A relentlessly teasing, purposefully enigmatic avant-garde playwright, an impresario who founded the ontological hysterical theater, a bookshelf full of Obie Awards, and a MacArthur Fellow in his late fifties. Richard Foreman died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87 years old.
David Herskovitz, artistic director of Brooklyn's Target Margin Theater and co-executor of Mr. Foreman's literary estate, said his death at Mount Sinai West Hospital was due to complications from pneumonia. said.
Mr. Forman founded his company in 1968 and went on to produce more than 50 of his own plays. For many years, the group was housed at St. Mark's historic East Village Church on the Bowery. The company's name is based on his metaphysical study of the nature of existence and his belief that, as he told John Rockwell of the New York Times in 1976, the situations he worked on were “fundamentally hysterical, filled with suppressed passions.” Forman's belief is that it emerges as a philosophical interaction.'' ”
The titles of his plays hinted at his worldview. “Dream Tantra for Western Massachusetts” (1971) is one of his many collaborations with composer Stanley Silverman. My Head Was a Sledgehammer (1979) is about a professor and two students who face setbacks in acquiring knowledge. “Bad Boy Nietzsche!” (2000) was about the German philosopher's nervous breakdown. “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!” (2004) was inspired by the George W. Bush administration.
Other titles, such as “Total Recall'' (1970), “Vertical Mobility'' (1974), and “Permanent Brain Damage'' (1996), are more concise but less resonant. It was.
Ben Brantley wrote in a 2004 review for The Times that Mr. Foreman's plays tended to be “unparalleled mini extravaganzas” that offered “dazzling theatrical delights.” Ta. Viewing Mr. Forman's body of work, he also noted the familiar “cross-cultural medleys of musical fragments, strings and poles that punctuate the stage, vulnerable baby dolls, and terrifying thugs in animal costumes.” Mentioned.
In the same book review, Forman's strength as a writer is that he “doesn't try to say anything.”
Mr. Foreman was recognized and rewarded early in his career. He won his first Obie Award in 1970, co-winning with Mr. Silverman for “Elephant Steps,'' sometimes described as an opera based on a radio show. It was first performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts in 1968.
Two years later, when “Elephant Steps” was performed at Hunter College in Manhattan, Harold C. Schoenberg, chief classical music critic for the Times, thought it was “all very chic,” but… , also confessed as follows. Hell continued. ”
Ms. Forman went on to win six more Obies Awards, first in 1973 for Ontological Hysterical Theater itself, and then in 1976 for the nearly two-hour one-act play about a woman who has strange dreams. Awarded for the show “Rhoda in Potatoland.'' .
It won the Orbies Award for Best Picture twice in the same year. This means that he essentially won the top prize at the same award with “The Cure'' (which focuses on the relationship between patient and doctor) and “Movies Are Bad, Radio is Good.'' ” (title is the theme) 1987. He then made 1998's “Pearls for Pigs” (about a mentally ill actor) and “Benita Canova” (about a mean high school girl). Some count these as two Obi, others as four.
During that time, Mr. Forman won the Best Director award for Václav Havel's Largo Desolato (1986) and the Special Obie Award for Lasting Achievement (1988).
In 1995, at the age of 58, Mr. Foreman received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant.” The foundation praised his “original vision and commitment to developing new theatrical language” that influenced the direction of American avant-garde theater.
Although no one could credibly criticize Mr. Forman for abandoning his bohemian roots to go mainstream, he directed and designed numerous classical works and operas in the United States and abroad. Among them are Johann Strauss's “Die Fledermaus” at the Paris Opera, Mozart's “Don Giovanni” at France's Lille Opera, Molière's “Don Juan” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and Joseph・It included Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's “The Threepenny Opera,'' directed by Papp. ” held at New York's Lincoln Center.
Mr. Foreman is well known in Soho, where he bought the 3,600-square-foot loft in 1970 for $10,000 (in a 2013 interview with The Times, he said of the neighborhood, “Now it's all boutique buildings. '' he said sadly.) During his career, he was recognizable by his matching dark hair, eyebrows, and walrus-like mustache. Decades later, when his mustache disappeared and his hairline receded, The Forward affectionately described him as “a disheveled oval-shaped man with long stringy hair and frayed, shapeless clothes.” ” was described.
Foreman, who suffered from photosensitivity, typically woke up well before dawn, covered his apartment's skylight with a cloth, went to bed around 7 p.m., and took frequent naps. “I'm lying down and dozing off,” he told the Times. “It was a fragmented life.”
It was also a life of purpose. “I've never felt very happy about the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Lower East Side Biography Project. “So what frustrates me is this obsession with finding out what's not here and why I want to be here. I'm trying to fill that big void with theater. , or whatever you want to call it.”
Richard Foreman was born Edward Friedman on June 10, 1937 in Staten Island. He was adopted by attorney Albert Foreman and his wife Claire (Levine) Foreman. The foreman's family soon moved to Scarsdale in Westchester County.
Richard graduated from Scarsdale High School, where he showed an early interest in theater and appeared in class productions. He also produced and directed Arthur Miller's “The Crucible” there, just two years after its 1953 Broadway premiere. He graduated from Brown University in 1959, where he majored in English and helped form the student theater group there. He also occasionally designed sets. Three years later, he received his MFA from Yale School of Drama (now Yale University's David Geffen School of Drama).
In an interview with the Biography Project, Mr. Foreman said his father helped him get his first job managing an apartment building in New York. This gave him a flexible schedule and allowed him to pursue artistic projects. His father then came to his aid again, showing one of his early plays to someone connected to the influential Schubert organization, who encouraged him and introduced him to a producer.
Mr. Forman early on became part of a downtown filmmaking group that included Jonas Mekas. With Mr. Mekas as his mentor, he made short films in the 1970s, adapted his play “Strong Medicine” into a film in 1981, and produced “Once Every Day” and the documentary about its making in 2012, “My He returned to film production with “Name''. Reiner Thompson and I were completely lost. ”
His last film was “Mad Love” (2018), a mostly grainy black-and-white 70-minute dreamy film released by PennSound Cinema. The central image was of a well-dressed man inserting his index finger into the open mouth of a well-dressed woman.
The last play he produced and directed himself was “Old Fashioned Prostitutes,'' which opened at the Public Theater in 2013. In his review of the play, he called it “a hilarious, mind-bending and memory-bending piece.” About an aging man who watches the present “give into the past,” Mr. Brantley praised Mr. Forman as “the most prominent elder statesman of the New York theater avant-garde.”
Mr. Foreman's first play in 10 years, “Assuming the Beautiful Madeline Harvey,'' ostensibly about a man and a woman in a Main Street cafe, opened in December at the East Village experimental theater La Mama, and was directed by Carla. – Directed by Feely. .
In 1961, Mr. Foreman married his high school friend, Amy Tobin, an actress who became a New York film critic. They divorced in 1972. In 1988, he married artist and actress Kate Manheim, who appeared in many of his plays. She is his only survivor.
In a 2013 essay for The Forward, Joshua Furst likened the power of Mr. Forman's work to the Jewish tradition of davening: What does it mean to be hysterical? What does it mean to wander through the meaningless emptiness that is the source of all meaning? ”
Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
