ABSTRACT
In The Audience, Herbert Blau observes an unsettling feature of theatrical presentation so obvious as to be overlooked entirely: that it takes place in real time, and thus brings people closer to death. While discussing Samuel Beckett’s brief play Breath, Blau notes that its “brief repetition of a faint, brief cry” is “sufficient to remind people that what can never be represented is no less moving in thought: that the body in performance is dying in front of people's eyes”. With each breath, like each splotch of blood on Hamm’s handkerchief, the performers realize they are both living and dying in breathing; they are trained to listen, as Beckett’s audience, for the ways that theater conjures but does not replicate experience because what “makes it theater” is the showing itself, the always-already the aesthetic reflection of that experience.
