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IMAGINED THEATRES
“Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Sack’s Imagined Theatres are mirages for the mind’s
eye, creations by leading artists and scholars that speak of stages that never were
but may yet be—an 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 performance’s 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.
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.
Edited by Daniel Sack

Daniel Sack is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Commonwealth
Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
DRAMA AND THEATRE STUDIES
Chiharu Shiota, A Room of Memory, 2008. Collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,
Kanazawa. Photo: Sunhi Mang
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
ISBN 978-1-138-12205-5 IMAGINED THEATRES

www.routledge.com
Writing for a Theoretical Stage
Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats 9 781138 122055

Imagined Theatres
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 reflec-
tions, 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 Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Sack’s Imagined Theatres are mirages for the mind’s eye,
creations by leading artists and scholars that speak of stages that never were but may yet
be—an 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 possibil-
ity, in which theory and practice conjoin in a liminal space of creative imagining. Sack
brings together contemporary theatre and performance’s 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.
Imagined Theatres
Writing for a theoretical stage

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.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this title has been requested
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.
Contents
Preface: The horizon xvii

Acknowledgments xviii
A note on the website xx
Introduction 1
Imagined Theatres
1. 230 Titles (I) 12
Tim Etchells
Gloss: Tim Etchells
2. 230 Titles (II) 14
Tim Etchells
Gloss: Tim Etchells
3. 230 Titles (III) 16
Tim Etchells
Gloss: Tim Etchells
4. After dinner 18
Julia Jarcho
Gloss: Julia Jarcho
5. “All the world’s a…” 20
Baz Kershaw
Gloss: Baz Kershaw
6. Ancestor call—Guerrero 22
Cherríe L. Moraga
Gloss: Brian Eugenio Herrera
7. Ancestor call—Malinche 24
Cherríe L. Moraga
Gloss: Helen Paris
8. Anecdote of the stage (after Stevens) 26
John H. Muse
Gloss: John H. Muse
vii
contents
9. Animal friendship: A docudrama 28
Minou Arjomand
Gloss: Broderick D.V. Chow
10. The art of forgetting 30
Daniel Sack
Gloss: Daniel Sack
11. Astigmatisms 32
Isaiah Matthew Wooden
Gloss: Natalie Alvarez
12. Candle tears 34
Meiling Cheng
Gloss: Meiling Cheng
13. Casting, four ways 36
Brian Eugenio Herrera
14. A Chinese actor’s late style 38
Broderick D.V. Chow
Gloss: Broderick D.V. Chow
15. Cities of refuge 40
Dominika Laster
Gloss: Yelena Gluzman
16. The classroom 42
Lin Hixson
Gloss: Matthew Goulish
17. Clockfire 44
Jonathan Ball
Gloss: Jonathan Ball
18. , Colon;zations and exclamations!: A set piece staged for the page 46
Jennifer DeVere Brody
Gloss: Jennifer DeVere Brody
19. The copper thieves 48
Irma Mayorga
Gloss: Irma Mayorga
20. Court theatre 50
Petra Kuppers
Gloss: VK Preston
21. Crow takes hat 52
Erik Ehn
Gloss: Irma Mayorga
viii
contents
22. Crowds with the shape of reason missing 54
Alan Read
Gloss: Alan Read
23. Dance for Baghdad 56
Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Gloss: Nicholas Ridout
24. dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home 58
Sharon Bridgforth
Gloss: Nia O. Witherspoon
25. Dealing 60
W.B. Worthen
Gloss: Aaron C. Thomas
26. Disappearing act 62
Fintan Walsh
27. A displacement 64
Patrick Anderson
Gloss: Rajni Shah
28. Dreams on screen 66
Rachel Joseph
Gloss: Rachel Joseph
29. Earthly 68
Joe Kelleher
Gloss: Joe Kelleher
30. Eavesdropping in on a cyclical conversation 70
Carl Hancock Rux
Gloss: Jennifer DeVere Brody
31. Enema of the people 72
Stephen Bottoms
Gloss: Stephen Bottoms
32. Esprit de corps 74
Kimberly Jannarone
Gloss: Joshua Abrams
33. Extremely poor children 76
Romeo Castellucci
Gloss: Joe Kelleher
34. Fade to black: Notes toward a re-performance
of gestures that never occurred 78
Ricardo Dominguez
Gloss: Ricardo Dominguez
ix
contents
35. Feminist theory theatre 80
Yelena Gluzman
Gloss: Yelena Gluzman
36. The Fort 82
Yvette Nolan
Gloss: Minou Arjomand
37. Friedrichshain 84
Nicholas Ridout
Gloss: Kimberly Jannarone
38. A garden party Hamlet86
Rachel Joseph
Gloss: Kyle Gillette
39. Ghost light, an animal congress 88
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Gloss: Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
40. Ghost practice 90
Sara Jane Bailes
Gloss: Andrew Sofer
41. Give, take, and shake 92
Rodrigo Toscano
Gloss: Carla Harryman
42. The greatest show on earth 94
Darren O’Donnell
Gloss: Darren O’Donnell
43. Gun 96
Jonathan Ball
Gloss: John H. Muse
44. Gut body 98
Petra Kuppers
Gloss: Petra Kuppers
45. A happy life 100
Aaron C. Thomas
46. Heaven’s stenographer shines the guiding light 102
Nick Salvato
47. Holding time 104
Helen Paris
Gloss: Sara Jane Bailes
x
contents
48. How does it go again? 106
Rebecca Schneider
Gloss: Rebecca Schneider
49. Human too 108
Una Chaudhuri
Gloss: Petra Kuppers
50. I can’t breathe… 110
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Gloss: Thomas F. DeFrantz
51. I, Marjorie 112
Jen Harvie
Gloss: Jen Harvie
52. Imagined cities (after Calvino) 114
Kyle Gillette
Gloss: Daniel Sack
53. The impossible magic show 116
Augusto Corrieri
Gloss: Augusto Corrieri
54. In character 118
Harvey Young
Gloss: Harvey Young
55. IRL 120
Joshua Chambers-Letson and Josh Rains
Gloss: Joshua Chambers-Letson and Josh Rains
56. It comes back together 122
Karen Christopher
Gloss: Andy Field
57. It could be a forest 124
Ralph Lemon
Gloss: Ralph Lemon
58. It was a large rubble space 126
Claire MacDonald
Gloss: Ant Hampton
59. Last resort [no one can stop you now] 128
Sylvan Oswald
Gloss: Jen Harvie
60. The last wor(l)d 130
VK Preston
xi
contents
61. The lost notebooks of the painter’s wife 132
Diane Glancy
Gloss: Diane Glancy
62. The means of production 134
Jen Harvie
Gloss: Patrick Anderson
63. A meta-theatre 136
Bush Moukarzel
Gloss: Claudia La Rocco
64. The monster when she opened her wings 138
Claudia La Rocco
Gloss: Claudia La Rocco
65. Motion capture 140
Christopher Grobe
Gloss: Sarah Bay-Cheng
66. Music for Charlie Morel 142
Aaron C. Thomas
Gloss: Joseph Cermatori
67. The night everything happened 144
Augusto Corrieri
Gloss: Isaiah Matthew Wooden
68. No subject 146
Wendy Houstoun
Gloss: Wendy Houstoun
69. NOT I (not) 148
Ant Hampton
Gloss: Peggy Phelan
70. Ocean oration 150
Una Chaudhuri
Gloss: Una Chaudhuri
71. Oh, have I died, then? 152
Howard Barker
Gloss: Daniel Sack
72. On location and context 154
Ricardo A. Bracho
Gloss: Ricardo A. Bracho
73. On scale 156
Joshua Abrams
Gloss: Kimberly Jannarone
xii
contents
74. Onboard entertainment 158
Joe Kelleher
75. or, The Whale (For Tess) 160
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
Gloss: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
76. An orogeny 162
Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
Gloss: Karen Christopher
77. Otto’s self board meeting 164
Pablo Helguera
Gloss: Fintan Walsh
78. Passenger pigeons 166
Yvette Nolan
79. Plant life (excerpt from a play in three acts) 168
Peggy Phelan
80. Poolside 170
Claudia La Rocco
Gloss: Joe Kelleher
81. Precipitation 172
Karen Christopher
Gloss: Helen Paris
82. The previous cry 174
Timothy McCain
83. Private language argument I 176
Andrew Sofer
Gloss: Nick Salvato
84. Private language argument II 178
Andrew Sofer
Gloss: Andrew Sofer
85. Questions for women in prison 180
Rhodessa Jones
Gloss: Rhodessa Jones
86. Realism 182
Kyle Gillette
xiii
contents
87. Remains 184
Andy Field
88. Rock performance 186
Nick Salvato
Gloss: Nick Salvato
89. SHE 188
Nia O. Witherspoon
Gloss: Irma Mayorga
90. Spiked 190
Claire MacDonald
Gloss: Augusto Corrieri
91. Stress melody 192
Christopher Grobe
Gloss: Christopher Grobe
92. Surveillance 194
Jonathan Ball
Gloss: Rachel Joseph
93. TALES 196
Natalie Alvarez
Gloss: Ju Yon Kim
94. Tectum theatre 198
Suk-Young Kim
Gloss: Suk-Young Kim
95. Th’Eater 200
Joshua Abrams
96. Theatre of the Blind (or: description) 202
Patrick Anderson
Gloss: Thomas F. DeFrantz
97. The theatre at Calpurnia 204
Nadine George-Graves
Gloss: Nadine George-Graves
98. Theatre generated by a probabilistic language model,
with grammatical artifacts retained 206
Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson
Gloss: W.B. Worthen
99. Theatre of intimacy and abandon 208
Casey Llewellyn and Claudia Rankine
Gloss: Peggy Phelan
xiv
contents
100. The theatre of the town 210
Joe Kelleher
Gloss: Erin Manning
101. Theatre/duty 212
Ju Yon Kim
Gloss: Ju Yon Kim
102. A theatrical revenge melodrama with ring-tones 214
Sarah Bay-Cheng
Gloss: Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
103. Thee Thy Thou Thine (a fragment) 216
Rose English
Gloss: Wendy Houstoun
104. Then a cunning voice and a night we spend gazing at stars 218
Emily Johnson
Gloss: Emily Johnson
105. Three dramaturgical miniatures (after Nietzsche) 220
Joseph Cermatori
Gloss: Daniel Sack
106. Thresholding 222
Erin Manning
Gloss: Erin Manning
107. Touching touches 224
Isaiah Matthew Wooden
Gloss: Isaiah Matthew Wooden
108. Triptych 226
Kyle Gillette
Gloss: Patrick Anderson
109. Two dances 228
Susan Leigh Foster
Gloss: Susan Leigh Foster
110. TwoDoor drama 230
Rebecca Schneider
Gloss: Daniel Sack
111. Universal theatre machine (for Leibniz, Turing, Brecht, and Boal) 232
Annie Dorsen
Gloss: Christopher Grobe
112. Unstill lives 234
Bonnie Marranca
Gloss: Bonnie Marranca
xv
contents
113. Untitled (imaginary theatre #1) 236
André Lepecki
Gloss: Rebecca Schneider
114. Untitled (imaginary theatre #2) 238
André Lepecki
115. Variations (I–III) 240
Deirdre Heddon
Gloss: Deirdre Heddon
116. Vocabulary 242
VK Preston
Gloss: VK Preston
117. The waiting room 244
Michael McMillan
Gloss: Michael McMillan
118. Wanderspiele 246
Natalie Alvarez
Gloss: Deirdre Heddon
119. What to, where (a poets theatre) 248
Carla Harryman
Gloss: Carla Harryman
120. Women & children & an old man Godot 250
Richard Schechner
Gloss: Richard Schechner
121. 252
Rajni Shah
Gloss: Rajni Shah
Notes on contributors 254

Related works 269
Constellations 289
xvi
Preface: The horizon
Daniel Sack
The curtain opens endlessly;

it does not stop at the proscenium’s
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.
xvii
Acknowledgments
One of the innumerable imagined theatres this book does not contain tells the story of
a performance that ends, like many theatrical performances, with a curtain call. After all
the actors have had their bow, the stage hands begin to emerge—one by one or holding
hands in pairs, squinting at the light. They keep coming as the audience’s clapping turns
insistent, as the stage fills and they spill over into the orchestra, down the aisles, and out
into the lobby—those countless hidden bodies whose labor made the show possible.
As if having traveled from far away, from the edges of a theatre that extends to towns or
countries unseen, it takes many hours for the last to make their way to the boards. The
last hand that moved the theatre bows as dawn brightens the city streets.
Great hosts from near and far have sustained this book, too. Without keeping you here
until morning with a list too long to name, a few figures deserve attention: Jane Hwang
Degenhardt, LeAnn Fields, Peggy Phelan, Alexandra Ripp, Rebecca Schneider, Jenny
Spencer, and Silvia Valisa. Special thanks to Kyle Gillette and Aaron C. Thomas for
close readings and outside eyes when I needed them most. Also to Ellie Kevorkian, the
“Liveness is Critical” residents, and the entire staff at the Bemis Center for Contemporary
Arts for encouragement at an important moment in the process.
Different iterations of Imagined Theatres were presented at Summerhall in Edinburgh,
Florida State University, Hampshire College, Harvard University, the Five College
Performance Studies Working Group, the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst, and conferences organized by Performance and
Philosophy, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for Theatre
in Higher Education, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the
Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale “Crossings” conference.
Thanks to Reiko Ishiguro at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,
Kanazawa, for assistance with permissions, and the artist Chiharu Shiota for the use of
her work. Coach House Books kindly allowed the reprint of texts from Jonathan Ball’s
Clockfire. Selections from my introduction were first published in a different form in
Theater magazine (Winter 2015) under the editorship of Tom Sellar, and the preface
initially found its way to print in the pages of the poetry and prose journal Parcel. Ten
of the imagined theatres and glosses collected under the constellation of “Technology”
were published in the Fall 2016 issue of Theatre Journal. Editors Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
and Joanne Tompkins were helpful interlocutors here and elsewhere.
This project was made possible with the generous support of a Faculty Research Grant/
Healey Endowment Grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Students and
colleagues at my home institution have been supportive throughout, but two people
were especially instrumental in their assistance. Tom Racine offered a steady hand with
xviii
acknowledgments
a mountain of invoices and all manner of convoluted tax forms. I cannot put words to
the gratitude I owe my assistant Patricia Matthews, a brilliant doctoral student in the
Department of English. With a precision of thought and a feel for language I can only
admire, she has been the most reliable and inspiring of collaborators.
Thanks to Dusty Sheldon and adjective studio for working on the website and thanks
to the staff at Routledge/Taylor & Francis for making the book possible. I want to
acknowledge Kevin Selmes for his meticulous attention to the words that fill these pages,
Kate Edwards for her patience in the face of ever-expanding complications, and, above
all, Ben Piggott for his willingness to approach the impossible (or at least unreasonable)
with excitement. He has backed this project unconditionally from the very first.
My acknowledgments begin and end with the contributors to this volume. These are
the people who have long shaped my understanding of the theatre, and have repeatedly
shown me where that understanding confronts its limits. It has been an honor to imagine
alongside them.
xix
A note on the website
The theatre keeps imagining itself anew. Every time we return to the rehearsal room or
settle into our seats, we imagine a difference, however small, however subtle. This need
not be a matter of disruption; it may be a gesture of conservation or repair. The theatre
looks, listens, feels outward from the immediate to discover what could be. Imagined
Theatres will continue beyond these covers, too. Alongside the publication of this book,
a website offers bridges farther and further afield.
Imaginedtheatres.com is an open-access online journal with two streams for further
development. Beginning in the summer of 2017, new “issues” containing texts by 15–25
authors will be released every six months. Under the stewardship of a guest editor or
team of editors, each issue focuses on a geographic area overlooked by the book, begin-
ning with South Africa (Summer 2017) and then Australia/New Zealand (Winter 2017).
Later issues will move into translation and may incorporate other themes in time. While
these volumes follow the basic structure of the book, guest editors may decide to articu-
late a slightly different orientation for each subsequent collection.
In addition, the site contains an ever-growing archive of select user-submitted work.
In an effort to treat this material with the attention often reserved for more conventional
academic production, an editorial board peer-reviews and curates these texts before
publication. You are invited to send your own writing for consideration—in glossed or
unglossed form—via the links provided on the website. The technologies afforded by the
site will allow for new arrangements and constellations to take shape within this archive,
discovering how the digital imagines the theatre differently from the book.
The platform will evolve over time, but web-exclusive work is already available. You
will find a list of references to earlier writings that might be called imagined theatres, as
well as links to contemporary artists whose existing work covers similar terrain. A series
of pedagogical applications are outlined, providing suggestions for classroom and work-
shop use. Here, too, we welcome accounts of different uses that you have made of this
material. Collectively, we hope to foster a second universe of theatrical possibilities, by
turns inspiring and responding to the actual production it exists alongside.
xx
Introduction
The lights rise on a room not unlike this one. At center a table with a cardboard box on it.
After a moment, a figure enters and sits down. The figure opens the box and takes out a book,
opens the book and begins to read.
The lights rise on a room not unlike this one. At center a table with a cardboard box on
it. After a moment, a figure enters and sits down. The figure opens the box and takes out
a miniature theatre. It is made of paper, remarkably intricate in its design—all the parts
and pieces down to the smallest scale, are in perfect working order. There are lines that
maneuver drops, levers that dim lights, machines that lift gods high, walkways that lead
to buildings within buildings, some labyrinthine echo from the Noh stage. A trick of
smoke and mirrors seems to immerse you as a participant one moment and then another
places you watching from outside, the stage hiding behind a proscenium, or thrusting
forward, even surrounding at once on all sides. Obsolete mechanisms stand side by side
with mysterious devices that promise unforeseen revelations. What are they all for?
You want to take it apart. You want to get at the essence of the theatre, even if
you know it’s a quixotic venture. This is how the poet/theorist Charles Baudelaire
explained the destructive inclination so common to children—that “first metaphysical
tendency”—to tear apart the toy to find the heart of the machine that sets it in motion.
If the toy or miniature dreams a secret life (as another poet/theorist, Susan Stewart, has
it), then the theatre guarantees some other prime mover behind the scenes, a stagehand at
the board or prompter feeding lines.1 In this case, I claim responsibility for casting you
in the performance that is the reading of this book, but there are many of us back here,
each proposing a different event that might dress you in strange costumes and take you
in stranger directions.
Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage is such a paper theatre—or, rather, a
universe of paper theatres—bringing together short conceptual performances written by
close to one hundred artists and theorists of the stage. Each writer offers a text one page in
length, describing an event that may or may not be performed in some future theatre to
come. Another single page text faces each theatre, written by the same author or another:
a gloss outlining a critical context, a history, or a personal reflection, which models one of
many possible responses to the hypothetical event. Imagined Theatres works in fragments,
only suggesting the outline of a shape and leaving the reader to fill out the volume. For
the imagination flits and falters; it does not finish a form or stick to its intentions; it frag-
ments attention.
These “imagined theatres” might seem illogical or fantastical; they might break the
laws of physics and etiquette. Or perhaps they could be staged in some ideal architecture
1
introduction
where the finances, conventions, ethics, or other practicalities of actual production do
not hold sway. Each is a thought experiment about the expectations of the theatre, a par-
able or paradox that touches upon its nature and elaborates on the many ways in which
that nature might be conceived. Imagined Theatres gathers together what may initially
seem impossible in order that its readers might interrogate where that impossibility lies
and what lies are obscured by calling it “impossible.” (For is anything truly impossible
in a theatre?)
Many of the imagined theatres in the following pages provoke questions of perfor-
mance’s fundamental dimensions: time and space. Some stretch the duration of an event
to last a lifetime or to outlive many generations, while others pass momentarily. Great
accumulations fill the page with a density that exceeds the carrying capacity of the thea-
tre’s confines: cities, nations, whole ecosystems and vast complexities flicker into appear-
ance. They literalize the long-lived philosophical conceit of the theatrum mundi, the world
as stage, and make theatres of canyons and gardens. They open prosceniums that look out
upon the edges of outer space to choreograph a dance between planets, mount a conflict
between microscopic actors, or frame a people in migration as performances.
Others ask us to reconsider who or what gets to perform on a stage. The theatre may
be largely concerned with humans watching other humans in action—holding a mirror
up to (human) nature, as Hamlet put it in his address to the actors about to perform his
own imagined play. But in an age when non-human animals, objects, technologies, and
the ecological surrounds at large are recognized as living actors, participating in events far
more intricate than any Disney-like dream of anthropomorphic song and dance might
portray, we require an expanded ethics and sociality born out of interspecies and interan-
imate relations. With its histories and para-histories of puppets, circus, and animal shows,
the theatre might pose responsible ways of thinking and acting with the non-human. It
shows how that mountain is doing something, how the ocean is delivering us a message.
Historically and culturally defined conventions limit the theatre in ways as profound
as any seeming natural order. In confronting these conventions directly, word for word,
imagined theatres show us what should be possible today, what thinkers like Jill Dolan and
José Muñoz have framed as the utopic aspect of performance. Such proposals demand that
we reconsider theatre’s publics, that we create spaces welcoming those normally without
the means and time to access its offerings, or whose makers do not require approval from
the gatekeepers of cultural acceptability or normativity. They play with the concrete
materiality of labor conditions, imagining theatres that recompense performers fairly,
or give voice to underrepresented participants. They turn our attention to sites where
people are made socially and politically invisible—prisons, hospitals, schools—or force
us to look hard at the undersides of institutions devoted to display—theatres, museums,
cinemas. Since the theatre is contiguous to the everyday, as these pieces challenge art
they also challenge quotidian life (knowing that these two dimensions can never be
separated). To call these “imaginary” is to recognize the current prejudices of artmaking
in the Anglophone world, but it is also to recognize that theatre is anything but fixed and
stable; it changes in different contexts and times. There have been many theatres, and
there will be many more.
Some of these texts will not look like theatrical texts at first glance. Remember how
Marcel Duchamp signed a name to a urinal and thereby turned that overlooked mundane
receptacle into a voluptuous porcelain sculpture. He placed this “readymade” object
into the frame of a museum, called it “art,” and thus the definition of art had to alter to
accommodate the interloper. So, too, walk across a stage and you will become an actor;
2
introduction
place a chair on its boards and it will begin to perform something. With Imagined Theatres,
you might think of the page itself as a stage or performance space where anything that
enters its field becomes a player. This expansion of the term “theatre” applies to the form
of the writing as much as its content. Yes, there are scripts in here with characters and
speeches, italicized stage directions like the ones that opened this very introduction. Yet
other texts appear as sets of instructions, stories in prose, or poems in verse. Some are
closer to what goes by the name of “philosophy,” or “history,” or “confession.” What
happens to these texts when they are called “theatres”? What is gained or presumed by
such a designation? What is lost?
Imagining the limit cases of a theatrical event, one might come closer to understand-
ing what theatre in its broadest conception can be and do. The philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein said of his own writing, “I am not interested in constructing a building, as
much as in having a perspicacious view of the foundations of possible buildings.”2 For
Wittgenstein, this meant a reflection on the nature of language itself, communication as a
game that we play with others, almost always according to unspoken rules. He described
his writing as a ladder of language that might be used to climb outside the building of
language and then regard its foundations. So, too, the hypotheticals of Imagined Theatres
are intended to see and put pressure on the actual makeup of the medium.
If Imagined Theatres is a building, then it is one with many, many rooms. Its occupants
are named and addressed towards the rear of the volume; there you will also find what
might be thought a kind of basement or attic collecting Related works for each of the
theatres contained herein (to keep the academic apparatus at bay except where it plays a
necessary part, any references mentioned in these theatres will be found there). A final
section provides a set of maps, or Constellations, illustrating different methods of access
and escape. Otherwise, the book follows a consistent modular structure that could be
expanded endlessly. Each left-hand side page—the verso—contains an imagined theatre.
Facing it, each recto presents a page-long gloss. Some contributors have written glosses on
their own work; others have been asked to dialogue with another contributor—perhaps
someone with whom they have worked extensively, perhaps a complete stranger.
For millennia, readers from China to Egypt to Greece and beyond have annotated
books with marginal commentary serving as explanation, interpretation, or reminders
to future readers—perhaps even one’s own future self. To “gloss” in this manner is to
participate in a text, to make the reader’s performance apparent. In dialogue with their
original actors, these parasitic texts present arguments for, against, and alongside their
host. I say “parasitic,” because a gloss is beside (a para-site), but also because a gloss is
not merely a transparent double. The Oxford English Dictionary says that “gloss” is “often
used in a sinister sense: a sophistical or disingenuous interpretation.” For a gloss might
also cast a lustrous layer atop a text, a sheen on the scene; it might divert attention or
draw a veil or curtain over the original text. This insinuation of deceptive behavior and
superficial appearance feels particularly apropos to the theatre, which has faced similar
charges throughout a long history of antitheatrical prejudice stretching back to Plato. So,
too, the theoretical has often been charged with hiding behind obtuse jargon—another
form of duplicity that has produced antipathy among many readers. I’d like to suggest,
then, that these glosses theatricalize the theoretical act.
Discourse around the theatre usually presumes a binary that sets practice/performance/
art on one side and theory/criticism/scholarship on the other. Imagined Theatres prefers
to see a continuum in place of an opposition: an imagined theatre lies closer to the prac-
tice end while still connected to theory, just as its gloss lies closer to theory while still
3
introduction
participating in creative practice. Some of the glosses here resemble theatrical scenarios
themselves, and some of the theatres, too, read like glosses on some other pre-existing
theatre that has gone missing. To echo the performance theorist Richard Schechner’s
understanding of the liminal state of play, where the actor is both not herself and not not
herself, one might say that an imagined theatre is at once not theatre and not not theatre,
just as a gloss is not theory and not not theory.3
As the subtitle to this book has it, imagined theatres and their glosses together comprise
a multitude of “theoretical stages.” An obsolete meaning of theory was “a sight, a spec-
tacle,” sharing a common root with the theatre as a “place of looking” from the Greek
word theatron. These texts are theoretical performances in that they make a spectacle of
theory, they make it perform. They are also theoretical performances in that they are
provisional and hypothetical. They could be, but they could also not be. Theory in the
theatre most often happens in response to performance, circulating in conversations after
the fact that do not include or effect practitioners. But what if the theoretical happened
as an event in itself? What if the act of imagining a theatre were an event with real con-
sequences? And what if the theatre were taken seriously as a mode for theorizing beyond
its own stages?
This book rests on the belief that the theatre allows us to theorize about our world as if
it were another and to test that difference in motion, in time. An engine of cosmogony,
the theatre creates, according to Elinor Fuchs, “another world passing before you in time
and space.”4 This is why the theatre has long been a favorite metaphor for philosophers
seeking to imagine a closed system with a logic of its own. When Plato wanted to tell
us about the nature of reality, he asked us to imagine a theatre. Not the open-air audi-
torium overlooking ancient Athens that he knew so well and upon which he watched
the performances of his day; rather, he invented a proto-cinema with shadow puppets
dancing on a cave wall. Recall, too, that the dialogues the philosopher wrote—thea-
tres that staged debates between his protagonist/teacher Socrates and a rotating cast of
antagonists—were initially read for small audiences; staged readings even if these did not
fully embrace imitation through costumes and sets. Indeed, in his book The Drama of
Ideas (2010), Martin Puchner has argued that, at odds with the conflicts of the Athenian
tragedies, these Socratic dramas originated a counter-tradition of philosophical theatre
performing argumentation in place of action. Thinkers like George Berkeley (Three
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713), Denis Diderot (Rameau’s Nephew, 1762),
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Dialogues, 1776) imagined theatrical conversations intended
to think through the limits of philosophy.
Imagined Theatres joins a long history of impossible theatres or theatrical performances
conceived for the page.5 Many plays written will never reach the stage, in spite of their
authors’ best intentions. Maybe these works do not find a willing or able producer;
maybe they make demands that exceed the means of production. Seneca’s Roman
tragedies were probably unstaged, indulging instead in an elaborate spoken description
of violence that threatened to overwhelm representation. In distinction to these works,
there are those dramatic texts deliberately written to be read, whose ideal stage is the
page itself. The closet drama exemplifies such a theatre of the book. Romantic poets
of the eighteenth and nineteenth century and modernist poets of the twentieth century
alike proposed events that challenged the very constitution of the theatre, while the
Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) staged scenes of erotic couplings and
unmentionable desires. Unmoored from visible anchors and material constraints, only
such closet drama, Puchner suggests,
4
introduction
can actually change a man into a woman, place thousands of people on an impossible
stage, and even turn objects and fragmented body parts into agents … This resistance
is part of a larger resistance to the limitations of the theater and the normativity that
stems from them. It is this possibility of resistance, built into the very structure of
the closet drama, that necessitates what one might call an epistemology of the closet
drama.6
Such bookbound performance increasingly finds its way into theatrical production
today. In one of the episodes of their Life and Times project (2009–present), for example,
Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper of Nature Theater of Oklahoma gave each spectator in a
darkened audience their own copy of a hand-drawn pornographic comic book, letting
each individual leaf through the explicit drawings under the private illumination of their
own handheld flashlight. A chamber full of private fantasies danced in those dim globes
of localized light. (For their contribution to this book, you will be required to bring your
own magnifying glass.)
The name of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma derives from an imagined theatre that
Franz Kafka describes in a brief fragment from his incomplete novel Amerika (1927). A
whole city of theatrical re-performance on the move across the Great Plains of the US,
the Nature Theatre of Kafka’s book offers a utopic promise of redemption for the pro-
tagonist, Karl, and his fellow immigrants and vagabonds lost en route to the American
Dream.7 Fiction writers and poets have often imagined theatres as metaphors and con-
ceptual sites where divergent worlds nest within other worlds. Roberto Bolaño’s extraor-
dinary novel 2666 (2004) turns to the image of a theatre to make sense of the monstrosity
of Santa Teresa, Mexico—a fictionalized version of the violent city of Juárez. He perverts
Plato’s theatre-cave into a mine-like hellmouth where the spectacle of brutality engulfing
the city is always obscured or merely overheard by a diverted audience. And then there
is the nightmarish performance in the opening chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
(1952), where the narrator and other young black men are tortured, blindfolded, and
forced to fight each other in a makeshift arena for the amusement of the leading white
men of society. This concludes with the terrified narrator’s re-performance of his high
school graduation speech to the mockery and celebration of the assembled masses—an
allegorical theatre of mid-century America that reflects racism far too familiar today.
From novels like Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) and Virginia Woolf’s Between the
Acts (1941), to the poetry of Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson, writers across different
literary genres provide rich examples of the kind of work that this volume collects.
Imagined Theatres is primarily concerned with what the language of theatre might
afford our thinking, but precedents in the visual arts have explored related ground.
The early happenings and chance-based events of John Cage or Allan Kaprow from
the 1950s and 1960s often originated in a score that organized time and space into
formations of possible actions. These events were usually performed by the artist, or at
least in his or her presence. However, Kaprow soon began creating instruction works
for individuals to perform on their own time and in their own space—the scores,
perhaps with an attendant prop, stood in for the event as artwork. In the conceptual
art of the 1960s and 1970s, actualization of a proposition was not compulsory; it was
even considered redundant once an idea had been proposed. Take one example among
many: Yoko Ono’s 1962 Instructions for Painting and subsequent work collected in the
books Grapefruit (1964–1972) and Acorn (2013) separate the linguistic construction of an
event from its enactment, presenting hypothetical occasions “for dealing with oneself.”8
5
introduction
She asks us to envision situations that reframe the world around the subject: imagine
secretly speeding up all the clocks in the world by two seconds (Clock piece) or opening
a small hole in a canvas and looking at the world through its window (Painting to see the
room). Though some of these have been realized, Ono conceived of them as “paintings
to construct in the head,” rather than atop some material support. Between artist and
spectator, “there [is] maybe a dream that two dream together, but there is no chair that
two see together.”9
Theatre theorists and artists have also often wondered over hypothetical events and
worlds that might test the limits of the stage. Antonin Artaud wrote performance texts
describing tableaus of apocalyptic proportions for his promised Theatre of Cruelty, but
his essays, too, manifest events upon the stage of the reader—sometimes on the very
body and nerves of his imaginary audience. As writers like Jacques Derrida have argued,
Artaud’s dream of a theatre without representation is impossible to actualize, but it has
nonetheless inspired generations of performance makers. If contributors to this collec-
tion repeatedly return to Samuel Beckett’s work, it is perhaps because so many of his
non-dramatic texts describe events that might be staged in some theatre at the end of
our world, but also because his plays seem to take place on a nearly internal register for
the spectator, a fragmented figure lit by attention against the black surround. Marguerite
Duras wrote plays for disembodied voices or novellas written in dialogue form that imi-
tate plays but resist enactment on a stage always already corrupted by an inherently patri-
archal representation. These are conceptual theatres, impossible perhaps, limning shapes
from the depths of consciousness. The late director and theorist Herbert Blau, too, spoke
of one such imagined theatre in an interview published in PAJ (Performing Arts Journal):
I’ve always wanted to create a theatre that would be … like Picasso’s sculptured
“Death’s Head” [1941]. So dense it would be almost like a black hole, the gravity so
great it would warp back into itself and come out the other side. And yet, it would
be like that sculpture, impacted, dense, or as if set in stone. I’ve always wanted to
create a theatre even[t] that had such mass and spatial power, such density in its pass-
ing that it would be virtually absolute.10
Even before I invited them to conceive texts for this volume, many of the contribu-
tors here had written or performed work that belongs in the library of imagined theatres.
A set of connected pieces by Tim Etchells (230 Titles: I, II, and III) stand in the foyer
of this alphabetically organized collection; they are marquees announcing productions
that are not contained here, but that might be imagined taking place in some forgotten
buried venue. For more than thirty years, Etchells has been artistic director of Forced
Entertainment, a collective of five artists/performers based in Sheffield, England, that has
excavated a theatre not unlike the one his alter-ego describes in the gloss to these first
works. In an email exchange we had at the outset of this book project, Etchells charted
the company’s engagement with the imaginary:
Marking a break with Forced Entertainment’s largely physical and visual work to
that date, Dirty Work—the performance I made with the group in 1998—took the
form of an imaginary performance summoned only via descriptive text from the
performers on stage. Writing at the time, I framed the piece as a kind of virtual or
imaginary performance, unpacked by the audience who were co-opted as authorial
collaborators, drawn into the act of picturing the events described.11
6
introduction
As a solo artist, too, Etchells has employed language as a prompt to make the spectator/
reader a collaborator in the work. Surrender Control (2001) and A Short Message Spectacle
(2010), for example, were instructional dramas delivered by mobile phone text messaging
to individual audience members who had subscribed to experience the work.
My year-long Internet project Vacuum Days (2011), later published as a book and pre-
sented as posters, comprised a rolling program of imaginary events announced online
at the rate of one per day. The 365 announcements of absurd performances, specta-
cles, debates, contests, film-screenings and other events was a distorted process of call
and response with unfolding political situations and events during the course of 2011,
mirroring the ubiquitous language of sensationalist media, news-as-pornography,
hyped-up current affairs, Internet spam, twitter gossip, and tabloid headlines.
Then there is Ricardo Dominguez’s work with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a
company he co-founded with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and
Elle Mehrmand. Consider the Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007), a hypothetical mobile
app intended to locate water sources and provide emergency assistance and poetry
to those walking across the desert spaces between the US and Mexico. Even though
the application was never developed, the project was under investigation by the US
Congress; right-wing political agitator Glenn Beck deemed the piece a gesture that
potentially “dissolved” the US border with its poetry. As Diana Taylor describes it, “the
idea of helping undocumented immigrants, not the tool, proved powerful and radically
altered the way in which power had to respond.”12
Or consider how Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish—director and dramaturge, respec-
tively, of the Chicago-based performance companies Goat Island and Every house has a
door—have worked at the hinterlands of their performers’ capacities. The Sea & Poison
(1998–2002), for example,
set out to construct “impossible dances” from a series of unperformable individual

movements, which challenge the limits of human ability, and as dance hover some-
where between musical composition and the clumsy marathon dance competitions
of American depression years. The Sea & Poison combines these investigations into
a layered expression of the effects of poison on the body—the social body and the
individual body—and of impossibility itself.13
Watching these willful failures to actualize a series of actions, one could feel a kind of
ghost choreography of intentions hovering over a space so filled with sweat and strain.
It’s an approach that the company has taken up in other ways, creating spaces in which
an audience might imagine an otherwise inaccessible time or space—the architecture of
a building (The Lastmaker, 2007), the theatre extending beyond the theatre space (Let us
think of these things always. Let us speak of them never., 2010), or a series of crimes or acci-
dents traced in legal documents (Testimonium, 2013). Conversely, artist Rose English has
exhibited the remains of theatrical events that never were performed, turning the imagi-
nation back towards what might have been, while choreographer Emily Johnson has
fostered participatory performances that ask dancers and local communities to together
imagine events they would like to see realized in the future through long gatherings
lasting the night or for days on end. Finally, fatally, Jonathan Ball’s collection of prose
poems Clockfire (2006), several of which have been reprinted here, describes imagined
7
introduction
theatres that hollow out the very possibility of theatre’s survival or one’s passage through
it. So, too, the scholars in this collection have written in ways that trouble what we mean
by a theatre, forcing us to reckon with a diversity of traditions, outlooks, and political
exigencies that stress the conventions of this ever-changing art.
Writing about and doing theatre have long been intertwined in my understanding
of this art. I first started exploring directing and devising while I was also beginning to
study the history and theory of performance in graduate school at Stanford University. As
conceived by what was then called the Department of Drama, the two courses—practi-
cal and theoretical—both pursued a common end: they demanded one imagine what
could be put onstage. Incited by my readings and by the weekly problems that the late
Carl Weber asked us to perform in his directing workshop, I dreamed up and wrote out
scenarios that seemed impossible, conceptions far beyond my means and time. There
was the play comprised entirely of accidents, the scene in which the audience secretly
watched the stage technicians building the set of Mother Courage for weeks on end, the
performance where we burned the theatre to the ground, and so on. I jotted these frag-
ments down in notebooks or saved them in files titled “future projects.” (And here I was
not so far removed from Joe Kelleher’s piece The Theatre of the Town in the pages that
follow.) Even as I moved further into an academic career of writing, further from my
theatre-making, I kept adding to my stockpile of imagined theatres. These became places
for a concept to play out in ways my academic work did not allow, or where I might
extend some greater distance the suggestion a performance conveyed.
In 2011, I made some of these imaginings public on a blog I called Behind this Curtain.
I thought the curtain emblematic of the theatre’s fundamental function—a means of
appearance and disappearance at once. Anything could be held behind this curtain. I
conceived a theatre of endlessly unfolding layers of curtains, constructed of any and all
materials: transparent, translucent, opaque. One entry put it this way:
I am a writer and only occasionally a director, so most of my imagined theatres must

remain in utero, suspended in conception without actualization. […] Behind each
imagining lies the expectation that these will take place some day or that they have
already taken place in one of the countless theatres that gleam dimly in some subter-
ranean quarter of this world of ours. A kind of contradiction in terms, an imagined
theatre is an impossibility clinging fast to its eventual realization.
I knew that others had their own dreamed-of and hoped-for theatres. Sometimes, sit-
ting in a darkened auditorium, I would drift into a reverie, wondering what the director
or designer or playwright or actor would do if they could do anything. Or, when at an
academic conference, listening to scholars present their research, I would sense some
underlying impulse at the root of their inquiry. I would dream of interrupting, asking
to hear of their imagined theatres. Instead, I began to gather people together with this
in mind, presenting a compilation of such texts first with two friends and fellow artist-
scholars, Kyle Gillette and Rachel Joseph, then in a series of solo readings and workshops
where those in attendance might write or share their own inventions. In classrooms and
in late-night conversations, I asked people to tell me of their imagined theatres, to write
them down. I imagined an endless festival of these works.
This book is the further development of that project. What began as an invitation to
twenty writers quickly expanded to include a host far more numerous. And then, over
the course of several months, small gifts of extraordinary writing began to arrive in my
8
Another random document with
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O thou blossom of eastern silence,
Take thy ancient way untrodden of men.
Go on thy dustless path of mystery,
Reach thou the golden throne of God,
And be our advocate
Before His Silence and His compassionate speechlessness.
The prayer frightened the eagles, unaccustomed to human voices.

But ere they were excited to fury our little ritual was over and we hid
ourselves under the stunted pine. The eagles, left without any
breakfast, looked out and scanned the sky for a sign of their parent.
They gazed below where flocks of parrots and jays flew, small as
humming birds. Wild geese came trailing across the snowy peaks
where they had spent the night on their journey southward. Soon
they too grew small as beetles and melted into space. Hour after
hour passed, yet no sight of the big eagle! The full-fledged eaglets
felt hungrier and hungrier, and began to fret in their nest. We heard a
quarrel going on in the interior of the eyrie which grew in intensity
and noise till one of them left home in disgust and began to climb the
cliff. He went higher and higher. Up and up he walked without using
his wings. By now it was past midday; we had luncheon, yet still
there was no sight of the parent birds. We judged that the eagle left
in the nest was the sister, for she looked smaller than the other
eaglet. She sat facing the wind, peering into the distance, but she
too grew down-hearted. Strange though it may sound, I have yet to
see a Himalayan eagle which does not sit facing the wind from the
time of its birth until it learns to fly, as a sailor boy might sit looking at
the sea until he takes to navigating it. About two in the afternoon that
eagle grew tired of waiting in the nest. She set out in quest of her
brother who was now perching on the top of a cliff far above. He too
was facing the wind. As his sister came up his eyes brightened. He
was glad not to be alone and the sight of her saved him from the
melancholy thought of flying for food. No eagle-child have I seen
being taught to fly by its parents. That is why younglings will not
open their wings until driven by hunger. The parent eagles know this
very well and that is why when their babies grow up, and the time
has come, they leave them and go away.
The little sister laboriously climbed till she reached her brother's side
but alas, there was no room for two. Instead of balancing themselves
on their perch, the sister's weight knocked her brother almost over.
Instantly he opened his wings wide. The wind bore him up. He
stretched out his talons, but too late to reach the ground. He was at
least two feet up in the air already, so he flapped his wings and rose
a little higher. He dipped his tail—which acted like a rudder and
swung him sideways, east, south, east. He swung over us and we
could hear the wind crooning in his wings. Just at that moment a
solemn silence fell on everything; the noises of insects stopped;
rabbits, if there were rabbits, hid in their holes. Even the leaves
seemed to listen in silence to the wing-beats of this new monarch of
the air as he sailed higher and higher. And he had to go away up, for
only by going very far could he find what he sought. Sometimes
eighteen hundred to three thousand feet below him, an eagle sees a
hare hopping about on the ground. Then he folds his wings and
roars down the air like lightning. The terrible sound of his coming
almost hypnotizes the poor creature and holds him bound to the spot
listening to his enemy's thunderous approach, and then the eagle's
talons pierce him.
Seeing her brother go off in this way, and being afraid of loneliness,
the sister suddenly spread her wings too. The wind blowing from
under threw her up. She also floated in the air and tacked her flight
by her tail toward her comrade and in a few minutes both were lost
to sight. Now it was our turn to depart from those hills in search of
our pigeon. He might have gone to Dentam. But it behoved us to
search every Lamasery and baronial castle which had served Gay-
Neck as a landmark in his past flights.
CHAPTER V
ON GAY-NECK'S TRACK
s we descended into the bleak oblivion of the
gorges below, we suddenly found ourselves in a
world of deepening dark, though it was hardly three
in the afternoon. It was due to the long shadows of
the tall summits under which we moved. We
hastened our pace, and the cold air goaded us on.
As soon as we had descended about a thousand
feet and more it grew warmer by comparison, but as night came on
apace the temperature dropped anew and drove us to seek shelter in
a friendly Lamasery. We reached that particular serai where the
Lamas, Buddhist monks, most generously offered us hospitality. They
spoke to us only as they had occasion in serving us with supper and
in escorting us to our rooms. They spend their evenings in meditation.
We had three small cells cut out of the side of a hill, in front of which
was a patch of grassy lawn railed off at the outer edges. By the light
of the lanthorns we carried, we found that we had only straw
mattresses in our stone cells. However, the night passed quickly, for
we were so tired that we slept like children in their mothers' arms.
About four o'clock next morning I heard many footsteps that roused
me completely from sleep. I got out of bed and went in their direction,
and soon I discerned bright lights. By climbing down and then up a
series of high steps, I reached the central chapel of the Lamasery—a
vast cave under an overhanging rock, and open on three sides.
There, before me stood eight Lamas with lanthorns which they quietly
put away as they then sat down to meditate, their legs crossed under
them. The dim light fell on their tawny faces and blue robes, and
revealed on their countenances only peace and love.
Presently their leader said to me in Hindusthani: "It has been our
practice for centuries to pray for all who sleep. At this hour of the
night even the insomnia-stricken person finds oblivion and since men
when they sleep can not possess their conscious thoughts, we pray
that Eternal Compassion may purify them, so that when they awake
in the morning they will begin their day with thoughts that are pure,
kind and brave. Will you meditate with us?"
I agreed readily. We sat praying for compassion for all mankind. Even
to this day when I awake early I think of those Buddhist monks in the
Himalayas praying for the cleansing of the thoughts of all men and
women still asleep.
The day broke soon enough. I found that we were sitting in a cleft of a
mountain, and at our feet lay a precipice sheer and stark. The tinkling
of silver bells rose softly in the sunlit air, bells upon bells, silver and
golden, chimed gently and filled the air with their sweet music: it was
the monks' greeting to the harbinger of light. The sun rose as a
clarion cry of triumph—of Light over darkness, and of Life over Death.
Below I met Radja and Ghond at breakfast. It was then that a monk
who served us said: "Your pigeon came here for shelter yesterday."
He gave a description of Gay-Neck, accurate even to the nature of
his nose wattle, its size and colour. Ghond asked: "How do you know
we seek a pigeon?" The flat-faced Lama, without even turning an
eyelash, said in a matter of fact tone: "I can read your thoughts."
Radja questioned with eagerness: "How can you read our thoughts?"
The monk answered: "If you pray to Eternal Compassion for four
hours a day for the happiness of all that live, in the course of a dozen
years He gives you the power to read some people's thoughts,
especially the thoughts of those who come here.... Your pigeon we
fed and healed of his fear when he took shelter with us."
"Healed of fear, my Lord!" I exclaimed.
The Lama affirmed most simply: "Yes, he was deeply frightened. So I
took him in my hands and stroked his head and told him not to be
afraid, then yestermorn I let him go. No harm will come to him."
"Can you give your reason for saying so, my Lord?" asked Ghond
politely.
The man of God replied to him thus: "You must know, O Jewel
amongst hunters, that no animal, nor any man, is attacked and killed
by an enemy until the latter succeeds in frightening him. I have seen
even rabbits escape hounds and foxes when they kept themselves
free of fear. Fear clouds one's wits and paralyses one's nerve. He
who allows himself to be frightened lets himself be killed."
"But how do you heal a bird of fear, my Lord?"
To that question of Radja's the holy one answered: "If you are without
fear and you keep not only your thoughts pure but also your sleep
untainted of any fear-laden dreams for months, then whatever you
touch will become utterly fearless. Your pigeon now is without fear for
I who held him in my hand have not been afraid in thought, deed and
dream for nearly twenty years. At present your pet bird is safe: no
harm will come to him."
By the calm conviction in his words, spoken without emphasis, I felt
that in truth Gay-Neck was safe and in order to lose no more time, I
said farewell to the devotees of Buddha and started south. Let me
say that I firmly believe that the Lamas were right. If you pray for
other people every morning you can enable them to begin their day
with thoughts of purity, courage and love.
Now we dropped rapidly towards Dentam. Our journey lay through
places that grew hotter and more familiar. No more did we see the
rhododendrons. The autumn that further up had touched the leaves of
trees with crimson, gold, cerise, and copper was not so advanced
here. The cherry trees still bore their fruits; the moss had grown on
trees thickly, and the wind had blown on them the pollen of orchids,
large as the palm of your hand, blossoming in purple and scarlet.
Many white daturas perspired with dewdrops in the steaming heat of
the sun. The trees began to appear taller and terrible. Bamboos
soared upwards like sky-piercing minarets. Creepers thick as pythons
beset our path. The buzzing of the cicada grew insistent and
unbearable, and jays jabbered in the woods. Now and then a flock of
green parrots flung their emerald glory in the face of the sun, then
vanished. Insects multiplied. Mammoth butterflies, velvety black,
swarmed from blossom to blossom, and innumerable small birds
preyed on numberless buzzing flies. We were stung with the sharpest
stings of worms, and now and then we had to wait to let pass a
serpent that crossed our path. Were it not for the practised eyes of
Ghond who knew which way the animals came and went, we would
have been killed ten times over by a snake or a bison. Sometimes
Ghond would put his ear to the ground and listen. After several
minutes he would say: "Ahead of us bisons are coming. Let us wait till
they pass." And soon enough we would hear their sharp hoofs
moving through the undergrowth with a sinister noise as if a vast
scythe were cutting, cutting, cutting the very ground from under our
feet. Yet we pressed on, stopping for half an hour for lunch. At last we
reached the borders of Sikkim, whose small valley glimmered with
ripening red millet, green oranges and golden bananas, set against
hillsides glittering with marigolds above which softly shone the violets.
Just then we came to a sight that I shall never forget. At our feet on
the narrow caravan road the air burnt in iridescence: the heat was so
great that it vibrated with colours. Hardly had we gone a few yards
when like a thunderclap rose a vast flock of Himalayan pheasants;
then they flew into the jungle, their wings burning like peacocks'
plumes in the warm air. We kept on moving. In another couple of
minutes flew up another flock, but these were mud-coloured birds. In
my perplexity I asked Ghond for an explanation.
He said: "Do you not see, O beloved of felicity, the caravan that
passed here was loaded with millet? One of their sacks had a hole in
it. A few handfuls of millet leaked out on the road before the sack was
sewn up. Later on arrived these birds and fed themselves here. We
came upon them suddenly and frightened them to flight."
"But, O Diadem of Wisdom," I asked, "why do the males look so
gorgeous and why are the females mud-coloured? Is nature always
partial to the male?"
Ghond made the following explanation. "It is said that mother Nature
has given all birds the colours that hide them from their enemies. But
do you not see that those pheasants are so full of splendour that they
can be sighted and killed even by a blind man?"
Radja exclaimed: "Can they?"
Ghond answered: "O, wary beyond thy years, no! The real reason is
that they live on trees and do not come down before the earth is very
hot. In this hot India of ours the air two inches above the ground is so
burning that it quivers with a thousand colours; and the plumage of
the pheasant is similar. When we look at them we do not see birds,
but the many-coloured air which camouflages them completely. We
almost walked on them a few moments ago, thinking them but a part
of the road at our feet."
"That I comprehend," resumed Radja reverently. "But why did the
female look mud-coloured and why did they not fly away with the
male?"
Ghond answered without hesitation. "When the enemy approaches
and takes them by surprise, the male flies up to face the enemy's
bullets though without thought of chivalry. The females' wings are not
so good. Besides she, being of the colour of the earth, opens her
wings to shelter her babies under them, then lies flat on the ground,
completely melting away her identity into that colour scheme. After
the enemy goes away in quest of the corpses of their already
slaughtered husbands, the females run away with their babies into
the nearest thicket.... And if it is not too late in the year, and if their
grown-up babies are not with them, the mother birds singly flop to the
ground and lie there, making the gesture of protecting their young.
Self-sacrifice becomes a habit with them, and habitually they put forth
their wings whether they have any young ones with them or not. That
is what they were doing when we came upon them, then suddenly
they realized that they were without anyone to protect, and as we still
kept on coming down upon them they took to flight, poor fliers though
they are."
With the approach of dusk we took shelter in the house of a
Sikkimese nobleman whose son was a friend of ours. There we found
further traces of Gay-Neck, who had been to their house many times
before, and so when he reached the familiar place on his latest visit
he had eaten millet seeds, drunk water and taken his bath. Also, he
had preened his wings and left two small azure feathers which my
friend had preserved for the sake of their colouring. When I saw them
my heart leapt in joy, and that night I slept in utter peace and
contentment. There was another reason for sleeping well, for Ghond
had told us to rest deeply, as after the following day's march, we were
to spend the night in the jungle.
The next night when we sat on that tree top in the deep jungle, often
did I think of the home of my Sikkimese friend and its comforts.
Imagine yourself marching all day, then spending the night on a vast
banyan tree in the very heart of a dangerous forest! It took us a little
over half an hour to find that tree, for banyans do not often grow in
high altitudes, and also the same reason that made us choose the
banyan made us look for a very large one of its kind—it would be of
no use to us if it were slender enough for an elephant to break down
by walking backwards against it! That is how the pachyderm destroys
some very stout trees. We looked for something tall and so stout that
no elephant could reach its upper branches with his trunk and not
even two tuskers could break it by pushing against it with their double
weight.
With enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the
tree.
At last we found a tree to our liking. Radja stood on Ghond's shoulder

and I on Radja's, until we reached branches as thick as a man's
torso. I climbed and sat on one of them and from it let down our rope
ladder which we always carried in the jungle for emergencies such as
the present one. Radja climbed up and sat near me, then Ghond
ascended the branch and sat between us. Now we saw that below us
where Ghond had stood it had not only grown dark as the heart of a
coal mine but there glowed two green lights set very close to one
another. We knew too well whose they were. Ghond exclaimed
jovially: "Had I been delayed down there two extra minutes the striped
fellow would have killed me."
Seeing that his prey had escaped him, the tiger gave a thunderous
yell, scourging the air like a curse. At once a tense silence fell and
smothered all the noises of insects and little beasts and it descended
further and deeper until it sank into the earth and seemed to grip the
very roots of the trees.
We made ourselves secure on our perch and Ghond passed the
extremely flexible rope ladder around his waist, then Radja's, then
mine, fastening the rest of it around the main trunk of the tree. We
tested it by letting it bear the weight of one of us at a time. This
precaution was taken for the purpose of preventing a sleep-stricken
member of our group from slipping down to the floor of the jungle, for
after all, in sleep the body relaxes so that it falls like a stone. Finally,
Ghond arranged his arms for pillows for our heads when slumber
came.
Now that we had taken all the necessary precautions we
concentrated our attention on what was happening below. The tiger
had vanished from under our tree. The insects had resumed their
song, which was again and again stilled for a few seconds as huge
shapes fell from far off trees with soft thuds. Those were leopards
and panthers who had slept on the trees all day and were now
leaping down to hunt at night.
When they had gone the frogs croaked, insects buzzed continually
and owls hooted. Noise, like a diamond, opened its million facets.
Sounds leapt at one's hearing like the dart of sunlight into
unprotected eyes. A boar passed, cracking and breaking all before
him. Soon the frogs stopped croaking, and way down on the floor of
the jungle we heard the tall grass and other undergrowth rise like a
hay-cock, then with a sigh fall back. That soft sinister sigh like the
curling up of spindrift drew nearer and nearer, then ... it slowly passed
our tree. Oh! what a relief. It was a constrictor going to the water hole.
We stayed on our tree-top as still as its bark—Ghond was afraid that
our breathing might betray our position to the terrible python.
A few minutes later we heard one or two snappings of small twigs
almost as faint as a man cracking his fingers. It was a stag whose
antlers had got caught in some vines and he was snapping them to
get himself freed. Hardly had he passed when the jungle grew very
tense with expectation. Sounds began to die down. Out of the ten or
a dozen different noises that we had heard all at once, there now
remained only three: the insects' tick tack tock, the short wail of the
stag—no doubt the constrictor was strangling him near the water hole
—and the wind overhead. Now the elephants were coming. Hatis
(elephants), about fifty in a herd, came and played around the place
below us. The squeal of the females, the grunt of the males, and the
run run run of the babies filled the air.
I do not remember what happened next, for I had dozed off into a sort
of waking sleep, and in that condition I heard myself talking pigeon-
language to Gay-Neck. I was experiencing a deep confusion of sleep
and dream. Someone shook and roused me. To my utter amazement
Ghond whispered "I cannot hold you any more. Wake up! Mischief is
abroad. A mad elephant has been left behind. The straggler is bent
on harm. We are not high enough to be altogether out of the reach of
his trunk, and if he raises it far enough he will scent our presence.
Wild elephants hate and fear man and once he gets our odour he
may stay about here all day in order to find out where we are. Rouse
thy vigilance, lad. Draw the blade of alertness before the enemy
strikes."
There was no mistake about that elephant. In the pale light of early
dawn I could discern a sort of hillock darkly moving about under our
tree. He was going from tree to tree and snapping off a few succulent
twigs that autumn had not yet blighted. He seemed greedy and bent
on gorging himself with those delicacies, rare for the time of the year.
In about half an hour he performed a strange trick, putting his fore
feet on the bole of a thick tree, and swinging up his trunk. It gave him
the appearance of a far-spreading mammoth; with that enormously
long reach he almost touched the top of the tree and twisted the most
delectable branches off its boughs. After having denuded it of its
good twigs he came to a tree next to ours, and there did the same
thing. Now he found a slender tree which he pulled down with his
trunk, and placed his forefeet on the poor bent thing and broke it with
a crash under his own weight. He ate all that he could of that one.
While he was breakfasting thus, his rampage frightened the birds and
monkeys, who flew in the air or ran from tree to tree jabbering in
terror. Then the elephant put his feet on the stump of the broken tree
and reached up into ours until he touched the branch on which we
sat. Hardly had he done so when he squealed, for the odour of man
all beasts fear, and swiftly withdrew his trunk. After grunting and
complaining to himself he put up his trunk again very near Ghond's
face. Just then Ghond sneezed almost into the elephant's nostrils.
That struck panic into the latter's heart; he felt beleaguered by men.
Trumpeting and squealing like a frightened fiend, he dashed through
the jungle, breaking and smashing everything before him. Again the
parrots, thick as green sails, flew in the sky. Monkeys screamed and
raced from tree to tree. Boars and stags stampeded on the floors of
the jungle. For a while the din and tumult reigned unchecked. We had
to wait some time before we dared to descend from our perch in
order to resume our homeward journey.
Late that day we reached home after being carried on horseback by a
caravan which we were fortunate enough to meet. All three of us
were dead tired, but we forgot our fatigue when we beheld Gay-Neck
in his nest in our house at Dentam. Oh, what joy! That evening before
I went to sleep I thought of the calm quiet assurance of the Lama who
said: "Your bird is safe."
CHAPTER VI
GAY-NECK'S TRUANCY
ut the day after our return Gay-Neck flew away
again, in the morning, and failed to put in an
appearance later. We waited for him most
anxiously during four successive days, and then,
unable to bear the suspense any longer, Ghond
and I set out in search of him, determined to find
him, dead or alive. This time we hired two ponies to
take us as far as Sikkim. We had made sure of our path by asking
people about Gay-Neck in each village that we had to pass through.
Most of them had seen the bird and some of them gave an accurate
description of him: one hunter had seen him in a Lamasery nesting
next to a swift under the eaves of the house; another, a Buddhist
monk, said that he had seen him near their monastery in Sikkim on a
river bank where wild ducks had their nest, and, in the latest village
that we passed through on the second afternoon we were told that
he was seen in the company of a flock of swifts.
Led by such good accounts we reached the highest table-land of
Sikkim and were forced to bivouac there the third night. Our ponies
were sleepy, and so were we, but after what seemed like an hour's
sleep, I was roused by a tenseness that had fallen upon everything. I
found the two beasts of burden standing stiff; in the light of the fire
and that of the risen half moon I saw that their ears were raised
tensely in the act of listening carefully. Even their tails did not move. I
too listened intently. There was no doubt that the silence of the night
was more than mere stillness; stillness is empty, but the silence that
beset us was full of meaning, as if a God, shod with moonlight, was
walking so close that if I were to put out my hand I could touch his
garment.
Just then the horses moved their ears as if to catch the echo of a
sound that had moved imperceptibly through the silence. The great
deity had gone already; now a queer sensation of easing the tense
atmosphere set in. One could feel even the faintest shiver of the
grass, but that too was momentary; the ponies now listened for a
new sound from the north. They were straining every nerve in the
effort. At last even I could hear it. Something like a child yawning in
his sleep became audible. Stillness again followed. Then a sighing
sound long drawn out, ran through the air; which sank lower and
lower like a thick green leaf slowly sinking through calm water. Then
rose a murmur on the horizon as if someone were praying against
the sky line. About a minute later the horses relaxed their ears and
switched their tails and I, too, felt myself at ease. Lo! thousands of
geese were flying through the upper air. They were at least four
thousand feet above us, but all the same the ponies heard their
coming long before I did.
The flight of the geese told us that dawn was at hand, and I sat up
and watched. The stars set one by one. The ponies began to graze. I
gave them more rope; now that the night had passed they did not
need to be tied so close to the fire.
In another ten minutes the intense stillness of the dawn held all
things in its grip, and that had its effect on our two beasts. This time I
could see clearly both of them lifting their heads and listening. What
sounds were they trying to catch? I did not have long to wait. In a
tree not far off a bird shook itself, then another did the same thing,
on another bough. One of them sang. It was a song sparrow and its
cry roused all nature. Other song sparrows trilled; then other birds,
and still others! By now shapes and colours were coming to light with
blinding rapidity. Thus passed the short tropical twilight, and Ghond
got up to say his prayers.
That day our wanderings brought us to the Lamasery near Singalele
of which I have spoken before. The Lamas were glad to give us all
the news of Gay-Neck. They informed me that the previous
afternoon Gay-Neck and the flock of swifts who nested under the
eaves of the monastery had flown southwards.
Again with the blessings of the Lamas we said farewell to their
hospitable serai, and set out on Gay-Neck's trail. The mountains
burnt like torches behind us as we bestowed on them our last look.
Before us lay the autumn tinted woods glimmering in gold, purple,
green, and cerise.
CHAPTER VII
GAY-NECK'S STORY
n the preceding chapter I made scanty references
to the places and incidents through which Gay-
Neck was recovered. Ghond found his track with
certainty the first day of our ten days' search for
him, but in order to see those things clearly and
continuously, it would be better to let Gay-Neck tell
his own Odyssey. It is not hard for us to understand
him if we use the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of imagination.
The October noon when we boarded the train at Darjeeling for our
return journey to town, Gay-Neck sat in his cage, and commenced
the story of his recent truancy from Dentam to Singalele and back.
"O, Master of many tongues, O wizard of all languages human and
animal, listen to my tale. Listen to the stammering wandering
narrative of a poor bird. Since the river has its roots in the hill, so
springs my story from the mountains.
"When near the eagle's nest I heard and beheld the wicked hawk's
talons tear my mother to pieces, I was so distressed that I decided to
die, but not by the claws of those treacherous birds. If I was to be
served up for a meal let it be to the king of the air; so I went and sat
on the ledge near the eagle's nest, but they would do me no harm.
Their house was in mourning. Their father had been trapped and
killed, and their mother was away hunting for pheasants and hares.
Since up to now the younglings had only eaten what had been killed
for them, they dared not attack and finish poor me who was alive. I
do not know yet why no eagle has harmed me; during the past days I
have seen many.
"Then you came to catch and cage me. As I was in no mood for
human company, I flew away, taking my chances as I went, but I
remembered places and persons who were your friends and I stayed

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Imagined Theatres Writing for a

Theoretical Stage 1st Edition Daniel

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“Imagined Theatres invites us to envision theatre as a utopic ‘no place’ of infinite

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

Imagined Theatres collects hypothetical performances written by nearly one

Edited by Daniel Sack

DRAMA AND THEATRE STUDIES

ISBN 978-1-138-12205-5 IMAGINED THEATRES

Edited by Daniel Sack

What possible and impossible worlds might the theatre imagine?

In what way is writing itself a performance?

Imagined Theatres collects hypothetical performances written by nearly one hundred

Daniel Sack is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Commonwealth

Edited by Daniel Sack

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

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Preface: The horizon xvii

Notes on contributors 254

The curtain opens endlessly;

What you assumed a line splitting

describing the outer curve of your attention.

afield, a train dividing the great dark plains

In what other houses do those other people sit,

Tragedy is all a matter of scale, said Aristotle:

Indefinitely, on the most distant horizon,

crimson velvet ouroboros.

set out to construct “impossible dances” from a series of unperformable individual

I am a writer and only occasionally a director, so most of my imagined theatres must

The prayer frightened the eagles, unaccustomed to human voices.

At last we found a tree to our liking. Radja stood on Ghond's shoulder

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Preface: The horizon xvii

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