Between the Sacred and the Profane: The Works and Days of Lee Breuer

Abstract

Combining memoir, manifesto, aphorisms, academic essays, photographs, poetry, and prose, Getting Off, Lee Breuer’s final work published during his lifetime (1937–2021), like his performance pieces, is impossible to categorize. We have here a fantastic toolkit (or bag of tricks) to help us navigate through Breuer’s wonderful journey across world theatre traditions, performance legacies, geographical continents, and intertextual dialogues, where his life and his art fuse into one marvelous concoction that at once surprises and baffles, but always rewards. It does so, following a genealogy that ranges from the Greeks to Jarry to Brecht, in a manner that fuses pedagogy and pleasure. Both Getting Off and La Divina Caricatura, Breuer’s last collection of plays, plunge into the lowest of depths, into the blasphemous, visceral, toxic realms of performance traditions and our performative existence, while also expanding in multiple—almost magical—ways what it means to be human, and what it means to perform. Reading these books together—and indeed they are in dialogue—is a rollercoaster of an experience through acting, puppetry, and directing, guided by the at once philosophical and naïve eyes of Breuer. As both titles suggest, the sacred is mixed with the profane, the high with the low, the religious with the secular. Breuer transpires as a magician and a scholar, a prophet and a trickster, a genius and a fraud, and he always gets off.