Getting Off: Lee Breuer on Performance

"Since the nineteen-sixties and seventies, New York's experimental-theatre scene has toned down its wild-man character, but Lee Breuer is the grand old man of the movement."—The New Yorker
Since he first arrived on the New York art/theatre/performance scene in 1970, Lee Breuer has been at the forefront of the American theatrical avant-garde, creating challenging works both independently and with Mabou Mines, the company he co-founded with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow. Breuer’s work as a director has included celebrated stagings of Samuel Beckett, radical readings of classics including The Gospel at Colonus on Broadway in 1988, a gender-bending adaptation of King Lear in 1990, and his revolutionary reinterpretation of Ibsen with Mabou Mines Dollhouse.

Theatre historian and journalist Stephen Nunns has assembled a unique look into one of American theatre’s most singular creative minds. Using interviews and excerpts from Breuer’s writings, with added historical commentary, the thrilling result is equal parts autobiography, artistic manifesto, and critical exploration. Beautifully illustrated with archival photographs, drawings, and sketches, this is a one-of-a-kind portrait of the artist and theatrical activist at work.

Lee Breuer is a founding co-artistic director of Mabou Mines Theater Company in New York City. His best-known work is The Gospel at Colonus, a Pentecostal Gospel rendering of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. He also authored/directed Mabou Mines' trilogy, Animations, which included The B Beaver, The Red Horse, and The Shaggy Dog Animation (Obie Award for Best Play), as well as A Prelude to a Death in Venice (Obie Award for script and direction), and An Epidog, the winner of the President's Commission Kennedy Center-American Express Award for Best New Work.