As a playwright, he transfigures the very active writing into absurdist, theatrical puzzles.
By David Savran
Like refugees from a derailed Orient Express, the characters in Richard Foreman’s Egyptology stagger into what looks like a strange 19th-century museum of Oriental antiquities. Here on the distant edges of culture, in Foreman’s extravagant examination of the familiar and the foreign, they struggle with one another: a clique of shadowy Eastern figures, a crashed aviatrix and a man costumed like Louis XIV. “I thought of pushing you around with my inheritance of cultural expectations,” declares one of these exotics, but “discovering that nobody held the values I defended, I decided to make a spectacle of myself.”
That’s more or less what the multifaceted Foreman has been doing on theatre stages for over 20 years. His prodigious oeuvre ranges from such idiosyncratically personal works as Egyptology, staged at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1983, to the librettos for a series of cheerfully mind-bending musical collaborations with composer Stanley Silverman. Born in New York City in 1937 and raised in Scarsdale (where he was president of his high school drama club), Foreman was reared on the commercial theatre of the ’40s and ’50s. In 1962, with a B.A. from Brown and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Yale, he moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright. After several years of trying unsuccessfully to break into the commercial theatre—where his absurdist boulevard comedies met with persistent rejection—he quite suddenly began to write a kind of play radically different from anything that Broadway offered. In 1968 he founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and, in a tiny space on Wooster Street in downtown Manhattan, produced Angelface, the first of his groundbreaking. pieces. That same summer he began the other half of his double career, collaborating with Silverman on Elephant Steps, the first of a string of critically acclaimed musical plays that would follow over the next 12 years.
In comparison with those on which he was raised, Foreman’s own plays are marked by what appears to be an almost total absence of character development or plot. Composed in a richly allusive and yet utterly concrete language, they abound in absurdities and discontinuities. His style, deeply resonant and sometimes very difficult for audiences, results not from a nihilistic rejection of narrative or the tenets of literary theatre, but from a desire to explore, through performance, the workings of consciousness itself. Foreman’s plays are about neither the intricacies of an objectively real world nor the psychological peculiarities of character. They are simply about perception, feeling, understanding, expression. They perform consciousness—consciousness understood as being itself a performance, a play of intuition and expression, external stimuli and endless reflection. For Foreman, consciousness is a hall of mirrors—or more precisely, a labyrinth of mirrors—in which images magically change shape as they are reflected across the endlessly silvered walls.
Consider the opening of Angelface:
Max: The door opens. I don’t even turn my head.
Walter: Does it turn?
Max: What?
Walter: Heads turn.
Max: Heads turn. My head is a head. Therefore: my head turns. Open the door a second time.
In this scene, Max is seated in the center of a room. A door opens revealing Walter standing there. Max speaks. Watching, we expect something to happen. Instead, Walter questions Max. Max doesn’t understand; he questions Walter. Walter tries another maneuver; he makes a statement, he makes sense. Then, composing an absurd syllogism, Max turns it into nonsense. Here are (the fragment seems to be saying) the workings of consciousness: statement, reflection, non-sequitur. Then it all starts again: “Open the door a second time.”
Beginning with Angelface, Foreman’s plays from the late ’60s and early ’70s explore consciousness by deconstructing the dramatic situations that dominate boulevard comedy: rivalries and erotic triangles. In the mid-’70s, with Vertical Mobility and Rhoda in Potatoland, Foreman’s focus shifts to a deconstruction of the act of writing itself—the act of bringing material to consciousness and putting it down on the page. In these pieces, the text dramatizes that inner dialogue, and the characters take up the different, shifting voices within consciousness, manifestations of the various selves vying for control of the pen. They tease, question and change the level of discourse, constantly interrupted by false starts and stops, seemingly random intrusions and blackouts. These scripts, hostages not to real but to written time, document Foreman’s attempts “to notate at every moment, with great exactness, what was going on as the ‘writing was written.’” They read not like imitations of a real world but “like notations of my own process of imagining a theatre piece.”
Watching Foreman’s theatre in cluttered lofts or non-proscenium theatres, stage lights shining in his eves, the spectator will feel disoriented. Seeing the familiar made strange and the unexpected become inevitable, he will struggle to make logical connections. Deprived of the opportunity of responding to character empathetically, he will work actively to understand, to interpret the action. As he does, he will discover that his own perceptual process repeats Foreman’s process of creating the work. He will find himself as enveloped in his own reflections as in the piece itself, his consciousness split, like the theatre itself, between watching and doing.
In recent years there has been another subtle shift in Foreman’s work. His latest pieces are both more exuberant and less explicitly reflexive than his early ones, making greater use of anecdote, alliteration, rhyme and music. They still explore consciousness and the act of writing, but focus as intently on more external phenomena: political process, in Miss Universal Happiness, a 1985 collaboration with The Wooster Group, or forms of media and control, in this season’s Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good. The fatalistic undercurrent in many of his earlier pieces has given way to the sheer delight of using language, song, characters and stage space, to a celebration of the free play of the mind and of the world.
I talked with Foreman in his Wooster Street loft one Sunday afternoon last fall.
Who are the artists who have had an influence on you as a writer?
Nobody was an influence for a long period of time, except Brecht. For about 20 years Brecht was, I suppose, my god, and I tried to find out everything I could about him. His rather flat-footed, aggressive literary style influenced the way I wanted to write. I thought his way was obviously the way to work in the theatre. He was absolutely my greatest influence. He certainly is not any more.
What was the effect of your studies at Yale?
I went to Yale as a playwright and wrote, one year, my imitation Arthur Miller; one year, my imitation Murray Schisgal (believe it or not); one year, my imitation Brecht; one year, my imitation Sartre. I studied under John Gassner, whom I found to be an extremely rigorous teacher, although even at that point my aesthetic was somewhat different from his. He thought I had talent, which was gratifying to me, but he said my one problem was that I tended to go for a big dramatic effect and would then repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. For a long time I tried to correct that until I realized, “How silly. If that’s what I want, I should turn it into an asset, or at least try to.” And indeed, that describes, sort of, the structure of the work I’ve been doing since then.
When I left Yale and came to New York, I met the underground cinema people. They were interested in contemporary American literature, which, up until then, I had denigrated completely. I thought of myself as being a rigorous, vicious European intellectual and had contempt for what I thought was the more primitive, naive American approach. I was introduced to Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, the whole school of poetry and, through them, to Gertrude Stein, who, when I discovered her in 1964, became the second big influence in my life. It was really the combination of Stein and Brecht, I suppose, that produced the first thrust of my work—with one other bizarre contribution: Because of the interest of some of these filmmakers in various esoteric matters, I got interested in alchemy.
I began thinking of the attempt to write a play as the attempt to work and rework the same material, much as the alchemists would keep working on their combined metals to transform them into gold. I really thought of writing a play as taking certain basic physical givens of the situation in the play, repeating them with slight variations again and again and again in the text.
Speaking of repetition, formally your work proceeds not through a linear, causal development but through a series of variations.
Yes, that’s the way I think. Of course, these earlier plays—from about 1968 until about 1975—were a bit different from what I’m doing these days. Now the writing tends to break down into very aphoristic fragments of, I think, a kind of elegant language, even though there’s no narrative progression. When I began there was no witty, aphoristic style. The characters spoke a very flat-footed notation of the physical sensations in their bodies: “Oh, my hand is now heavy. It’s still heavy. Why is it heavy? Why does it feel like it’s growing?” Discussions like that would go on and on and on, and circulate. And then there was a shift. It was almost as if I wanted to start from scratch, to start from the ground of matter before I dared to use a more aphoristic, comic style, which spoke more openly about all of my real metaphysical concerns.
Were you interested in using Brecht to provide that concrete, material base?
I wasn’t thinking of that aspect of Brecht, I was thinking of him totally in terms of the alienation effect, the desire for a non-empathic theatre. The language, meanwhile, was derived from Stein and from this alchemical approach to manipulations. Stein also, in trying to write in a continual present. So the move into a more aphoristic style was a move away from that continual present into recycling all the inherited garbage and treasures of Western culture, which I think has been the emphasis of my work in the last 10 vears or so.
How do you start working on a piece?
Well, that has changed radically over the years. First of all, I work as a poet works. I think that’s the cause of one of the problems I’ve had with the critics. I don’t think people who go to the theatre spend much time pondering contemporary poetry. If they think of another literary form, they think of novels. They do not think about the implications of language and what can be done with it. And language, rather than narrative, has always been my concern, along with the psychological implications of what the words do to the person who is speaking them, the way that they hit associations and strike off other trains of thought.
John Gassner taught me that plays aren’t written but rewritten. Actually, it used to be a lot of fun. I would fix and fix and fix and fix. When I began writing the style of plays that I write now, I still believed that a play had to be written from an outline and then rewritten. But I came increasingly under the influence of theoretical work by artists about how 20th-century art should be produced. I decided that it was perhaps interfering with other sources of creativity to work from the constriction of an outline.
So I began writing without an outline. However, what happened was that I would get an idea for a play and start to write it out in scene form and after 2 pages, 10 pages, sometimes 20 pages, it would dry up. About once a year—after sitting down every day to write—suddenly a play wouldn’t stop and I’d go through to the end. That left me with notebooks full of plays that never went anywhere. I remember saying, “Why can’t I use all these false starts and actually stage them?” I believe the first play that was made up of false starts was Hotel China. Eventually, I began to feel free to take pages from last year’s work, shuffle them around, treat them as raw material to manipulate. That, essentially, is the way I work now. For many years I was very shy about admitting how loose my compositional methods were getting. I began to feel guilty, thinking, “You’re not sitting down and working like a good solid, honest workman, the way Ibsen did.” So I didn’t come right out and admit my increasing belief that the most interesting writing would simply come to you at odd moments. You had to pick it up on the fly, as it were, and then treat that random material much as you would treat the random material of your life, selecting and organizing all kinds of impulses in order to write an Ibsenite play.
This is not at all different from the way that most 20th-century poets work, though I suspect not too many novelists do. The reason I work this way is simply that I have different metaphysical interests, different therapeutic interests in making art, than Herman Wouk might, if he’s writing a novel that he hopes is going to sell a lot of copies and be bought as a movie. In the last year-and-a-half, I have tried more and more to integrate into plays song forms that I’ve been writing to specific tape loops. I write under the influence of that looped music very repetitively, and try to let come whatever comes through the motor input of those musical rhythms.
As in The Cure.
Yes. Actually the first time I used any of those songs was in Miss Universal Happiness. I started feeling freer about taking my amassed collection of 500 pages and putting them out on the floor to see how I could combine them in a collage to write a play. I was interested in various strategies that would allow different material to come through. At one point, for example, I consciously tried to discipline myself so that I was writing in reverse. As I was writing from left to right, I tried to imagine there was something else I couldn’t read being written by an invisible hand going from right to left on the same line. And somehow I thought that imagined collision, or superimposition, produced a different kind of material.
Now, through all of this, I believe that a tremendous thematic center emerges for each play, and the texts have the same kind of coherence as the words of someone in psychoanalysis, free-associating on the couch month after month. The analyst, who I think of as the director Richard Foreman, is finding in these texts the same kind of coherence a psychoanalyst finds in the material his patient is producing when he thinks,
“I’m just saying whatever comes into my head.” Tremendous necessity is always at work, and it’s my job as a director to find the necessity at work in the text that I am trying not to control as I produce it. What are reflected in my texts are, I think, all the forces that are operative in the world at this moment, seen from the particular perspective of Richard Foreman. I think the task of the 20th-century artist is to tell his fellow human beings, “This is what it’s like to experience the universe from this position. Is that relevant? Is it of interest to you? Does it relate to the way that you experience the universe?”
When you’re writing a play, how do you conceive characters?
You have to understand that I don’t write a play anymore. I put things down in notebooks. And when it comes time to produce a play, I look through the notebooks to find interesting language, interesting sections. I haven’t written characters except perhaps during the first years that I was writing. These days, when I give a text to the actors there’s no indication of who is speaking. It looks like a poem on the page. For the first eight years or so, even when I wrote in the notebooks, I would write down who was speaking. I felt sort of casual about it because I had always believed along with Max Jacob, the French poet, that character is an error, that our characters are determined by the accidents of our birth and our social circumstances. If you go a step further, you can say that they’re the accidents of our genes. I have always been interested in trying to write from and evoke that level of the self that underlies character, that level of consciousness that we all share, upon which is superimposed the accident of character.
When I assign the lines, however, I think of the collision between the particular character of my performer and what I consider to be the more universal thrust of my language. So I will say, “How does this universal statement about fear collide with the particular characteristics of Kate Manheim, or of [Wooster Group actor] Ron Vawter, who has other characteristics?” Let’s say that Kate and Ron were in a play together. I could totally reassign the lines, I could restage the play and I profoundly believe that it would be just as true, that in staging it I would find other, just as rigorous solutions with that distribution. For the last 10 years, the scenario for my plays has evolved in rehearsal. Not the language—that stays pretty much the same.
I noticed that in Miss Universal Happiness you used the members of The Wooster Group in their more or less traditional roles, the ones they’ve developed over the past few years.
Yes, and that’s what interested me. I must admit, I’m not interested in helping an actor discover how to play a type totally opposed to him. If actors are interested in that, they may be frustrated working with me. If I give them something to do and they try twice but they don’t do it well, I’ll say, “Instead of that, do a tap dance.” I’m trying to make ever more vivid and present what they are and allow that to inhabit the particular environment of my text.
I should add one thing. I have also written 8 or 10 musical comedies with Stanley Silverman. When I’m writing musical comedies, I try to work in a somewhat more conventional mode with more conventional aims. There, I think, I’m writing characters in a more classical sense. I imagine the characters and try to write lines and songs appropriate to them. So, just as I stage both my own work and conventional, classical plays, I think of myself as having a double career as a writer: the totally explorative writer who’s trying to get himself in as much trouble as possible writing poetic texts, and the more audience-oriented writer writing musical comedies with Stanley.
When you work with Stanley, does the text come before the music?
Yes, always. Basically by Stanley’s choice. I would be willing to work the other way around. Before I go into rehearsal, I don’t study the text very much. I think the truth of the text should be discovered on its feet, in the theatre, with the actors. I don’t make lots of notes, I go in kind of naked with the language. And then, if a character says, “Oh, my foot is heavy. Yes, but will this handkerchief help?” I have to decide whether I want to use a real handkerchief, or if the foot is really heavy. Or when he’s talking about his foot, is he holding his head? Is his foot symbolic of his sexual organs? I have to decide what I think is being said in the text.
What impact does your work as a director have on your scripts?
I imagine that every artist dreams of creating in the most organic way possible. I don’t know if that means that ideally I would like to write the play in rehearsal. But I do know I specifically leave out many narrative keys in my writing because I feel they can be more suggestively, imaginatively fulfilled in the staging. I know I’m staging it and it’s part of the same process. Whereas when I pick up Ibsen or other, more contemporary authors, I often have the feeling, “It’s all here in the text. Why bother doing it?” I think that’s one of the reasons a lot of directors think, “Well, I’m going to do Hamlet but it’s going to be done under water.” [Laughs] How boring just to do it unless you can do it differently!
There are a lot of people who have said, “I like his directing—well, I don’t like his directing, his directing’s okay—but his texts, well, there’s not much to his texts.” I have confidence, though, that in time people are going to be able to relate to my texts and see that they have the same coherence and density as a lot of 20th-century poetry. I’m not saying I’m as good as Ezra Pound. I am saying that my texts operate in the same way and are not incoherent and meaningless. The fact that I generate them differently from the way people usually generate texts for the theatre is, I think, quite irrelevant.
I have often said that I’m a more conventional director than I am a writer. I think my writing pushes further ahead, faster, in terms of stylistic, aesthetic adventure, than does my staging. I think I tend to domesticate texts that are wilder than my staging.
Do you read the critics?
Yes. But I’ve always wished that I didn’t. I hope that maybe this year I won’t. I get very upset, as I think most people in the theatre do, when they are negative, even though I may think the critic’s a fool and what he’s saying is clearly foolish. I agree with Gertrude Stein that artists don’t need criticism, only encouragement. All you can do as an artist—for the kind of artist that I am and that I think artists should be—is to try to radicalize your own impulses and strip away everything that isn’t you and make whatever is you that much stronger. Of course, critics who write for the newspapers are interested in talking about how well the audience has been manipulated, not about how rigorously a specific vision has been pared away and presented on stage. So it’s frustrating, but that’s life.
Now that we’re moving into a more conservative political era, there has been a lot of criticism—not only of me, but of the kind of director and writer I represent—that we’re self-in-dulgent. I’m accused again and again of solipsistic vision. I find that absurd. It simply means that the people reviewing me don’t recognize my cultural references. Moment by moment my plays are appealing to this or that cultural reference. For instance, Africanis Instructus is about the discovery of Africa and about how the modern world destroys all the exoticism of foreign cultures, about how the energy goes out in this collision between societies. There’s one scene in which a black man from Africa brings in a red telephone on a platter and the actors start singing about this red telephone that means emergency to the white people. A critic for The Village Voice wrote, “He just picks out of his unconscious these meaningless images and they’re singing about a red telephone. What does that have to do with Africa?” As if a red telephone doesn’t have to do with all the hangups of the West and the hotline to Moscow and our emergency-oriented life! All of the symbols have reference to culturally inherited preoccupations. Maybe the critics just aren’t as well read or as well informed as they should be.
I also think it’s because they’re not used to dealing with such loaded images outside of a narrative framework.
Yes, I suppose that’s true. But good Lord, if you’ve had any exposure to the other contemporary arts, you know that is the way material is organized these days by artists.
How aware are you of the social implications of your work?
Immediately—after the fact. Maybe there are some artists who proceed purely by calculation. I don’t. I talk about my work afterwards, and I can analyze intellectually as well as anyone else what is operating in my work. But I think an artist sort of does it, and then sees what he has—and he either throws it out or goes on. That’s the way I think all artists work.
How do you see the American theatre these days?
Well, I don’t go to the theatre. I don’t find theatre very interesting, but I never have. I do pay attention to many other arts—poetry and painting are a terribly vital source for me, as well as continual, obsessive reading, especially in the areas of philosophy, psychoanalysis and a lot of—how shall I put it?—therapeutic, religious, mystical writings. That’s what I do mostly: read. I read 5, 10 books a week.
You’ve mentioned the more conservative political climate. Do you think it’s had an impact on your own work?
I think it is impossible that it has not. I would like to think that it hasn’t, that I’m holding out for something different, but I believe you are a product of your time and you’re going to reflect that. For instance, my last play, The Cure, got much quieter and, for many people, more accessible than some of the more hysterical, frantic things I’ve done in the last few years. I’d like to think that was a choice that had nothing to do with trying to be in tune with the ’80s. But we are beings who respond to the contingencies of circumstance, and we cannot predict, we cannot really analyze what is making us do what we do. I certainly don’t approve of the climate of the ’80s. I’m horrified to see reports and articles in the press now saying that the ’60s was the worst period America ever went through. I think the ’60s was the one decent, healthy period in American life. My task is to try to resist everything spiritually deadening about the ’80s and to keep something else alive.
As a matter of fact, the reason I did the play with The Wooster Group two years ago was in specific response to that. This is the one group that I respect in New York, that I think is as interested in getting into trouble as I am. I wanted to immerse myself in an environment where I didn’t have to worry about stepping on anybody’s toes, because I don’t like to offend people. I want to be making art in an arena where I feel not even an unconscious inhibition about getting myself in trouble.
I’m going to do another play with The Wooster Group next year, and I think that’s a healthy thing for me to do because I had started to become part of the establishment avant-garde, the token avant-garde. I’ll certainly never be as acceptable as some of my co-token avant-gardists because I still manage to do things that a lot of people have difficulty with. But it’s a problem: to resist the horrible corruption of the theatre which is, finally, just to want to be loved.
What are your goals for the future?
I have absolutely no goals anymore, except maybe to get out of the theatre. I think one should change, and the remaining opportunities for change in the theatre are not that great.
I’ve always thought that my work (and most interesting 20th-century art) is therapy on some level. None of us live anywhere near the potential that is built into us. We’re all asleep, me included. If you’re a good artist, your art tends to be better, more rigorous, more alert than you are when you’re alone in your apartment eating dinner. If I have any goal, it would be to make some of the rigor of my art pertain more in the other hours of my waking life. I’m very aware of the fact that when I make a work of art, I’m making a place where I would like to be. I wish the world had the same rigor that my work of arts has, and I don’t think that’s a particularly healthy wish. I realize increasingly that to hope that a work of art is going to solve your life’s problems, or any life problems, is not very sensible.
I now deeply, fully understand that no matter how good my art gets, it’s not going to change anything. And that realization, sinking into me slowly, has had a profound effect on the way I think of the future.
Do you hold out any hope for the theatre?
I wish more people who are concerned deeply with language would try to work in the theatre. I think, for instance, in America now there’s a young group of poets who are very great artists, part of this so-called language movement in poetry.
I think I will alwavs be interested basically in writing—in generating language that can be mostly talk and then some gesture, music, staging. Or the balance can change. But to me, it’s all the writing of a text, whether or not the staging is a part of that text. So even as a director, as a person who makes his scenery, makes his music. I think of myself as a writer making texts.
This interview is adapted from David Savran’s forthcoming book In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, to be published in December 1987 by Theatre Communications Group.
As a director, he recasts the conflicts of consciousness, as exotic, eye-filling spectacles.
By Arthur Bartow
Ontological: “The principal area of metaphysical speculation, called ontology, is the study of the utimate nature of being.” Actual, fact, truth, sober reality, positiveness, self-existence.
Hysteric: “Freud concluded that hysterical symptoms were symbolic representations of a repressed unconscious event accompanied by strong emotions that could not be adequately expressed or discharged at the time. He found that ‘catharsis’ reactivation of the memory could remove the hysterical symptoms.” Hidden, iconography, impersonation, hieroglyphic, hint, sublimination, occult, allusive, imperceptibility.
Theatre (of the absurd): “Apparently pointless situations and dialogue, typically expressing the existential nature of man’s self-isolation, anxiety, frustration.” Hallucinatory, vaudeville, cause and effect, farce, slapstick, enactment.
A deafening thud, blinding lights, an irritating buzzer, and there’s Kate Manheim, leading lady of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, nude—nude! Does Richard Foreman’s mother know what he does for a living? Does anyone quite understand how he manages to baffle, amuse, shock, bewilder and entrance audiences with a precisely choreographed directing technique that is as perversely dense and symbolic as the plays he himself writes?
Foreman’s productions grip our attention because they are finely crafted, meticulously intelligent works that result in a flow of funny, erotic or frightening images that appear to have a logic that is itself imbalanced—a realism that is unreal. The challenge, then, seems to be to find the meaning of the symbols, to understand the insinuation of style. But Foreman rejects such an approach, saying, “The minute man knows the message, he sleeps.” Viewing, Foreman believes, is more important than understanding; yet his theatre aggressively demands an intellectual response. What a spot for an audience to be in! Those famous lights flashed in the eyes of the spectators are not just a disquieting theatrical technique—they literally put the public in the spotlight, placing the burden of effort on them to be aware, keeping the sleeper awake. In best Brechtian tradition, the audience is reminded of its own feelings.
Foreman’s production settings are playful constructivist, three-dimensional, mathematical creations that constantly redefine the space. His early plays, produced in his tiny 70-seat loft theatre, were almost cabinet-like with their moving panels and shifting perspectives. An architectural signature of his work has always been strings stretched across the stage defining some non-existent area, overlaying the playing space, yet strangely out of sync with it.
The actors he preferred in the early productions were non-actors, visually interesting “found objects” chosen for their spiritual qualities rather than for acting technique. Kate Manheim has performed in more Foreman productions than any other actor and will forever be associated with Rhoda, the heroine of such epics as Rhoda in Potatoland, Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs and Classical Therapy or A Week Under the Influence. Nudity was much in evidence in the early Foreman plays but has diminished as he has gotten older and found himself directing more and more plays by other writers.
While his approach to theatre ultimately rejected the traditional training he received at Brown and Yale universities, the rigorous approach to literature and theatre that he acquired in those institutions amplified his talent for organization of mind and effort. Even among the extraordinary collection of American avant-garde theatre artists developing in the 1960s, he was unique. Much of the experimental work of that period was body-oriented; Foreman, meanwhile, was at work creating a new language for the stage, an amalgam of environment, sound, movement and text. This gesamtkunstwerk insisted that all these elements were vital in the attempt to evoke the source of nature and spirit, abstraction and dream.
A meeting with Foreman at his Soho loft is not unlike sitting down with a middle-aged Albert Einstein amid rows and rows of bookshelves, he in his comfortable slippers, kindly, patiently and sometimes eagerly explaining for the 739th time his theory of relativity.
At first, the theatre thought of you primarily as a playwright. Now there is the sense that the director side of your ego has taken control. What separates these facets of your talent?
I am driven by a desire to put something into the world that I find lacking in my life, and I try to correct for that lack by making works of art that give me the environment that I would rather be living in. Originally, I became a director simply because nobody else would direct my plays. I didn’t really direct any material other than my own until I did Threepenny Opera at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977.
How does a young man from Scarsdale who goes to Brown and Yale in the 1950s, and then goes to New York to write Broadway comedies, become a unique revolutionary artist in the theatre?
For some reason, from the time I was very young, I had an attraction for the strangest material. I read The Skin of Our Teeth for the first time at about 12 and thought, “It’s like a dream, it’s so weird, it’s wonderful.” I remember seeing Elia Kazan’s production of Camino Real, which I dragged my Scarsdale parents to, and they said, “What’s this all about?
I have always gravitated to things that try to talk on some more spiritually oriented level, rather than realistic discussions and manipulations of the real, practical, empirical world in which we live.
The big revelation was discovering Brecht—and especially his saying that you could have a theatre that was not based on empathy. For some reason, even at an early age, what I hated in the theatre was a kind of asking for love that I saw manifested on the stage, getting a unified reaction from everybody in the audience. Brecht said it didn’t have to be like that, and until I was in my mid-20s, he was the beginning, middle and end of everything for me.
That only changed when I came to New York and encountered the beginnings of the underground film movement. I discovered that people my age were making their own movies, operating on a level that was akin to poetry rather than storytelling. And thought, “Aha! Why couldn’t the techniques of poetry that operate in film, operate in theatre?”
Your plays have been examined and explained and analyzed in an effort to understand their meanings. As a director, do you feel the need to insert guidelines in your work to give it clarity?
Yes, more and more. Oftentimes, however, people find those explanations confusing. First of all, things change and we get older, and I don’t know if what I do is quite as hard to understand these days at it was 15 years ago—because other people are doing similar things. Other currents of thought are in the air.
In fact, some of my explanations are couched in terms that are rather difficult because to be true to what I’m trying to get at is difficult. I don’t think of myself as doing anything radically new or different. I think of myself as being a meeting point for all kinds of ideas, all kinds of feelings, that are around us at hand. It seems to me that I’m dealing all the time with things that are in the air, both as a director and as a writer. I take them and I try to play with them in an exhilarating way. Part of the difficulty is that people are sitting there thinking, “Yes, but is he saying that we should be this, that, or the other thing?” I don’t think that’s my function as an artist. My function is to enjoy and help my audience enjoy an exhilarating kind of play with all of the elements that are present in this very heterogeneous culture where we have hundreds of years of history—and everything that’s been thought and felt in all those hundreds of years—readily available on bookshelves, TV, cassettes, records. It’s all there as never before, and how do you keep your head above water? Well, you learn how to ice skate on the crystallized surface of the pond, underneath which is all of the morass of these hundreds and thousands of years of history.
You’re trying to be a medium, to let all of these messages come through. Your task is to make some kind of harmony out of them. You do have to eliminate some of the noise so that something is perceptible. I have never been in favor of the kind of big undisciplined soup theatre that for me a lot of the 1960s mixed-media things were. Even though many people can’t perceive it, I’ve always been an extremely structurally oriented artist who tries to clean everything up. As a director, my one criticism of myself is that I’m too neat—I’ve tried to keep the event too clean, too defined, too much under control, and I wish at times that I could be a little messier as a director, as I am in my writing.
Is this cleanliness, this structure, tied to the way you work with actors? You’ve said before that you tend to be dictatorial in terms of detail, movement, placement and timing. All of those details seem to come exclusively from you.
This is less true today than five years ago. Unless I am totally deluded, these days the vast majority of actors I work with find it a positive experience, whereas in the early days some of them definitely felt very constrained. I still block the play and I still ask for all kinds of specific things. I never ask an actor to do something he’s uncomfortable with.
Your use of space and the scenography for your plays is also “neat and defined,” to use your words.
There’s no denying that my main interest in the theatre is compositional, that I am interested in the interplay of all the elements. I am not interested in the theatre where the audience becomes seduced by a kind of empathetic relationship to the actors.
And yet, in a sense, audiences are seduced because there’s so much humor in your plays. We laugh, we find it amusing.
I think people should laugh more. Audiences are often afraid of laughing because a) things are going so fast that they think they might miss something, and b) I come with this reputation of being tough and intellectual and radical. I’ve had friends of mine sit in the theatre at my plays laughing, and people sitting in front of them look back at them as if it were some sacrilege.
Your famous wires stretched across the stage seem to suggest an alchemy, a science. It has come to the point where a designer can’t put a wire across the stage without having it referred to as “a Richard Foreman wire.”
Yes. But all those things of mine are slowly disappearing, at least becoming more minimal. When I did a revival of Arthur Kopit’s End of the World With Symposium to Follow for American Repertory Theatre, we were starting to rehearse, and [ART artistic director] Bob Brustein came and sat next to me. He said, “You know, this is really going well. But tell me something, are you really committed to those strings?”
With those taut strings, are you trying to frame stage areas, to bring them into more concise focus?
Visually, there’s somehow a connection with those drawings in antiquity where human figures are extended along straight lines. It’s hard for me to talk about, really, but somehow there is an articulation of the space—so that it’s almost as if the actors are overlaid by a kind of grid. It’s almost like a musical staff. I just like knowing where I am physically and, somehow, also on a spiritual and emotional level. Those strings define some kind of force field, some kind of reverberation box within which whatever is going on in the play reverberates even more intensely. It’s like someone sketching who may start making lines of force, feeling the need to work with a diagonal, and then the body grows out of that.
Almost a connection with God.
Well, it does connect with God in that it connects with what I think are the most abstract spiritual energies—the kind of nervous motor energy that wants to find a way to concretely manifest itself in the three-dimensional world. It starts out as impulse. And my technique in the theatre is to feel the impulse, not knowing yet what it means or how it wants to work, but to let the impulse lead me. Then it takes on a three-dimensional, actorly, prop-like form—but I remember to always keep present for the spectator a kind of interplay between the original thrust, the place that it came from, and the real three-dimensional human, physical manifestation that it takes on at this particular historical moment. The impulse leads to another impulse, which leads to another impulse. I work the same way when I’m doing Brecht or Molière or Kopit.
That’s easier to envision in your own plays than in something like Don Juan or Threepenny Opera. In those cases, how does that impulse manifest itself in you as a director?
When you’re actually working on something, you don’t think conceptually. At least, I don’t. It’s important for me to delineate the way in which the play grows. The first thing I do is make a set. These days I generally design the set even when I’m working with a designer—I basically build a model that I give the designer. The set for me means creating a kind of space that both implies the grid of this original thrust, the energy of this original abstract thrust, as well as the specific locale of the play. Given the proper set, I then have within it different layers of being so that this impulse can realize itself.
In addition to strings, a lot of my sets use railings and specific geometric divisions of space that might suggest a courthouse, a bullring, a synagogue. Now all of these enclosures somehow immediately give me a grid-like place within which to work. That’s both the suggestion of the impulse of wanting to present things to your fellow man plus defining special sacred private places where you are alone with your soul or whatever. At the very root, it allows me to play with more public impulses as well as more private impulses within any text. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it seems to me those are the energies that are set up.
The next thing I do is get music organized. All my plays, including the classical plays and the contemporary plays that I haven’t written, have music behind the text most of the time. Those are taped loops that I make myself, that I take from a variety of sources. Again, I choose music that somehow takes a section of the text and makes a comment on it or lifts it into a slightly different plane. For instance, in Arthur Kopit’s play, while a general is talking about why the United States has such and such a nuclear policy, the music suggests the kinds of desires about how one wants to live one’s life that end up producing a general who’s going to work for the Pentagon, who’s going to try to defend America.
Do you sometimes choose music that is in opposition to the action of the play?
Oh, sure. That’s an old Brechtian technique, of course, to distance, to estrange. But I don’t think about that conceptually. It’s a way of working that happens almost automatically. At the moment, I don’t tell myself why it’s interesting. It just seems right to me. We start rehearsing from the first day with all that music.
Your major collaboration has been with composer Stanley Silverman, working on some five operas, including Dream Tantras for Western Massachusetts, Hotel for Criminals, and Doctor Selavy’s Magic Theatre, all of which you directed.
The productive thing about Stanley and me is that he understands completely what I’m doing. In that sense, he’s one of the most perceptive and intelligent people I’ve ever worked with in the theatre. We have somewhat different tastes, and I think he isn’t as interested in some of the really far-out things I’m interested in. We generally have one or two meetings where I give him the words and he’s interested to find out what I think is going on and what kind of music I imagine. That doesn’t necessarily mean he would write it that way. We’re friendly, but we’ve never talked that seriously about anything.
Then the setting, the music, and all of this has been digested in advance of rehearsals. Is that basically a subconscious gestation?
Absolutely. Before I go into rehearsal I know my stuff, but I don’t sit pondering over the play. I read it once or twice and make very brief notes about staging ideas in terms of the set I’ve designed. But they’re all tentative. Any text includes hundreds of possibilities. Until I hear the specific actors that I am using, I don’t know in which direction I’m going to be logically led. I will discover certain things they are emphasizing or that seem to be true because of their personality that relates to certain possibilities in the play. Then my task is to strengthen that line of interpretation.
Of course, I do have a clear idea of what I think the play is saying and the direction I want to take it. It’s like being shipwrecked on a new planet. How do you live on this planet? It demands certain things, there are certain rules you have to abide by to live on this planet. But, within that, you could build a house with five rooms, a two-story house or a lean-to. Those are the decisions you make in the rehearsal period. The only way I know how to work is three-dimensionally, to get up immediately on your feet with the actors and feel things in the body and make it happen that way. It’s my articulation of the actors and space, vis-à-vis the text psychologically, that I’m proudest of, and I have absolute total confidence that I know how to do it.
What kinds of images do you give the actors?
I remember when I used to say to the actors in Don Juan that what we were trying to evoke was something that resembled what you see if you picture the seashore, the waves crashing against the rocks. And there’s all this foam. I’m trying to create a theatrical event which is like the energy and activity of that foaming as the waves crash against the rocks. Out of that foam, “Oh, look! There’s Don Juan!” And then he gets swept back into the foam of cosmic energy. “And there’s Sganarelle!” And he goes back into the foam, and what happens in the play rises and sinks in this foam of life energy. With my music and with the particular kind of blocking I do, that’s what I’m after.
Your stage movement in crowd scenes is especially skillful.
Even though I’ve often been called a hermetic artist—and in certain ways I am—to stage a play to me is to stage a public event. That influences the way that I would use crowds. That goes further than simply saying that I’m not interested in fourth-wall theatre. I want everybody to be aware of the fact that they are watching a show.
I remember once trying to do an opera for the New York City Opera. I was very young at the time. I went to Julius Rudel, and he said to me, “What are you trying to do here, and what’s your interest in theatre?” I said, “Well, the best thing a friend ever said to me was, ‘Richard, I really enjoyed watching
your play. Even more than I enjoyed watching it, I enjoyed watching myself watching it.’” Rudel looked at me and said, “That is the most disgusting comment I’ve ever heard. That is self-indulgent. You should want to capture the audience and make them forget about themselves.” Well, we come from different worlds.
This is a major conflict for audiences and theatre artists alike.
Sure. I’m perfectly open to the possibility that five years from now I may decide, “Hey, Rudel was right. What is all that junk I’ve been doing for the last 20 years?”
Is that ability you have to block groups of people something that can be learned?
It may be. There are various theories that any talent you have is a compensation for a lack. I am terribly physically inhibited. I have never had the guts to get up in a disco or anywhere else and dance. The third or fourth play I ever staged was Threepenny Opera. Here was shy Richard, who had never gotten up on a dance floor, and all of a sudden I’m confronted with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene, and I have to stage musical numbers and dances.
Still, when it comes to making art, the last thing in the world I would ever think of doing is to try applying any of the things that I’ve learned from reading. It has to be a spontaneous process, and I never think about all of that intellectual baggage when I’m making a work of art. At this point, I probably don’t think about it any differently from Neil Simon or Hal Prince, but it just comes out different because we’re different people.
You once said, “Style attacks with truth—where man most deeply is, but where he has the least developed navigational techniques.”
Believe it or not, even when I was 15 years old and used to go to Broadway theatre every weekend, I hated all the hits but occasionally I’d see flops that I thought were wonderful. Americans just don’t understand that style can be content, and style has things to say. Invariably, people never understand that in art, stylistic position is a moral position, an intellectual position, and carries the real content, the real meaning. That lack of understanding is continually frustrating. But it’s easy to see why it’s so difficult. In order to live your life in a normal capitalistic society, you have to put blinders on so that you are not distracted from the things that you have to do to get on in this world.
To add to that conflict, your early productions shocked audiences with sound and lights.
I think people still tend to find my work abrasive and aggressive. I still use lights in the audience’s eyes. I don’t use loud buzzers anymore. But a lot of that stuff is still there because I want to wake the audience up, to stop them from being seduced by what they’re watching. Lucidity, clarity, waking up. That’s what I’m interested in, both in my life and in my art, for myself and my audience. I’ve discussed this with some other modern directors like Elizabeth LeCompte [of the Wooster Group]. We make these things up because it makes us feel better. It’s not to torture people. It’s to feel good, like after you’ve had a workout in the gym.
But, of course, by doing that you sometimes run into hostility.
I’ve been very lucky because I’ve been able to do exactly what I wanted to do in the theatre for 20 years. That quest is an attempt to bring onto stage the operations of some other energy that is not the energy of the human—the socialized human personality. I am trying to do it, believe it or not, through rhythm. A lot of people have always said, “Foreman is basically a visual artist.” I am interested in a kind of dialectical relationship between what you see and what you hear, which becomes a kind of rhythmic articulation—an evocation of a different level of being, a different kind of energy that one can bring into life.
Why have you extended yourself to other work besides your own plays?
The reason I’m doing plays other than my own now is to see whether this particular kind of rhythmic articulation is applicable to all kinds of works. One way to relate it is the old theory of the Jewish cabala, that the world we live in is a world of broken pieces of physical material, reality, and our task as human beings is to somehow find the spark of light in these things and lift them back to God, to the wholeness that there supposed to have. I know how pretentious that sounds, but I’m trying to take things that show the picture of our fallen physical world and find a way to organize it rhythmically so that somehow it starts to swirl and starts to lift and some other quality comes through that restores it to something else in the cosmos.
Do you find yourself limited by your own frame of reference when directing your own work?
When I am directing my own material, I have no inhibitions about treating “Richard the author” as a joke, with contempt, making fun of him all the time, making fun of my text. I automatically do that with all texts that I’m working on. So I have to watch my Ps and Qs if an Arthur Kopit is around. It doesn’t mean that I don’t respect his text, but to me you’ve got to play with this stuff, you’ve got to handle it like it’s just stuff. It’s not holy. The great relaxation of dealing with one’s own scripts is you can say, “What is this garbage this guy wrote? How are we going to fix this mess?”
You’ve worked abroad a great deal in the past few years, but now you’re back in this country for an extended period. Is that because you feel that the pendulum will swing back in the next few years to where audiences will be willing to hear all kinds of disturbing, less rational truths?
I think I’m interested in America because I had a problem most of my life in wanting to cast out all of those traits that I didn’t like about myself. And one of the traits I didn’t like about myself was being, to the bottom of my soles, an American. I feel that the American culture is an adolescent culture. I feel that I’m an adolescent and I idolized what I thought was the greater maturity and sophistication of Europeans. I wanted to identify with that but, finally, it ain’t me. I have to come back and work out of the dumb, naive openness that is a great strength of America, but was very hard for me to accept.
This article is adapted from Arthur Bartow’s forthcoming book of interviews, The Director’s Voice, to be published in February 1988 by Theatre Communications Group.
