The Brooklyn Rail

One of the special pieces in my collection of theater ephemera is the framed poster for PAIN(T) and Vertical Mobility that Richard Foreman created in his unmistakable Ontological-Hysteric Theater visual style in 1974. I had already seen Dr. Selavy’s Magic Theatre a year or so earlier, but it was these later works that drew me deeply into his visionary world. The poster, which hangs in my apartment, displays the handwritten notes I wrote on it after seeing the productions staged in his Broome St. theater. They include:

—tableau object
—repetition as form
—French music hall
—grotesques sexual imagery (using women)
—actors (dehumanization, object carriers)

This was the beginning of a relationship to Foreman’s work that would carry through the decades, influencing me as a writer on contemporary American theater, and as editor of PAJ (Performing Arts Journal), along with Gautam Dasgupta, who was one of the performers in RHODA IN POTATOLAND, a surprise hit that played for three months, after opening in December 1975. One of Foreman’s best-known manifestos, “How to Write a Play,” appeared in the second issue of PAJ, September 1976. Its characteristic diagrams and capital letters highlighted his proclamations on such subjects as confrontation, art, kitsch, paradox, presence. “In making a play I am trying to make that important object that is not yet there.”

Like many of my generation who came to New York City after college to work in the arts, I found in the experimental scene downtown—theater, dance, music, drama, film, performance art, video, criticism—an entire world radically challenging my traditional theater training yet shaped by its modern foundations. In the seventies, audiences were engaged in trying to understand the new performance, how to write and think and talk about it. Cafes were filled with people discussing the dazzling flow of innovative avant-garde offerings. We took art seriously, argued over it, dissected it, supported it. Each successive production by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater was greeted with anticipation and the promise of visionary delights. I found myself in this arena as a young critic trying to create a new vocabulary for what I was seeing: not only Foreman’s theater but that of artists I became familiar with then, and who included Robert Wilson, Lee Breuer/Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Philip Glass, Jack Smith.

It was the example of Foreman and in particular the theaters of Wilson and Lee Breuer that led me to develop the concept of The Theatre of Images, which was published in 1977. Among the texts of these artists in the volume, I chose Foreman’s iconic Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation. I was intrigued by the pursuit of consciousness in his theatre, his flattening of space, performer as speaker, the raisonneur figure he himself performed with his voice on tape. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater blasted through the achievements of Bertolt Brecht, Luigi Pirandello, and Gertrude Stein, and made them speak to our time. In understanding the influential artists of this era, it was taken for granted that language, gesture, performance, sound, and image would be unique in each of their theaters. Foreman imagined a performance world in which all space was semantic. He educated audiences to value complexity, otherworldliness, intellectual rigor, and uncompromising explorations of the human mind. His was a peerless dramaturgy, writing as thinking—the most philosophic theater America has ever had. In fact, because he recommended it, in those days a number of us were reading Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art. I recall that at some point Foreman and Kate Manheim also had a salon on Sundays in their apartment on Wooster street, where friends and artists could congregate and talk about what they were seeing.

Over the decades I regularly attended productions of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and probably missed only a few of the pieces. I can still recall the image of the actor Tony Azito slithering, marionette-like, across the stage in the ravishing Threepenny Opera Foreman staged for the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. It was half a century ago.

As the years went by there were many features in PAJ by and about Foreman and his theater, even a PAJ Publications book of his plays, writings, and criticism on his oeuvre. It came to pass that the May 2024 issue of PAJ featured his last play, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, staged by Object Collection at La Mama in December, a month before his death. I have been grateful for the presence of one of the important thinkers and artists whose work helped create the performance culture of New York to the very end of his life.

And so, this has been a long journey for me, the span of my professional life in theater. From time to time, it is good to be reminded of where one started, and the people and ideas that served as guideposts along the way.