BOOK REVIEWED: Sara Farrington, The Lost Conversation: Interviews with an Enduring Avant-Garde. Brooklyn, New York: 53rd State Press, 2022.
Sara Farrington wasn’t one to let the Coronavirus pandemic slip by in an anxious, listless, unproductive haze. She organized and conducted interviews with legendary theatre makers and performance artists who produced revolutionary work mostly in New York from the 1960s on. Her book, The Lost Conversation, collects those interviews, annotated with the progress of the pandemic and other news at the time of each interview. It documents a generation, a community in many respects, of people who knew each other and sometimes populated each other’s projects. It looks back at these remarkable artists and allows them to tell their stories about how they managed to create memorable pieces when financing was essentially nonexistent.
Each of the interviews in the book is introduced by an incongruous parenthetical about the stage...