The Renegade Richard Foreman
yalereview.org
yalereview.org
>These were not plays in any traditional sense. Instead, Foreman created living works of art by “using everything” that a given moment in time brought to bear on his process. He began not with a completed script but with a raw running text, the lines of which he would assign during his monthslong rehearsals, arranging and rearranging his words, giving them to one actor then trying them out on another.
>The visual style of his earliest works resembled that of the surrealists: he composed tidy, witty tableaux of odd objects and strange people speaking what often seemed like stray thoughts, all of which briefly shared the air before careening into their next encounter. Later, the look of his productions became more macabre, almost menacing: he would litter the stage with stuff, visual interferences that prompted the audience to lean closer and look harder. Throughout, his plays remained fairly consistent, all running about seventy minutes and keeping his performers in a near-constant state of movement as they spouted lines that sounded as though a mystic had fallen through the looking glass or a philosopher had become stuck in a screwball comedy. These mind-melting, incandescent productions were equal parts theater, philosophy, literature, and visual art.
>He wrote and directed at least one new play a year, designing the sets as well as the sound, which comprised densely layered loops and samples that he himself played live at every performance.
>Foreman was a MacArthur Fellow whose genius status did not prevent handfuls of people from leaving the theater at nearly every single one of his shows.
Something the HN crowd can appreciate: he offered up his plays to the public, on his website ontological.com, free to stage or create new works or do what you wished.
If you have a spare sixty seven minutes, you could watch his play Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE