The Occupied Space

The Sixty-Year Answer

I read the 1968 book young and I taught it for years, and the debt gets paid in full inside this one before a single charge is filed. The thin book gave the field its four famous rooms, the Deadly, the Holy, the Rough, and the Immediate, and the most honest instrument in criticism, the observation that boredom is the one gauge an audience owns. And the man himself backed his sentences with a working life that ran into his nineties; he died in the summer of 2022, at ninety-seven, having outlived every censor who ever licensed him. Admiration is stipulated on the first page and again in the acknowledgments, where the thanks are sincere. The disagreement is the tribute.

And then the trial begins anyway. The famous opening image, a man walking across a bare stage while someone watches, describes a scene with the deed, the licence, the light bill, and the mortality cropped out of the frame. This book walks the occupied ground the image cropped: the estate sale that removed the author's chair from the room one custom at a time, the censor who never died and now examines speech from one desk with a worldwide parish, the economics of the watched walk in an age that auctions attention by the tenth of a second, and the bodiless figure our century builds and calls a performer.

The hinge of the whole case is his own footnote. Casting about for hope, the 1968 text observes that the best English playwrights of its moment, Osborne, Wesker, Arden, Pinter, every one of them, directed and acted and commanded rooms. He gathered the evidence for my doctrine, printed it, and ruled against it on the next page. Chapter Nine prints that footnote at the size it always deserved, and Part Three builds what the trial cleared ground for: the birth production, the delegation clause, the credit Written and Staged by, and a twenty-five-century lineage running from the Athenian production credit through Molière to the room down the street.

What the Book Contains

The reading editions run 264 pages in paperback dimensions, with the argument followed by a full working apparatus built for readers who want to audit the case.

From the Text

His book mistook a vacancy for a nature. It read an eviction as an essence, took the author's absence for the room's original condition, and then, with full sincerity, appointed the one profession that profits from empty rooms to preside over the filling of them.

theatre is the art that requires someone who can die, present on a shared clock, in a room that keeps no copy.

An audience at Bunraku holds two truths at once, the doll is dead and the doll is grieving, and the double vision is the art.

Author Interview

About the Author

David Boles is a writer, dramatist, editor, and publisher. A member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and a graduate of the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University, he has published novels, nonfiction, and dramatic works through David Boles Books Writing and Publishing since 1975. His titles include the Institutional Autopsy trilogy (Carceral Nation, The Claimed Body, Underwritten), The Broadway Machine, Miscast, The Apothecary of Mantua, Beautiful Numbness, Selling Saturday Morning, the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, The Borrowed Saint, and many other works. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at Prairie Voice, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.

Boles is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.