John Lahr and Jonathan Price attempt a new kind of theatrical textbook which tries to show readers how to see theatre in life and life in theatre. The book itself is designed as a kind of theatrical event. Using more than 150 pictures within the text—a cross-cultural vision that ranges from Adolph Hitler to Abbie Hoffman, from Aristotle to Artaud—Life-Show dramatizes how deeply the impulse of play runs in our daily lives. The book provides a means of decoding what is authentic and inauthentic theatrical experience, both onstage and off.

Through we may not be regular theatre-goers or think of ourselves as actors, our existence is nonetheless theatrical. We “make a scene”, “play it cool”, “act up”, “do a number”. Our idiom for our life betrays our performing self. Acts of conscience, the pageants of state, gestures of rage, rituals of love—these signs and symbols of the stage world are al around us. The book argues that unless we know how to read them; they can overwhelm our lives and do damage to our image of ourselves.

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