Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage

5 pieces edited by Daniel Sack

Dealing by W.B. Worthen – gloss by Aaron C. Thomas

Disappearing Act by Fintan Walsh – gloss by Aaron C. Thomas

A Happy Life by Aaron C. Thomas – gloss by Aaron C. Thomas

Music for Charlie Morel by Aaron C. Thomas – gloss by Joseph Cermatori

Remains by Andy Field – gloss by Aaron C. Thomas

From the back cover

What possible and impossible worlds might theatre imagine?

In what way is writing itself a performance?

How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that become real theatrical productions?

Imagined Theatres collects hypothetical performances written by nearly one hundred leading theorists and artists of the contemporary stage. These dramatic fragments, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary events that put theory itself onstage. Each no longer than a page, and accompanied by a reflective gloss, these texts consider what might be possible and impossible in the theatre.

From Joseph Cermatori’s gloss on Music for Charlie Morel

Vinteuil is a fictional composer, plucked from some lost time, the Lost Time of Proust. But his music, inaudible though it may be, refuses to stay within this text. It cannot be confined to the pages of Proust’s La Prisonnière, nor to those of Imagined Theatres. Neither does it exist only within the fiction established by Aaron C. Thomas’s writing, but “exerts itself” into the reader’s sensory world: “The music they hear—the music we hear—is unmistakable.” It takes on a life all its own: silently, from behind a fluttering curtain, it pulsates, “swelling, expanding, contracting.” Rising and falling, it brims with all the warmth and tenderness of a lover’s chest as one rests one’s head upon it in the earliest hours of the day, while the sun stretches its gauzy light through the humid morning air and the drapes of a bedroom window.