Sack - Imagined theatres: writing for a theoretical stage

What possible and impossible worlds might the theatre imagine?

In what way is writing itself a performance?

How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections, and imaginary conceptions that become real theatrical productions?

Imagined Theatres collects hypothetical performances written by nearly one hundred leading theorists and artists of the contemporary stage. These dramatic fragments, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary events that put theory itself onstage. Each no longer than a page, and accompanied by a reflective gloss, these texts consider what might be possible and impossible in the theatre.

Daniel Sack is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Like Calvinos Invisible Cities , Sacks Imagined Theatres are mirages for the minds eye, creations by leading artists and scholars that speak of stages that never were but may yet bean editorial and critical tour de force.

Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of English, African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater at Yale University.

Imagined Theatres invites us to envision theatre as a utopic no place of infinite possibility, in which theory and practice conjoin in a liminal space of creative imagining. Sack brings together contemporary theatre and performances brightest artist/thinkers in a constellation of words and images, ideas and propositions that give me hope, not just for the theatre, but for how human beings might interact, relate, and connect in ways that performance helps us conjure. An inspired collection for precarious times.

Jill Dolan, Dean of College and Annan Professor of English and Professor of Theater at Princeton University.

Writing for a theoretical stage

Edited by Daniel Sack

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2017 selection and editorial matter, Daniel Sack; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Daniel Sack to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN: 978-1-138-12204-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-12205-5 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-26495-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Visit the website at www.imaginedtheatres.com

In memory of Robin Joy Allan and all her imagined theatres.

Daniel Sack

The curtain opens endlessly;
it does not stop at the prosceniums
jamb, but instead runs on.

What you assumed a line splitting
open the frame of a thought is but the
tangent of a larger encompassing circle

describing the outer curve of your attention.
The sound of the tracks recede into what
you called offstage, farther and further

afield, a train dividing the great dark plains
into what is still the theatre and yet
already becoming not the theatre.

In what other houses do those other people sit,
patient for the slow progress of the veil
to reveal their night has truly begun?

Tragedy is all a matter of scale, said Aristotle:
You must be able to hold the event in memory
or take its full shape in with a single glance.

Indefinitely, on the most distant horizon,
the curtain is coming around at the other
side of sight, inverting itself like a

crimson velvet ouroboros.
You think you see it opening still:
this life here and now, appearing.