BOOKS REVIEWED: Lee Breuer with Stephen Nunns, Getting Off: Lee Breuer on Performance. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2019; Lee Breuer with photographs by Beatriz Schiller, La Divina Caricatura. New York: Seagull Books, 2018.
Combining memoir, manifesto, aphorisms, academic essays, photographs, poetry, and prose, Getting Off, Lee Breuer’s final work published during his lifetime (1937–2021), like his performance pieces, is impossible to categorize. We have here a fantastic toolkit (or bag of tricks) to help us navigate through Breuer’s wonderful journey across world theatre traditions, performance legacies, geographical continents, and intertextual dialogues, where his life and his art fuse into one marvelous concoction that at once surprises and baffles, but always rewards. It does so, following a genealogy that ranges from the Greeks to Jarry to Brecht, in a manner that fuses pedagogy and pleasure. Both Getting Off and La Divina Caricatura, Breuer’s last collection of...