The Theatre of Images

Book excerpt: The three plays collected in The Theatre of Images challenge the conventional understanding of performance. In Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, Richard Foreman, a philosopher as well as a playwright, creates a reality on stage that reflects his own reality - focusing on familiar, everyday events with the addition of recorded voice and projected image. A Letter for Queen Victoria, by Robert Wilson, is an opera without singers. Verbal declamations take the place of arias, creating a spectacle without narrative structure through tableaux and gesture. Represented in comic-book form, The Red Horse Animation demonstrates the play's reliance on cinematic techniques in its composition. It is what author Lee Breuer calls "caption literature", a radical alternative drama documenting the conception of dramatic work. With introductory essays by Bonnie Marranca, this reissue of The Theatre of Images brings back to print one of the most influential books on the American avant-garde in the last two decades.