Stage Fright: Modernism Anti-the- Atricality & Drama

These strike me as the sharpest edges of The Dubious Spectacle, but I’ve hardly done justice to the whole; there are surprising chapters on American drama (there’s no better successor to Bentley’s “Trying to Like O’Neill” than Blau’s “The Pipe Dreams of Eugene O’Neill in the Age of Deconstruction”), and on photography, and the essays are studded with moving appreciations of several colleagues, notably Lee Breuer and Ruby Cohn. Blau finds the force of performance to arise from the scrupulous encounter with the words, words, words of scripted drama, from the “sounding of a text down to the last fugitive syllable, or phoneme, when the words seem to have left the page as if there had never been any words, dematerialized into the air” (118). This understanding of performance may be slightly unfashionable in the era of “performance studies,” but the results are indisputable: Blau thinks about performance by thinking through the plays of Yeats and Beckett and Brecht and Shakespeare and the work they can do when they do their thinking on the stage.