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The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive: Herbert Blau

2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2004.0149

1086-332X

Herbert Blau,

Theatre and Performance Studies

The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive:Herbert Blau Herbert Blau (bio) Memory seems to be doing double duty these days, since I've been working on an autobiography, and quite recently, for a conference in St. Petersburg, I gave a keynote on "The Emotional Memory of Directing." The conference was held at Meyerhold's theatre, the Alexandrinsky, but if the title defers to Stanislavski, by way of AnActor Prepares, the emotional memory was mine—or, with irrepressible subtexts, a composite of mixed emotions—about having worked with actors for just about half my life. Adventitiously, just before St. Petersburg, I was in Dublin, having been invited to reflect, for the Abbey Theatre's centennial, on "Memory and Repertoire," the memory again mine, as reassessing the Abbey's history summoned up from my own what, years ago in the theatre, seemed a vain ambition. What I talked about, in cultural contrast, was trying to evolve a repertoire, and a company with continuity, in a vaster, diverse country, where there was only what used to be called (by the old yellow-covered Theatre Arts) "Tributary Theatre," with everything coming from Broadway, as if in rivulets to the outland, and with everybody paying tribute, the actors dreaming of it. Nor was there anything even remotely like the conditions for a national theatre, neither the semblance of a burgeoning unity nor an apparent mythic tradition—whatever the illusions there—that William Butler Yeats invoked when he founded the Abbey Theatre. While those who invited me had particularly in mind The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, which Jules Irving and I founded in 1952, they were unaware that Yeats was one of the two major figures (the other T. S. Eliot) in my doctoral dissertation, which I was writing, as our theatre started, for the English Department at Stanford. Nor did they know that the first play I ever directed—in our loft above a Judo Academy (with rat shit below the stairs that I'd clean up before rehearsal)—was Playboy of the Western World. But that was a relatively conventional choice in what became, quite radically at the time, an innovative repertoire, the first or early productions of now-canonical [End Page 733] playwrights: Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Whiting, Arden, Duerrenmatt, Frisch, and, among those utterly unknown, Maria Irene Fornes. Moreover, out of a discouraging context, The Workshop did manage to develop and sustain a company, from eight actors in that loft to (including the technical staff) considerably more than a hundred, performing in two or three theatres simultaneously. With our theatre a major force in the San Francisco Renaissance, it was a shock to the city when, in 1965, some of us went to New York, as Jules and I took over the directorship of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, replacing Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan. That, sadder to say, was hardly a major success, and I've reflected on it before, as I have on much of this, in one or another book. As my dear friend Ruby Cohn said, in her characteristic way, when I told her I was working on an autobiography: "What are you doing that for, you're always writing autobiography." Well, maybe so. But if memoirs are now in, that was—and compellingly long before—more like a habit of mind which, not unlike performance, exists at the nerve-ends of thought. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. On graduating from NYU, in 1945, with a BChE degree, Herbert Blau received this certificate and a gold key from Tau Beta Pi, which is an engineering school's equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa. (Photo courtesy of the author.) As to how it all came to be, my initiation in the theatre and the perspective emerging from it, I've not yet dealt with in the autobiography, no less the radically altered vision in the work of my KRAKEN group. But if you were to look at the first chapter, about my growing up in Brooklyn, on the streets of Brownsville (now prefixed with Ocean Hill: with or without the prefix as bad as a neighborhood gets), you'd see that the [End Page...