Life-show — John Lahr

In Life-Show John Lahr and Jonathan Price take the metaphor of the theater and use it to probe deeply and provocatively into the dramatic details of contemporary culture. Their book is a radical new approach to understanding the stage through history, literature, and art. Free of academic speculation or pretension, it is filled with scenes to serve as a survival kit for the individual personality. Ranging from Adolf Hitler to Abbie Hoffman, from Aristotle to Artaud, Life-Show dramatizes and clarifies how deeply the play impulse runs in our daily lives, and provides us with a method for discerning what is authentic and inauthentic theatrical experience both on and off the stage. Though we may not be regular theatergoers or think of ourselves as actors, if we take a moment to scrutinize the ways in which we play out our lives in a particular setting, ask why we are moved to "make a scene" or "play it cool," to "act up" or "do a number" on someone we know, it becomes easier to see how theatrical our existence has become. Acts of conscience, spectacles of state, gestures of rage, rituals of love-the signs and symbols of the stage world are all around us; unless we know how to read them, they can overwhelm and threaten our lives, do damage to our image of ourselves. "Usually," the authors observe, "people don't explain who they are and what they really want. The clues to their real intentions are not all verbal. Their costumes, their faces, their tones of voice 'give them away.' We have to pay attention to the set ('the background'), the props, the tones of scenes. The tension between them is the real 'drama.' " With more than one hundred and fifty pictures integrated into the text, Life-Show plays with words and images familiar in American life and culture in a way that will lead to a new appreciation of the theater on stage through understanding the theater in life. The study of one illuminates the other. The book itself is a theatrical event.