A Life of Curiosity: Lunch with Herbert Blau

by Willy Dintenfass

In conjunction with the Center’s commemorative event, C21: celebrating 40 years, guest speaker Herbert Blau lead a brown bag lunch discussion with a small group of undergraduate students. The talk was ostensibly to be about Samuel Beckett–the students had been reading Beckett, on whom Blau is considered an authority–but in fact it took a much more fluid shape, focusing as much on Blau’s remarkable life as on Beckett’s.

An “intellectual, and proud of it,” Blau is known for an enduring curiosity and love for ideas. “When I know what I think I’m just not interested,” Blau remarked at one point, and this attitude may in part be responsible for his wild trajectory. Growing up in Brooklyn, Blau wanted to play ball, either football or basketball. As he tells it, it wasn’t until he realized he wasn’t going to be able to play sports professionally that he began focusing on academics, earning his first degree in chemical engineering. Blau was ready to head off to MIT when he heard about an army friend who’d written a play and received a fellowship at Yale. Blau decided to write a play, ended up writing two (one entirely in verse), and he too received a fellowship. Blau, who had never before seen a play, soon grew bored with what he regarded as predictable theater. This boredom would ultimately drive him to found and direct three important theater groups: The Artist’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and the experimental theater group KRAKEN.

Although Blau recounted his experiences casually, pausing for bites of salad between anecdotes, the students in attendance were inspired and impressed, by his resume (he came to be friends with Beckett over the years), but also by his confidence. Several students asked questions trying to discern the source of it, but Blau, for whom it seems to be simply a fact of life, couldn’t say.

In his crankier moments Blau would chafe slightly at the implication that Beckett has exerted some huge influence over his life’s work. He claimed Shakespeare as a bigger influence, saying that he still has a tendency to “think Hamletically.” (Later he would refer to Hamletic thinking in part as “springing past inaction into action,” which, given the ending of The Unnamable–‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’– also seems somewhat Beckettian.) Nevertheless, one story in particular illustrated the power of the combination of Beckett and Blau.

In 1957, Blau and his colleagues staged “Waiting for Godot” at San Quentin Prison. The production was a success, and inmates founded their own theater group, which Blau worked with over the years. One member, Rick Cluchey, was originally imprisoned without parole for armed robbery and attempted murder. Through his work with the theater group, he was eventually awarded parole and ultimately pardoned. Cluchey developed a close relationship with Beckett himself, and has gone on to act in a number of Beckett plays.

Herbert Blau once wrote, “Art changes nothing but at least it changes that.” This was not the impression he left upon the students in attendance at the discussion, who afterwards seemed to feel that art has the capacity to change a great deal.