Imagine a vanished theatre where titles of long-forgotten performances provide the only evidence for its existence—“Crap Shoot Nova” (13), “Evisceration Station” (16), “Fukushima Ahoy” (13)—each an “echo of events that once took place” (17). Imagine an ecological theatre in a Victorian zoological garden (20); a theatre that replicates your childhood (30); a zoomorphic theatre, where the trunks of elephants become “the multicolor exoskeletal colonies of coral reefs” (34); a theatre of guerrilla hospitality, in which a refugee, an immigrant, or displaced person is invited into your home to share food, drink, and stories (41); a theatre of interspecies warfare that sees the slaughter of thousands of birds, the air “redolent of [their] grilled flesh” (166); a theatre of excess, where a man, perhaps Louis the Sun King, sits before a sumptuous feast of “breathless impossibility” structured only by its “overabundance” (200); a theatre in which “Nothing happens” (252).

This brief enumeration indicates just some of the many imagined theatres that appear in Daniel Sack's stunning anthology Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage. With more than two hundred texts from almost a hundred contributors, what might be discovered by gathering such an eclectic medley of imagined theatres together in a single volume? Quite a lot, it turns out. The strength of Sack's edited book lies not just in its vertiginous mix of subjects and the caliber of its contributors, but also in the intellectual audacity with which it challenges its reader to ask, “is anything truly impossible in a theatre?” (2). It is a book that imagines theatre anew by way of immersion in a “seemingly endless catalogue of [theatrical] impossibilizations” (239).

Two limits are placed on the volume, which might otherwise be infinite. One is geographical and, although convenient, less convincing: the volume (with the exception of a piece by Romeo Castellucci) is limited to contributors drawn entirely from the Anglosphere. The other is better, a rigorous formal conceit: the use of a “modular” structure reminiscent of Raymond Queneau (although it is Italo Calvino who provides the inspiration here). This “universe of paper theatres,” writes Sack, assembles together short pieces—“conceptual performances” (haikus, exercises in Borgesian prose, microplays)—each limited to a single, left-hand page, accompanied on the facing page by an equally short “gloss” (1). Thus on the verso side, the page becomes a kind of “performance space,” even as the recto gloss offers a “parasitic” space or “para-site” for critical amplification, taking a variety of forms: personal anecdote, miniessay, or thought experiment (3). The verso–recto distribution of texts gives neither primacy. Each textual intervention penetrates the other recursively in a visionary dance of ideas and spectacular images. Rebecca Schneider's suggestion in Performing Remains (Routledge, 2011) of a “choreography” of writing may have been designed for just this purpose. Redoubling, intensifying, or redirecting the critical task of imagining how theatre might be, each contributor pushes the reader beyond the quotidian into a fantastic realm, undoing the coordinates of the known theatrical world.

If the idea of a book dedicated to impossible theatres perplexes, its subtitle—Writing for a Theoretical Stage—provides a clue as to how it should be read. These theatres, although “impossible” and “imagined,” are not thereby “unreal.” They are virtual theatres, theoretically actualized, offering a heightened vision of theatre and a genuine enlargement of its relation to the world—both human and nonhuman. Sack writes, “what may initially seem impossible … [provides a means to] interrogate where that impossibility lies and what lies are obscured by calling it ‘impossible’” (2). Here, a number of different ways of understanding the impossible surface: theatrical possibilities are limited not only by spatiotemporal constraints, physical laws, or what can be imagined within the linguistic restrictions of a given cultural heritage, but also by more tangible historical and political barriers, imposed both by the Anglosphere's imperial and colonial past and by the ongoing effects of contemporary racism.

This is one way of “constellati[ng]” (10) the book, to follow Sack's recommended way of reading it. Nadine George-Graves imagines a theatre that “allows us to fantasize about the ease with which performance could produce social justice,” where racism could be overcome “little-by-little”—an “imagined” theatre precisely because “we know the way the real world works” (205). Michael McMillan riffs off Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks to imagine a play of gazes in a waiting room, where unspoken yet evident racial assumptions inscribe “like tattoos” the body of the only black man to enter—he is “invisibly visible” (244). Rhodessa Jones, reflecting on her experience of working with African American and Latina female prison inmates, writes of how black women are “[f]orced to be free and independent in the face of oppressive invisibility” (181). For Harvey Young, it is the “compulsory visibility of diasporic African Bodies” (119) and the experience of embodied blackness that is exposed in his imagined theatre, where (white) participants slip into “the skin of a black person minus the bones and innards” (118), so as to be immersed in a world of “excessive attention” (119)—of the kind racialized bodies receive daily from state authorities such as the police. And, in a beautifully elegiac piece, Broderick Chow imagines the late acting style of Lee Jun-Fan, otherwise known as Bruce Lee, reviewing an older Lee's performance in a number of canonical plays. In Macbeth, rather than the kinetic energy of his earlier films, such as Fists of Fury, it is Lee's “stillness” and “coiled, serpentine energy” that is hypnotic (38). In presenting this imaginary “afterlife” of Bruce Lee, Chow visualizes “a theatre culture decentered and decolonized”; placing Lee within the Western canon, he suggests, is to put “pressure on the idea of ‘good acting’ and its intersection with race, class, gender, and nation” (39).

There are innumerable ways of “constellating” the manifold of ideas that appear in this dazzling collection. Although its eclecticism is no bad thing, what unites these diverse theatrical experiments is a singular belief in the power of theatre to “constellate” images that not only reflect but also give critical shape to the world. An accompanying website (http://imaginedtheatres.com/) invites readers to extend the thought experiment by publishing their own hypothetical performances. Just as with the “real” theatre, Imagined Theatres engineers something miraculous: it permits ideas to escape the confines of the scripted page so that they may assume a life of their own within the virtual space of an imaginary stage.