In Memoriam: Herbert Blau (1926–2013)

Herbert Blau exerted an outsized influence on my life and career, as he did on so many, long before I met him or even read a word that he had written, when, as an undergraduate, I first opened Martin Esslin’s classic book, The Theatre of the Absurd. Reading those introductory pages, I was riveted by Esslin’s vivid description of the performance of Waiting for Godot at the San Quentin Penitentiary in 1957:

Herbert Blau [the “apprehensive director”] decided to prepare the San Quentin audience for what was to come. He stepped onto the stage and addressed the packed, darkened North Dining Hall—a sea of flickering matches that the convicts tossed over their shoulders after lighting their cigarettes. Blau compared the play to a piece of jazz music “to which one must listen for whatever one may find in it.” In the same way, he hoped, there would be some meaning, some personal significance for each member of the audience in Waiting for Godot.

In some sense, Blau will always be for me the brave director who set the stage not only for the convicts in that darkened auditorium, but also for me, a kid in the darkened stacks of a university library. I was thrilled when Professor Blau agreed to contribute a chapter to a book I edited with Martin Puchner, which appeared in 2006. One of the first things I did as editor of Modern Drama around the same time was to invite Herb Blau to Toronto to give a lecture to celebrate Beckett’s centennial; we published it in the journal: “Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett” (Winter 2006). When Herb came to Toronto, I insisted on taking him out to dinner all by myself. I was struck by his resemblance to the baseball star Yogi Berra, and here we were, in an Italian restaurant, talking about modernism, philosophy, and theatre. It warms me now to remember his kindness. The following day, his lecture was, of course, a performance. It gave me a much fuller appreciation of his idiosyncratic, jazz-like prose. It was fluid. There really was meaning between the lines. He said that the one thing that was different about the theatre and every other art was that the artist was always dying, physically, every second, before you. His own performance that day – he was probably about 82 – literally wore him out. He had to sit down for some time after nearly everyone else had left. He didn’t complain; he just needed to rest. I found him immensely generous. In many ways, he epitomized for me the imaginative and intellectual excitement of precisely that intersection between texts and performances that requires both hard thinking and leaps of faith, the sceptical and the naïve, the earthly and the divine.