Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage ed. by Daniel Sack (review)

This collection is comprised of short one-page conceptual performances that are intended to defy theatrical convention and possibility. Alongside the hypothetical events are contextual reflections and responses referred to as “glosses,” “intended to “theatricalize the theoretical act,” and in some instances, “cast a lustrous layer atop a text” or “draw a veil or curtain over the original text,” according to Daniel Sack. Part of the pleasure of reading Imagined Theatres is that the fantasy performances take various forms including scripts, confessions, lists, instructions, and poems. The glosses also take stylistic leaps, making the reading of the book a very active, subjective experience.

An ambitious anthology that blends the sensual imagination of theatre creation with the critical intellect of scholarship, Imagined Theatres seeks to complicate the binaries between practice/performance and theory/criticism. What began as a modest project with about twenty contributors grew to approximately one hundred scholars and artists of impressive range and expertise from the UK, U.S., and Canada. Released in tandem with the publication is an online open-access journal (www.imaginedtheatres.com) that seeks to expand the initiative’s predominately Western European scope to guest editors who focus on geographical areas not included in the book.

Some of the most thought-provoking fragments are those that explicitly expose theatre’s deficiencies. Ricardo A. Bracho’s impression and accompanying gloss call for the urgent need to decolonize theatre by brilliantly drawing a parallel between institutional spaces such as prisons, schools, and detention centers with art galleries and performance spaces. Deirdre Heddon’s imagined theatre and gloss highlights the frustrating underrepresentation of women in the UK’s theatre industry sector. Other authors, like Stephen Bottoms, revise common thematic devices into a contemporary context. His critique of modern drama’s tradition of using nature merely as a metaphor for human suffering, calls for a future theatre that situates the environment and the catastrophic effects of climate change as central subjects. Provocateurs like Darren O’Donnell express an irreverent contempt for scripted theatre as a form that needs a drastic reinvention.

Other texts require creative reading feats and stretch the imagination with their playfulness. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “Dance for Baghdad” is typed in an illegible, miniscule font that requires a magnifying glass to decipher. Also included are texts provided by essential artists like Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish, who have been conceiving and describing abstract, absurd, imaginary, and impossible theatres throughout their careers. Finally, there are entries that offer nods to Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett’s influence, like Jonathan Ball’s Theatre of Cruelty–styled “Clockfire” and Rajni Shah’s imagined script that simply reads, “Nothing happens.”

Years ago, I began keeping a record in my cellphone of performance ideas. Incubated during sleepless nights or endorphin-heavy idealism while hiking with my dog, most of these “what if” performances are outrageous, not technically possible, or too risky to stage. Imagined Theatres legitimizes such mythical figments of the imagination as not merely frivolous, unproductive brainstorming hidden in a personal device or notebook, but rather as ideas meant to be disseminated as potential creative fuel to provoke a theatre that never stops trying to revolutionize.