Avant-garde performance & the limits of criticism : approaching the Living Theatre, happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts movement /

With this book, Sell (English, Indiana University of Pennsylvania) provides the reader with a most welcome understanding of the relationship between the avant-garde, the Cold War, and theatrical criticism. Indeed, he brings the scholarship on American-style theatrical avant-gardism to an entirely new level. Those who wish to appreciate fully the parameters of this study, and of the previous avant-garde theorists with whom the author takes issue, must start with the book's introduction, "The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized." From there Sell divides the discussion into three interrelated case studies (i.e., sections): "The Connection: Cruelty, Jazz, and Drug War, 1959-1963," "Happenings, Fluxus, and the Production of Memory," and "The Black Arts Movement: Text, Performance, Blackness." Sell demonstrates how all were shaped by the social, political, and cultural events of the Cold War era. His analysis of the Living Theatre's production of Jack Gelber's The Connection and its influential production style is among the best in print. Sell successfully argues that the creativity of 1950s and 1960s avant-gardism is still shaping the theatrical landscape today. The scholarship and writing in this book are among the finest this reviewer has encountered. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. M. D. Whitlatch Buena Vista University