The Wooster Group's Elizabeth LeCompte maintains that each show is a piece about the making of the piece. Productions derive from exhaustive exploratory processes, during which she almost purposely stumbles on from day to day, feeling her way towards an apt fit of texts, performance styles, music, visuals, video inserts and so on, eschewing the temptation to neatly unify things semantically or stylistically. As journal entries reproduced here indicate, it is an extremely precarious approach, with LeCompte more than once teetering on the brink of abandoning projects, as she experienced ‘complete despair’ (p. 229) and performers became frustrated following yet another ‘arbitrary unproductive tangent’ (p. 237).

Aware of contentions around documenting performance in a way that pretends to reconstruct the stage event itself, conscious too that productions evolve over several years of touring, and respecting LeCompte's collagist approach, Quick's lavishly illustrated workbook does not attempt a unified picture of individual performances either. Instead, he goes behind the scenes to illustrate the processes, drawing on the group's extensive archive of texts, videos and artefacts. Juxtaposing rehearsal notes and photographs, physical scores, technical drawings, video stills, promptscripts and so on, he portrays the diverse ways in which Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Antony, Brace Up!, Fish Story, House/Lights, and To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) came to be presented.

Such an assemblage sometimes resembles a box of archaeological relics; Quick notes how many of the scores and texts recall palimpsests, covered as they are in erasures or writings-over as the various layers of the production accumulate and shift over time. The documentation also reflects how productions maintain a tension between attempts to have actors keep things in play, improvising and responding to the now of performance and the extreme discipline behind complicated movement routines and the precision demanded by complex sound and video scores. Quick also notes how the company's extensive self-documentation operates both pragmatically (as a record to which they can return for revivals) and creatively (as they mine the material for insights into how to develop new approaches or even new productions).

While David Savran, Susan Letzler Cole, Euridice Arratia and others have provided previous accounts of rehearsals, and Quick's interviews with LeCompte and Kate Valk sometimes recycle familiar stories and accounts of their methods, there is still much that is new and revealing tucked away here, particularly when it comes to the genesis of House/Lights and To You, the Birdie!, and the ways in which the performers work with ear devices and video that are unseen by the audience, as a means of maintaining a freshness to their encounter with the material in each performance. The book will be very useful to anyone teaching the Wooster Group's work who already has a close knowledge of the productions. Other readers might have benefited from a little more annotation accompanying the individual items and more contextualizing commentary than that provided by the opening and closing essays, insightful as they are.