probably would have done with the theater program at CalArts: another realization of “embodied” thought. KRAKEN was followed by another lifetime of writing, lecturing, and teaching. Herb and I remained close throughout the remainder of his life. My wife Joan La Barbara and I visited Herb and his wife Kathy Woodward in Seattle whenever we could and continued those long wonderful discussions that

seemed to always start where we last left off. In New York, Herb would show up from time to time, and we would go up the street from our apartment to the Minetta Tavern.9 They would let me have the usual corner table that was almost always available; there we could continue our dialogue for hours before ordering food. Herb and I only worked together once more, in the early 1990s, when I asked if he would help out with the production of the media chamber version of my opera Jacob’s Room. The concept for this piece was that the opera takes place in the mind of Jacob, a holocaust survivor (played by Thomas Buckner) who has tried to forget. The audience hears his voice moving slowly through the auditorium, reading Plato, as images of the past, triggered by a word or phrase, materialize on the stage where we see and hear a woman (Joan La Barbara) Page 204 →and a musician (Erica Duke); also seen is the haunting black-and-white video imagery created by Steina and Woody Vasulka. Herb spent a week in a recording studio in Santa Fe working with Tom on the recording of what the audience would hear floating through the auditorium. The first words spoken by the voice of Jacob are heard while a few still clouds are seen on the dark stage: “When finished and fully winged, the soul soars upward and puts order to the whole world.” With the word order, the clouds animate into bursts of bombs; below we see people fleeing. The word was intended to trigger, in Jacob’s mind, an involuntary memory of the war; Plato’s order becomes Hitler’s order. There were two glass-walled recording booths in the studio. Herb sat in one, facing Tom in the other, a microphone in front of each of them. Tom had an ear bud so that Herb could coach him in real time. Herb worked for the entire first day, and again at the end of the week for another several hours, on how to say the word order. “It’s the words. It’s the words.”

Notes 1. In the early 1960s, several people had worked at the San Francisco Tape Music Center: directors Lee Breuer and Ken Dewey; the director and founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Ron Davis; and one of the earliest liquid projection artists, Elias Romeros. 2. Elaine Woo wrote in Robert Lavigne’s obituary, “The painter among poets, he created portraits of many of its luminaries, including Philip Whalen, Kerouac and Creeley” (Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2014). 3. 1957: “The top hit of the year—the Portable Tape Recorder TK830—has, among other features, two tape speeds, a 3-D sound button and a sound level indicator with a visual dial, all for 9.5 marks.” 4. http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/Lavigne 5. I found sheets of discarded glass, placed one sheet at a time over a large metal garbage can, and recorded the sound of me breaking the glass with blows of a large hammer. 6. Stacy Keach.В All in All: an Actor’s Life on and off the Stage. Lyons Press, An Imprint of Globe Pequot Press, 2013. 7. “Jules Fisher knows his way around theaters, having won a rich share of Tonys honoring his lighting designs for Jelly’s Last Jam, Grand Hotel and The Will Rogers Follies. He also won praise for lighting the outdoor setting at last week’s pre-inaugural concert. But ask him about the little-known Modular Theater at CalArts in Valencia and he makes an unchallenged claim: вЂThere is no theater like it.’” Robert Epstein, “Designing Theaters for All Seasons,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1993. Page 205 →8. Lawrence Christon, Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1995. 9. The Minetta Tavern, on the corner of Minetta Lane and Macdougal Street, opened in the 1930s and was a local hangout for artists and writers (including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, andE. E. Cummings). In the years during which I lived around the corner, it was quiet and seldom full, especially late at night; thus my corner table was often available. In 2009, it became McNally’s Minetta Tavern, a fashionable upscale “Parisian Steakhouse” with a bouncer at the front door and always full.

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“Living in Front of Your EyesВ .В .В . Living and Creating” An Interview with Julie Taymor Recorded on Friday, October 2, 2015, and conducted by Clark Lunberry. CL: I realize that your time at Oberlin, and working with KRAKEN, stretches back to the early 1970’s, but I’m wondering what remains of that distant period for you, what Herb Blau might have called the “emotional memory” of that long ago work with him? How did you end up studying with Herb? Do you recall your initial reactions and responses meeting Herb, working with Herb, being with him? JT: I wasn’t officially studying with Herb, and I was there instead to be a part of that Oberlin company; I was one of the youngest members of that company. That first year I did two productions with Herb, developmental productions, and the first was Seeds of Atreus (1973), that was from the Oresteia Trilogy. That was then later culled into one piece and taken to the Performance Garage in New York. Bill [Irwin] was in it, and Linda Gregerson, and other people who later went off and did really diverse kinds of work. Before Oberlin, I had been very physically oriented in my work, a visual/physical person until I worked with Herb, having worked prior to that with the Theater Workshop of Boston, with Julie Portman; and I also studied mime in Paris at the Г‰cole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. But what I really thank Herb for is making me a much more verbal person, in improvisation. Working with the group at Oberlin, we would take material and improvise both physically and verbally for hours, expressing ourselves through language, as well as through physical imagery. With this group, I was, though, the person responsible quite often for the visual images; I designed the costumes for Seeds of Atreus, as well as performingPage 208 → in it, and I played Electra. But the piece at Oberlin that I remember much more was The Donner Party, Its Crossing (1974) because that piece took over a year of our lives in its preparation, as we read diaries, historical accounts, as well as Indian legends and tales, about the crossing of America, immigration from one place to another—“Going West,” however you’d describe itВ .В .В . migrating. And, in the process of that work, I came up with the physical concept of the square dance, of using the square dance in the production. So, my part of that Oberlin company was often to help with the visual concepts and architectures of the pieces. Page 207 → Fig. 9. Julie Taymor in The Donner Party, Its Crossing, 1974. (Photo by Christopher Thomas) But what I loved about Herb was how he really, really got the language out of actors. We didn’t generally have a playwright, so our pieces were mostly created out of improvisation, through the performers. And because Herb was such a verbal person, and a writer himself, he was able to cull, and edit, and really be the master director/editor behind what we did. He would put it all together. The idea of ideographs, and creating from ideographs, as I was later to do: I think that was a combination for me of my work at the Г‰cole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and working with Herb Blau. That was a very strong part of creation: to be able to get to the very essence of a concept, through minimizing of the elements, distillingВ .В .В . pulling it all down to its essential. CL: You spoke of Herb “getting language out of us,” out of the actors. Do you recall the techniques that he may have used during rehearsals to actually make that happen? For me, I saw Herb in a seminar room, as a graduate student, and he made us talk in various ways. But I’m

wondering how he made you, as performers, do that, and how he brought that language forth? JT: I don’t know; I don’t remember. CL: It may have just been infectious, through his own passion for the materials. JT: Yeah, I think that it was from what we read and just the generic kinds of improvisation that we undertook. We did a lot of physical exercises, such as tai-chi, and it was the era of Grotowski. So, we were doing that kind of exploratory work. The work was very psychological, very emotional, and we used each other a lot in the process. I’m trying to recall, but it’s been way too many years for me to remember that. Forty-some years! CL: You said there were things that you read. Did Herb have materials that he asked you to read, as research for, for instance, The Donner Party, Its Crossing? JT: We would do that, often on our own; all of us would. Of course, there was no internet, so you would do research in libraries and locate diaries of people of the period, subject matter, newspaper articles. And then we would bring those things in and improvise around them. It was very freewheeling; it took a year to create that theater piece. Page 209 →But that kind of work was also very insular. And I think that from my perspective now, outside, I feel that the process was probably more interesting than the results. I didn’t see the production (as an audience member), so I don’t know. That kind of theater experience was very isolated; it was seven or eight hours a day in a gym in Oberlin, Ohio. You know what I mean? There was little outside stimulation as you would have if you were in New York. It was very much “closed doors.” CL: Yes, it sounds monk-likeВ .В .В . or extremely isolating. JT: It was very monk-like. I was one of few in the group who was also a student (instead of just being in the group), so I was doing other studies in addition. But that kind of work was very interior. We started, probably, the first year with many more people, and then it got cut down to seven or eight for The Donner Party. CL: And that was through a process of reduction on Herb’s part, or attrition, with people getting worn out? JT: I don’t remember. I think that it was probably a combination of both. CL: I knew Herb much later as a university professor (in Milwaukee, from 1995–2003), as an academic, a brilliant theoretician. But I’m curious about that other side of him: Herb as a director, that history of Herb’s that everyone in the graduate program knew about—a period in which directing theater was behind him. You may not be in a position to speak about that, but I’m curious about how Herb dealt with actors and the way he brought them out, as he brought out students intellectually. What techniques might he have used? Do you have any recollections of Herbas-director, the Herb that I never met? JT: The people that Herb was attracted to, like me and Bill [Irwin], and a few others that I remember, we were really clay for him, in the sense that, he was not a physical person, he wasn’t a visual person; he was a person of intellect and words. And he needed us to be able to put those ideas into form, into physical form. But, on the other hand, he fed us those ideas to explore. So, it was a kind of wonderful balance. I don’t remember him being physical at all. I know that he wanted it, that physicality. I think that

that desire for the physical is very Peter Brook–like also, to be honest. I think that Peter is another person who is attracted to what you might call the “non-intellect,” the visceral, but he can’t help himself because he’s too intellectual. I think that Herb was one of those. CL: So, what you are describing is a collaborative process where Herb was bringing the verbal, the intellectual, and you (and others) were bringing the physical and the visual. Is that fair? JT: And the emotional. We all became very good verbally and did come up with ideas; I’m a very verbal person now, and, of course, I do a lot of Page 210 →Shakespeare. People often think that I’m primarily visual. You know, people often like to divide you: you’re either visual or verbal; you’re either an actor or you’re an auteur. However, I feel that I am very comfortably both. I work with brilliant actors, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Katherine Hunter; I don’t split it that way between the visual and the verbal, but I think that, for me, Herb was very helpful in getting me to appreciate how to communicate in an intellectual and verbal way. And that he helped me make that bridge between those two predilections, or abilities. He really got the verbal out of me and I really appreciate my time with him. And this verbal growth was very helpful because, when I went off to Indonesia right after Oberlin, in 1975, I started my own theater company and used many of those techniques explored at Oberlin to create at least one very original theater piece out of improvisation. So, I don’t remember exactly what we did there at Oberlin, but I know that it has fed into whoever I am now, somehow. CL: I was just looking back at some of Herb’s writing where he is actually speaking about his work at Oberlin and a particular moment when one of the actors, in apparent frustration with the role being rehearsed, said, “I don’t feel this, I’m not feeling this,” to which Herb snapped back, “I couldn’t care less what you feel, or don’t, feelings are cheap. I only care what you think. What we are doing here is thinking, trying to understand.” Does that kind of exchange resonate? Do you remember that kind of encounter? JT: Probably. It does sound familiar. But these rehearsals were also very emotional, as we were all in that very monk-like situation. It was very hard on the actors—like a kind of psycho-drama. Probably what you say is true about Herb, that division between thinking and feeling, but maybe that is also why those pieces don’t now resonate today as well as they should, if you see what I’m saying. There probably was too much intellect there, and not understanding that that’s just not what theater is. Theater has to have a good balance. Shakespeare knows thatВ .В .В . that’s why he was a genius. CL: And so what you are suggesting is that, of what you are remembering of your time working with Herb at Oberlin, it was the process, not the product that remains? JT: Well, I don’t know because I never saw the pieces performed from the outside, as an audience member. I think that the process was extraordinary and that watching it would be like looking through a keyhole. You wouldn’t probably, watching, get that that which was great about it was the process of creation, as opposed to the final product. I just think that the performances were probably too oblique and vague, and disconnected, for a general audience. You’d have to like that kind of theater. It was definitely not populist or commercialPage 211 → in any kind of way; it was very intellectual. And even though it was very physical, it still didn’t put things together in a way that was easy. But I appreciate it and think that it was great training for me as a director. CL: I’m wondering if you now look back on that period as “of its period,” coming out of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and if it now feels defined by that placement, and maybe even “dated.”

JT: No, I don’t think that it’s “dated.” I think that it’s the opposite. I think that we’ve now gone into an extremely boring period where playwrights are writing psychological family fuck-up dramas. I think that the work of the ’60’s and ’70’s is far more interesting, but that work takes a dedication that American actors (and especially if you live in the cities) cannot afford to do, and that the unions and the situation do not allow it. When I first came to New York, I wanted to create one of my first pieces the same way as at Oberlin, but you have to do it non-union, and so you have to count on extremely young, inexperienced people. You cannot get union actors to work in that way over long periods of time. I would love to work that way again. I would love it. And I think that, right now, God is the playwright. And that really limits what can be done. For instance, that means all of the language of a production is in English, if you are in the U.S., if you know what I mean. I find most contemporary plays limiting and limited. And they don’t have as many characters and they are not as expressive of imagery, because they are not as collaboratively created. What Herb and so many people were doing at that time is dismissing the playwright. I think that the playwright is very important to be a part of that process but not taking over so completelyВ .В .В . I think that at Oberlin we had a playwright; I don’t remember who it was, but they were gotten rid of at some point. CL: The fact that you can’t remember is itself interesting. JT: Without a playwright, we created the performances. Herb was the editor; the master-editor; the master-builder. And I think that’s a very exciting way to work. Mabou Mines was that way also and many other theater groups in New York at that time were. Robert Wilson sometimes was, and still is, that way. There are still certain directors who create collaboratively. Simon McBurney, Robert LepageВ .В .В . These are some of the more experimental directors, still, who sometimes use a prewritten text or play, or develop it. Maybe Simon doesn’t as much as he used to, but Theatre de ComplicitГ© was also one of those kinds of theater and it certainly was not that many years ago. CL: In Eileen Blumenthal’s book about your work, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire (2007), Herb is quoted describing The Donner Party and a long monologue that you developed for that piece, a monologue that he then adjusted Page 212 →or scripted in some manner; he describes this as “a no-nonsense speech absolutely modeled on Julie. She talks about the absurdity of the trip, the inadequacy of the people. It’s elliptical, but she is obviously talking about our group. This one has a bad attitude; this one is screwing up.” I’m wondering: were you speaking of the Oberlin group in that speech, and could you talk about what Herb heard in that piece of yours? JT: I haven’t looked at that reference, and that text, in years, so I don’t remember. But it sounds about right because, as I was saying to you, Herb may have said that emotions are not necessary, but when you’re with seven or eight people, in a room, eight or nine hours a day, isolated from all others, of course, emotions are going to enter into the fabric, into the content of what you are doing. And, yes, I’m not going to say who, but I have veryВ .В .В . I really remember very negative feelings about certain persons in there. And that reaction made sense to us. I think we saw the absurdity ofВ .В .В . we didn’t love everybody that we were working with, but wouldn’t that be similar to the Donner Party’s own journey? So, yes, the experience mirrored the story that we were telling, and I would definitely have been bridging those worlds as a performer, and as a creator. CL: Now you’ve already mentioned that when you left KRAKEN, you went to Indonesia.В .В .В . JT: You know what! It wasn’t called KRAKEN when I was at Oberlin. I don’t remember it as KRAKEN; every time you say it, I think, “What was that?” I was part of the Oberlin Group.

I think that it became KRAKEN after I left. I remember it only after I left. CL: Well, after you left the group, you went to Indonesia, and in Blumenthal’s book about your work, Playing with Fire, you do make a kind of contrast with the work that you had been doing with Blau. For instance, in that book, Blumenthal writes, “What impressed Taymor most about Rendra’s group was its relationship with the communityВ .В .В . outdoors, neighbors, children.В .В .В . This was startling because the Blau workshop had been вЂso private, so interior, so precious and nobody could watch until we were readyВ .В .В . in refreshing contrast to the rarefied audiences of the Western avant-garde’” (14). You’ve already been alluding to this contrast with your work with Herb, but is there anything else that you could add, the contrast with what Herb was doing and what you then saw in Indonesia? JT: Well, I think that Herb was a little too elitist for my taste. What happened when I went to Indonesia is that I saw theater in its original form. And that was more impressive to me than this kind ofВ .В .В . insular theater. But also, the avant-garde theater really shunned and looked down upon popular theater in the West. And for me, why I adore Shakespeare so much is that his plays are so Page 213 →similar with what I saw with the MahДЃbhДЃrata, when I was in India, or Ramayana, in Indonesia; you could have it all in one theater piece. That you could have levels of intellect that, incomprehensible to the majority of the audience, would be meaningful only to the Hindu priests, or poets, or philosophers, but the pieces would still work on multiple levels. There’s a wonderful image, or metaphor, that the Brothers Quay have said, the animated filmmakers with whom I have worked: create work that is like an elevator that goes to however many floors, and the audience is allowed to get off on any of them. I really believe in that. The Lion King is very much that. You know, if you don’t like musical theater, that’s fine, but you might like La BohГЁme, or South African choral music, if you don’t like Elton John. And if you are a child, you might not get the sophistication of some of the theatrical images—the idea of the circle going into a hole as representing drought, or the tears that come out in white silk from the eyes of the lioness—but you’ll understand it; you’ll understand what they mean. But a more sophisticated theater-goer, or maker, will like the means, the way the story was told. And that is my belief. That is what makes me want to do theater, to be able to reach people on very many levels. My Midsummer Night’s Dream is the same. Children love it; they like the pillow fight. But people who are there will get it on a different level; they’ll see the physical, the theatrical themes; they’ll appreciate the performances in different ways. So I feel that HerbВ .В .В . with, for example, the square dance [in The Donner Party], I think that I was, without my knowing it, pushing Herb in that direction. I pushed him with the populist image of the square dance as the metaphor for the Donner Party’s trip. CL: As opposed to emerging from something more abstract, such as modern dance? JT: Yes. He wouldn’t have come to that, the square dance, on his own and I think that he appreciated that part of me. And that was a good balance for him, as he was a good balance for me at that time. CL: Herb of course wrote a book entitled The Audience and, asked about his imagined audience, Herb said, “I couldn’t care less about the audience. What I did care about is precisely what we were doing, on the premise that theater is thought” (11). There is certainly a kind of elitism in a bold statement such as that, as well as provocation, which was often a part of what Herb was doing. And yet, you are still speaking of audiences, or aiming for audiences, in different waysВ .В .В . JT: But I think that you can do both, thinking and feeling. You see, for me, I don’t think that you have to be elitist in order to be abstract and intellectual and philosophical and psychological and

poetic. I just don’t believe that you Page 214 →have to do thatВ .В .В . And yet I still think that there is a prejudice toward that. The more minimalist something is, the more pared downВ .В .В . somehow that’s “higher” art. And I think that it’s not just the makers who often believe that; it’s also the critics who are also very verbally oriented. They don’t understand the power of imageryВ .В .В . that imagery is not justВ .В .В . what would you say? .В .В .В В .В .В . spectacle. Le spectacle is what the French call theater, but our connotation of spectacle is that it is mindless. CL: I was recently teaching Artaud and, of course, his great ambition was to restore the mise-enscГЁne, the “total spectacle” to theater. And, before, when you were talking about so much of contemporary theater returning to psychological dramas, that kind of theater, the psychological, was precisely what Artaud detested and insisted that he wanted to destroy, desiring something more complete, comprehensive. JT: Yes, I’m with him! CL: That desire was also fueling Herb. JT: Sure, all of the artists who were working in the ’60’s and ’70’s were inspired by that. CL: Herb, in the seminar room, would very often insist that students “may engage with a play far more profoundly if they don’t go to a productionВ .В .В . the brain is the best stage of all, the most expansive, versatile, dynamic, and volatile in containmentВ .В .В . that englobed space behind the eyeballsВ .В .В . now that’s what a theater should be!” I heard Herb say this over and over.В .В .В . JT: But that’s not theater. CL: Why? .В .В .В Because it’s not embodied, physically enacted? JT: It’s not theater; it’s not a performance. It’s not with an audience; it’s not with a community. That’s not theater; that’s thinking. That’s thought; that’s imagination. But it’s not theater! Herb was just trying to redefine something because that’s what he liked. But that’s not theater; that’s not what the definition of theater is for me. CL: It’s theory perhaps, and Herb was, in part, trying to collapse the two, theater and theory, but maybe not successfully, from your point of view? If you eliminate the body; if you eliminate the stage, the audienceВ .В .В . the performance, then you eliminate theater? JT: Many people will say now that all you need to do to make theater is to have one performer and one audience member. That’s about as minimal as it can be. And it could be a puppet and an audience member, but that there has to be someone who is performing, or creating, and someone who is receiving, or reacting. And that is theater. I think that theater engaged alone, in thought, is process, but that theater needs to come to some performance. You can use the word theater in many Page 215 →ways. Such as, “he’s a highly theatrical person.” So, you can do that, but the actual creation of theater is, for me, if you want to have limitations, it’s really about those two things: the performance and the audience. CL: And it’s true, Herb would frequently return us to the actor whom he would say is “dying in front of your eyes.” That is one of his most well-known and repeated ideas, what he called a “universal” of theater, that the actor is there “dying in front of your eyes.”

JT: Why does he say that the actor is “dying in front of your eyes”? CL: It’s the actor’s mortality that is present, and it’s that which is being performed—that the actor is in time, and so time is present, and that mortality is what is being witnessed. JT: This is the part of Herb that doesn’t reallyВ .В .В .В , I just think, “oh, come on already”; the actors are living in front of your eyes. They are living and creating. They’re not dying! I would say that dying would be if they were just standing there and nothing was happening. But if they are actually creating, they’re living. Herb’s view is a negative one. CL: Herb would also, like Artaud, return us to breathing, and the breath, and that’s a manifestation of lifeВ .В .В . JT: Well, that’s living. To return us to breathingВ .В .В . that, I would say, goes more with [Tadashi] Suzuki. I actually think that Suzuki often has many more interesting thoughts about theater than Blau does. Herb was a great man to work with and, I enjoyed my time with him, but I don’t really go by his theories. There are other theater people who are more impressive and are more important to me than Herb was in that regard. He was important to me in my development, extremely important, absolutely essential in my development, but I don’t agree with many of his ideas of the theater. CL: And, well, that “development” of yours, from Herb, might be enoughВ .В .В . After KRAKEN, after he worked with you, Herb left the theater completelyВ .В .В . JT: Well, there you have it. CL: And he became an academic, a theorist, and a writer, and he never really did theater again. When you were working with him, did it seem as if “the writing was on the wall,” that his time in theater, his time with a particular kind of theater, was nearing an end? JT: Well, look: here are the two things. Bill Irwin and I were two of the main people in that tiny Oberlin company that went on to have careers that people heard ofВ .В .В . Bill went to clown school and I went to Asia. After Oberlin, it’s like we fled [laugh]. We fled! CL: What did you flee? JT: We fled that kind of insular, intellectual, elitist, theoretical world. We wanted Page 216 →to feel the real pulse of theaterВ .В .В . which I don’t think Herb could get. I think he was too in his head. I think that, at Oberlin, he worked with people who were different from him, which is what made it a great collision, and collaboration. And that approach to theater that we had there was really open-minded and exciting, but ultimately there was no way that I was going to want to stay in that kind of company, and work in that kind of way. It’s not fulfilling enough. And I was interested in the other kind of theater. I thought that what Ariane Mnouchkine, with the Théâtre du Soleil, was doing far more interesting workВ .В .В . at that time. World theater. I like that. I like cross-cultural; I like using different media. I like the power of imagery as much, if not more than the wordВ .В .В . transcending cultures, which words limit, because it’s language. CL: Well, thank you, Julie. This has been wonderful and it’s been great to hear your recollections of that time so long ago working with Herb. JT: I loved Herb, so don’t make it out that I didn’t love him. You heard what I said. He was very important in my life, but we are very different in our beliefs.

WHAT THY MEMORY CANNOT CONTAIN Page 217 →Gregory Whitehead Out of the dark/ out/out/out/out/out/out/out/ Look what thy memory/ look/look/look/ cannot contain/ cannot/CANnot/can/NOT/ Commit to these waste blanks WASTE BLANKS /В .В .В . /to these commit And thou shalt find/ look/look/look/ those children nursed/ to these commit/ delivered from thy brain/ what thy memory/ cannot contain/ to take a new acquaintance/ cannot/CANnot/can/NOT/ of thy mind/ thy mind/thy mind/thy mind thy mind/thy mind thy/mind thy/mi/and when the clot occurs in the conventional notion of the clot, you say, alright/В .В .В . / that’s the drama

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Contributors Lee Breuer writes songs, poems, plays, and films. Currently, he is writing a book that combines them all. Breuer also stages his own work, as well as adaptations of classic theater. Awards include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a MacArthur Award, Obie Awards, and others. He is co-artistic director of Mabou Mines and was a member of Herbert Blau’s Actor’s Workshop. Sue-Ellen Case, Professor Emerita and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has published widely in the fields of German theater, feminism and theater, performance theory, and lesbian critical theory in such journals such as Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Differences, and Theatre Research International, as well as in many anthologies of critical works. Her books include Feminism and Theatre (1994, revised 2008), The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (1997), Performing Science and the Virtual (2006), and Feminist and Queer Performance (2009). Gautam Dasgupta co-founded and was co-editor/publisher of PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 1976–2006. He has written widely on film, theater, and the performing arts for various publications in the United States and internationally and is the author and/or editor of books on theater and culture. In 1998–99, he was an inaugural fellow at the newly established American Academy in Berlin. Currently he is Professor of Theater at Skidmore College in upstate New York. Elin Diamond is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is the author ofВ Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and TheaterВ (1997) andВ Pinter’s Comic PlayВ (1985),В and editor ofВ Performance and Cultural PoliticsВ (1996) and co-editor ofВ Performance, Feminism, and Affect in Neoliberal TimesВ [with D. Varney and C. Amich] (2017) andВ The Cambridge Companion to Caryl ChurchillВ [with E. Aston] (2009).В В Her essays on drama, performance and feminist theory have appeared inВ Theatre Journal, PMLA, Page 220 →ELH, Discourse, TDR, Modern DramaВ and inВ anthologies published in the United States, Europe, and India. She is currently at work on a book on mimesis, modernism, and performance.В В S. E. Gontarski, Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, is the author of many books, including Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, edited with Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison (2016); The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014); A Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004); and Beckett after Beckett, edited with Anthony Uhlmann (2006). He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants and has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships. Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, is a poet, a 2007 National Book Award finalist, and a former Guggenheim Fellow. She was a member of Herbert Blau’s KRAKEN theater group at Oberlin College. She is the author of six books of poetry and two books of criticism and the coeditor of one collection of scholarly essays. Her poems have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. Martin Harries, Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (2000) and Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (2007), as well as numerous articles on theater and performance. Bill Irwin is an American actor, clown, and comedian. He began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and is noted for his contributions to the renaissance of the American circus in the 1970s. He was a member of Herbert Blau’s KRAKEN theater group at Oberlin College. Julia Jarcho, Assistant Professor of English at New York University, is a playwright, director, and scholar, and the artistic director of the company Minor Theater.В Productions includeВ The TerrifyingВ (Minor Theater

/Abrons Arts Center, 2017),В Every Angel is BrutalВ (Clubbed Thumb, 2016),В Dreamless LandВ (New York City Players, 2011),В American TreasureВ (13P, 2009),В andВ Grimly HandsomeВ (Incubator, 2013), which won an Obie Award for Best New American Play. Publications includeВ Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond DramaВ (Cambridge University Press, 2017),В Minor Theater: Three PlaysВ (53rd State Press, 2017), and essays inВ Critical InquiryВ andВ Modern Drama.В Page 221 →Anthony Kubiak, Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (2002) and Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (1991), as well as many articles on theater and performance. He is a former student of Herbert Blau in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Modern Studies Program. Daniel Listoe, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is a former student of Herbert Blau in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Modern Studies Program. His work has appeared in American Literary History, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Law and Literature, and SubStance, among others. Clark Lunberry, coeditor of The Very Thought of Herbert Blau (with Joseph Roach) and Professor of English at the University of North Florida, is the author of Sites of Performance—Of Time and Memory (2014) and Writing on Water/Writing on Air (2016). His interdisciplinary articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, SubStance, and Performing Arts Journal. He is a former student of Herbert Blau in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Modern Studies Program and was Blau’s research assistant from 1998 to 2000. Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of PAJ Publications andВ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is the author of three volumes of criticism,В Performance Histories,В Ecologies of Theatre, andВ Theatrewritings, and also edited several drama, essay, and interview collections, includingВ Conversations with Meredith Monk, New Europe: plays from the continent,В InterculturalismВ and Performance, andВ Plays for the End of the Century. Her essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Bonnie Marranca is Professor of Theatre at The New School for Liberal Arts/Eugene Lang College, in New York City. Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and of English at Stanford University, and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997); and editor and contributor to Live Art in Los Angeles (Routledge, 2012). Phelan is also co-editor of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993) and The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). Her most recent volume, Contact Warhol: Photography Without End, co-published in 2018 by MIT Press and the Cantor Arts Center, was done in collaboration with Richard Meyer and the Warhol Foundation. Page 222 →Joseph Roach, coeditor of The Very Thought of Herbert Blau (with Clark Lunberry), is Sterling Professor of Theater, English, and African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1993), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), and It (2007). His articles have appeared in The Drama Review (TDR), Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Discourse, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Text and Performance Quarterly. Richard Schechner, University Professor Emeritus at New York University, is a performance theorist, theater director, author, and editor ofВ TDR: The Drama Review.В His many theater productions includeВ Dionysus in 69, Commune, The Tooth of Crime,В Mother Courage and Her Children, Three Sisters,В andВ Imagining O.В His books include,В Performed ImaginariesВ (2015),В Performance Studies: An IntroductionВ (2013, third edition),В Performance TheoryВ (2003),В The Future of Ritual (1995),В andВ Between Theater and Anthropology (1985). Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music and, with Herbert Blau, a founding member of

California Institute for the Arts. He is a pioneer in the development of electronic music and multimedia performance and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work that brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon, commissioned by Nonesuch Records. It has become a modern classic and was recently entered into the National Register of Recorded Works at the Library of Congress. Julie Taymor, a former member of Herbert Blau’s KRAKEN theater group at Oberlin College, is a director of theater, opera, and such films as Across the Universe (2007), The Tempest (2010), Titus (1999), and Frida (2002), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. She is widely known for directing the stage musical The Lion King, for which she won two Tony Awards, one for direction and one for costume design, the first woman to receive a Tony for directing a musical. Gregory Whitehead is a leading radiophonic sound artist and writer based in Lenox, Massachusetts. He collaborated with Herbert Blau on the sound-art piece Phantom Pain: The Theater of Operations (1989). He is the author of numerous essays on the poetics of radio space and coeditor of a groundbreaking anthology of sound art and radio texts, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.

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Index Actor’s Workshop. See San Francisco Actor’s Workshop Adele (nГ©e Adele Laurie Blue Adkins), 167–69, 171–72 Adorno, Theodor, 34, 66, 67 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The (with Horkheimer), 67 Aeschylus, 56, 58, 115, 179 Oresteia, The, 2, 19, 56, 104–5, 126, 127, 136, 152, 206 Ahmed, Sara, 28, 29 Strange Encounters, 29 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 139 Alley Theater (Houston), 139 Altamont, 48 Althusser, Louis, 6, 35, 112–14, 142 “вЂPiccolo Teatro,’ The: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” 112–14 ANTA Washington Square Theatre, 49 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze, Guattari), 52, 82 Anxiety of Influence, The: A Theory of Poetry (Bloom), 163 Aragon, Louis, 153 Archimedes, 144 Arden, John, 190 Arena Stage (Washington, DC), 139 Arendt, Hannah, 121, 122, 152 Aristotle, 19, 102 Artaud, Antonin, 2, 8, 19, 21, 33, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 68, 74, 93, 114–15, 123, 128, 132, 134, 154, 176, 214, 215 Theater and Its Double, The, 123 Theater of Cruelty, 46, 48, 114–15 Artforum, 147 Artist’s Life As a Work in Progress, The (LaVigne), 194, 196

As If: An Autobiography (Blau), x, 10, 39, 46, 49, 53, 54, 100, 102, 106, 109, 110, 190 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 187 “Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art” (Blau), 71–72 Audience, The (Blau), x, 1, 8, 10, 26, 62–63, 68, 74, 106, 112, 114, 123–27, 143, 178, 213 Augustine, 116 Austin, J.L., 33–34 Back to Beckett (Cohn), 39 Badiou, Alain, 12 Balcony, The (Genet), 1, 38 Balzac, Honoré de, 146 Bardo, 82–98, see also Buddhism, Tibetan; dream yoga; Tibetan Book of the Dead, The (Bardo Thodol) Chikhe Bardo (Dying), 94–98 Kyene Bardo (Living), 83–87 Milam Bardo (Dreaming), 90–94 Sipe Bardo (Becoming), 82–83 Tingzin Bardo (Becoming Aware), 87–90 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 50, 190, see also Théâtre du Rond-Point Barthes, Roland, 6, 10, 42, 47–48, 52, 85, 129, 174, 187 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 174 Pleasure of the Text, The, 48 Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville), 20 Baudrillard, Jean, 24–25, 27 Beauvoir, Simone de, 27 Beckett, Samuel, 2, 19, 20, 26–27, 31, 33, 35–42, 45–46, 47, 48, 50, 70–72, 114, 118, 125, 130, 137–38, 147, 154, 159–60, 161–62, 167, 169, 190 Catastrophe, 71 Endgame, 2–3, 9–10, 20, 39–42, 42, 46, 49, 53, 109, 138, 159–60, 194, 196–97 Footfalls, 136 Imagination Dead Imagine, 48, 70, 176 Not I, 176

Ohio Impromptu, 71 Waiting for Godot, 5, 19, 35–39, 45–46, 109, 161, 166, 176, 189 What Where, 71 Behan, Brendan, 190 Page 224 →Behler, Ernst, 171 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [L’Être et le nГ©ant: Essai d’ontologie phГ©nomГ©nologique] (Sartre), 21 Benedetti, Robert, 203 Benjamin, Andrew Plural Event, The: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, 163–64 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 64, 68, 107–8 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 107 Bentley, Eric, 29, 134 Berlin Wall, 141, 154 Berliner Ensemble, 120, 146, 154 Birthday Party, The (Pinter), 5, 108 Black Mountain College, 6 Black Power, 23 Blau, Herbert, x, xi, 4, 5, 42 As If: An Autobiography, x, 10, 39, 46, 49, 53, 54, 100, 102, 106, 109, 110, 190 “Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art” (Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett), 71–72 Audience, The, x, 1, 8, 10, 26, 62–63, 68, 74, 106, 112, 114, 123–26, 143, 178, 213 biography, 3–10, 48–50, 190–91 Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater, x, 1, 2, 7, 8, 12, 16, 20, 25–26, 26, 28–29, 31, 47, 105, 106, 124, 130, 192 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), at, 6, 15, 23, 26, 49, 140–41, 191, 202–3 City College of New York, at, 49 Danton’s Death (BГјchner), Lincoln Center production, 6, 23, 136, 200–202 division, 61–76 Dubious Spectacle, The: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000, x, 10, 16, 76, 110, 111, 115, 116, 179, 191, 194, 195, 198

elitism, 212–16 Endgame (Beckett), 1959 production, 39–42, 42 Eye of Prey, The: Subversions of the Postmodern, x, 10, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 39, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51–53, 128–29, 131, 138, 142–43, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 186, 187 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, recipient, 7 history, on, 102–18 “I Don’t Wanna Play: The American Theater ’64, Its Problems and Promise,”,” 53 Impossible Theater, The: A Manifesto, x, 6, 7, 31, 36–37, 46, 49, 55, 74, 99, 108–9, 116–18, 120, 122, 134–35, 137, 174, 191 King Lear (Shakespeare) and, 9, 18, 74, 116–18, 174, 181, 194–96, 197–99 KRAKEN (theater group) and, 6–9, 23, 31, 49, 59, 78–81, 124, 131, 135, 136–37, 140, 191, 203, 208–16 LaVigne, Robert, collaborations with, 5, 18, 40, 194–97, 200 Life of Galileo, The (Brecht), production, 199–200 “Meanwhile, Follow the Bright Angels,” 190 mirrored doubling, 31–43 Mother Courage (Brecht), 1956 production, 5 Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion, x, 10, 29, 105–6, 175–76 Oberlin College, at, 6, 15, 23, 56–60, 78–81, 78, 191, 206–16 performance theory, 48–54, 61–76 Phantom Pain: The Theater of Operations (with Whitehead), 14, 217 Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, x, 10, 38, 39, 40, 102, 108, 109 Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, x, 1–2, 10–11, 12, 15, 89, 103–4, 192 “Remembering Beckett: An Interview” (Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett), 71 “Remission of Play. The,” 130 Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, at, 6, 102, 122, 139–40, 200–202 Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett, x, 1, 3, 10, 31, 39, 40–42, 45–46, 71, 109, 160, 170 San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, at, 4–6, 7, 14, 18, 23, 48–49, 59, 108, 120–21, 122, 124, 137–38, 139, 152, 153, 159–60, 174, 181 San Francisco State University, at, 4, 26 “вЂSet Me Where You Stand’: Revising the Abyss,” 116

Page 225 →“Spacing Out in the American Theater,” 68–69 Stanford University, studies at, 4 Subotnick, Morton, collaborations with, 5–6, 14–15, 18, 194–204 Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point, x, 7, 8, 12, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 40, 49, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 97, 98, 99, 101, 105, 108, 135, 136, 140, 143, 159, 176 TDR (Tulane Drama Review), as Advisory Board Member, 190–91 “Thinking History, History Thinking,” 103, 106 To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance, x, 10, 12, 34, 35–36, 46, 111, 114, 141–42, 153, 193 “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play,” 157–58, 162–63, 165–66 University of Maryland, Baltimore County, at, 6, 191 University of Washington, at, 3, 8, 191 University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM), at, 8, 112, 191, 209 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), San Quentin production, 5, 37, 53, 74, 159, 189 Watchman figure (The Oresteia), on, 104–5, 126, 152 When Death Is Dead, 3 “Who is Godot?,” 45–46 Blin, Roger, 46, 190 Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (Blau), x, 1, 2, 7, 8, 12, 16, 20, 25–26, 26, 28–29, 31, 47, 105, 106, 124, 130, 192 Bloom, Harold, 163 Anxiety of Influence, The: A Theory of Poetry, 163 Blumenthal, Eileen, 211 Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire, 211–12 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Butler), 34 BohГЁme, La (Puccini), 213 Boulez, Pierre, 139 Boyle, Kay, 37–38 Braudel, Fernand, 103, 104, 105 On History, 103 Brave New World (Huxley), 203

Breakfast Club, The, 75 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 31, 33, 47, 49, 50, 61, 64–67, 69–71, 74, 132, 137, 138, 144, 148, 154, 190 Life of Galileo, The, 199–200 Mother Courage, 5 “Short Organon for the Theatre, A,” 64, 69–70, 132 Verfremdungseffekt, 82, 91–94 Breton, André, 45, 153 Breuer, Lee, 5, 14, 18, 139, see also Mabou Mines; Maleczech, Ruth Brook, Peter, 110, 209 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 147 Brown, Norman O., 128, 129, 130, 145 Life after Death, 145 Love’s Body, 53, 128 Bruss, Elizabeth, 27 Büchner, Georg, 6, 23, 200, 202 Danton’s Death, 6, 23, 136, 200–202 Buckner, Thomas, 203–4 Buddhism, Tibetan, 82–98 Buñuel, Luis, 2 Chien andalou, Un, 2 Butler, Judith, 25, 28, 32, 36 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” 34 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 32 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 19, 85–86, 87 Devotion of the Cross, The, 20 Life is a Dream, 85 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 6, 15, 23, 26, 49, 140–41, 191, 202–3, see also Disney, Walt Blau, Herbert at, 6, 26, 49, 140–41, 191, 202–3 Modular Theater, 202–3

School of Critical Studies, 140–41 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Barthes), 174 Camus, Albert, 21, 116, 139 Carlson, Marvin A., 6–7, 8 Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, 6–7 Case, Sue-Ellen, 7, 12–13, 19–30, 160 Catastrophe (Beckett), 71 Cave Allegory (Plato), 24, 136 Center for Twentieth Century Studies. See University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) Page 226 →CГ©zanne, Paul, 19 Chalmers, David, 85 Chandler, David, 56, 80, see also KRAKEN (theater group) ChГ©reau, Patrice, 139, 145 Chicago 8 Trial (1969), 50 Chicago Democratic Convention (1968), 50 Chien andalou, Un (BuГ±uel), 2 Chinoy, Helen, 29 City College of New York, 49 Blau, Herbert at, 49 Civil Wars, The (Wilson), 58 Cixous, HГ©lГЁne, 27 Cocteau, Jean, 148 Cohn, Ruby, 4, 26–28, 29, 39 Back to Beckett, 39 Just Play: Beckett’s Theater, 26 New American Dramatists, 1960–1990, 26 Cold War, 39, 41, 46, 55, 68, 109, 116 ComГ©die FranГ§aise, 139 Copeau, Jacques, 120

Corrigan, Robert W., 138–39, 190, 191, 202, see also TDR (Tulane Drama Review) Craig, Gordon, 134 Crooked Eclipses (KRAKEN), 6 Crucible, The (Arthur Miller), 194 cummings, e.e., 205 Cunningham, Merce, 151 Curb, Rosemary, 29 Danton’s Death (Büchner), 6, 23, 136, 200–202 Blau, Herbert Lincoln Center production, 6, 23, 136, 200–202 Dasgupta, Gautam, 13, 120–49, 150 Davis, R.G., 25 Deafman Glance (Wilson), 153 Dean, Howard, 172 Debord, Guy, 63 DeGeneres, Ellen, 168, 171–72 Delaney, Shelagh, 190 Deleuze, Gilles, 52–53, 87, 93, 128, 129 Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari), 52, 82 Dench, Judi, 184–85 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 8, 21, 23, 27, 31, 33–34, 36, 47–48, 51, 129 “Signature, Event, Context,” 33–34 “Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, The,” 114–15 Devotion of the Cross, The (Calderón), 20 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The (Adorno, Horkheimer), 67 Diamond, Elin, 5, 7, 12–13, 26, 27, 31–43, 156, 160 Dionysian theater, 84, 88, 126 Disney, Walt, 6, 23, 49, see also California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Donner Party, Its Crossing, The (KRAKEN), 6, 8, 78, 79, 80, 207, 208, 211–12, 213 doubling. See mirrored doubling

Downie, Penny, 184–85 dream yoga, 90–93 Dubious Spectacle, The: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Blau), x, 10, 16, 76, 110, 111, 115, 116, 179, 191, 194, 195, 198 Duchamp, Marcel, 152–53 Duke, David, 135 Duras, Marguerite, 116, 139 Hiroshima mon amour (with Resnais), 116 Г‰cole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, L’, 206, 208 Electric Circus, 202 Eliot, T.S., 20, 137, 144 Waste Land, The, 19, 25 Elizabethan theater, 72–73 Elsinore (KRAKEN), 6, see also Hamlet (Shakespeare) Emancipated Spectator, The (RanciГЁre), 64 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 137 Empson, William, 72–74 Some Versions of the Pastoral, 72 Endgame (Beckett), 2–3, 9–10, 20, 39–42, 42, 46, 49, 53, 109, 138, 159–60, 194, 196–97 Blau, Herbert production, 196–97 Epicurus, 83 Esslin, Martin, 5, 29, 37, 159 Theatre of the Absurd, The, 5, 53, 159 Eye of Prey, The: Subversions of the Postmodern (Blau), x, 10, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 39, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51–53, 128–29, 131, 138, 142–43, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 186, 187 Page 227 →Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 189 Finley, Karen, 145 Fisher, Jules, 202, 203 Footfalls (Beckett), 136 Ford Foundation, 139

Foreman, Richard, 139 Forman, Simon, 177–79, 180 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), critique of, 177–80 FornГ©s, MarГ-a Irene,5 Foucault, Michel, 6, 19, 27, 31, 111, 129 Franklin, Aretha, 20 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 34, 50, 63, 84–86, 88, 130–31, 147, 158, 161, 163 Future of an Illusion, The, 35 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 34 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 85 Unheimlich, the [Die Unheimliche], 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 96, 97, 100 Frohnmayer, John, 145–46 Fukuyama, Francis, 148 Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 35 Gass, William, 133 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler), 32 Genet, Jean, 5, 19, 24, 30, 33, 38, 48–49, 137, 138, 167, 169, 190 Balcony, The, 1, 38 Ginzburg, Carlo, 103, 104 History, Rhetoric, and Proof, 103 Glass, Philip, 156 “Godot Comes to Sarajevo” (Sontag), 32, 37 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19 Golden Bowl, The (James), 133, 171 GГіmez-PeГ±a, Guillermo, 147 Gontarski, S.E., 5, 12–13, 45–54 Graves, Robert, 18 White Goddess, The, 18 Greek drama, 33, 59, 72–73, 80, 84, 126, 152, 179

Watchman figure (The Oresteia), 104–5, 126, 152 Greenberg, Clement, 147 Gregerson, Linda, 7, 8, 15, 56–60, 57, 80, 206, see also KRAKEN (theater group) Gregory, André, 5, 51 Gropius, Walter, 50, see also Piscator, Erwin; Total Theater Grotowski, Jerzy, 20, 51, 62, 208 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud), 34 Guattari, Félix, 52–53, 128 Anti-Oedipus (with Deleuze), 52, 82 Gulf War, 141 Gunn, Thom, 59 Habermas, Jürgen, 148 Haldeman, H.R., 6 Hamlet, see also Elsinore (KRAKEN) Hamlet (Shakespeare), 6, 20, 32, 35, 82, 126–27 Harries, Martin, 14, 61–76 Hass, Robert, 60 Healing Fiction (Hillman), 88 Helms, Jesse, 135 Hemingway, Ernest, 205 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 173 Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon (Bass, Harter), 161 Higgins, Dick, 172 Hillman, James, 84, 85, 88 Healing Fiction, 88 Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, Duras), 116 History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Ginzburg), 103 Hoguet, Robert L. Jr., 49 Hopkins, Anthony, 210

Horkheimer, Max, 67 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The (with Adorno), 67 How to Write (Stein), 22 Huizinga, Johan, 25 Hunter, Katherine, 210 “I Don’t Wanna Play: The American Theater ’64, Its Problems and Promise,” (Blau), 53 Ibsen, Henrik, 33, 56 Imagination Dead Imagine (Beckett), 48, 70, 176 “Impossible Seductions: The Work of Herbert Blau” (Kubiak), 82, 84 Impossible Theater, The: A Manifesto (Blau), x, 6, 7, 31, 36–37, 46, 49, 55, 74, 99, 108–9, 116–18, 120, 122, 134–35, 137, 174, 191 Page 228 →In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Moten), 171 In Three Zones (Leach), 49 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 85 Ionesco, EugГЁne, 5, 190 Irigaray, Luce, 27 Irving, Jules, 4, 6, 23, 48, 49, 189, 191 Irwin, Bill, 7, 8, 15, 56, 78–81, 79, 206, 209, 215, see also KRAKEN (theater group) Isaac and Oedipus: A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Akedah (Erich Wellisch), 185 Jacob’s Room (Subotnick), 203–4 Jacobean theater, 33 James, Henry, 10, 64, 133, 141, 151, 158, 162–66, 167 Golden Bowl, The, 133, 171 Portrait of a Lady, 162–66 Turn of the Screw, The, 165 What Maisie Knew, 158 Jameson, Fredric, 171 Jarcho, Julia, 14, 61–76 Jarry, Alfred, 148 John, Elton, 213

Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire (Blumenthal), 211–12 Jung, Carl, 84, 87–88 Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Cohn), 26 Kafka, Franz, 19 Karatani, Kojin Transcritique, 116 Kazan, Elia, 49 Keach, Stacey, 202 Keaton, Buster, 19 Kierkegaard, Søren, 116 King Lear (Shakespeare), 9, 18, 19, 102, 110, 116–18, 174, 181, 194–96, 197–99 Blau, Herbert production, 194–96, 197–99 King Lear in Our Time (Mack), 110 Klein, Melanie, 84 KRAKEN (theater group), 6–8, 7, 9, 15, 23, 57, 78–81, 110, 206, see also Chandler, David; Gregerson, Linda; Irwin, Bill; Newman, David; Oberlin College; O’Connor, Michael; Ott, Sharon; Russell, Tyran; Sanders, Wes; Taymor, Julie; University of Maryland, Baltimore County Blau, Herbert and, 6–8, 23, 31, 49, 59, 78–81, 131, 135, 136–37, 140, 191, 203, 208–16 Crooked Eclipses, 6 Donner Party, Its Crossing, The, 6, 8, 78, 79, 80, 207, 208, 211–12, 213 Elsinore, 6 Seeds of Atreus, The, 6, 8, 24, 56, 58, 78, 80, 136–37, 206, 208 Kubiak, Anthony, 8, 14, 82–98 “Impossible Seductions: The Work of Herbert Blau,” 82, 84 La Barbara, Joan, 203 La Mama, 23 Lacan, Jacques, 6, 21, 23, 27, 31, 34–35, 37–38, 84, 89, 129, 142 “Mirror Stage, The,” 34–35, 38 Ladd, Thornton, 202 LaPlanche, Jean, 84

LaVigne, Robert, 5, 18, 40, 194–97, 200 Artist’s Life As a Work in Progress, The, 194, 196 Blau, Herbert, collaborations with, 5, 18, 40, 194–97, 200 Leach, Wilford, 49 In Three Zones, 49 Lecoq, Jacques, 206, 208 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 66, 75 Lepage, Robert, 211 Lessig, Lawrence, 28 Levine, Phil, 59 Life after Death(Brown), 145 Life Is a Dream (CalderГіn), 85 Life of Galileo, The (Brecht), 199–200 Blau, Herbert production, 199–200 “Liminality and Performative Genres” (Turner), 166 Lincoln Center. See Blau, Herbert; Irving, Jules; Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; Vivian Beaumont Theater Lion King, The (Taymor), 213 Listoe, Daniel, 8, 14, 102–18 Littlewood, Joan, 120, 190 Living Theater, 48 Lombardi, Vince, 123 Lorde, Audre, 25 Lot and His Daughters (Van Leyden painting), 68 Page 229 →Love’s Body (Brown), 53, 128 Loy, David, 85–86, 87 LukГЎcs, Georg, 146 Lunberry, Clark, 1–16, 8, 206–16 Luther, Martin, 18 Lyotard, Jean-FranГ§ois, 129

Mabou Mines, 5, 50, 211, see also Breuer, Lee; Maleczech, Ruth Send Receive Send, 50 Mack, Maynard, 110, 111, 116, 117 King Lear in Our Time, 110 Mahābhārata, 213 Maleczech, Ruth, 5, see also Breuer, Lee; Mabou Mines Malevich, Kazimir, 146 Man on Wire (documentary), 69 Manley, Beatrice, 5, 18 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 145 Marinetti, Filippo Emilio, 148 Marranca, Bonnie, 7, 13, 120–55 “Virtual Theatre of Herbert Blau, The,” 151–52 Marx, Karl, 19, 24, 63, 141–42 Mauss, Marcel, 181 McBurney, Simon, 211 Theatre de Complicité, 211 “Meanwhile, Follow the Bright Angels” (Blau), 190 Melville, Herman, 81 Bartleby the Scrivener, 20 Moby Dick, 107 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 110–11 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 146, 148 Mezey, Phiz, 5 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 213 Mills College, 194 Milton, John, 123, 144 Mirren, Helen, 210 “Mirror Stage, The” (Lacan), 34–35, 38

mirrored doubling, 31–43 Mishima, Yukio, 5 Mitchell, Katie, 58 .В .В . some trace of her, 58 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 216, see also Théâtre du Soleil Moby Dick (Melville), 107 MoliГЁre, 190 Moral Majority, 135 Moten, Fred, 171 In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 171 Mother Courage (Brecht), 5 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 164, 169, 173–74 MГјller, Heiner, 23, 154 My Dinner with AndrГ© (Malle), 51 National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), 168 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 139, 145–46 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 52 New American Dramatists, 1960–1990 (Cohn), 26 New York Review of Books, 37 New York University, 3 Blau, Herbert, studies at, 3 Newman, David, 81, see also KRAKEN (theater group) NhГўt Hanh, ThГ-ch,92 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 74, 162, 171 Nixon, Richard, 6, 108 Not I (Beckett), 176 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens), 115 Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (Blau), x, 10, 29, 105–6, 175–76 O’Connor, Michael, 80, see also KRAKEN (theater group)

O’Sullivan, Michael, 5, 18, 197–98 as King Lear in Herbert Blau production, 197–98 Oberlin College, 6, 15, 23, 56–60, 78–81, 78, 191, 206–16, see also KRAKEN Blau, Herbert at, 23, 56–60, 78–81, 78, 206–16 Object of Performance, The (Sayre), 169 October (journal), 147 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 121, 127, 138, 194 Ohio Impromptu (Beckett), 71 Oliveros, Pauline, 194 On History (Braudel), 103 Open Theater, 31 Oresteia, The (Aeschylus), 2, 19, 56, 126, 127, 136, 206 Watchman, The, figure of, 104–5, 126, 152 Page 230 →Othello (Shakespeare), 176 Ott, Sharon, 81, see also KRAKEN (theater group) PAJ (Performing Arts Journal), 121, 152, 153, 154 Patraka, Vicki, 160 “Performance and History: What History?” conference, 103, 111, 161 Performance Garage, 31, 206 Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Schneider), 154–55 Petit, Philippe, 68–69, 75, 123, 153 Man on Wire (documentary), 69 Peymann, Claus, 145 Phantom Pain: The Theater of Operations (Whitehead, Blau), 14, 217 Phelan, Peggy, 7, 13, 25, 156–70 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing,” 25 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 169, 171 Picasso, Pablo, 136 “вЂPiccolo Teatro,’ The: Bertolazzi and Brecht” (Althusser), 112–14

Pinsky, Robert, 59–60 Pinter, Harold, 46–47, 48 Birthday Party, The, 5, 108 Pirandello, Luigi, 124, 127, 138, 148, 152, 184 Right You Are (If You Think So), 143, 152 Piscator, Erwin, 50, see also Gropius, Walter; Total Theater Planchon, Roger, 120, 190 Plato, 24, 123, 126, 136 Allegory of the Cave, 24, 136 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes), 48 Plural Event, The: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (Benjamin), 163–64 Pointer, Priscilla, 4 Popova, Lyubov, 146 Portman, Julie, 206 Portnow, Neil, 168 Portrait of a Lady (James), 162–66 Preface (1908), 163 Pound, Ezra, 133, 205 Powell, Mel, 202 Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco (Blau), x, 10, 38, 39, 40, 102, 108, 109 Proust, Marcel, 2, 173, 175, 178 Ramayana, 213 Rancière, Jacques, 64 Emancipated Spectator, The, 64 Reagan, Nancy, 160–61 Reagan, Ronald, 25, 135, 148, 160–61 Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual (Blau), x, 1–2, 10–11, 12, 15, 89, 103–4, 192 Reinelt, Janelle, 160 “Remembering Beckett: An Interview” (Blau), 71

Renaissance theater, 33 Rendra, Willibrordus S., 212 Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, 6, 23, 122, 136, 139–40, 200–202, see also Danton’s Death (BГјchner); Vivian Beaumont Theater Blau, Herbert at, 6, 23, 49, 102, 122, 136, 139–40, 191, 200–202 Resnais, Alain, 116 Hiroshima mon amour (with Duras), 116 Richard III (Shakespeare), 173 Right You Are (If You Think So) (Pirandello), 143, 152 Riley, Terry, 194 Riviere, Joan, 27 Roach, Joseph, 13–14, 173–87, 192–93 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 175 Rommel, Manfred, 145 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 96, 98 Rosqui, Tom, 5, 9, 18, 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 183–85 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), revivals (1969, 1986), 183–85 Russell, Tyran, 80, see also KRAKEN (theater group) Sade, Donatien Alphonse FranГ§ois de, 129 Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Blau), x, 1, 3, 10, 31, 39, 40–42, 45–46, 109, 160, 170 “Astride of a Grave; or, the State of the Art,” 71–72 “Remembering Beckett: An Interview,” 71 San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, 4–6, 4, 9, 10, 18, 39, 42, 48–49, 59, 108, 120–21, 139, 152, 153, 174, 181, 189, 190, Page 231 →194–200, see also Blau,. Herbert; Endgame (Beckett); Irving, Jules; King Lear (Shakespeare); LaVigne, Robert; Programming Theater History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco (Blau); San Quentin; Subotnick, Morton;Waiting for Godot (Beckett) Blau, Herbert at, 4–6, 4, 7, 10, 14, 18, 23, 39, 48–49, 59, 102, 108, 120–21, 122, 124, 137–38, 139, 152, 153, 159–60, 174, 181, 190, 194–200 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 25 San Francisco State University, 4, 26, 27

Blau, Herbert at, 4, 26 San Quentin, 5, 37, 53, 74 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), Blau-directed production, 5, 37, 53, 74, 159, 189 Sanders, Wes, 81, see also KRAKEN (theater group) Sartre, Jean-Paul, 27, 139 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [L’Être et le nГ©ant: Essai d’ontologie phГ©nomГ©nologique], 21 Sayre, Henry M., 169 Object of Performance, The, 169 Schechner, Richard, 14–15, 51, 144, 189–93 Schneider, Alan, 45–46 Schneider, Rebecca, 154 Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 154–55 Seattle Repertory Theater, 139 Seeds of Atreus, The (KRAKEN), 6, 8, 24, 56, 58, 78, 80, 136–37, 206, 208 Send Receive Send (Mabou Mines), 50 Sender, Ramon, 194 “вЂSet Me Where You Stand’: Revising the Abyss” (Blau), 116 Shakespeare, William, 2, 31, 83, 87, 111, 136, 156, 173–87, 190, 209, 210, 212 As You Like It, 187 Hamlet, 6, 20, 32, 35, 82, 126–27 Henry IV, Part 1, 173 King Lear, 9, 18, 19, 102, 110, 116–18, 174, 181, 194–96, 197–99 Merchant of Venice, The, 110–11 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 213 Much Ado About Nothing, 164, 169, 173–74 Othello, 176 Richard III, 173 Romeo and Juliet, 175 Sonnet 23, 158

Tempest, The, 86 Troilus and Cressida, 128 Winter’s Tale, The, 173, 174, 176–87 Shepard, Sam, 30 “Short Organon for the Theatre, A” (Brecht), 64, 69–70, 132 “Signature, Event, Context” (Derrida), 33–34 Silver Apples of the Moon (Subotnick), 202 Smith, Malcolm, 5 Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll, 27 . . . some trace of her (Mitchell), 58 Some Versions of the Pastoral (Empson), 72 Sontag, Susan, 32, 37–38 “Godot Comes to Sarajevo,” 32, 37 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), Sarajevo staging, 37 Sophocles Oedipus Rex, 121, 127, 138, 194 “Spacing Out in the American Theater” (Blau), 68–69 Stanford University, 4 Blau, Herbert, studies at, 4 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 46, 47, 53, 68, 132 Stein, Gertrude, 22–23, 123, 148 How to Write, 22 Stein, Peter, 145 Stengers, Isabelle, 92–93 Stevens, Wallace, 25, 87, 102, 115, 124, 175 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” 115 Stiles, Kristine, 169 Stoppard, Tom Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 96, 98

Strange Encounters (Ahmed), 29 Strasberg, Lee, 131 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Tennessee Williams), 20 Strindberg, August, 20 Subotnick, Morton, 5–6, 14–15, 18, 194–204 Blau, Herbert, collaborations with, 5–6, 14–15, 18, 194–204 Electric Circus, artistic director, 202 Jacob’s Room, 203–4 Silver Apples of the Moon, 202 Page 232 →Suehsdorf, David. See Chandler, David Suzuki, Tadashi, 215 Symonds, Robert, 5, 9, 18, 40 Tai Chi, 81 Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Blau), x, 7, 8, 12, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 40, 49, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 97, 98, 99, 101, 105, 108, 135, 136, 140, 143, 159, 176 Taymor, Julie, 8, 15, 56, 80, 206–16, 207, see also KRAKEN (theater group) Г‰cole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, L’, at, 206, 208 Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire (Blumenthal), 211–12 Lion King, The, 213 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), production, 213 Theater Workshop of Boston, at, 206 TDR (Tulane Drama Review), 139, 189–91, see also Corrigan, Robert W. television, 65–66, 75, 167–69, 171–72 Grammy Awards telecast (CBS, 2016), 167–69 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 86 Theater and Its Double, The (Artaud), 123 Theater Arts Magazine, 121 Theater of Cruelty (Artaud), 46, 48, 114–15 “Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, The” (Derrida), 114–15 Theater Workshop of Boston, 206

Theatre de Complicité, 211 Théâtre du Rond-Point, 50, see also Barrault, Jean-Louis Théâtre du Soleil, 216, see also Mnouchkine, Ariane Theatre Journal, 30 Theatre of the Absurd, The (Esslin), 5, 53, 159 Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Carlson), 6–7 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 107 “Thinking History, History Thinking” (Blau), 103, 106 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing” (Phelan), 25 Thomas, Christopher, 7, 57, 79, 207 Thompson, Evan, 96 Tibetan Book of the Dead, The (Bardo Thodol), 14, 94, 96–97, see also Bardo; Buddhism, Tibetan Tibetan Buddhism. See Bardo; Buddhism, Tibetan; dream yoga; Tibetan Book of the Dead, The (Bardo Thodol) Tiresias (figure in The Waste Land [Eliot]), 19, 25 To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance (Blau), x, 10, 12, 34, 35–36, 46, 111, 114, 141–42, 153, 193 Toklas, Alice B., 22 Tolstoy, Leo, 146 Total Theater, 50, 51, see also Gropius, Walter; Piscator, Erwin Transcritique (Karatani), 116 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 128 Tulane University, 189 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 165 Turner, Victor, 166–67 “Liminality and Performative Genres,” 166 Twin Peaks (Lynch), 140 Unheimlich, the [Die Unheimliche] (Freud), 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 96, 97, 100 “Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play” (Blau), 157–58, 162–63, 165–66 University of Colorado at Boulder, 160 University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 6, 191

Blau, Herbert at, 6, 191 University of Michigan, 58 University of Washington, 3, 8, 191 Blau, Herbert at, 3, 8, 191 University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM), 8, 112, 191, 209 Blau, Herbert at, 8, 112, 191, 209 Center for Twentieth Century Studies, 8, 112 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Phelan), 169, 171 Upanishads, 25 Van Gogh, Vincent, 21 Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht), 82, 91–94 Vian, Boris, 49 Page 233 →Vietnam War, 23, 24, 108, 140, 141 Vilar, Jean, 120, 146, 190 “Virtual Theatre of Herbert Blau. The” (Marranca), 151–52 Vivian Beaumont Theater, 6, 49, 200–201, see also Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center Wagner, Richard, 190 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 5, 19, 35–39, 53, 74, 109, 161, 166, 176 Blau, Herbert, San Quentin production, 5, 37, 53, 74, 159, 189 Sontag, Susan, Sarajevo staging, 37 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 105 Walters, Barbara, 160–61 Wangyal, Tenzin, 90, see also dream yoga, see also dream yoga Warrilow, David, 71 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 19, 25 Watchman figure (The Oresteia), 104–5, 126, 152 Watergate, 108 What Maisie Knew (James), 158 What Where (Beckett), 71

When Death Is Dead (Blau), 3 White Devil, The (John Webster), 19 White Goddess, The (Graves), 18 Whitehead, Gregory, 14, 217 Phantom Pain: The Theater of Operations (with Blau), 14, 217 Whitehead, Robert, 49 “Who is Godot?” (Blau), 45–46 “Who The Hell Is Herbert Blau? The Road May Be Dead, but Regional Theater Is a Lively Business” (Theodore Hoffman), 49 Willett, John, 29 Wilson, Robert, 58, 153, 211 Civil Wars, The, 58 Deafman Glance, 153 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 173, 174, 176–87 Forman, Simon, critique, 177–79 memory in, 176–80, 182–87 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) revivals (1969, 1986), 183–85 surrogation in, 177, 180–81, 183–87 temporality in, 177, 179–80, 183, 185–87 Winters, Yvor, 4, 59–60, 111, 133, 137, 143 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 83, 134 Woodstock, 48 Woodward, Kathy, 138, 203 Woolf, Virginia, 26 World of Warcraft, 75 WOW Café, 139 Yeats, William Butler, 144, 148, 175 Young, La Monte, 194 Young, Stan, 5