Abstract
Herbert Blau’s life-long engagement with Modernism, performance, and performance theory constituted a process through which Beckett was a constant touchstone. Their parallel critiques of performance and representation would challenge the limits of Modernist thought and its creative production. Their intersection began with Blau’s 1957 staging of Waiting for Godot at the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, but its subsequent performance in California’s San Quentin Prison made the play a cult classic and caught the attention of the Free Southern Theater whose politicized staging toured the American South amid the violence of the Civil Rights movement. Both Beckett and Blau, finally, would explore ways of moving beyond the limits of the stage and the conventions of theatre to create performances central to Modernist thought, Blau towards the performance of thought on the page, Beckett with a series of theatrical reconceptions that undervalued story and theme to offer a theatre at the limits of thought, a theatre of affective lyricism.
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- 1.
Ruby Cohn (1967) includes short excerpts about both the FST and the San Quentin Godots in her excellent, if underappreciated, Casebook on Waiting for Godot (79–89).
- 2.
For more on this image see my ‘“A Mixed Choir” from the Ditch of Astonishment: An Introduction’, in Gontarski (2015: 2–30).
- 3.
This revival featured Beckett stalwarts Barry McGovern and Alan Mandel as Didi and Gogo, respectively. (See: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/03/theater-review-waiting-for-godot-at-the-mark-tape r-forum.html). See also Minor and Larocco (2015: 509–526).
- 4.
- 5.
See, for example, Salvador Dalí’s theatrical maquette, the spectral, illusionistic The Little Theater of 1934.
- 6.
‘Who is Godot’ is reprinted as the opening chapter to Blau 2000 (21–22).
- 7.
The quote comes from the 1954 Grove Press edition of Waiting for Godot.
- 8.
See for example the highly dramatized TV ‘docudrama’, Conspiracy: Trial of the Chicago 8 (1987).
- 9.
This is, of course, the great theme of Ralph Ellison’s superb 1952 novel The Invisible Man (New York: Random House).
- 10.
For a discussion of this phase of Jerzy Grotowski’s work see the 1981 Louis Malle film, with Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, My Dinner with André.
- 11.
This is a whole category in Schechner’s highly influential Performance Theory, second edition (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), then as a Routledge Classic in 2003.
References
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———. 1964b. The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
———. 1982a. Blooded Thought: Occasions of the Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.
———. 1982b. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 1987. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1990. Universals of Performance. In By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, 251–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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———. 2015. Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Gontarski, S.E. (2018). Theoretical and Theatrical Intersections: Samuel Beckett, Herbert Blau, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Godot. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_12
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