Richard Foreman's "Old-Fashioned Prostitutes' in New York

The distinctive elements of American experimental theater erupted in the 1960s, largely in Lower Manhattan, out of the flames of Julian Beck and Judith Malina's The Living Theater. Such companies as The Open Theatre, Mabou Mines and the Performance Group— all devoted to ensemble performance, directorial and authorial inventiveness, non-linear, non-character based anti-realism (of a sort)— invented a new language for theater.

They concocted staged work that included images rather than sets, choreographed movement, sound, song, and acting styles drawn from world theater traditions as well as popular culture and the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Brilliantly idiosyncratic directors like Joseph Chaikin, Lee Breuer and Robert Wilson revised the classics: Breuer took Sophocles into a Gospel church (Oedipus at Colonus), Wilson and Philip Glass put Einstein on the beach. Others, like The Wooster Group and, later, the SITI Company devised their own approaches to acting and creating performances.

Amidst it all, Richard Foreman— playwright, director and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre crafted a linguistically fervent, kaleidoscopic, comic metaphysical theatrical world out of his own obsessions, mediations and animated conceptions of acting and the possibilities of a mise en scène in motion.

From Freud to Heidegger

In addition to directing plays worldwide, Foreman's theater was housed in St. Mark's Church in the Bowery from 1992 to 2009. His productions were invariably characterized by bright lights shining into the audience's eyes, ropes and wires stretched over the stage, costuming from a lunatic's antiques store, and oddly logical but non-sequitorious dialogue and shards of music, alarms and other sound effects from a clown's dream world— a clown, that is, familiar with Freud, Heidegger, the Kabala, all of theater history and the wariness of glamorous, intelligent women.

You could call the women fantasy figures, muses, flirts, the anima of Foreman's unconscious or, as they are referred to in this play, coquettes, or, even more fondly, old-fashioned prostitutes. Any which way, two of them are there, dressed like flappers or Parisian dance hall girls, taunting and delighting Samuel, a late middle-aged mock artist who wears a white suit, monocle, beret and, to emphasize his status as a lost searcher, an open book on his chest.

(It is "some sort of Jewish Book," Foreman told the audience in a talkback after the performance.)

Which Berkeley?

Neither Samuel (Rocco Sisto), nor the two women (Stephanie Hayes and Alenka Kraigher) are exactly characters. Samuel, sounding like George Raft on painkillers, speaks— through a microphone, in a steady, slow voice— about his haphazard recollections of being with, or talking to "Suuuze, or Suuzie" (Alenka Kraigher). At moments, Suzie and Gabriella (Stephanie Hayes) repeat or complete Samuel's thought, or each other's, in their own droll, non-committal ways of speaking.

Of course, it quickly becomes apparent, as with so many of Foreman's plays, that what's on stage is a dramatization of the mind (his mind? All of ours?), slipping and darting this way and that, propelled by desire and the dazzle of possibly actually knowing or grasping something.

As for a plot: A long time ago, Samuel explains, a shabbily dressed old man holding a cardboard box walked by him and said, "Go to Berkeley, make film." The memory is continued by Suzie: "Lying on the bed in my hotel room, I wondered— I wondered should I have approached him/To ask for clarification."

No matter, Gabriella adds the complication: Did the old American mean Berkeley, as in California, or should Samuel explore the ontology of reality and illusion as found in the work of the 19th-Century philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley? So, the intentional/unintentional pun leads to playing with a conundrum that's at the heart of thinking and theater and memory itself.

Forgotten celebrities

And why not? For Samuel, it can be no other way. "Imagine no world but this world," he consoles himself, then repeats the sentence, smiling, with the knowledge that this offhand reflection is meant to include everyone attending the performance.

To aid and confuse and amuse Samuel (as well as the women and the audience), Foreman's set consists of sliding doors, walls covered with stock photographs of surrealist artists and forgotten celebrities, newspapers, pillowed benches, a liquor rack and tacky chandeliers. Two sections of the wall contain random letters (because, one figures, sooner or later, the letters can be combined to make actual words). Lights and alarms go off periodically as Suzie slides her hand through a ring hanging from the ceiling. An offstage male voice interrupts the flow of conversations from time to time, saying "OK" or "Hold it."

Michelin man

Compounding the mini-circus, two silent male actors appear throughout the slow/fast moving production to gesture, bob around the stage or serve drinks. The server (David Skeist) is dressed like an Elizabethan page; the other, is Bibendum, aka Michelin I(Niclas Norena), who is garbed in a white fluff outfit and, like a purposeless Michelin tire man, rolls or bumps into objects. At one point, they drop cardboard boxes off the stage.

Foreman always has these figures like these prancing around or weirdly gesturing as his plays play on. They could be like errant thoughts or specters in the mind's field of vision, except that everything in his work has the quality of errant thought"“ and profoundly so. Isn't that what theater is for?