The Renegade Richard Foreman
How the downtown playwright reinvented theater
A photograph taken by Babette Mangolte of Richard Foreman’s Pandering to the Masses (1974) at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Copyright © 1974 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved.
The mind is a supple, ever-changing thing. This is a fact, not a flaw. For the theater artist Richard Foreman, who died this past January at age eighty-seven, the time of thinking, of writing, of creating was always now. And now. And now. In a 1926 essay called “Composition as Explanation,” Gertrude Stein wrote: “Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.” As a young artist, Foreman picked up Stein’s idea and chose to stand in the slipstream of the present. He set aside middles and ends—too artificial, too confining—preferring for his plays to channel the sublime havoc of being. As he wrote in 1972:
I want to be seized by the elusive, unexpected aliveness of the moment.…
…surprised by
a freshness
of moment that eludes constantly refreshes.
Between 1968 and 2013, Foreman made more than fifty productions for the stage. These were not plays in any traditional sense. Instead, Foreman created living works of art by “using everything” that a given moment in time brought to bear on his process. He began not with a completed script but with a raw running text, the lines of which he would assign during his monthslong rehearsals, arranging and rearranging his words, giving them to one actor then trying them out on another. (The published collections of his works are more or less transcriptions of the live shows, including dialogue and direction.) He built and rebuilt his sets, props, and costumes every day in his theater space. Foreman’s aesthetic changed over the decades. The visual style of his earliest works resembled that of the surrealists: he composed tidy, witty tableaux of odd objects and strange people speaking what often seemed like stray thoughts, all of which briefly shared the air before careening into their next encounter. Later, the look of his productions became more macabre, almost menacing: he would litter the stage with stuff, visual interferences that prompted the audience to lean closer and look harder. Throughout, his plays remained fairly consistent, all running about seventy minutes and keeping his performers in a near-constant state of movement as they spouted lines that sounded as though a mystic had fallen through the looking glass or a philosopher had become stuck in a screwball comedy. These mind-melting, incandescent productions were equal parts theater, philosophy, literature, and visual art. They were also, by nature and by design, irreproducible, conceived as a different kind of cultural force. As Foreman described them in 1985:
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