All The World’s A Stage, And A Book?

There’s a two-faced CIA agent who wears both faces at the same time.

There’s a desperate villager, a U.S. soldier, and a Soviet general.

And those pretty decorative patterns on the various surfaces? On closer inspection, they just might turn out to be a lovely visual marriage of opium poppies and Kalashnikovs.

That’s because Art Hazelwood’s Tora Bora only looks like a children’s pop-up book, albeit on steroids. It’s also an opera, a movie, and a political statement, and it’s one of the centerpieces in ​“The Book As Stage: Performance and Theater in the Book Arts.”

The latest exhibition at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library on York Street — the depository for Yale’s theater, architecture, and book arts special collections combined — runs through Dec. 18, with a special performance by Warren Lehrer, one of the book artists in the show, at the Yale University Art Gallery on Friday (Dec. 9) at 6:30 p.m.

For the exhibition, Associate Director for Special Collections and Public Programs Jae Rossman has assembled in 15 vitrines a beguiling survey of how the book format has been used for artistic expression, beginning with the fine arts printing movement’s creation of beautiful books at the beginning of the 20th century down to books that double as little stages or unique cross-disciplinary sculptural objects in our own Tora Bora days.

“I have been looking for an excuse to exhibit it [Tora Bora, because] we want people to see that ​‘book arts’ is not just about pretty pictures, but artists working in this format work on issues that other artists do,” said Rossman. For example: ​“political issues.”

More broadly, Rossman, whose previous shows in the downstairs library space at 180 York St. include an exploration of ​“Song of Solomonitis,” has opened a new chapter, as it were, on how to understand the medium of the book: not only as a container for narrative, but also as a little stage where the curtain goes up each time you open to a page.

There your imagination is the director, producer, starring actor, lighting designer, stage manager, and so forth. We do this naturally, I think, as readers — especially little kids — but the book arts on display in this exhibition remind us of the marvelous human processes that we may be all too often taking for granted.

The beautifully type-set book, for example, is a great stage for a play like Percy Shelley’s The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts.

The play’s subjects, like incest and patricide, according to Rossman’s informative labels, made it too hot to mount on a traditional stage in the writer’s lifetime. The Cenci made it to the stage for the first time in 1922.

Meanwhile, the hourglass figure of the Bald Soprano in Eugene Ionesco’s eponymous absurdist comedy comes to remarkable typographic life thanks to the iconic invention of graphic designer Robert Massin in this 1964 book published by Editions Gallimard.

After exploring exquisite typography as an expressive means, Rossman’s middle vitrines offer examples of how books serve to document stage productions.

One that takes me back to The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont — home of the Bread and Puppet Theater — is a handset letterpress accordion-format book, with text and images augmenting a recording of The Dream of the Dirty Woman, which document a performance by the company.

Rossman writes: ​“The book expands to almost ten feet so that the reader is surrounded, just as the audience at Bread and Puppet’s site in Vermont was surrounded by the forest during the performance.”

The final section features artists’ books that form themselves into complete self-contained stages with actors and changing backdrops — like Hazelwood’s Tora Bora, or Ann Kresge’s Shadow Play, her setting of poems by Melinda Kennedy in the wayang kulit, or Javanese puppet theater format.

There is also a delicate evocation of Gothic paintings, with threads that literally bring to life the then evolving lines of perspective, in the work of architect and book artist Susan Collard.

Of several in the show, it’s probably the best example of how a book — let the art historians debate the definitions — is simultaneously a unique sculptural creation and an arena for performance in its own right.

Warren Lehrer, the artist who is going to perform on Dec. 9, has upped the ante on ​“book as performance.” He has created a fictional character, Bleu Mobley, endowed that nonexistent prolific author with at least 101 separate publications, and then created a physical book that is a kind of bibliography describing the publications.

Or as Rossman writes: ​“Typically, the book format is used to bring permanency to the fleeting moment of performance. In this case the author/artist used the book format to create a performance opportunity.”

Apparently the book is selling well on Amazon, reported Rossman.

All of which Lehrer, a grad of the Yale Art School in 1980, will present when he appears as Bleu Mobley himself on Dec. 9. at the Yale University Art Gallery.