Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman was an American avant-garde experimental playwright, director, and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Though highly original and singular, his work was influenced by Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, The Living Theatre, Surrealism and Dada. In the writing of his scripts the Dada cut-up technique was used.
Foreman often played the central godhead puppet master during his plays as he sat in the center of the audience in the director/engineer’s seat from which he controlled the sound effects and other stage craft. He often spoke parts of the script in an omniscient voice through pre-recordings.
In May of 2025, The Brooklyn Rail published a Tribute to Richard Foreman with contributions from poet Charles Bernstein, musician John Zorn, Richard Schechner, Kate Valk, Bonnie Marranca, P. Adams Sitney, Shauna Kelly, painter Susan Bee, Tony Torn, Jay Sanders, executive director and chief curator of Artists Space, Andrew Lampert, Tom Sellar, Travis Just, Felix Bernstein, Ivan Sokolov, Willem Dafoe, and artist/performer Kate Manheim.
Achievements and awards
Foreman wrote, directed and designed over 50 of his own plays, both in New York City and abroad. He received three Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year, and received four other Obies for directing and for sustained achievement. Foreman has received the annual Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.Early life and education
Edward L. Friedman was born in New York City on June 10, 1937. He was adopted by Albert and Claire Foreman of Scarsdale, New York, who changed his name to Richard Foreman. Foreman's birth mother was an orthodox Jew, and his birth father was Catholic "with artistic talent," according to information he received from the Jewish adoption agency, Louise Wise Services. Both his adopted parents were Jewish. Foreman said, "...my parents were very supportive, but nevertheless, I didn't feel that close to them in certain ways." At Scarsdale High School, from which he graduated in 1955, Foreman was heavily involved in the theater department.A 2018 documentary produced by the Lower East Side Biography Project outlined Foreman's early motivations for pursuing work in the theater. The documentary maintains that Foreman suffered from extreme shyness as a child; it also reveals his adoption.
Foreman went on to study at Brown University and received an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1962. As a freshman, he starred as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, receiving much acclaim, despite his later stated antipathy for Miller's work. Later at Brown, Foreman founded the Production Workshop, Brown University's student theatre group, while taking part in other student theater productions. In 1993, Brown presented him with an honorary doctorate. At Yale, Foreman studied under John Gassner, the drama critic and former literary manager at The Theatre Guild.
Career
Early career and artistic influences
Richard Foreman moved to New York City directly after graduating from Yale School of Drama and worked as a manager of apartment complexes. Before finding his footing as a theater practitioner, Foreman became an avid patron of New York's downtown experimental theater and film scene. Foreman described feeling "overwhelmed" upon seeing The Living Theatre's productions of The Connection and The Brig. Foreman also attended screenings of avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas at The Living Theatre. Mekas' early cinematic work had a profound impact on Foreman. In The Lower East Side Biography Project documentary, Foreman stated, "those really got to me. I thought this is the most poetic, beautiful, creative art that I've seen Americans producing." Foreman claimed that, for a long time, he was too shy to introduce himself to Judith Malina and Julian Beck or to Jonas Mekas, but fascinated by Mekas' work, Foreman and his wife, Amy Taubin, began following Mekas as he filmed various projects in New York.Foreman finally inserted himself into the avant-garde scene when police interrupted a screening and seized a copy of the 1963 film, Flaming Creatures, and charged Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and Florence Karpf for violating New York's obscenity laws. Foreman called Mekas, offering his help, and over the following years, Foreman and Mekas became close friends and collaborators.
Through his connection to Jonas Mekas, Foreman became acquainted with Fluxus architect and artist, George Maciunas. Foreman began working for Mekas and Maciunas, overseeing their movie theater, at 80 Wooster Street. Foreman also became heavily involved in the development of Maciunas' , which consisted of converted SoHo lofts designed to be living and working spaces for artists.
During the 1960s, Foreman also got to know theater director Robert Wilson, filmmaker and actor Jack Smith, and theater director and scholar Richard Schechner, all of whom encouraged Foreman to start producing his own work. With Schechner, Foreman formed a theater collective in 1968 called "A Bunch of Experimental Theaters of New York Inc," which included seven theater companies: Mabou Mines, The Manhattan Theatre Club, Meredith Monk/The House, The Performance Group, The Theatre of the Ridiculous, Section Ten, and Foreman's company, Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. From this point on, Foreman began producing works under the moniker "Ontological-Hysteric."
Influence of Gertrude Stein
A number of scholars have called attention to the parallels between the theories of Gertrude Stein and Richard Foreman's theatrical aesthetics. Foreman himself has spoken about the significance of her writings to his work. In 1969, Foreman declared, "Gertrude Stein obviously was doing all kinds of things we haven't event caught up to yet."Kate Davy analyzes Stein's influence on Foreman in her article, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre: The Influence of Gertrude Stein. The primary connection between the works of Stein and Foreman, she proposes, is the writers' conception of consciousness in writing. Stein preferred "entity writing" over "identity writing." According to Stein's model, "entity writing" is "the 'thing-in-itself' detached from time and association, while identity is the 'thing-in-relation,' time-bound, clinging in association." "Entity writing" is free from any notion of remembering, relationships, or narratives, and it expresses what Stein called the "continuous present." Stein's method of writing is meditative practice that requires the writer's "deliberate detachment of oneself from the external world while documenting one's own consciousness in the act of writing." Therefore, this type of writing is said to reflect the workings of the writer's mind in its presentation. Stein adopted this theory of the "continuous present" to her work as a playwright. She abandoned the theatrical conventions of narrative structure in favor of a theatrical experience that focuses on the real-time consciousness—one in which "the spectator can move 'out' of the composition, or stop, at any moment without creating syncopated emotional time."
Foreman's theatrical experiences invoke Stein's theories in that they both abandon narrative, focusing on the here-and-now, and they seem to include Foreman's "process of making the play" in the presentation of the play. In his essay, "How I Write My," Foreman explains his process of taking text to performance: "The writing tending towards a more receptive, open, passive receiving of 'what wants to be written' and the staging tending towards more active organization of the 'arrived' elements of the writing -- finding ways to make the writing inhabit a constructed environment."
Davy notes that like Stein, Foreman tends to avoid "'emotional traps' or the intentional manipulation of an audiences emotional responses by eliminating the 'lifelike' qualities of drama, thereby creating a world into which the spectator has great difficulty projecting himself." Davy gives the example of Foreman's characters often referring to themselves in the third person, which creates an alienating effect for the audience member who cannot project themself into the experience of the character. Through Foreman's alienating characterization, the audience is made to look at Foreman's actors as "self-enclosed units," or theatrical props, rather than characters. Therefore, Foreman's aesthetics demand that the spectator not escape into the play, but become conscious of their own process of interpretation. In Foreman's essay, "14 Things I Tell Myself," he elaborates, "Our art then = a learning how to look at 'A' and 'B' and see not them but a relation that cannot be 'seen.' You can't look at 'it' because it IS the looking itself. That's where he looking is, doing the looking." Davy points out that "by eliminating internal punctuation in long complicated sentences," Stein's writing produces a similar effect for her readers who have to actively take part in discerning Stein's words.