The Brooklyn Rail

I may have met Richard Foreman in 1968. Then he was married to Amy Taubin who was volunteering at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. So, I am certain that I encountered him through her, perhaps at a screening of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Then, he was trying to get support for a comedy he had written to be opened on Broadway. I knew that he had been at the Yale Drama School with my close friend, Ken Kelman. Kelman was actually in the first play he mounted at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on Wooster Street. I missed Angelface, because I was in Europe showing avant-garde films that year. Subsequently, I seldom missed a Foreman production. I even went to Tanglewood in the Berkshires to hear his first opera; and to Lincoln Center for his version of Threepenny Opera (the only play I ever saw there). I was honored when he asked me to contribute an essay on one of his plays for a reference work on drama.

Richard had the best private library of anyone I knew. In the seventies I often borrowed books from him that had not yet been acquired or catalogued at the New York University or Columbia University libraries to which I had access. I found the notes he had written on the flyleaf and in the margins invaluable guides to his theatre.

The day of the initial moon landing, he and Amy invited me and my first wife to their apartment. That was the only time I was there. After his marriage dissolved, I was often in his SoHo loft. Kate Manheim, my assistant in the library of Anthology Film Archives, became the star of his theater and later his second wife. Kate’s Sunday “salons” and dinners there, especially Thanksgiving feasts, and a massive party for Jonas Mekas’s fiftieth birthday, are particularly memorable.

I imagine an undistinguished Athenian might die contented, knowing that he had sat through Aeschylus’s The Oresteia on the hard stones of the Theatre of Dionysus, or some ordinary Elizabethan would console his last moments by recalling how often he had been to the Globe Theatre for Shakespeare. I can go to my death happy that I saw at least twenty of Foreman’s astounding productions of his own work at the Film-Makers Cinematheque, at his theater on Broadway and Broome Streets, and at St. Marks’ Church.