Our subject is the double meaning (and various shadings) of the subtitle. There is a long tradition in which the theater, distrusting its power of illusion, has been more or less conscious of its reality as theater, and makes a point of it in performance, refusing to be thought of as mere appearance, or misleadingly confused with life. Or as Bertolt Brecht once said, “theatering it all down.” At the same time there has been an emphasis on the idea of the self in the center of the stage, though that gets mixed up with the role of the actor. These tendencies, not mutually exclusive, have become so obsessive and sophisticated in certain advanced forms of theater, that one is likely to find no stage at all in the conventional sense, and sometimes even, no dramatic text. What remains instead is only theater, and instead of a character, only the self or fictions of the self; or in the breaking down and dispersion of the fictions, the appearance in the actor of the absence of a self. Or as in recent theory, from “deconstruction” to “queer,” the notion of a self as, ideologically, an aberration of history.

We shall discuss these unnerving (or awakening?) issues, while reading, and conceptually staging—in the mind’s eye—a spectrum of modernist and contemporary texts, from Pirandello and Brecht through Beckett and Genet to Suzan Lori-Parks and Sarah Kane.