Eli: I've tried here to repeat and play with a particular rhetorical style.  It sort of falls on its face in parts, but it was fun to try out.  If the page looks all screwy, try opening it with a different web browser.  Different ones handle the embedded CSS differently and may decide not to render things like boxes.  Sadly, I think Internet Explorer handles it the best.

In his chapter on "LSD (...Just the High Points... )," in Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, David Savran attempts to capture the Wooster Group's performance's relationship with history, textuality, and "hallucination."  In doing so, he plays with the genre of the critical essay.  He specifically engages with the themes that he is reading in their performance in the form as well as the content of his chapter.  He uses a technique from the Group's own repertoire within his essay both to expose his relationship to their work and to further his points about how the work functions.

In Breaking the Rules, Savran plays a little with the genre of the critical essay.  a) How so, b) to what end, and c) how do you evaluate what he does?
      -Ehren Fordyce

I am referring, of course, to the act of direct quotation of sources within a piece contrasting with the group's representation of the same person, place, or event.  Whereas the Wooster group uses several types of quotation within their performance, (audio recording, reading from books, hyper-naturalistic monolog reconstructed from recordings, and video images) Savran uses several different types of quotation within his book, including standard block quotes, block quotes in boxes, long Transcripts of interviews with the group in Italics, footnotes, and photographs of the production.

These various forms of quotation are interspersed throughout his text and serve to call attention to Savran's own attempt at writing a history of inherently contested events, a theme he sees as a major part of the LSD performance:

L.S.D. uses difference, the gap between present and various pasts, between reading and writing, between disparate perspectives, to expose the illusional, manufactured quality of history and the ways in which politics, economics, and ideology determine what is recorded and how.  
(Savran, 175)

Quotes that he sets aside in this manner generally occur in a very logical place in the text and often follow a reference to the quotation and a colon like so:

For the audience cognizant of that failure, the prophecy of Allen Ginsberg resounds with a bitter poignance:

Peter and I went up to Harvard last week eating synthetic mushrooms—very high—The Revolution Has Begun—Stop giving your authority to Christ & the Void & the Imagination—you are it, now, the God...

(Savran, 188)

His quotes in boxes, on the other hand, tend to appear in slightly more random places and while they do relate to the text that proceeds and follows them, they do it in a more indirect fashion.  
His choices work the best for me when he talks about the group's interaction with Arthur Miller. We first learn about these events through the transcript of an interview with the group. A page later, Savran provides a concise summary of the interaction obviously drawn from the interview.(Savran, 189-191) In the interview, this episode comes across as a jumble of memories.  Many members of the group chime in about different moments of their interactions with Miller, sometimes with conflicting viewpoints. They also provide personal sidenotes to the story that get left out of Savran's summary.  For instance, someone points out that Miller approached a particular performer and commended them on their performance.  This Juxtaposition highlighted, for me, the process of creating history and the violence one must do to people's stories in order to concisely reproduce them.

Of course, he does not do this merely to expose his own relationship to the group.  It is no coincidence that he uses this technique in his book on the Wooster group.  He deliberately uses form to enact content in his essay, putting on a Wooster Group mask so that we can experience as well as understand their methodology.  This kind of effect

...Cheap booze.  Plentiful whores; those warmblooded little women who appealed to his old Catholic double-standards, reverent Earth Mothers who said a Hail Mary before fucking for cash beneath a color litho of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The tropics, however, are only a paradise in part.  They have more menacing associations as well, linked in L.S.D. to G. Gordon Liddy.  As he confesses in his autobiography, he recruited and worked with Cuban-Americans from 1971 to 1973 on intelligence gathering operations and

Ron Vawter: Liddy was down in Miami, training a bunch of Cubans.  It's another stream in the piece.  He is this odd man.  Busting Leary, the Cubans, Watergate, then joining with Leary again.  It's a great American portrait.

domestic sabotage (The latter included a foiled attempt to spike Daniel Ellsberg's soup with LSD before he was to deliver a speech.)...
(Savran, 212)

occurs throughout the piece with varying degrees of success and we stumble along with Savran between different frames of reference surrounding the performance, the groups interviews for the performance, his interviews for his chapter on the performance, excerpts from the performance, direct quotes of source material for the performance.  Sometimes I find his use of quotations compelling; other times they get in the way of reading his essay.  Perhaps this is yet another reduplication of the experience of attending a Wooster Group performance.