The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000. By Herbert Blau. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002; pp. 328. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Extract

Herb Blau, reportedly, is writing a memoir. Surely, however, all his books are memoirs—memoirs of “blooded thought,” to use the phrase he has coined for the embodied, materialized process of thinking/experiencing he most prizes in the theatre. Or perhaps I should say “of” the theatre, since he has shown us for fifty years how both making theatre and theorizing theatre can be combined: how they mutually imply each other, neither one much good without the insights provided by the other—which is not to malign either alone, except when one ignores or denigrates the value of the other, as some theorists and practitioners have often been inclined to do. In The Dubious Spectacle, Blau has collected essays and lectures spanning over twenty-five years. They chart the intellectual and artistic preoccupations that he followed, but they also offer a variant of cultural history of a period in American theatre that reaches back into the 1950s and forward toward an “impossible” future (another of his signature terms).