The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000 (review)

Herbert Blau's recent collection of essays treats the practice of theatre, the function of theory, and the work that theatre might perform in the academy. Written for a variety of occasions, the essays nonetheless have a cumulative power, marking the nearly three decades in which Blau has roughened the interface between theatre and theory, writing about the critical work of performance that he calls "blooded thought." Spanning the most recent phase of Blau's career, the essays are haunted by a deeper past, and throughout The Dubious Spectacle, Blau repeatedly recalls the formative events of his artistic and intellectual life: rejecting the lassitude of the Drama department at Stanford to work with the rebarbative, independent-minded critic Yvor Winters; making gritty, elated theatre with the Actors' Workshop of San Francisco; opening the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center; inventing and overseeing the curriculum at Cal Arts, and creating a new performance idiom with his company, Kraken. Blau is everywhere concerned with "the precipitation of theater from whatever it is not, which like the mystery of difference itself may be indecipherable" (17). While this is a palpably political understanding of theatre, it doesn't imply a theatre that can be readily reduced to pious thematics. Ranging widely across contemporary theatre, visual arts, music, and literature, the book is nonetheless driven by a single, maddening irritation: the twin failure of the American theatre to develop a searching, critical art practice, and of American critical culture—specifically American academic culture—to find the voice, and the language, to enable that thinking and its embodiment on the stage.

Blau opens the second essay in the collection, "The Impossible Takes a Little Time," by recalling one of Eric Bentley's remarks from The Playwright as Thinker—surely now one of the great unread books. Bentley had been to the Yale School of Drama to see a production of Rosmersholm but was disappointed by the discussion the play inspired among the students after the show: "the students talked about the lighting, costumes, directing, everything in fact but what was being lit, costumed, directed—'Ibsen's lines and Ibsen's meaning'—as if it didn't matter what the play meant" (18). Blau is quite aware that "theory is far from the thought of the American theater, which has next to no theory at all" (19), but what angers and depresses him is not that there's no theory about the theatre (that comes later), but that the makers of theatre have been reduced to mere functionaries, highly trained in the skills demanded by the professional world of theatre, film, and television, which will exploit them, all the while being certified as "artists" in a final act of ideological captivity. Rather than pursuing the research mission of the modern university, or even the broadly educational mission of the liberal arts, too many theatre programs resemble big-time college athletic programs, defining success as the complete commodification of their students, providing a bright package of skills to sell to the industry. American universities have, perhaps, always served political and corporate interests, but to Blau, art is neither an empty nor a pejorative term; his bitterness arises from the spectacle of artists trained in the facility for expression, with nothing they want to say.

Blau's disappointment "that there is no natural discourse among practitioners in this presumably social art, no ideational framework for it, and sometimes, it seems, no desire" (27), is long-standing, and there is no one more capable of or committed to exfoliating the thinking of theatre. Indeed, Blau's comments on Artaud might well be applied to his own work: "No major figure of the theater speaks so unremittingly and exactingly about Ideas" (29). This is not to say, though, that Blau—despite his own distinguished, maverick career in the academy—finds in contemporary high theory a more plausible practice. Partly...