Theatrical Seekers and True Believers
A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD
Edited by Melanie Joseph and David Bruin. Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2019. 220 pp., $50 hardcover, $20 paper.
MOMENT WORK: TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT’S PROCESS OF DEVISING THEATER
Edited by Moisés Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams. Vintage Books, New York City, 2018. 320 pp., $18 paper.
IN 1994, NEW YORK CITY WAS DROWNING IN A wave of gentrification that swept along neighborhoods and theatres in its path. Times Square had been sold to Disney, essentially, and Sixth Avenue to big-box stores. Small theatres were trying to get bigger, and some Off-Broadway companies aspired to produce Broadway hits. Income inequality became a fact of New York life, and at City Hall Rudolph W. Giuliani was equating freedom with authority.
Against what Cornel West called “the unholy ship of fools obsessed with money, image, status, and power,” Melanie Joseph, a Canadian who had abandoned a medical education, launched a broadside on behalf of the revolutionary traditions of art and theatre. She was determined to reconnect politics and art in
