As If: An Autobiography: Volume One, and: Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual (review)

Over the course of a career spanning more than six decades, Herbert Blau has done nothing better than anyone else in the theatre. Read that sentence again. If those opening words of Waiting for Godot—"Nothing to be done."—are by now a commonplace among U.S. theatre scholars and practitioners, it is in large part due to Blau's pioneering productions of Beckett's works at the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco in the 1950s, and to his subsequent publications including The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964), Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (1982), and Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (2000), among others. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that "the nothing to be done that had to be done, to become the nothing that is" (Reality Principles 186) recurs thematically through Blau's two newest books: As If: An Autobiography: Volume One; and Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. As Blau writes in the latter:

If there's long been, not only in the theater, but in my writings on Beckett too, that virtual habit of thinking through him, his words my words, or by means of the aporias in his own afflicted thought, ephectic, solipsistic, and even masochistic, that occurs by something more than the self-commiserating solace of sympathetic identification.

(185)

Yet where Beckett's "nothing to be done" is oft interpreted as a kind of paralysis, Blau seems to have approached it, in life as in art, as a kind of challenge, leading to an unlikely career narrative that, though he has rehearsed it before, continues to emerge as singularly his.

The uniqueness of Blau's remarkable career is one takeaway from his autobiography, As If. The first three chapters detail Blau's early years in New York, where he was born and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Brownsville, an area populated by working-class Jews, many of them recent immigrants. His father Joe was a plumber, active in union politics, but Joe and his wife Yetta recognized in their son's intelligence and early success at school the potential for more intellectual pursuits. As Blau writes, when he asked his father for permission to work as an apprentice in the summers to earn extra money, "He said, reaching an arm toward me, fingers spread, 'If you touch a pipe, I'll break your hand.' The proposition was simple: the grades were still coming, and I was destined for something else" (13-14). This destiny would not seem to include theatre; Blau excelled at Boys' High School and went on to the chemical engineering program at New York University, interrupted by military service at Fort Benning, where he trained as a paratrooper but was not sent overseas, assigned instead to serve as editor of the base newspaper. This experience in journalism led, on his return to NYU, to Blau's appointment as sports editor and later editor-in-chief of the school's Heights Daily News. "Before I began to write for the Heights Daily News," writes Blau, "I had never been to the theater" (89). Fate intervened, however, in the person of Leonard Heideman, Blau's predecessor as editor-in-chief. Heideman, who would later go on, under the name Laurence Heath, to a career as a television writer (Bonanza, Dynasty, Murder She Wrote), "was about to go into the playwriting program at the Yale Drama School, and . . . let me see the play that got him accepted. I read it, and liked it, but said to myself, I could do that" (89). Blau quickly wrote two plays, and at Heideman's suggestion, sent them to the playwriting programs at Yale and Stanford. Offered fellowships to both, Blau chose Stanford, where his classmates would include...