The Brooklyn Rail

Our company Object Collection started in Richard’s theater in St. Mark’s Church in 2004. We did five of our first shows in that funky, dusty room with the remarkably awkwardly placed column and janky electrical system. Kara Feely and I met many of our performers, designers, and other general downtown miscreants there. 

I started working for Richard as his sound engineer in 2007 and was involved in three of his final theatrical pieces (Kara would come to rehearsal and observe). It is reasonable to say we learned how to be artists in that room. Or at least we learned what kind of artists we wanted to be.

Richard’s rehearsals were by turns exhilarating, boring, inventive, repetitive, occasionally rapturous, endlessly creative. This was precisely the kind of radical art that Kara and I hoped to be a part of. Art that was voracious in its interests, unapologetically intellectual, and often profoundly stupid (but stupid-smart, like the Ramones of course). 

In theater rehearsals there is a lot of downtime. Sitting there in the house with Richard, I would shoot my mouth off about music, literature, films and art. Richard and I hit it off. I would tell him about four-hour performances I did with Christian Wolff in Germany, and he would tell me about the time he made an offhand comment to Thelonious Monk outside the Five Spot, earning Monk’s side-eye.

Richard turned up at a few of Object Collection’s shows, much to our surprise. We had decidedly little “professional” success and our audiences were generally tiny. One show (Innova from 2011) was particularly ambitious, and particularly unsuccessful. It was three hours long, brutally loud, and intensely aggressive. Stupidly, we had an intermission and frequently half the audience would leave before the second half. Richard came one night when there were just six people there. Three left at the break, Richard stayed. He loved it. We were frankly ready to pack it in as a company after that show. His words of encouragement were heady fuel and absolutely kept us going.

After he retired from the theater, Kara and I would meet Richard every few months for lunch, sometimes with wine. We would talk about what we were working on, what we were reading and watching. When Object Collection became a nonprofit, Richard joined as a founding board member.

Richard would give me DVDs of his old pieces and, after it became more difficult for him to go out, I would give him videos of our new shows. I remember once talking with him about Jacques Rivette’s then-unavailable film L’ Amour fou, which Richard had said he loved but hadn’t seen in decades. Kara and I revered Rivette, and I was able to find obscure things in the back alleys of the internet. So I downloaded the movie and gave it to Richard on DVD. Talking about it later with him, we realized Richard had been friends with half the cast.

For a long time, Kara and I were thinking about doing a piece based on Richard's writings. At first, I thought we might adapt his novel No-Body (1997), but it felt like one of his older pieces as it was written in the mid-nineties. In the summer of 2022, we asked Richard if he had any recent texts, and he gave us a stack of a dozen or so written in the last ten years. We chose one and got to work on Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey (2024).  

What struck us immediately was how perfectly constructed Richard’s text was while simultaneously making us feel like we were being sucked into a whirlpool… but the best kind of whirlpool, a seemingly endless spiral of thought, digression, doubt, humor, and revelation, all centered around an innocuous chance encounter between two individuals (Madeline Harvey and Roger Vincent) in a vaguely Parisian café.

We set out to break down Richard’s text, find the repetitions, the “seams” so to speak. But this was an incredibly elusive process. In the early days, we taped the complete text on the wall, covering most of a room. It seemed the only way to approach it really was to treat it like a landscape and allow its overt theatricality to just spill over the riverbanks. 

We chipped away at it, and characters were found, scenarios invented, and a dense tapestry of sound and activity unfolded, but always (incessantly actually) we let those words carry us from boulevard cafe, to the underworld, to other planets, the void, and back again. 

Kara and I spent the last two years immersed in Richard's words, which is one of the best ways to spend your time. I think he would have liked our show, we did our best.

Paraphrasing what Dizzy Gillespie said about Louis Armstrong: no him, no us.