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Richard Foreman, the relentlessly teasing, intentionally mysterious avant-garde playwright and impresario who based the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, gained a bookshelf filled 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 Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn and a co-executor of Mr. Foreman’s literary property, stated the dying, 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 firm title refers back to the metaphysical research of the character of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the conditions he labored with had been, as he instructed John Rockwell of The New York Times 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 going through the frustrations of buying information. “Bad Boy Nietzsche!” (2000) was about that German thinker’s nervous breakdown. “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!” (2004) was impressed by the George W. Bush administration.
Other titles, like “Total Recall” (1970), “Vertical Mobility” (1974) and “Permanent Brain Damage” (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 Times evaluation. Looking 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 similar evaluation known as Mr. Foreman’s power 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 typically been described as an opera a couple of radio present. It had its premiere on the Tanglewood music competition in Massachusetts in 1968.
When “Elephant Steps” got here to Hunter College in Manhattan two years later, the chief classical music critic of The Times, 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,” a virtually two-hour one-act present a couple of girl having weird desires.
On two events he gained Obies for greatest play in the identical 12 months — which means that he basically tied with himself for the highest award: for “The Cure” (with an emphasis on patient-doctor relations) and “Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good” (the title was the theme) in 1987; then for “Pearls for Pigs” (a couple of 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 the perfect 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 Foundation fellowship, popularly generally known as the “genius grant.” The basis praised him for his “unique imaginative and prescient and dedication to growing new theatrical vocabularies” that influenced the course of American avant-garde theater.
No one may 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 within the United States 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 Center 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 Times interview.) Early in his profession he was identifiable by his matching darkish hair, eyebrows and walrus-style mustache. Decades later, when the mustache was gone and his hairline had receded, The Forward described him affectionately as “a raveled, egg-shaped man with lengthy, stringy hair and frayed, formless garments.”
Suffering from mild sensitivity, Mr. Foreman stated, he normally rose effectively 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 fall asleep,” he instructed The Times. “It’s been a lifetime of bits and items.”
It was a lifetime of goal as effectively. “I’ve by no means been very pleased in regards to the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Lower East Side Biography Project. “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 High School, 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 University, the place he majored in English and helped kind the coed theater group there; he additionally typically designed units. Three years later, he obtained an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale).
His father helped him get his first job, managing condo buildings in New York, Mr. Foreman stated within the Biography Project interview. That gave him a versatile schedule and allowed him to pursue creative initiatives. His father then helped him once more, displaying 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 Seventies, tailored his play “Strong Medicine” to movie in 1981 and returned to film manufacturing in 2012 with “Once Every Day” and a documentary about its making, “My Name Is Rainer Thompson and I’ve Lost It Completely.”
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 “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” which opened on the Public Theater in 2013. In a evaluation of the play, which he known as a “gleeful mind- and memory-bender” about an getting old 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 Beautiful Madeline Harvey,” about, on the floor, a lady 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 good friend 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 lot of his performs. She is his solely speedy survivor.
In a 2013 essay in The Forward, Joshua Furst in contrast the ability of Mr. Foreman’s work to the Jewish custom of davening: “If you 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.
