In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Herbert Blau1926–2013
  • Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Jill Dolan, Janelle Reinelt, and Richard Schechner

TDR invited a few of Herbert Blau’s colleagues/friends to share their recollections of his life and work. Reviews of two of Blau’s recent books, As If: An Autobiography and Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual, both published in 2011, can also be found in this issue of TDR.


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Herbert Blau speaking on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Washington, where he was the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities. 13 October 2012. (Photo by Dick Blau)

from Sue-Ellen Case

I was not yet 20 when I wandered into Ruby Cohn’s class in Modern Drama at San Francisco State College. Hanging around her office, as undergrads will when the class is life-altering, I noticed that her officemate was often, in the morning, taking a nap. Herb had been up late rehearsing at the Actor’s Workshop and was napping before teaching his classes. It was the golden age of SF State, when working-class students like me could still afford an education, and brilliant teachers, like Herb, son of a plumber, could inspire a generation that would hit the strike lines in favor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies, facing off riot-geared cops in front of the English Department. That same practice of radical knowing, always Herb’s signature, led him to take Waiting for Godot out of the theatre and into San Quentin penitentiary, and to envision a Cal Arts that would bring together the leading avantgarde artists and scholars at that raucous time, with Alan Kaprow’s students doing a “hum in” on the lawn, while Angela Davis visited the class of Maurice Stein.

As I sat in the living room of Herb’s house in Silver Lake for the first meeting of that Cal Arts faculty, listening to Herb’s long, complex sentences, I began to absorb the brilliant undiscipline that made his knowing so radical. One thought could be made to stretch from Ravi Shankar’s sense of the raga through the poetry of Yeats and the work of Judy Chicago to a fragment of Samuel Beckett, all, somehow fitting together for the likewise far-flung faculty he had assembled in that room, which included Judy Chicago, the art critic Paul Brach, and the electronic composer Morton Sobotnik. Titles of Herb’s later books like Nothing in Itself and As If ring with the resonances or atonalities Herb mapped out across the stage and the page (a [End Page 7] conjoined twinning of practice with theory that he refused to separate) during his long life of exploration and achievement.

Not everyone liked what Herb did. I watched how he responded when the post–Walt Disneys fired him from Cal Arts and read about how the New York critics killed him when, with Jules Irving, he brought theatre to Lincoln Center. It was then that I began to learn the life practice of undiscipline that was required for radical knowing: he didn’t stop and he didn’t alter the mode and direction of his explorations. We didn’t always get along, either, but it didn’t matter. Herb was loyal, as his many students and colleagues will tell you. He supported behind the scenes with those literally thousands of letters of recommendation he wrote for me — and for a generation of scholars and practitioners. With the passing of Herb and Ruby and others, some of us have begun to realize that a generation of leaders, mentors, pioneers is slipping away from us. But they taught us Beckett — to laugh at death; and Brecht — to go on with purpose.

from Elin Diamond

There is something missing from the introduction I wrote for Herbert Blau’s Programming Theatre History: The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco.

Though I would base my brief contribution on Herb’s program notes (which he wanted), I decided to visit the Billy Rose Theatre Collection to look at the 10 or so boxes that make up the Actor’s Workshop archive. I had some feelings...

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