Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Afterthought from the Vanishing Point: Theater at the End of the Real -- 2. The Impossible Takes a Little Time -- 3. Spacing Out in the American Theater -- 4. From Red Hill to the Renaissance: Rehearsing the Resistance -- 5. A Dove in My Chimney -- 6. Elsinore: An Analytic Scenario -- 7. Deep Throat: The Grail of the Voice -- 8. A Valediction: Chills and Fever, Mourning, and the Vanities of the Sublime -- 9. The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity -- 10. Fantasia and Simulacra: Subtext of a Syllabus for the Arts in America -- 11. With Your Permission: Educating the American Theater -- 12. The Pipe Dreams of O'Neill in the Age of Deconstruction -- 13. Readymade Desire -- 14. Water under the Bridge: From Tango Palace to Mud -- 15. Fervently Impossible: The Group Idea and Its Legacy -- 16. Noise, Musication, Beethoven, and Solid Sound: New Music and Theater -- 17. Flat-Out Vision -- 18. The Absolved Riddle: Sovereign Pleasure and the Baroque Subject in the Tragicomedies of John Fletcher -- 19. "Set Me Where You Stand": Revising the Abyss -- 20. Limits of Performance: The Insane Root -- Notes -- Previous Publications -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.