Kyle Gillette – författare

The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveller, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travellers and residents theatrical visions while also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention.

The book explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino''s novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travellers interested in researching their own invisible cities.

Written for practitioners, travellers, students, and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina

Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.

Kyle Gillette explores Wilder’s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play’s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play’s many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play’s philosophical stakes.

Gillette magnifies the play’s ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina

Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.

Kyle Gillette explores Wilder’s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play’s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play’s many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play’s philosophical stakes.

Gillette magnifies the play’s ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.