As If: An Autobiography, Volume 1 by Herbert Blau, and: Reality Principles: From The Absurd to The Virtual by Herbert Blau (review)

In his last years, director and scholar Herbert Blau (1926–2013) was still looking to the future. As If was intended as the first installment in an expansive account of a life of ongoing inquiry through theatre. This volume tells the story of Blau’s youth, his discovery of performance as he finished an NYU bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, and his work with the Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco, which he and Jules Irving cofounded and ran with élan from 1952 to 1965. While the narrative stops around 1965, when they moved to New York City and briefly directed the new Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Blau often looks ahead, making connections to KRAKEN, the group he founded in 1971, and his many books, including The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964), Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (1982), and Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (2000).

Like As If, Reality Principles—a collection of essays largely written since 2000—demonstrates the continuing vitality of Blau’s ideas and their pervasive influence in modern theatre, as well as its scholarship. He remained a passionate advocate of theatre, understood as the place where the lines of force in contemporary life intersect with the politics of the room—whether that room is a performance space, rehearsal room, classroom, or the space between one’s ears. Blau invested in theatre as inquiry. “[T]he brain is the best stage of all,” he writes, “inexhaustibly ideational, with a repletion of image, as if the singular brain were fractured, dialectically plural, of untold and variable magnitude, and maybe as antitheater, where (with all the neurons working) you can see it again and again, in some other heuristic form, but not with absent vision … thought itself [as] an appetite” (AI 181; emphasis in original).

In As If’s account of Blau’s growing up, a Jewish kid in the lively, tough neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn who in fights would hold his opponent’s collar in a right-handed grip while he jabbed at the face with his left, it quickly becomes clear that from an early age he had an instinct to doubt received wisdom. He tells these early stories in a vocabulary that deliberately avoids the politically correct. Blau went his own intellectual way in the anxiety- and conformity-prone years after World War II, when he wrote his dissertation on metaphysical poetry at Stanford and simultaneously took on a full-time teaching position at San Francisco State University. Directing and teaching became coterminous. As Blau vividly documents, the Actor’s Workshop introduced work that to San Francisco audiences could barely be called plays: challenging material by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, and others, and new visions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov. He writes warm, detailed accounts of the people with whom he worked during these years, including scholar Ruby Cohn, painter Robert LaVigne, and actors Michael O’Sullivan and Robert Symonds. Actors, most importantly his first wife, Beatrice Manley, taught him much about theatre and were essential to the development of his ideas and directing and the shape of his career. During the 1960s, the workshop’s evolving work process, based on Blau’s premise that “being baffled is a virtue” (67), introduced the younger people involved—among them Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech, cofounders of Mabou Mines in 1970—to exciting ideas and provided space for them to experiment. While his production of King Lear was underway, for example, they collaborated and performed at night in the workshop’s smaller space, the Encore Theatre. As If reveals the intellectual and personal ferment at work in the Actor’s Workshop, even as it developed into an institution. Blau occasionally uses the forum of his autobiography to justify controversial decisions made, but more often his assessment illuminates, giving credit...