As If: An Autobiography traces the complex life and career of director, scholar, and theorist Herbert Blau, one of the most innovative voices in the American theater. From his earliest years on the streets of Brooklyn, with gang wars there, to the often embattled, now-legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, the powerfully told story of Blau''s first four decades is also a social history, moving from the Great Depression to the cold war, with fallout from "the balance of terror" on what he once described in an incendiary manifesto as The Impossible Theater.

Blau has always forged his own path, from his activist resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts to his emergence as a revolutionary director whose work included the controversial years at The Workshop, which introduced American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde, including Brecht, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. There is also an account here of that notorious production of Waiting for Godot at the maximum-security prison at San Quentin, which became the insignia of the Theater of the Absurd.

Blau went on from The Workshop to become codirector of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and then founding provost of California Institute of the Arts, where he developed and became artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. Currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Blau has been visionary in the passage from theater to theory, and his many influential and award-winning books include The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000; Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett; Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion; To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance; The Audience; The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern; and Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point.

This richly evocative book includes never-before-published photographs of the author, his family and friends, collaborators in the theater, and theater productions.

“Herbert Blau’s long sustained inquiry into theater’s most provocative questions—presence, liveness, and finitude—are, at their deepest level, queries into life. Reality Principles returns us to Blau’s inspiring provocations and extends them to new subjects—9/11 and Ground Zero, the nature of charisma, Pirandello and Strindberg.” —Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

Reality Principles gathers recent essays by esteemed scholar and theater practitioner Herbert Blau covering a range of topics.  The book’s provocative essays—including “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” “The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd,” “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness,” “The Human Nature of the Bot”—were given as keynotes and/or memorial lectures and are collected here for the first time. The essays take up a remarkable array of topics—from body art and the self-inflicted punishments of Stelarc, Orlan, and the Viennese Actionists, to Ground Zero and 9/11—and allow Blau to address critical questions of theater and theory, performance and relevance, the absurd and the virtual, history and illusion, community and memory. Reality Principles offers a panoramic view of Herbert Blau’s perspectives on life and the imitation of life on stage.

First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns—which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power—take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?

First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns—which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power—take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?

‘One of the great stories of the American theater..., the Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.’ – Elin Diamond, from the Introduction

Herbert Blau founded, with Jules Irving, the legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next 13 years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others.

Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative programme note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theatre. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, first time round, and in the context of 1950s and 60s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War.

Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of the Workshop''s incrementally artful, alluring programme covers, Blau''s recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique reflection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.

‘One of the great stories of the American theater..., the Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.’ – Elin Diamond, from the Introduction

Herbert Blau founded, with Jules Irving, the legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next 13 years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others.

Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative programme note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theatre. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, first time round, and in the context of 1950s and 60s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War.

Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of the Workshop''s incrementally artful, alluring programme covers, Blau''s recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique reflection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.

As If: An Autobiography traces the complex life and career of director, scholar, and theorist Herbert Blau, one of the most innovative voices in the American theater. From his earliest years on the streets of Brooklyn, with gang wars there, to the often embattled, now-legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, the powerfully told story of Blau''s first four decades is also a social history, moving from the Great Depression to the cold war, with fallout from "the balance of terror" on what he once described in an incendiary manifesto as The Impossible Theater.

Blau has always forged his own path, from his activist resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts to his emergence as a revolutionary director whose work included the controversial years at The Workshop, which introduced American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde, including Brecht, Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. There is also an account here of that notorious production of Waiting for Godot at the maximum-security prison at San Quentin, which became the insignia of the Theater of the Absurd.

Blau went on from The Workshop to become codirector of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, and then founding provost of California Institute of the Arts, where he developed and became artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN. Currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Blau has been visionary in the passage from theater to theory, and his many influential and award-winning books include The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000; Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett; Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion; To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance; The Audience; The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern; and Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point.

This richly evocative book includes never-before-published photographs of the author, his family and friends, collaborators in the theater, and theater productions.

“Herbert Blau’s long sustained inquiry into theater’s most provocative questions—presence, liveness, and finitude—are, at their deepest level, queries into life. Reality Principles returns us to Blau’s inspiring provocations and extends them to new subjects—9/11 and Ground Zero, the nature of charisma, Pirandello and Strindberg.” —Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

Reality Principles gathers recent essays by esteemed scholar and theater practitioner Herbert Blau covering a range of topics.  The book’s provocative essays—including “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” “The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd,” “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness,” “The Human Nature of the Bot”—were given as keynotes and/or memorial lectures and are collected here for the first time. The essays take up a remarkable array of topics—from body art and the self-inflicted punishments of Stelarc, Orlan, and the Viennese Actionists, to Ground Zero and 9/11—and allow Blau to address critical questions of theater and theory, performance and relevance, the absurd and the virtual, history and illusion, community and memory. Reality Principles offers a panoramic view of Herbert Blau’s perspectives on life and the imitation of life on stage.

First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns—which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power—take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?

First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns—which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power—take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?

‘One of the great stories of the American theater..., the Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.’ – Elin Diamond, from the Introduction

Herbert Blau founded, with Jules Irving, the legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next 13 years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others.

Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative programme note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theatre. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, first time round, and in the context of 1950s and 60s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War.

Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of the Workshop''s incrementally artful, alluring programme covers, Blau''s recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique reflection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.

‘One of the great stories of the American theater..., the Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.’ – Elin Diamond, from the Introduction

Herbert Blau founded, with Jules Irving, the legendary Actor''s Workshop of San Francisco, in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next 13 years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others.

Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative programme note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theatre. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, first time round, and in the context of 1950s and 60s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War.

Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of the Workshop''s incrementally artful, alluring programme covers, Blau''s recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique reflection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.