Anthony Kubiak

I am interested in strangeness.

Not weirdness, or edginess, or in-your-faceness, exactly, but rather the deeply disturbing human riddles that won’t go away. That haunt us. Why are we so violent, and yet so capable of love, and enraptured by beauty? Why do we feel so estranged from the natural world, and yet are so drawn by it? Are we one self or a multitude? If one, why is that self so hard to pin down, so mysterious and unknowable? If many, what accounts for the sense of an enduring, single identity? What is the role (role, interesting word) of theater in all of this? Is theatre about some enduring truth of life, or is the only truth of theatre that we live only in illusion? Is that theatre’s truth? Is truth illusion, illusion truth? Or is it, as Keats said, that 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty’?

Perhaps I was a Buddhist once.

Title: 
Professor of Doctoral Studies
Degree: 
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Phone: 
(949) 824-3425
E-mail: 
akubiak@uci.edu