On Dec. 13 — a Friday, wouldn’t you know — I heard Richard Foreman talking to me as if in a dream. As had always been his wont, he was ruminating with a kind of appalled resignation about the unreliability of our own thoughts and perceptions.
He wasn’t there in person. He has been ill. But his recorded voice occasionally filled the air like that of some tutelary demon. I was at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, where the troupe Object Collection was putting on a work called “Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey,” in which a woman at a boulevard cafe wonders if she even exists.
This was the first new play written by Foreman, 87, in a decade, though it was not staged or designed by him. Both these facts are big deals. But before I explain why, a little background.
Man With the Microphone
For many years, around just this time in the early winter, Foreman would allow us to lose our own minds by walking straight into his.
Others might celebrate the holidays at Radio City Music Hall or with a “Messiah” concert. But the annual seasonal spectacle to which I most looked forward, for more than dozen years starting in the early 1990s, took place in a theater at St. Mark’s Church, where one man was spilling the contents of his brain onto a stage no larger than a hotel room. These operated under the rubric of the company Foreman had founded in 1988, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Here, Foreman presided — as director, playwright, light and sound designer, and disembodied voice — over short, sharp shocks of plays with alarming names: “My Head Was a Sledgehammer,” “I Got the Shakes,” “Panic! (How to Be Happy!),” “Permanent Brain Damage.” That last title offers a fair description of the condition into which, in Foreman’s view, all human beings are born.
This innate disability was Foreman’s equivalent of original sin — an impairment that made knowledge and reality itself forever shifting, forever unreliable. His nonlinear, plot-free plays centered on hapless figures who roamed amid conspicuously homemade, string-segmented sets cluttered with everyday objects that seemed to have wills of their own. Small wonder that his beleaguered characters were as prone to pratfalls as slapstick comics.
They spoke in a language in which every assertion contained its own contradiction. “This happens! This really happens,” one of them might say. “But if mere actors speak this, then it no longer happens.” Or: “Truth revealed takes the unfortunate shape of everything that isn’t true.”
For anyone who wasn’t there, it’s hard to explain just how exhilarating these existentially challenged creatures could be. I, for one, found it cathartic to reconsider philosophical questions, in the largest sense, that I had mainly put aside after stoned, all-night gabfests in college but that continued to hum in some backroom of my brain.
Just as important for those of us who are never happier than when experiencing a perfectly realized play was the pure, razzmatazz theatricality and artistic discipline on the stage. Within each work’s short span (exactly 65 minutes), the actors executed their spills, collisions and self-sabotaging dialogue with the drill-team precision of Rockettes.
And always present, to the side in the front row, was Foreman himself, looking like a lugubrious basset hound as he operated the tech board and intoned ominously amplified directives and annotations: “Here’s tomorrow’s baked goods, stale already.” Or simply, “Wake up!”
Foreman’s characters might have no control over their daily lives, but the man with the microphone controlled their onstage existences with a completeness that few, if any, other playwrights have ever known. He was the ultimate auteur, dotting every “i” and pulling every string, and the idea of a Foreman play in which Foreman wasn’t at the helm seemed an impossibility.
Adapting an Auteur’s Sensibility
But a decade after he renounced playmaking (he has said he was tired of repeating himself), other Foreman-loving theater artists are starting to put on Foreman plays. First came a revival of his “Symphony of Rats” (1988) by the Wooster Group, which I caught last year and which is returning to the Performing Garage in SoHo (not far from where Foreman still resides) next month.
Since that show’s directors were the Woosterites Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk, creative coevals of Foreman, this “Symphony” (about an American president in a melting wonderland) felt of a piece with the Foreman sensibility. True, it deployed the sophisticated technology that is more Wooster than Foreman. But, as Jason Zinoman wrote in his New York Times review, the show felt “like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another,” and it provided an affectionately skewed sense of déjà vu.
“Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey,” which runs through Dec. 22 at La MaMa, is a different animal. For one thing, it is made up of entirely new material. The show’s creators, the director Kara Feely and the composer Travis Just, are working not from a script but one of the many texts Foreman has been composing in recent years.
Foreman has said that his texts “are generated rather than written,” as if he were taking dictation from an unknown source. This one describes a chance, fleeting encounter between the title character, Madeline Harvey, and a man called “handsome Roger Vincent” at a boulevard cafe that may or may not be in Paris. That was also, sort of, the setting for Mr. Foreman’s last new work, “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” from 2013.
Somehow aliens and spontaneous combustion are involved. Of course it is really about the chimerical nature of time, memory and our all-too-fallible senses.
The setting for this thwarted pursuit of knowledge bears little resemblance to Foreman’s magical playrooms of yore. Despite the presence of monitor screens, the set brings to mind a host of more conventional dramas set in bars and cafes. Music — by Just, who had worked with Foreman on several productions — is omnipresent as it never was in previous Foreman shows, underscoring speech with sounds astral and suspenseful.
In the early performance I saw, the actors spoke their repeated, classically Foreman lines (one recurring phrase: “honey dripping from a silver spoon into a cup of frozen tea”) without that sense of certainty — or perhaps inevitability is the word — that characterized the Ontological-Hysteric versions. And the matching exact, hypnotic synchronicity of physical movement was only fitfully achieved.
But it’s worth remembering that Foreman said, in a 1982 interview, that he hadn’t liked the few productions he’d seen of his plays staged by others because “they weren’t different enough.” And he has always suggested that the most active force in his universe is the law of mutability.
“Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey” hearteningly shows that there are indeed younger artists longing to reinterpret the singular wonder of Foreman’s metaphysical play puzzles. Perhaps, after all, the sensibility of the man who wrote that “befuddlement can clarify” will endure longer than those enchanted, 65 minutes of stage time that exist only in our (most unreliable) memories.
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