Daniel Sack’s Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying is a collection of semi-autonomous essays that Sack aptly describes as functioning like discrete teardrops ‘in a longer stream of inquiries into the nature of performance’ (p. 25). There is a methodological elegance to the essays collected in this volume – an acknowledgement that there is no one way into a critical understanding of tears. Instead, the multiplicity of approaches suggests a stunning range of possibilities for studying both the phenomenon of tears and the broader fields of affect and performance studies.

It is fitting that the editor of Imagined Theatres begins his exploration of tears with ‘On the Nature of Tears: A Semi-fictional Dialogue’. The chapter unfolds as a staged lesson between Sack and his real-life biochemist father, a former tear researcher. Sack plays the role of the performance theorist son, bringing their distinct perspectives on crying into conversation. I was struck by how Sack skilfully uses this dialogue to explore tearful ‘family relations’ between the fictional and the factual. For example, he draws a compelling connection between the punctum – the anatomical term for the small opening through which tears exit the eye – and Roland Barthes’s more familiar use of the term punctum to describe the inexplicable emotional impact of certain photographic details. This analogy underscores Sack’s point: even though these meanings of punctum refer to different things, they form a kind of family relation, much like the perspectives of the two characters in the dialogue itself.

In the following chapter, ‘I’m Too Sad to Tell You: On the Private Language of Tears’, the imagined dialogue between father and son shifts to a different kind of conversation – one that takes place across non-normative bodies and non-normative tears. The chapter serves as a masterclass in ekphrastic essay writing, focusing on performance and video art. Here, Sack explores the possibility of thinking of tears as akin to punctuation – a creative and critical way into meaning-making even in the face of the inscrutable.

While Sack clearly states that this book is not a history of tears, if there is an essay that comes close to writing this history, it is ‘Learning How to Cry (Again): Or, How Actors Keep Feeling the Past’. One might even say that tears are used here to write a short performance history of masculinity. The chapter moves between time frames and encompasses everything from the Iliad to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s (formerly known as Sam Taylor-Wood) Crying Men series (2002–4); from Diderot’s The Paradox of the Actor (written in 1773; published in 1830), to the author’s own experience of acting and (not) crying. Other stops along the way include important (and often disturbing) discussions of the uses and abuses of method acting – particularly Lee Strasberg’s advocating the use of one’s own experience to produce tears.

Having moved from the historical to the structural, and from sense memory to materiality, in ‘The Weeper’s Toolbox’ Sack turns attention to the prosthetic, prop and prompt to think about tools that ‘work at crying from the outside in’ (p. 94). This investigation moves deftly on to the last full chapter, ‘On Getting Water from a Stone’, which situates an insightful reading of Pinocchio between a discussion of crying statues of the Virgin Mary and crying robots in Blade Runner to ask questions about the humanity of tears, and how tears figure as a sign of nascent humanity.

This nascent humanity is taken up in ‘Teaching How to Cry’, an epilogue of sorts that provides an admirable ending to a study that, conceptually, knows it can never get a hold of tears. It takes the form of an autobiographical memory of Sack delivering a lecture he had given many times. This time, though, as he reads a fragment from Walter Benjamin, the academic cannot explain why his voice falters and his eyes water. I appreciate that the writer, while guessing at what could have happened, keeps open the mystery that he really does not know. Perhaps this is gendered – and Sack mentions as much – since I have had this experience too many times to name and have long since given up wearing the mask of the (white straight male) masterful lecturer expected of faculty in higher education. But as Sack’s smart and affecting essays make clear, tears make a spectacle of us all, turning each of us from automata into humans.