The Brooklyn Rail

For members of the art theater tribe, nothing kindled our faith like the annual hajj to the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Nothing else in the American theater even remotely approximated the hypersensory emprise of those wild, funny, disorientating productions. For four decades—starting in 1968—Richard Foreman gave us the utter thrill of his thought fusillades, spectacular hallucinations, and dark memento mori in the form of other-worldly objects and eccentric handwrought designs—a peerless magic show of the mind. To go to the Ontological-Hysteric was to encounter the most essential properties of theater—to perceive, to see—in heightened, challenging ways not offered by the shopworn realism or moral instruction of most American drama. Which was why the Ontological attracted so many young people (myself included) to experimental theater and why it sustained other artists as a beacon of hope. Year after year, against the odds, Richard Foreman was somehow still there at the back of St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, making a revelatory show (if not more than one in a prolific year), working in his own way, persisting and evolving.

Despite his lifelong protestations and threats to defect to a more hospitable, less vulgar form—he considered himself a filmmaker manque—Richard Foreman was a man of the theater if ever there was one. He slyly borrowed moves from melodrama. He arguably strung up the most radical extension of Bertolt Brecht’s aesthetics (though not politics). He incurred a debt to Gertrude Stein and several French avant-gardes. Sure, he radically appropriated cinematic structures from the New York Underground for the stage, but if you watched him in rehearsal, you realized he was also an old hand who wrote music-theater libretti, knew how to stage an entrance, how to make a joke work, and how to compose an image in time and space. This man of the theater—the maestro, as he sometimes alluded to his alter ego self in his late works—threatened early and often, in and outside of his plays, to disappear from sordid show business and take the whole show with him. The ultimate effect of his stagecraft and cinema alchemy, however, was always to affirm the theater, to enlarge its frontiers and deepen its possibilities. For someone who disavowed the form he labored in, Foreman certainly immersed with devotion. You would notice him in the lobby taking the tickets, then in the booth running the sound board at every performance: an eminence presiding over a Theatrum Mundi formed from his own consciousness. In his God-like omniscience he was both Creator and ultimate audience for all that unfolded on the Ontological-Hysteric stage. Everything emanated from his presence.

Foreman’s passing marks an end—perhaps the decisive end—of the “downtown” theater as we knew it. It’s a final scene that has been long in the making. AIDS, 9/11, gentrification, COVID, and tech each successively weakened the scene that started in lower Manhattan coffeehouses and lofts after World War II, flourishing from the sixties onward, inventing postmodernism and redefining forms along the way—now largely moribund (with a few exceptions). When Foreman announced he would stop making full-scale Ontological productions in 2005 (continuing to experiment with hybrid projects for some years after), it left a hole at the experimental center of a community that was never truly filled. First the magic was gone—and now so is the magician.

Foreman liked to say that he spent his career attempting the same play over and over again in different guises, hewing to his technique of jotting thoughts in notebooks and shaping them into plays in the rehearsal room—a process that could be maddening and exhilarating by turns for collaborators. As I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the 2000s, I realized that the single-mindedness he claimed was both fundamentally true and essentially false. In the beginning was a kind of Paradise: the early productions like Sophia=(Wisdom) (1972) and Rhoda in Potatoland (1975)—created with the spellbinding Kate Manheim—explored the sensual possibilities of a panorama whose mysteries continually reveal and entice. With erotic charge and subdued humor, the enigmas in the early and middle decades felt inviting and challenging. Later, especially in the smaller-scaled shows he made starting with The Cure (1986), the tone shifted in more cloistered spaces. Frustration mounted, felt most keenly by anguished, existentially addled characters like Eddie (in 1991’s Eddie Goes to Poetry City) or Samuel (in 1993’s Samuel’s Major Problems). His quasi-autobiographical protagonists’ sense of meaning might lie just around the corner, but they struggle to locate it amid constant psychic clutter, ending up perpetually disoriented and disillusioned. A hidden order of the universe seemed about to manifest—his stage populated with interlopers who profess to hold all the clues, rabbis, pirates, temptresses—but somehow divine knowledge-you-can-use always eluded the Eddies, those poor Richards, who most aspired to know it. (One way to read Foreman’s work, which consistently touched on Kabbalah and mystical thought, is as a decades-long spiritual quest for the hidden via the stage.)

It seemed to me that his late film-performance fusions (like Zomboid! in 2006) emphasized the dehumanization Foreman observed creeping into our technology-infused lives. Live bodies stood muted in the shadow of film compositions appearing behind them; a sense of loss and death pervaded. An ending or just a new turn in a lifelong experiment? Above all Foreman’s productions were searches—for elusive paradises for the restless mind, for a cosmic source of the baffling universe. We’ll never have an Ontological again, but those who experienced the mysteries in those shows got to glimpse theatrical divinity.