Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual (review)

Reviewed by: Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual Sarah Bay-Cheng Herbert Blau . Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. 292. $85 (Hb); $35 (Pb). In "Auto Archive," an essay included in the recently published Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual (2011), Herbert Blau recounts an observation made by his friend, the late critic Ruby Cohn, who responded to his autobiography then in progress (now published, As If: An Autobiography, Vol. 1 [2011]): "What are you doing that for," she asks, "you're always writing autobiography" (qtd. on 265). Cohn's statement might very well serve as an appropriate epigraph for Blau's latest collection. First published in Theatre Journal (2004), "Auto Archive," with its reflection on Blau's tendency toward the autobiographical, offers a fitting conclusion to his latest collection, which includes a range of ruminations on theatre, modernism, and postmodernism from 1969 to 2009. To read this book is to revisit many of Blau's most well-known obsessions at the intersection of theatre and theory, where he boldly encompasses politics, higher education, and performance art and offers his witty assessments of mainstream American theatre. Deeply felt, both charming and strident, and written in his inimitable and sometimes inscrutable prose, Blau's essays here suggest - by way of his extraordinary career both in the theatre and as a theorist, though not, as he frequently points out, as a theatre scholar - a movement from the modernist absurd to the virtual postmodern. Many of these essays have already been either published or presented as talks, and they cover ground familiar to readers of Blau's other books, to which he frequently refers. Very few people writing on theatre and performance today possess Blau's remarkable breadth of experience, either historically or professionally. Drawing upon a career at the leading edge of American experimental theatre (with his Actors Workshop of San Francisco and, later, his KRAKEN theatre), all too briefly as the head of Lincoln Center, and in a range of positions in academia (founding Provost of CalArts, for example), Blau returns to the question of theatre's role and relevance in culture: What is theatre? How do we know? Why does it matter? He resituates his questions within the contemporary environment of what he terms the "dromoscopic, simulacral, hyperdigitized world" in which the performing body appears to be a hindrance (9). "Why theater at all?" he asks. Suspicious of cultural studies and the appropriation of theory to expedient ends, he focuses our attention [End Page 407] upon questions of ontology. Examining (and re-examining) theatre as a form of illusion that nevertheless draws upon materiality to demonstrate reality's illusion, Blau asks, "[I]f all the world's a stage or life is a dream or an insubstantial pageant fading, what's not theater?" (131). This question - Blau's key "reality principle" - unites the essays through diverse analyses of life both inside the theatre, most notably in his writing on modernist playwrights and "The Emotional Memory of Directing," and outside it, in considerations of 9/11, media politics, and recent American culture, particularly in his "Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the Noble Savage" and "Ground Zero: The Original Vision (May 16, 2008)." Reality Principles is often engaging and occasionally frustrating. Blau is most convincing in his argument for modernism's, most especially Beckett's, legacy in the twentieth-century avant-garde. His "The Commodicus Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Affliction" (2004), for instance, positions Beckett's theatricalizing of nothingness as a critical fulcrum linking Proust and Eliot to conceptual art and Robert Smithson to contemporary playwrights such as Sarah Kane and digital artists. Deftly deploying Beckett's writing within the context of critical theory and often as theory itself, Blau finds evidence of Beckett everywhere in the latter half of the twentieth century. Digital projects such as Remote Host by Katya Davar are rendered in a "Beckettian landscape" (151), and Marina Abramovic´ and partner Ulay become, in their Relation Works, "the seeming binary of the tramps in Waiting for Godot" (159). While Beckett is not the only modernist figure...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.