Byron & Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities
English, Comparative Literature, Drama, University of Washington

The Right Side of the Tracks, from
As If: An Autobiography

In this lecture, taken from his memoirs, Herbert Blau plumbs his beginnings in the mean and ugly Brooklyn streets and the unlikely connections that informed his subsequent life as a director, an educator, and a writer.

An innovative director and theoretician of performance, Herbert Blau is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. As co-founder of The Actor’s s Workshop in San Francisco (1952-1965) and co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York (1965-68), Blau introduced American audiences to avant-garde drama in some of this country’s s very first productions of Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. He extended the challenges of such cutting-edge work as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN (1968-1981). The two books that emerged from that work — Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (1982) and Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (1982)— received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and became seminal books in the developing field of performance theory. Blau’s s most recent book is The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater (2002). His first is The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964). In addition to the theater, Blau’s vital critical intelligence has taken up the subjects of literature, visual arts, fashion, postmodern culture and politics.