The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000

Forsideomslag
U of Minnesota Press, 1. jan. 2002 - 347 sider

Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory.

Blau's struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style.

If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau's struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau's previous books have come to expect.


Fra bogen

Indhold

Theater at the End of the Real
9
2 The Impossible Takes a Little Time
26
3 Spacing Out in the American Theater
45
Rehearsing the Resistance
61
5 A Dove in My Chimney
70
An Analytic Scenario
78
The Grail of the Voice
126
Chills and Fever Mourning and the Vanities of the Sublime
140
13 Readymade Desire
207
From Tango Palace to Mud
214
The Group Idea and Its Legacy
223
New Music and Theater
238
17 FlatOut Vision
254
Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher
273
Revising the Abyss
289
The Insane Root
315

9 The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity
145
Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America
165
Educating the American Theater
189
12 The Pipe Dreams of ONeill in the Age of Deconstruction
197

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Side 339 - gainst his glory fight, And time, that gave, doth now his gift confound. Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, And delves the parallels in beauty's brow; Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow. And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

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