Book Series Guide

Author guide

Herbert Blau Books in Order

Herbert Blau (1926–2013) was an American theater director, scholar, critic, and performance theorist. He co-founded the Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, co-directed the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, founded the experimental group KRAKEN, and held distinguished academic positions at institutions including the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the University of Washington. His writing connects theater practice with criticism, performance theory, modernism, postmodernism, fashion, politics, and cultural history.

theater criticismperformance theorytheater historynonfictionmemoiressay

Catalog record updated .

Not sure where to begin?

Start with one of these

As If: An Autobiography

Best entry point for Blau's life, theater career, and intellectual development.

The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto

Foundational early manifesto articulating his ideas about experimental American theater.

The Audience

Major mature work on spectatorship, performance, and theatrical theory.

Outside the series

Bibliography by category

Novels (7)
  1. The Audience

    nonfiction · 1990

  2. Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion

    nonfiction · 1999

    What Herbert Blau suggests, in Nothing in Itself, is that fashion itself, today, has been anticipating and redefining, in the dazzle on the runway, or even in ready-to-wear, the terms in which it is critiqued, while sometimes giving the…

Nonfiction (1)
  1. As If: An Autobiography

    memoir · 2011

Essays and speeches (4)