The Brooklyn Rail

2024 was a Foreman year for me. In spring, on the advice of dear friends from San Francisco who care about theater, I saw the Wooster Group’s adaptation of Richard Foreman’s wry acid trip from the eighties that masquerades as political satire, Symphony of Rats. That performance took so much more than just the top off my head that after spending weeks catching up on his work, I just had to go meet the author in his legendary Maciunas loft. We spoke for hours as Richard went over all the things he no longer believed in—theater first (of course), then cinema, then literature (“Though the word—why, I think I might still believe in the word”).

I did not escape the loft unscorched. At one point, Richard announced it to me that the best film of all time might well be Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God—a work that many in my circles in Russia would give anything to rewatch on any given day, and a film that I was certain no one ever saw, let alone would be interested in, on this continent. (Andrew Lampert reassures me that there are a few more nutcases in New York who care for this kind of ghoulish spectacle, though those can be counted on one disfigured hand.) Stunned, I excused myself and hobbled down, nearly tipping over when exiting into Wooster Street on feet unsteady from having found a blinding kinship in a soul so vast and insurgent its eyes blasted craters in your thoughts with mere suggestion of the worlds they traveled.

When the December premiere of Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey was coming up, Richard collapsed into a coma only a couple of days before the first night. His last play opened with these strange voices debating the central question of the work, whether a certain character—we may as well call her Madeline Harvey—exists or not. A few minutes later, while the neon-lighted figurines of actors kept lashing out at each other with their atonal descant on how a consciousness might cease to be, another voice cut in—a recording of Richard himself. That, in itself, was no surprise for the regulars. Foreman had always inserted himself into his productions, live-managing the sound from the front row of his theater, displaying his own face on TV screens arrayed around the set, projecting his voice to boom around the hall, a demiurge gone rogue disclosing his own presence. The shock, however, came from how poignantly the trick was brought back to life in the absence of the author. Few people in the theater, apart from the company, could feel the eerier import of that joke. The disembodied, pre-recorded, and palpably edited voice filled the space with its zany ruminations on the irreality of being as the mind behind that presence was braving the cosmic seas of still stranger worlds.

Richard’s passage to the psycho-astral realm on the eve of his last premiere had so shattering an effect because it manifested a higher form of truth that was of a piece with his entire creative world. Foreman had always been drawn to limit-state epistemologies. His works tended to express this sensibility in a New Agey idiom—a mash-up of pop mystique, oneiric rites, drug-induced visions, mind alteration, and pathology. Take these titles of some of his masterpieces: My Head Was a Sledgehammer, The Gods Are Pounding My Head, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Wake Up Mr Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!, Zomboid!, Permanent Brain Damage. No safe exit to be found in an “interpretation of dreams,” however. An avid reader of Jacques Lacan and a descendant of the Dada rather than André Breton, Foreman was deeply skeptical about the sublation of dream material in human language given the devastating influence of commodity culture on the unconscious itself. A self-avowed sleepyhead by nature, he struck his sparks not so much from nocturnal phantoms as from the torpor of the day and what it concealed. Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey places a strong emphasis on this departure from dream writing: “But even if falling asleep could be interesting … dreaming is a surprise and not necessarily interesting.” It was fitting, then, that the dreamer had gone on to a new state, in which, as science tells us, we are not sure what it is that the human brain perceives and generates. A different kind of sleep, then—one that, according to visionaries as diverse as Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Richard Wagner, is, in itself, strangely a form of waking.

Foreman made use of the psychochemical mumbo jumbo inherited by the New Age from decadence at its looniest, but his shamanism was always beautifully sham. Interrogating this debased, reified form of spirituality was his way of reanimating the decaying shards of metaphysics for a world long beyond any metaphysical experience whatsoever. Foreman’s genius lies, of course, in precisely the tendency to expose these tensions, such as when the proximity of utter bathos to unimaginable sublimity reveals itself as a historical problem in that aspect of his art for which there can be no better definition than “catastrophe writing.”

I finished a draft of this piece on Holocaust Remembrance Day—a context only seemingly inappropriate to Foreman who was always very open about his own Jewish heritage. Nor does “catastrophe” have to refer to a single watershed of an origin—it is an ongoing current of history, as the New York audiences of Foreman’s Maria del Bosco were reminded in 2002 in a bone-chilling scene echoing the events of 9/11, which Richard had seen from the window of his loft just a few weeks earlier. A ballerina wearing a pink tutu keeps crashing a model airplane piloted by a baby doll into a large window to the sounds of a Robert Schumann Lied until a loud crash destroys the otherworldly serenity of the scene and three KKK-hooded figures take the plane away. The vision may feel enigmatic, but how else to reflect on a horror that preempts all representation by more familiar means. Richard’s final image—presented by Object Collection mere weeks before he was unplugged from life and freed for a journey all new—is just as powerful, asking, I think, as much about what remains of our moment’s inheritance of so much prior destruction as it does about the stories left over from the past:

RENÉ: Would those stories still exist? And who would it be who was actually then someplace still existing?

RITA: Imagine Madeline Harvey alone in a room, when suddenly and spontaneously, her whole body is on fire. And within seconds her entire body—consumed by flames burns down to pure ash. All but a single left foot in a singular red shoe completely untouched.

LOUISE: THIS COULD REALLY HAPPEN!

RITA: And it HAS already happened to a few fortunate bodies—burning to pure ash in a similar PURIFYING fire. And when that does happen to someone, then which stories above all others would remain untouched—much like the single left foot of Madeline Harvey herself? With her singular red shoe.