As If: An Autobiography by Herbert Blau (review)

Just over halfway through what was to have been the first volume of his autobiography, Herbert Blau writes that the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, the company he helped found in 1952, “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 American theater” (142). He enumerates the first or early US productions of unknown or controversial playwrights, including Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, and Pinter, as well as the Noh plays of Mishima and the first play by María Irene Fornés ever produced. He suggests that the workshops, offered to encourage alternative modes of performance, led to the formation of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Mabou Mines, and he counts Lee Breuer and André Gregory among his assistant directors. In 1955, the company negotiated the first off-Broadway Actors’ Equity contract outside of New York City. Most of the second half of this volume dedicates itself to a detailed history of Actor’s Workshop productions directed by Blau, including the Waiting for Godot that played at the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin in 1957 and inspired the formation of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. The book concludes with an extended consideration of his landmark Endgame in 1959. All of this serves as a corrective for histories of US theatre and experimentation centered on the East Coast, as well as for those characterizations of Blau as solely the author of impenetrable works of theory. It furthermore elucidates the superhuman dedication and persistence required to establish such institutional achievement in that or any American landscape.

By contrast, much of the first half devotes itself to richly detailed formative experiences of family life and growing up on the mean streets and sporting fields of Brooklyn in the 1930s, and through the war years, during which Blau trained as a paratrooper at Fort Benning but was never deployed overseas. A reader will search in vain for any but the most cursory connections between these extended narrations and Blau’s major contributions to the theatre in later years, with the notable exception of a harrowing episode involving a fellow paratrooper who could not bring himself to jump out of the airplane at the appointed time, which Blau considers as a form of stage fright. These passages instead function foremost as recounting of singular local moments, textures, and experiences whose value lies purely in the recounting to prevent their loss. Beyond that, one senses the coming into being of a grim consciousness that will inform his future work, as in the passage describing his studies at the NYU School of Engineering in the Bronx, with his dawning awareness of the risk of “the mad abstract dark,” a phrase he offers from Yeats. Blau starkly distinguishes the quests for certitude in scientific methods from the aims of theatre, “where I’ve almost come to believe that being baffled is a virtue” (66), insights gained from the dread during the first years when atomic weaponry became a reality.

Through the entire book, Blau demonstrates astounding gifts of portraiture, rendering family member, friend, or colleague with such care, compassion, and depth of observation that one feels one has lived with each of them as he has, equally impressed by their talents, baffled by their foibles, and mesmerized by the sheer force of their existence. When Blau mourns their passing, one after another, we mourn with him. If one project of the book is to prevent forgetting, that imperative appears at its most urgent in the retelling of the toll of the McCarthy years’ atmosphere of paranoia and betrayal on the culture of higher education and the arts in California, where Blau was by then teaching, writing for the theatre, and discovering how, why, and when to resist injustice. But the objectives of this book’s memory far exceed the political, and frequently cross over into the existential and...