Richard Foreman
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Richard Foreman (born in New York on 10 June 1937) is an American playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer; he is the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Life
He graduated from Brown University (B.A. 1959), and received an MFA in Playwriting from Yale Drama School in 1962. In 1993, Brown presented him with an honorary doctorate. His dramatic works are driven by misunderstanding instead of the more traditional conflict. He describes his works as a "Theatre of Coincidence". The goal of his performances is a "Disorientation Massage", in contrast to Aristotle's goal of catharsis.
As of January 12th, 2006, Richard Foreman has written, directed and designed fifty-seven of his own plays both in New York City and abroad. Five of his plays have received Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year-—and he has received five other Obies for directing and for "sustained achievement". He 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 officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France. His archives and work materials have recently been acquired by the Bobst Library at New York University (NYU).
His work has been primarily done at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York, though he has gained acclaim as director for such productions as Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center and the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks's "Venus" at the Public Theater.
In 2004, Foreman established the Bridge Project with Sophie Haviland to promote international art exchange between countries around the world through workshops, symposiums, theater productions, visual art, performance and multimedia events. Starting with Zomboid (2006) Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric productions have incorporated the projection of video footage generated through Bridge workshops as a kind of "film-score" that the live performance is conducted in a relation to.
Foreman's plays have been co-produced by The New York Shakespeare Festival, La Mama Theatre, The Wooster Group, the Festival d'Autumn in Paris and the Vienna Festival. He has collaborated (as librettist and stage director) with composer Stanley Silverman on 8 music theater pieces produced by The Music Theater Group & The New York City Opera. He wrote and directed the feature film, Strong Medicine. He has also directed and designed many classical productions with major theaters around the world including, The Threepenny Opera, The Golem and plays by Václav Havel, Botho Strauss, and Suzan-Lori Parks for The New York Shakespeare Festival, Die Fledermaus at the Paris Opera, Don Giovanni at the Opera de Lille, Philip Glass's Fall of the House of Usher at the American Repertory Theater and The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Woyzeck at Hartford Stage Company, Molière's Don Juan at the Guthrie Theater and The New York Shakespeare Festival, Kathy Acker's Birth of the Poet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the RO theater in Rotterdam, Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at the Autumn Festivals in Berlin and Paris.
Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo. Richard Foreman's papers are located in the Fales Library at New York University. The Fales Library Guide to the Richard Foreman Papers
Prizes and awards
2004 Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France
2001 PEN/Laura Pels Master American Playwright Award
1995-2000 MacArthur Fellowship
1996 Edwin Booth Award for Theatrical Achievement
1992 & 1995 NEA Playwriting Fellowship
1992 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature
1990 NEA Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in Theater
1990 Ford Foundation play development grant for "Eddie Goes to Poetry City"
1974 Rockefeller Foundation Playwrights Grant
1972 Guggenheim for Playwriting
9 Village Voice "OBIEs", (including 3 for Best play, and one for Lifetime Achievement) Stand,Go,Am (A romp in ten easy Hans Liszt )
Bare with all Explicit limitations to Enjoy! with pleasure your Text, which does no wrong.
Because then, I had been. Or try it another way - I hadn't been.
But had you been (laughs) , would then it?! The same erstwhile!
It is high time to dazzle, but no, off you go, instead! Fixed in your ways you couldn't have meant to...
Dazzling with his erudition, the dog barks.
Close to the bone, the sinew, the rat!
That is why on the "Long March" the Chinese, who worshiped Mao, Eat Bark!
Hunger is a raw task master.
And so... And so...
Call you then that, my good man, a proper so? For if perhaps the better part of you has alluded, although obliquely in your glances, to a man's uneasy footing before the abyss.
Before such a shapely bosom, the bare bodkins of the mater lies exposed.
Tinkering is it? Trifling then? A day and night its... its... Sameness, prepared with silence, Eh! Silencio, silentium est aureum.
Sameness he says, in its particulars, is golden red, in the apoplectic tenderness of his sinewy heart, in the tones of an utter idiot!
From sea to sea, Abuse is prettier when covered over by Shit.
He knows the English aristocracy well!
And why then, but for who is the gainsman?
Had I know It was you dear sir, had I but know all these things, How fair my life should have been, How awfully fine!
I had cast my belt at the stars and hit my eye with the buckle.
Having begun to exist, you should of known better!
I has been, err, naturally planing to throttle some of Hegel's propositions, but thought it, err, beneath the dignity.
The common dignity, what a fine thing!
Had a "German Hatter!" gone then to Chermashnya, since it stands closer then does Moscow, which borders the Hudson river basin.
Alluvium and alluvial drift be damned!
Without people in ones way, one does not know hunger pains.
Ah yes, Hunger, an invention of the petite bourgeois, to scare away ghosts! (laughs).