Richard Foreman (1937–2025)

Richard Foreman (1937–2025)

Iconoclastic avant-garde playwright and director Richard Foreman, who lifted up fresh voices as regularly and with as much gusto as he penned wild new plays—more than fifty, in all—died on January 4 in New York City of complications of pneumonia. He was eighty-seven. The founder of the now legendary off-off-Broadway Ontological-Hysteric Theater, he earned seven Obie awards over his career—three of them for Best Play of the Year—the fruits of his fertile imagination and fearless devotion to plunging into untested waters, dragging his audiences with him. “For many years,” wroteNew York Timestheater critic Ben Brantley this past December, “Foreman would allow us to lose our own minds by walking straight into his.”

Richard Foreman was born Edward L. Friedman on June 10, 1937, in New York, and adopted by a Scarsdale, New York, couple, who awarded him the name he would carry all his life. A preternaturally shy child, he was introduced to the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan at the tender age of nine and began writing plays in high school. The teenaged Foreman traveled regularly to midtown Manhattan, where he found himself fascinated and revolted in equal measure by the bright lights and blatant pandering of big Broadway shows, which stood in contrast to his own unconventional tastes. These tastes would soon lead him to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Gertrude Stein and that of avant-garde New York filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Foreman attended Brown University, graduating with a degree in English, and the Yale School of Drama, graduating with an MFA in playwriting in 1962. While at Yale, he studied under John Gassner, the onetime literary manager of the Theater Guild.

“He said, ‘Richard, you know, you have talent, and I don’t say that to everybody,’” Foreman told theBrooklyn Railin 2020. “‘But you make one big mistake. You find an effect that you like, and you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.’ So, I went home and thought, ‘Oh boy, I better do something about that.’ But then I thought, well, wait a minute. If that’s what I like to do, couldn’t I radicalize that? Make it my style? Which,” he concluded, “is what I did.”

Taking as his goal the “disorientation massage,” in contrast to Aristotle’s goal of catharsis, Foreman in 1968 founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and—filling the roles of director, lighting and sound designer, and tech himself—set about staging his own plays. Bearing such jarringly evocative titles asMy Head Was a Sledgehammer,Permanent Brain Damage, andWake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!, these were characterized by their collagelike natures and nonlinear plots themed around the problems of the body and those of the mind, as well as by their shoestring sets and stentorian narration, delivered by an offstage Foreman. He inaugurated his new endeavor withAngelface, 1968, which opened at Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque on Wooster Street, after the fire department forbid Mekas to show films there. Two years later, he won his first Obie, forElephant Steps, an opera he wrote with composer Stanley Silverman, with whom he frequently collaborated. Six more followed, along with a Lifetime Achievement in the Theater award from the National Endowment for the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the PEN American Center Master American Dramatist Award. In 2004, he was elected an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.

At the same time that he was rattling audiences—in some instances right out of their seats and out the theater door—Foreman was elevating the work of emerging artists, dramatists, and designers through various internships, staffing opportunities, summer residencies, and curation efforts, including the Obie Award-winning Blueprint Series, which he initiated in 1992, after the Ontological-Hysteric Theater moved into its longtime home at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. Among those whose careers he helped kickstart are theater ensembles Elevator Repair Service, Radiohole, and the National Theater of the United States of America; theater director Pavol Liska; and playwright Young Jean Lee.

Foreman additionally directed the plays of others, notably Brecht and Kurt Weill’sThe Threepenny Operaat Lincoln Center, New York; Molière’sDon Juanat the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; and Suzan-Lori Parks’sVenus, whose premiere he directed for New York’s Public Theater. In his typically unquenchable style, he remained engaged in his work until he died. His most recent play,Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, premiered last month at La MaMa, in Manhattan’s East Village, in a production mounted by Brooklyn-based theater company Object Collection, many of whose members launched their careers with Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

“Farewell to Richard Foreman, one of theater’s ultimate auteurs, who turned human uncertainty into the stuff of crackling, head-spinning spectacles,” wrote the Times’s Brantley on Threads. “A titan has left the stage.”