Richard Foreman, the relentlessly teasing, intentionally mysterious avant-garde playwright and impresario who based the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, received a bookshelf stuffed with Obie Awards and obtained a MacArthur fellowship in his late 50s, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87.
David Herskovits, the creative director of Goal Margin Theater in Brooklyn and a co-executor of Mr. Foreman’s literary property, mentioned the loss of life, at Mount Sinai West Hospital, was from problems of pneumonia.
Mr. Foreman established his firm in 1968 and went on to current greater than 50 of his personal performs; for a few years the group was housed at St. Mark’s within the Bowery, the historic East Village church. The corporate title refers back to the metaphysical examine of the character of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the conditions he labored with had been, as he informed John Rockwell of The New York Occasions in 1976, “mainly hysteric — repressed passions rising as philosophical interactions.”
The titles of his performs hinted at his worldview. “Dream Tantras for Western Massachusetts” (1971) was one in every of quite a few collaborations with the composer Stanley Silverman. “My Head Was a Sledgehammer” (1979) depicted a professor and two college students dealing with the frustrations of buying data. “Unhealthy Boy Nietzsche!” (2000) was about that German thinker’s nervous breakdown. “King Cowboy Rufus Guidelines the Universe!” (2004) was impressed by the George W. Bush administration.
Different titles, like “Complete Recall” (1970), “Vertical Mobility” (1974) and “Everlasting Mind Harm” (1996), had been extra concise however no much less resonant.
Mr. Foreman’s performs tended to be “peerless mini-extravaganzas” providing “dizzying theatrical joys,” Ben Brantley wrote in a single 2004 Occasions evaluate. Taking a look at Mr. Foreman’s physique of labor, he additionally talked about the acquainted “cross-cultural medley of musical fragments, the strings and poles that section the stage, weak child dolls and menacing thugs in animal outfits.”
The identical evaluate known as Mr. Foreman’s energy as a author “his refusal to spell something out.”
Mr. Foreman was acknowledged and rewarded early in his profession. He obtained his first Obie Award in 1970, sharing it with Mr. Silverman, for “Elephant Steps,” which has generally been described as an opera a few radio present. It had its premiere on the Tanglewood music pageant in Massachusetts in 1968.
When “Elephant Steps” got here to Hunter School in Manhattan two years later, the chief classical music critic of The Occasions, Harold C. Schonberg, discovered it “all very stylish,” however he additionally confessed, “I don’t know what the hell was happening.”
Mr. Foreman went on to win a half-dozen extra Obies, first in 1973 for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater itself, then in 1976 for “Rhoda in Potatoland,” an almost two-hour one-act present a few girl having weird goals.
On two events he received Obies for finest play in the identical yr — which means that he primarily tied with himself for the highest award: for “The Remedy” (with an emphasis on patient-doctor relations) and “Movie Is Evil, Radio Is Good” (the title was the theme) in 1987; then for “Pearls for Pigs” (a few mentally disturbed actor) and “Benita Canova” (about imply schoolgirls) in 1998. Some individuals rely these as two Obies, others as 4.
In between, Mr. Foreman obtained one of the best director award for Vaclav Havel’s “Largo Desolato” (1986) and a particular Obie (1988) for sustained achievement.
In 1995, when he was 58, Mr. Foreman obtained a MacArthur Basis fellowship, popularly often called the “genius grant.” The muse praised him for his “authentic imaginative and prescient and dedication to creating new theatrical vocabularies” that influenced the course of American avant-garde theater.
Nobody might credibly accuse Mr. Foreman of abandoning his bohemian roots and going mainstream, however he did direct and design quite a few classical works and operas each in the USA and overseas. They included Johann Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus” on the Paris Opera, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at Opéra de Lille, France, Molière’s “Don Juan” on the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Joseph Papp’s manufacturing of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” at Lincoln Middle in New York.
Mr. Foreman was well-known in SoHo, the place he purchased a 3,600-square-foot loft for $10,000 in 1970. (“Now it’s all Boutiqueville,” he noticed regretfully, referring to the neighborhood, in a 2013 Occasions interview.) Early in his profession he was identifiable by his matching darkish hair, eyebrows and walrus-style mustache. Many years later, when the mustache was gone and his hairline had receded, The Ahead described him affectionately as “a matted, egg-shaped man with lengthy, stringy hair and frayed, formless garments.”
Affected by gentle sensitivity, Mr. Foreman mentioned, he often rose nicely earlier than daybreak, coated the condo’s skylights with material and went to mattress round 7 p.m. He was a frequent napper. “I lie round, I nod off,” he informed The Occasions. “It’s been a lifetime of bits and items.”
It was a lifetime of goal as nicely. “I’ve by no means been very completely happy in regards to the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Decrease East Facet Biography Mission. “So what makes me tick is that this obsessive want to determine what isn’t right here that I need to be right here. I make performs — or no matter you need to name them — to attempt to fill that nice huge void.”
Richard Foreman was born Edward Friedman on June 10, 1937, in Staten Island. He was adopted by Albert Foreman, a lawyer, and his spouse, Claire (Levine) Foreman; the Foremans quickly moved to Scarsdale, in Westchester County.
Richard graduated from Scarsdale Excessive Faculty, the place he confirmed an early curiosity in theater, showing in school productions. He additionally produced and directed Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” there, simply two years after the play’s 1953 opening on Broadway. He graduated in 1959 from Brown College, the place he majored in English and helped kind the scholar theater group there; he additionally generally designed units. Three years later, he obtained an M.F.A. from the Yale Faculty of Drama (now the David Geffen Faculty of Drama at Yale).
His father helped him get his first job, managing condo buildings in New York, Mr. Foreman mentioned within the Biography Mission interview. That gave him a versatile schedule and allowed him to pursue creative tasks. His father then helped him once more, exhibiting one in every of his early performs to somebody on the influential Shubert group, who inspired him and launched him to a producer.
Early on, Mr. Foreman turned a part of a downtown filmmaking group that included Jonas Mekas. With Mr. Mekas as his guru, he made movie shorts within the Nineteen Seventies, tailored his play “Robust Drugs” to movie in 1981 and returned to film manufacturing in 2012 with “As soon as Each Day” and a documentary about its making, “My Identify Is Rainer Thompson and I’ve Misplaced It Utterly.”
His final movie was “Mad Love” (2018), a 70-minute reverie, largely in grainy black and white, launched by PennSound Cinema. Its central picture was of a well-dressed man inserting his index finger right into a well-dressed girl’s open mouth.
The final play he produced and directed himself was “Previous-Customary Prostitutes (A True Romance),” which opened on the Public Theater in 2013. In a evaluate of the play, which he known as a “gleeful mind- and memory-bender” about an getting older man watching the current “flip into the previous,” Mr. Brantley praised Mr. Foreman as “probably the most eminent elder statesman of the avant-garde in New York theater.”
Mr. Foreman’s first play in a decade, “Suppose Lovely Madeline Harvey,” about, on the floor, a girl and a person at a boulevard cafe, was staged in December at LaMaMa, the East Village experimental theater, and directed by Kara Feely.
Mr. Foreman married his highschool buddy Amy Taubin, an actress who turned a New York movie critic, in 1961; they divorced in 1972. In 1988, he married the artist and actress Kate Manheim, who has appeared in a variety of his performs. She is his solely speedy survivor.
In a 2013 essay in The Ahead, Joshua Furst in contrast the facility of Mr. Foreman’s work to the Jewish custom of davening: “For those who let the rhythm of his rocking enter you, he’ll remind you what it feels prefer to be ecstatic, what it’s to be hysterical, what it means to circle the meaningless void that’s the wellspring of all which means.”
Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
