Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s (Part 2)

[This is a continuation of the survey of theater activity in Greenwich Village and the East Village during the first decade of the Off-Off-Broadway movement. At the end of Part 1, I left off with a brief discussion of the influence of playwriting and acting ensembles on the kind of theater produced in this period and I pick up here with the next important aspect of Off-Off-Broadway: the finances—or lack thereof. (Advice to readers: Some things won’t make total sense unless you’ve read Part 1 first.)]

As I observed in passing, another thing that was missing from the Village theater scene of the ’60s was money. There was almost none involved. New York Times reviewer Mel Gussow described this phenomenon just after the decade ended: “It is theater on a shoestring. Ticket prices are minimal or nonexistent. The only profits are artistic. It is the place where one can be experimental—or even traditional—and not worry about reviews or grosses.” “The great thing about the . . . Off Off Broadway scene is that you can afford to fail there,” proclaimed the late Lanford Wilson, who got his start on the stages of Off-Off-Broadway. “You can try things that you don’t know will work. If they don’t, you might find out why.” Writer Paul Goodman, an enthusiastic supporter of this new theater scene, characterized troupes like the Living Theatre as “a group of theatre-people . . .—some of them of great reputation—who have all of them . . . given themselves, often financially unrewarded, to the development of our modern art. . . . Nobody would question that they are devoted to the growth of theatre and not to making money; they try to make enough to sustain themselves.” Many of the dramatists and directors, in fact, could have moved into decent-paying positions in the mainstream, but then someone else would have had control over their work—producers, artistic directors, business managers, executive directors—making demands on everything from casting to script revisions. (Even Joe Papp, in producer mode, was known to throw his weight around.) These artists sacrificed comfortable lives for the artistic freedom to see their work staged the way they wanted it.

The budgets for OOB productions were often under $100 (and some were as little as $35-50, though more established troupes, like the Living Theatre, could spend as much as $8,000-10,000 to mount a show). The troupes themselves subsisted on donations and public and private funding when they could get it, though sometimes political activity or leanings, like that of the Living Theatre, queered the pitch for corporate and state support. (This, of course, is why the NEA, which was launched in 1965, was supposed to look only at the artistic merit of eligible art, not the content. In the 1990s, however, certain political figures, including members of Congress and the President of the United States, bent the agency toward judging the political and social import of the art under funding consideration. When an anti-obscenity pledge, derisively dubbed the “loyalty oath,” was required for all recipients of NEA funds, many artists and producers, including Joseph Papp, refused to sign and gave up the federal support rather than accept prior restraint.) Money that came with strings attached wasn’t welcome. Shaliko founder Leo Shapiro, for instance, asserted that for one federal program, “I had to satisfy the commissar in too many ways, [so] I couldn’t do it.”

The members lived off of odd jobs, temp work, or bread-and-butter jobs like waiting tables, driving cabs, selling clothes, doing copy- or technical-editing (often overnight)—I even knew actors who held unlikely or unpleasant jobs: one actor with whom I worked who came from a family of butchers worked at that profession at a market near me in the Village and another, who called himself a char, cleaned people’s homes. There was a common unemployment scam as a way to pay the bills: instead of paying the artists a small yearly salary, the company paid its members twice as much for six months, then they could subsist on unemployment insurance for the next six. (There was also a gimmick involving the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal program in effect in 1973-82. By defining some of the members as trainees, the company could get a grant under CETA. The paperwork was voluminous, however, and there was government oversight that made the tactic onerous so it wasn’t used often.) Expenses for the theater, production budgets, and small payments for the artists, as well as other income came from passing the hat. For the most part, though, OOB artists worked for nothing out of devotion, either to the art in general or to the troupe’s vision. A young Off-Off-Broadway actor in 1972 put it simply: “Why do we do it? There’s only one reason. It’s to get out there and act. We love it.” (When I was trying to become an actor and was working in the Off-Off-Broadway arena, one of my friends was fond of saying, “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them.”) By the same token, Shapiro declared: “I’m a director. I love rehearsing. I love to work.”

Many of the performance spaces weren’t licensed as theaters or even cabarets, so it would have been illegal to charge an admission even if the troupes wanted to be so crass. (Ellen Stewart avoided the licensing issue by forming La MaMa as a private club. She asked for a minuscule membership fee which was often waived.) The spaces usually offered few amenities—actors and spectators not infrequently shared bathrooms, which couldn’t be used during the performance—and creature comforts like cushioned seats, legroom, clear sightlines, clean (and vermin-free) houses, air-conditioning (or even, sometimes, heat), palatable coffee, and adequate lobbies, were rare. Not a few would-be theatergoers (not to mention some reviewers, agents, or mainstream pros like directors, producers, and casting directors) were reluctant to go to the theaters and neighborhoods where Off-Off-Broadway happened. In The Off Off Broadway Book, published in 1972, Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman noted that the OOB performance spaces “were small, nontheatrical facilities, makeshift theatres in cellars, bars, lofts, storefronts and coffeehouses,” but as Elinore Lester added, “Part of the ‘sensuous experience’ which might also be distasteful to the average theatergoer is the ordinary physical discomfort that is taken in stride by OOB-niks. All of the permanent OOB spots have hard chairs, but each also has its special tribulations.” Seating capacities (legal, that is) could be anywhere from 50 or 75 up to 99, the maximum Equity allowed (after it began to set rules under which union actors could appear). Props, costumes, and set materials were begged, borrowed, and, yes, stolen. (Sidewalk scavenging was a useful skill among OOB producers, directors, and set designers.) Ellen Stewart told how she and her earliest collaborators at La MaMa had a routine of taking five-finger discounts at five-and-dimes to help mount their shows and sometimes members of a troupe were known to cash rubber checks to help assure that their play would open. The trade-off, Lester continued, was that “[m]embers of the audience are never far enough from the stage lights to feel totally blacked out. They must . . . participate in the action by keeping their chairs from grating and their coffee cups from rattling. This gives them the feeling they count as individuals . . . .” Even if the playwrights and directors wanted a “fourth wall” production, there was no room for such a convention. “The last Off Off Broadway show I saw,” recounted one enthusiastic young OOB theatergoer to Lester, “an actress in a negligee accidentally tripped into my lap during the performance . . . . I got into an all-night bull session with the playwright after the show.”

The plays that were being offered ignored all the established rules and conventions for contemporary drama. “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage,” asserted Joe Cino, “it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here.” Off-Broadway had been daring in its staging techniques, especially in its earliest incarnation at the turn of the century, but the plays were often classics or European work by established authors and their American disciples. Off-Off-Broadway swept even that limitation away, as much out of necessity as artistic choice. (A new play by an unknown author often came without royalties.) What was lost to budgetary constraints and cramped spaces, however, was made up for in enthusiasm and energy. A new style of dramaturgy, acting, and directing evolved, drawing on the techniques of Brecht, the theories of Artaud, and the innovations of Meyerhold. Realism and Naturalism just weren’t the style on the new downtown stages, any more than Aristotelian structure or Method acting were. Impressionism, Expressionism, Symbolism, montage (as defined by Sergei Eisenstein on stage before he introduced it to the new art of film), and collage were frequent influences. There was no theory being evolved, however, no manifesto of Off-Off-Broadway, no unifying social or political agenda; it was all by accident, serendipity, and happenstance: theatrical bricolage. These folks all just wanted to make theater, using whatever was available and whatever worked. (Of course, the theories did come later as academics, critics, and subsequent artists tried to capitalize on the innovations of the progenitors. As Grotowski put it: “A philosophy always comes after a technique.”) The plays, as Ralph Cook demanded, were relevant to the life going on in the Village communities in which the artists and the spectators lived. They reflected what was happening in Washington Square or Tompkins Square, or on Christopher Street or St. Mark’s Place.

Because dancers, musicians, and poets were part of the same downtown community as the actors, directors, and dramatists, performances often incorporated verse, singing, and dancing or dance-like movement. (The Village painters and sculptors, some now-famous like Larry Rivers, sometimes designed sets for Off-Off-Broadway theaters. Julian Beck himself had been an Abstract Expressionist painter before starting the Living.) The language, even with the poetic influence, was frequently profane and colloquial; the actions, which could be either hyperreal or totally symbolic and ritualized, were frequently violent, sexual (of every conceivable variety), and disturbing. Elenore Lester listed what a spectator might find on an OOB stage: “Lusty love-making in the choir loft, four-letter words echoing in the parish hall, dancers and actors in outrageous costumes or non-costumes cavorting in a vaulted church interior, hairy hippies sprawled in the church pews.” John Keating warned that there were “no restrictions of any kind” on what went on on the stages of the Village theaters, including what elsewhere would be considered immorality, indecency, or blasphemy. He added that “the experimentation ranges from the wildly imaginative to the wildly self-indulgent.” As the young spectator, a painter, in Lester’s report continued, “The plays? Man, they’re alive. Even when they stink, they’re alive.” The OOB models, the prototypes, were the Living’s Connection and The Brig, Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, Michael McClure’s The Beard, Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah, the routines of Lenny Bruce, and Happenings.

The Connection by Jack Gelber, which the Living Theatre began presenting in 1959 and kept in its repertoire through 1963, is considered by many to have been the initiating production of Off-Off-Broadway, combining as it did contemporary themes and language with live jazz music. It also put the audience into the event—they were “allowed” to observe the lives of the junkies waiting for their fix as a documentary film is being made—and posited that the world of the play was a metaphor for the lives of all of us who are, in one way or another, all waiting for some kind of “fix.” Former Marine Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig, the portrayal of brutality and inhumanity in a Marine Corps jail in Japan in the 1950s, opened on 15 May 1963 under the direction of Judith Malina on a set designed by Julian Beck (performing the same jobs they had for The Connection). The Living also presented Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities twice, opening on 20 December 1960 and 20 November 1961, and then, in a production that coincided with an uptown Off-Broadway staging, generating lots of press and winning Joe Chaikin an Obie, Man is Man (18 September 1962-31 March 1963). Other early OOB fare included Gene Frankel’s renowned production of Genet’s The Blacks which opened at St. Mark’s Playhouse (which would later become Theatre Genesis) on 4 May 1961 and ran until September 1964. It featured African-American actors in white masks. Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Albee’s The Zoo Story (in the playwright’s American début) opened in rep at the Provincetown Playhouse on 14 January 1960; they ran until 1965, though they’d moved to the Cherry Lane by that time; The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker by William Snyder opened at the Sheridan Square Playhouse on 17 September 1962 and ran until 26 May 1963; Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano opened at the Gate Theatre on 17 September 1963 in a double bill with The Lesson.

In 1962, producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder (later to team with Albee to form Albarwild, a play-producing organization and a play-development unit) presented the groundbreaking Theater of the Absurd bill, a seminal event in the early formation of the Off-Off-Broadway scene, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village from 11 February to 25 March 1962. The plays in the repertory series, all of which shared the same ten actors and were directed by, among others, Alan Schneider, George L. Sherman, Donald Davis, Albee, and Barr, were Kenneth Koch’s Bertha; Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humor; Genet’s Deathwatch; Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield; Albee’s Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and The American Dream; Beckett’s Endgame; and Ionesco’s The Killer. Such fare was for the most part unknown on other New York stages at that time. At the end of the decade, Edward Parone, the head of the Albarwild Playwrights Unit, directed an evening of 11 very short plays—six to 20 minutes—by 12 Off-Off-Broadway authors like Leonard Melfi, Israel Horovitz, Terrence McNally, Martin Duberman, and Jean-Claude van Itallie, at the Cafe au Go Go in the West Village. Collision Course opened on 9 May 1968 and covered “contemporary America” as each writer provided a humorous perspective on a serious subject, among them sex, the war in Vietnam, racism, and slums.

Of course, with so much freedom of expression and so few constraints from administrators and managers, not all the plays offered Off-Off-Broadway were top-of-the-line theater. “Once we are convinced of the artistic taste of a director, we leave everything in his hands,” explained Ralph Cook, and Ellen Stewart, who told me, “I don’t read texts, okay,” insisted, “The plays that we’re doing are the plays I want to do. I don’t interfere in how they get to be that way.” In its early days, Off-Off-Broadway was often amateurish and could be so far out that even dedicated downtown audiences might be left confused. (The popular media, particularly TV, still likes to portray OOB showcases in this light—kooky, unintelligible performances by over-serious artistes who disparage the audiences for not understanding their art. I might even suggest that the current Broadway/former Off-Broadway hit, David Ives’s Venus in Fur, which is about an audition for an Off-Off-Broadway play, engages in this depiction for humor.) Former reviewer Keating observed: “At its worst, Off Off Broadway reduces the theatre of the absurd to the theatre of the ridiculous and meaning is not so much impenetrable as non-existent. At its best it exhibits flashes of freshness and freedom rarely attempted elsewhere.” Paul Goodman characterized this new theater’s audience as “torn between fascination and the impulse to walk out in disgust,” though Lanford Wilson asserted that OOB spectators were more open to experimentation than mainstream theatergoers (who paid a lot more for their seats), even if the play ended up not working.

The theater that grew up in the East and West Villages was a spectator-oriented theater. The artists spoke to the viewers in the language they both spoke and understood. What’s more, the artists weren’t just speaking to the spectators, but those viewers were from their same community: the plays weren’t aimed at the uptown audience or one from out of town. The writers and directors were talking to the folks who lived down the block or around the corner from the theater—in the very world the Village theaters were putting on stage. Cook summed this up:

The actors, directors, and writers are members of a geographical community and are presenting plays for members of that community . . . as an integral everyday part of the life of the community. The audience, young and old, born of the streets of New York, or escapees from Ohio or Poland, come together to see themselves or their neighbors as they are, and perhaps to find the means of survival in this accelerated age.

Not only did the audiences respond viscerally to the performances, the performances responded directly to the audiences. This theater was a real-time exchange between performers and spectators while they were right there in the room together. “What is happening onstage is not a mirror,” said OOB playwright Murray Mednick; “it’s what’s happening.” The performances often involved some kind of intellectual, emotional, or physical actor-audience engagement. Michael Smith contrasted the established theater with the new:

There are few occasions for personal commitment in the commercial theatre today. The structure is industrial—the “entertainment industry”—and the product tends to be generalized, fixed, packaged diversion, coldly performed and passively to be watched; like television and the movies, it is indifferent to the spectator. . . . Seeing the theatre in these terms—to permit it to become this—denies its nature, which is to join performers and spectators in a mutual experience.

The critics, usually the reifiers of cultural significance, were simply ignored. They weren’t needed. While the Off-Broadway producers wanted the press coverage and did everything their big brothers and sisters uptown did to get reviews and news stories in the papers, the Off-Off-Broadway actors, artists, and producers turned their noses up at that whole aspect of professional theater. Indeed, when reviewers did come downtown and published on the new offerings, most coverage was inadequate and condescending (and often appeared after the show had closed). Few of the established journalists understood what was happening in the Village. For example, in a column for the New York Daily News, where he’d been a drama reporter and then senior drama critic from 1940 through 1993, Douglas Watt wrote in reference to an OOB production of Brecht’s Mother Courage by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group:

Now, I don’t pretend to know exactly what this new [Brechtian] esthetic is, if we can call it an esthetic, but I do deplore it if for no other reason than that it opens the floodgates to amateurism. Which is why I think such catchy labels as Theater of the Absurd and Theater of the Ridiculous are noxious, conferring, as they do, a form of respectability on what is all too often plain nonsense.

The 61-year-old Watt, who’d been reviewing theater in New York City for 35 years by this time, acknowledged his confusion about one of the mainstays of Off-Off-Broadway theater, Bertolt Brecht, whose plays and ideas were built into the very foundation of Off-Off-Broadway. Exceptions to this attitude (which, to be fair, wasn’t shared by all establishment reviewers) included the Village Voice (founded in 1955), the hometown paper of downtown New York, as well as inside reportage from the burgeoning alternative press that was proliferating downtown like The Villager (1933) and The East Village Other (1965)—Other Stages (1978), a monthly that covered alternative theater in New York City, and The East Village Eye (1979) came along later—and underground periodicals that sprang up (and often disappeared after a few issues). Unlike the uptown dailies, these were part of the scene. Even paid advertising, when the theaters sprang for it, was enigmatic. Because of the unlicensed nature of the spaces, which drew the ire of city agencies (often intensified by animosity to the nonconformity of the artists involved), many listings and ads, such as those for La MaMa in the Voice, omitted the address. Everybody who needed to, knew where it was; otherwise it wasn’t worth tempting fate.

By the end of the decade, the Village theater scene had changed noticeably. The OOB houses still existed—La MaMa had moved out of its rented home at 122 Second Avenue and was about to open its own building at 74A E. 4th Street—but Joe Cino was dead and Caffe Cino was gone, and Ralph Cook had left Theater Genesis which had closed its doors as well. In 1975, the derelict block along 42nd Street from 9th to 10th Avenues was officially designated Theater Row and soon became home to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theaters (now extending all the way west to 11th Avenue), moving the center of the alternative theater uptown to the Theater District. Off-Broadway institutions like the New York Shakespeare Festival and Circle in the Square-Downtown were still producing in the Village, but were by this time decidedly establishment, if still a bit edgy. (By 1970, Circle in the Square opened its own uptown theater on 50th Street just west of Broadway, competing directly with commercial producers.) The artists, especially the writers, who’d been radical outsiders in the theater world were now the nascent talent of a new mainstream: Tom O’Horgan had become a Broadway success with Hair; Terrence McNally, Sam Shepard, Leonard Melfi, and Israel Horovitz were seeing their plays in commercial productions. “Off Off Broadway has been absorbed into mainstream theater,” wrote Elenore Lester in 1968.

Actors’ Equity had entered the arena in 1966, promulgating the Showcase Code, requiring the theaters to abide by certain rules if they wanted to cast union actors. The code, periodically updated and renamed, was intended to prevent the exploitation of the actors by OOB producers, but at the same time it restricted the rehearsal period and hours, limited the number of performances, and put a cap of the ticket price the theaters could charge. If a producer didn’t sign the non-negotiable code, Equity actors weren’t allowed to work at the theater (though some did anyway, using false names in the program). Essentially, the artistic freedom that reached its pinnacle in Off-Off-Broadway in the ’60s and the collaboration among the artists began to diminish as roles of “playwright,” “producer,” “director,” and “actor” became more rigidly defined. (In 1975, when a new OOB code was handed down by the union council, actors who worked in the arena voted it down because they found it too restrictive.) By the 1980s, Off-Off-Broadway was approaching a sort of impecunious Off-Broadway with the goal of the producers, playwrights, and actors to get a show reviewed in the mainstream press and transferred to a commercial theater so they could all move on up with it. Plays no longer cost $50, $75, or $100 to stage, and bare-bones productions weren’t enough anymore. Grant money became more a necessity than a luxury, and some OOB theaters began tailoring their choices of scripts to appeal to granters and site evaluators. The epitome of this dream was Urinetown in 1999: an OOB musical that went all the way to Broadway in 2001 where it even won a passel of Tonys. (Before Urinetown was Dance With Me, which began as Dance Wi’ Me Off-Off-Broadway in 1971 and came to Broadway in 1975. Terrence McNally’s Bad Habits opened Off-Off-Broadway in February 1974 and moved to the Booth Theatre in May. The 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Next to Normal, began in 1998 in workshops both out of town and in OOB spaces in New York City, moved to Off-Broadway in 2008, played at Washington’s Arena Stage later that year, and then came to Broadway in 2009, winning several Tonys.) It was less the art that drove many of the participants in Off-Off-Broadway in the last third of the 20th century than the artists’ careers.

There’s still life in the movement yet, though. In 1997, the Present Company launched the New York International Fringe Festival (from which Urinetown was picked up), one of the largest multi-arts events in the country that’s essentially an annual celebration of Off-Off-Broadway theater in spaces all over lower Manhattan. In 2004, the New York Innovative Theatre Awards (IT Awards) were founded to recognize achievement Off-Off-Broadway. At the end of the ’60s, nonetheless, “the center of gravity in advanced theater activity is again shifting,” observed Lester. “Forms are changing and so are the locations: the new ones are the streets, the parks and the college campuses . . . .” Radical theater, presented frequently on the streets as guerrilla performances, was assuming the mantel of the new “new theater.” The storefront and loft theaters of Off Off Broadway were already beginning to be the old guard. Indeed, the Living Theater’s return to New York City in 1968 after five years of self- imposed exile in Europe helped inspire many small troupes to take to the streets to agitate not so much for artistic and theatrical audacity, but political and intellectual liberties. Though those streets were all over the city and even beyond, the center, the heartbeat, was still Greenwich Village. If you looked closely at the protesters and radical artists at the hub of this activity, you shouldn’t have been surprised to find a connection somewhere to New York University, the behemoth of the East Village. The movement’s parade ground was Washington Square Park, the gathering place for the hippies, activists, radicals, and students of the Village. Assembling to confront social evils as they saw them, young artists agitated for peace, civil rights, youth power, the sexual revolution, and the decriminalization of marijuana. They often performed for free and lived together communally, with a total commitment to their causes and their troupemates. They were the counterculture in action. As one participant in the radical theater movement proclaimed in 1968: “There is going to be a confrontation between the Establishment and the dissident forces in this country within the next few years. I don’t know whether or not that confrontation is going to be bloody, but I am sure the theater is going to be a main carrier of this revolution.” Indeed, among the protesters at the 21 October 1967 March on the Pentagon was a troupe of NYU students who performed their anti-war street musical Brother, You’re Next, based on Brecht’s Man is Man, on the steps of the Defense Department headquarters. The Village had moved on from the theater of free artistic expression; it was now in the era of “movement theater.” It was a new decade.

[Most of the Off-Off-Broadway sources from which I’ve quoted in “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” were either contemporaneous or written during the period and published right after the decade ended. The most prolific reporter among my sources, Elenore Lester, wrote “The Pass-the-Hat Theater Circuit” (New York Times Magazine 5 Dec. 1965); “In the Parish Hall, the Hippies Go Ape” (New York Times 26 Mar. 1967); “. . . Or the Wave Of the Future?” (New York Times 30 June 1968); “In the Bronx, Revolution?” (New York Times 29 Dec. 1968); and “Off Off Broadway Takes Center Stage” (New York Times 31 Aug. 1975). Other sources were: “New Theatre and the Unions” (Paul Goodman, Dissent Fall 1959; in Creator Spirit Come! [Taylor Stoehr, ed., 1977]); “Observations: A New Deal for the Arts” (Paul Goodman, Commentary Jan. 1964); “Making It Off Off Broadway” (John Keating, New York Times 25 Apr. 1965); Eight Plays from Off-Off Broadway (Nick Orzel and Michael Smith, eds., 1966); “Religion and Drama Meet Off-Off Broadway” (Dan Sullivan, New York Times 20 Jan. 1968); “Off Off Broadway Aims to Be Right On” (Mel Gussow, New York Times 12 July 1972); The Off Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre (Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman, eds., 1972); “Off Off Broadway Emerging From Wings” (New York Times 15 July 1974); “What Makes Off Off Broadway Off Off?” (Stuart W. Little, New York Times 22 Dec. 1974); and Off-Off-Broadway Explosion (David A. Crespy, 2003). Other sources I consulted include: New York’s Greenwich Village (Edmund T. Delaney, 1968); Dreiser (W. A. Swanberg, 1965); “Look at New School of Dramatic Thought” (Douglas Watt, Sunday News [New York] 13 Apr. 1975); The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (William L. O’Neill, 1978); The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, 1959); The Off-Broadway Theater (Julia S. Price, 1962); The Off-Broadway Experience (Howard Greenberger, 1971); and Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater (Stuart W. Little, 1971). Of course, some of my observations came from my own experience as well.]

Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s (Part 1)

In the years before World War I, when the century was less than a dozen years old, an upheaval that would have cultural and artistic repercussions across the country was taking place in an obscure corner of New York City. The social, artistic, and political forces came together in what became known as the bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Intellectuals of all stripes came to work or live in this community, its distinct character, according to Edmund T. Delaney, a lawyer who wrote extensively about New York history, “somewhat richer than other parts of the city,” and influenced “American literature, art and thinking wholly out of proportion to their numbers.” The influence, across the gamut of culture and ideas, was made by a motley group including proponents of atheism, socialism, cubism, anarchism, free-thought, free-love, birth-control—”and women who bobbed their hair and smoked cigarettes.” As socialist journalist John Reed portrayed it:

Inglorious Miltons by the score,
And Rodins, one to every floor.
In short, those unknown men of genius
Who dwell in third-floor-rears gangrenous,
Reft of their rightful heritage
By a commercial, soulless age.
Unwept, I might add—and unsung,
Insolent, but entirely young.

To be sure, Villagers included “crackpots or phonies,” but many were sincere artists and thinkers and, in the words of W. A. Swanberg, biographer of Village resident Theodore Dreiser, “most were conscious rebels . . . [in] revolt against mildewed American concepts and properties . . . .” This side of Village life was summed up by radical author and editor Max Eastman, in the words of his biographer William L. O’Neill:

All that was self-consciously new in American culture—the “new women,” the “new morality,” the “new art”—could be found there. On one level Greenwich Village was becoming a showcase of the cultural revolution, on another it led the movement, serving as headquarters to . . . the Innocent Rebellion.

It’s perhaps illustrative of this “Innocent Rebellion” that at a New Year’s Eve party in 1917, several inebriated Village residents including John Reed, American painter John French Sloan, and Dada artist Marcel Duchamp climbed up the interior staircase of the Washington Square Arch, built a fire on its roof, hung Chinese lanterns, fired cap guns, and released balloons. Reading a statement, they declared “The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village,” a utopia committed to “socialism, sex, poetry, conversation, dawn-greeting, anything—so long as it is taboo in the Middle West.” With Europe at war since 1914, the United States having entered the conflict in April, and the political scene at home roiling and acrimonious, the Village independents wanted little to do with the “commercial, soulless age.” They wanted the freedom to create and go their own ways.

All this creative activity set the stage for an influx of artists “ready to espouse all the new causes—individual freedom, free love, socialism, avant-garde literature and futuristic painting.” Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, the historians of the Provincetown Players, pointed out that “with so many arts represented, drama was the natural meeting-ground, the inevitable medium of expression.” The new theater art was in the air, but wasn’t much practiced on America’s commercial stages and would therefore have been a most attractive outlet for the new ideas and artistic endeavors of the Village artists and thinkers. For example, among the participants in the Washington Square Players, which was formed in the Village but performed uptown, were journalist Reed, short-story writers Alice Brown and Susan Glaspell, lawyers Lawrence Langner and Elmer Reizenstein (later, Elmer Rice), businessman Edward Goodman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Floyd Dell, publishers Charles and Albert Boni, and sundry others. They amalgamated with the few professional actors, scenic artists, and playwrights and began a movement that started or influenced a number of interrelated theater developments across America: the art theater, the little theater, Off-Broadway, and serious American playwriting.

In the early 1900s, the “Little Theater Movement,” a nationwide phenomenon, grew into Off-Broadway in New York City. Offering artistically significant plays in an inexpensive, non-commercial atmosphere, groups such as the Washington Square Players (1915) and Provincetown Players (1916 in New York City) staged plays Broadway ignored, in small, out-of-the-way theaters mostly in (or near) the Village. Other Village-area theaters included the Cherry Lane Theatre (1924; the oldest, continuously used Off-Broadway theater in New York), Theatre de Lys (1953; renamed the Lucille Lortel in 1981), Actors Playhouse (1956), Gate Theatre (1957), Sheridan Square Playhouse (1958), and Sullivan Street Playhouse (1960; where The Fatasticks played for 41 years). Producing troupes included Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (1926), Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater (1947), Theodore Mann and Jose Quintero’s Circle in the Square (1951), Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (1954; now the Joseph Papp Public Theater), John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous (1965), and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater (1968). (Neither Off-Broadway nor, later, Off-Off-Broadway—officially designations of Actors’ Equity based on seating capacity—were confined to Greenwich Village. Theaters and companies working in those arenas were based all over the city and some were even itinerant, but the artistic and theatrical dynamic that spawned, nurtured, and fed the movements was centered in the West and, later, East Villages.) Many troupes weren’t only experimental but amateur as well, some lasting only a few years before falling victim to financial problems or their own success as artists parlayed triumphs into jobs in commercial theater and, later, Hollywood. After World War II, however, Off-Broadway attracted critical attention. Several successes transferred to Broadway, beginning with New Stages’ presentation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute (1948).

In the 1950s, the West Village and, later, the newly designated, edgier East Village (rebranded from the northern part of the Lower East Side around 1964) became the cradle of New York’s Beat generation, with its new, raw, and mold-breaking style of poetry and writing; jazz, heard in Village night clubs and coffeehouses; challenging forms of painting and art such as Abstract Expressionism, especially “action painting” (which was an impetus for the Happening) as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, a Village resident; and the revolutionary politics preached by its denizens and frequent visitors. With untried, non-commercial, or experimental plays or productions, using then-unknown talent and shoe-string budgets, Off-Broadway became an artistic magnet. Serious attention started with Circle in the Square’s hit 1952 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. In 1956, the Village Voice gave out the first Obie Awards to recognize accomplishments in this arena. (In 1964, the Obies began recognizing OOB plays; since 1986, the Lucille Lortel Awards, presented by the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers, have also been given for excellence Off Broadway.) Such companies as the Living Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival, Roundabout Theatre Company (1965), Chelsea Theatre Center (1965), Negro Ensemble Company (1967), and Circle Repertory (1969, as the Circle Theater Company), many of which started Off-Off-Broadway, presented original, failed commercial, or neglected plays. By the 1970s, a split developed between commercial Off-Broadway houses such as the Astor Place (1831), Orpheum (1904), Theatre de Lys, Perry Street (1975), and Minetta Lane (1984, the first new Off-Broadway theater built in New York City in 50 years), and non-profit companies like the Ridiculous Theatrical Company (1967), Jewish Repertory Theatre (1974), Hudson Guild (1974), and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre (1977) that fostered new works and U.S. productions of European and non-Western plays. Mostly, however, real experimental and avant-garde theater had moved to Off-Off-Broadway. “Off Broadway died in 1970 and no one even sent flowers,” wrote Tom Eyen, an OOB playwright, three years later.

In response to the Eisenhower years, particularly McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings; the rise of issues like the war in Vietnam, nuclear-weapons development, civil and equal rights for African Americans and women (and, later, Latinos and gays); and proliferating consumerism, the Beat impulse evolved into the angrier and more activist ’60s. In the early 1960s, the Village theater and art scene was just developing into the exciting, vibrant, and multi-cultural world that it became known as by the end of the decade. Folk and rock music also came to the Village in the early part of the decade, and bars and clubs in the Village like the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, Googies, the Night Owl Cafe, the Fat Black Pussycat, and too many more to name became venues for singers, musicians, songwriters, and poets like Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Tim Hardin, Joan Baez, Rod McKuen, James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg. With this upheaval came the birth of a new alternative theater centered in the Village, inspired strongly by the writings of Antonin Artaud and the work of European dramatists: Off-Off-Broadway (a label supposedly devised by Village Voice reviewer Jerry Tallmer). Like Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold was a general inspiration for nearly all the avant-garde theater artists working or developing in the 1960s: his theories were just in the atmosphere of the time, especially in Greenwich Village. (It’s significant, I think, that the American editions of several seminal books of theatrical theory were published in these years: Artaud’s The Theater and its Double, 1958; Brecht on Theatre, 1964; Antonin Artaud Anthology, 1965; Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, 1968; Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, 1968; Meyerhold on Theatre, 1969.)

Before the start of the 1960s, Off-Broadway, with a few exceptions like, notably, the New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Joseph Papp Public Theater), had begun to become little more than a less-expensive Broadway, a commercial-theater venue. “The development of the Off Off theater,” wrote John Keating, a former review-writer for Cue magazine and one-time president of the Drama Desk, in a 1965 New York Times article, “is . . . explained by its adherents as . . . a revolt against the growing professionalism and decreasing experimentalism of the regular Off Broadway movement.” As the costs of Off-Broadway production rose, the impulse to experiment and innovate lessened. Off-Off-Broadway, with its minimal-to-non-existent budgets, became the anvil of experimentation. A founder of Circle Rep, Marshall Mason, insisted, “Off Off Broadway gives us freedom from economic pressures,” and Eve Adamson, director of the Jean Cocteau Repertory, observed, “I can afford to do a crazy play of Oscar Wilde. On Broadway no one can.” And the head of the Off Off Broadway Alliance (now the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, or ART/NY) said, “We’re the laboratory where directors, actors, and playwrights can sharpen their tools.”

Among the principal venues for the new OOB theater were the churches of the Village. Theatre Genesis (1964), for example, was actually part of the cultural ministry of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and the Washington Square Methodist Church on West 4th Street (which would later house Grotowski’s Theatr Laboratorium in 1969) had their own cultural and theatrical programs. Observed Elenore Lester, a New York Times writer who covered the new OOB arena in the ’60s and ’70s, in these and similar parishes, “a new kind of churchgoer sees underground films, original plays by young writers or hears far-out poetry or jazz liturgies.” In addition, of course, were the two most prominent OOB venues unaffiliated with a church: Caffe Cino (1958) and Café La MaMa (1961; later, the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club). In all of these places, and many others, spectators could see experimental films, Happenings, jazz bands, political speakers, and radically innovative poets. Among the hippies and protesters who frequented the Village or lived there, there were theater people, innovative writers, and radical thinkers like Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Ralph Cook, Ellen Stewart, Joe Cino, Al Carmines, Robert Hooks, Douglas Turner Ward, Joe Chaikin, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Michael Harrington, Murray Bookchin, and Paul Goodman who gravitated to the East and West Villages in the 1960s and afterward.

As this was all beginning to swirl and roil in the Village, developing into a disorderly, uproarious, and unrestrained hub of hippiedom and the counterculture, there were new kinds of theater being tried out by writers and directors—aided greatly, of course, by adventurous actors and imaginative designers and technicians—that were redefining the form, not to mention the content, of American theater. Off-Broadway had deteriorated into a place where artists went merely to get work: “The distinction between the practice of an art and the performance of a job or assigned task is lost” in the “establishment theatre,” wrote Michael Townsend Smith, OOB playwright and reviewer for the Village Voice. Finding little personal or artistic satisfaction in the established theater, whether Broadway or Off-Broadway, commercial or non-profit, the artists came to the Village to search for something they couldn’t find anywhere else. At the beginning, getting a part in an Off-Off-Broadway production wasn’t just a matter of acquiring a résumé credit, as it frequently is now, but a chance not only to be seen but to work alongside fascinating writers, directors, and designers. In Elenore Lester’s words, “Everyone is in it for love. . . . [T]hey’ll try anything if they think it’s ‘beautiful,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘real theater’ or ‘a challenge.’” Audiences, advised Lester, came for analogous reasons: “to be shook up, intellectually and emotionally.”

In 1965, a 19-year-old student who’d been traveling to Greenwich Village since his high school days when he met the Becks, hung out at Theatre Genesis, and discovered Caffe Cino, illustrated the world of Off-Off-Broadway for an Ohio campus publication. In a dialogue reminiscent of a very young man’s take on Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, a cabbie offers to take a young theater-seeker “off-Broadway” and the passenger says, “I’m looking for something fresh, something alive. A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation. A theatre where the grand tradition of theatre, ritual theatre, is joined to the . . . .” He breaks off when he realizes that Off-Broadway’s offerings differ little from what’s playing everywhere else. The cabbie, having turned into “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino,” transports them magically to “off-off-Broadway” where “[s]omething’s always new.” The cabbie instructs the young man that the new playwrights represented there are “trying to say something” as they “attempt to get back at the roots of the theatre—spoken poetry—in the most direct manner possible.” In words that echo Antonin Artaud, the cabbie explains: “We’re trying to do something basic to get at the rituals that have always formed the core of theatre.” (In seven years, that 19-year-old, Leonardo Shapiro, would be directing and creating plays with his own company, Shaliko, in the East Village. He became part of the very world he described.) To support the new theater activity came ad hoc little troupes, often in communication with European experimenters like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Michel de Ghelderode, Jean Genet, Fernando Arrabal, and Harold Pinter, and directors like Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Charles Marowitz, Joan Littlewood, Roger Blin, Jean-Louis Barrault, Giorgio Strehler, and later Jerzy Grotowski and Yuri Lyubimov.

The progenitor of the Off-Off-Broadway movement was Joe Cino’s coffeehouse, opened at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958 and closed soon after Cino’s suicide in 1967. Cino, a former dancer, had originally intended it as a place for his artist friends to display their work, then poets began reading their writing there. The first theatrical offerings were established plays by writers like Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, and Jean Giraudoux, but by 1960, playwrights began reading their scripts, and eventually staging them. The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s Flyspray in 1960. Eventually plays by Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick (the most prolific Cino writer in its lifetime) were staged and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors like Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63) and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse. Though Cino eventually built a small stage, the early productions at Caffe Cino were staged on the coffeehouse floor with the audience sitting very close around the playing area. Sets and props were minimal because of the lack of funds and the need for simplicity, and the lighting was the main source of atmosphere. Many of what would become the innovations and identifying characteristics of OOB theater were born at the Caffe Cino, but as much of necessity and impecuniousness as artistic choice and philosophy. The coffeehouse’s short life is far outstripped by the influence Caffe Cino had on New York and American theater, the Village, and Off-Off-Broadway. One Caffe Cino writer, Claris Nelson, called it “an island where our souls can play.” It was the first venue to become identified as a home for gay-themed plays before the Stonewall riots launched the gay rights movement in New York and elsewhere. Cino’s model, the coffeehouse theater, was copied by dozens and then scores of other small spaces around the city, centered mostly in the West and East Villages but fanning out to all the boroughs and even other cities and towns across the country. This all happened by word of mouth because if Off-Off-Broadway got very little press in its first decades, Caffe Cino got none. In 1967, Joe Cino committed suicide. Friends tried to keep the caffe going, but it couldn’t survive without Cino and in the face of new regulations for cabarets and clubs, and it closed in 1968. If Artaud was the OOB movement’s philosopher and Meyerhold its model director, Cino had been its stage manager. Almost no theater artist who worked in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s doesn’t owe some kind of debt to Joe Cino—if not directly, then indirectly.

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, founded in October 1961 by Ellen Stewart, a would-be clothes designer, in an East Village basement as the Café La MaMa, was seen by many to be the successor to Caffe Cino. It’s the only one of the main Off-Off-Broadway originators that’s still producing. (Ellen Stewart died at 91 on 13 January 2011, the last of the original OOB impresarios; see my homage on ROT, “The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011),” 4 April. It also provides a slightly more detailed history of the theater.) La MaMa moved about the East Village for many years until it purchased its own building at 74A E. 4th Street, still its headquarters (and for many years the residence, on the top floor, of Stewart). Stewart started La MaMa so her brother and his friends would have a place to create and perform their theater works. She dedicated the theater to the playwright and welcomed artists who were underrepresented, underfunded, and often misunderstood, at a time when the perception of what theatre could be was changing rapidly. For artists such as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Tom O’Horgan, and Philip Glass, La MaMa was an artistic refuge, especially after Caffe Cino closed. Stewart also brought international artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Andrei Serban, Kazuo Ohno, The Tokyo Kid Brothers to the U.S. to present their work at La MaMa. In addition, La MaMa E.T.C. maintains a resident company at the theater, first The La MaMa Troupe directed by Tom O’Horgan and then The Great Jones Repertory directed by Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados, the current company. Other companies and artists had residencies at the La MaMa complex, too, some for several years and others for a short time until they moved out on their own; 30 companies and artists work out of La MaMa at present. The latest troupe to be offered a residency at the theater was the Belarus Free Theater, forced into exile by the totalitarian government in their home country. La MaMa may be the busiest producer of plays in New York City—or possibly the entire country—with three theaters in its main building, a large space in the Ellen Stewart Theatre (formerly the Annex), plus a rehearsal building, an art gallery, an archive, and artists’ dormitories.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South was devoted to social outreach through programs to help people, including the controversial and unpopular, in need. The “beatnik church” supported a radical arts ministry, making space available for art exhibitions, rehearsals, and performances, ensuring that it was a space where artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Rauschenberg, unknown at that time, could experiment in their work without fear of censorship. Later, artists Red Grooms and Yoko Ono also exhibited work at the gallery. The first Happening is said to have been presented at Judson Memorial. After the church hired Al Carmines as Assistant Curate, he opened the Judson Poets' Theatre in November 1961 with The Great American Desert, a satiric Western drama by poet Joel Oppenheimer. Carmines presented experimental plays and musicals by writers such as Sam Shepherd and Lanford Wilson, and directors like Tom O'Horgan in the church's main Meeting Room. Starting in 1962, Carmines began composing and producing his own musicals, including several based on texts by Gertrude Stein, staged by the Judson Poets director Lawrence Kornfeld. In the 1980s, the church sponsored political-theater performances, such as those by Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. In 1977, Carmines suffered a cerebral aneurysm that disabled him with devastating headaches. He ceased his theatrical activities in 1981 and retired from the ministry in 1985, effectively ending the run of the Judson Poets' Theatre, the third (and the second-longest-lasting) of the four original OOB houses. Al Carmines died in 2005 at age 69.

Ralph Cook’s Theatre Genesis was housed in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, an Episcopal church on Second Avenue at E. 10th Street. Cook, a fervent civil-rights activist who’d been arrested for his activities on several occasions, had been hired in 1964 by the church’s rector as the arts curate to coordinate the arts ministry at St. Mark’s and he immediately launched the theater. The plays he staged concerned the life of the street—usually in the language of the street—and were imbued with a sense of anarchy that was laced with spirituality. Cook encouraged his playwrights, often poets before he recruited them, to work improvisationally with the actors and directors, experimenting with language to explore their world and the conflicts they encountered in their lives. The artists were working through their ideas and concerns and the spectators didn’t see a reflection of something that had already happened, but watched it happen right in front of them. The performance style, while not abandoning Stanislavsky’s psychological realism, was more subjective in its interpretation, stripping everything down to the basics and, as Artaud required, refusing to indulge or condescend to the audiences. The closeness Cook fostered among his artists was intended to build a tight community and the explorations were conducted on a personal level as the artists revealed their core humanity in plays that bore witness to what was happening outside the church. Cook viewed playwrights as seers, the only ones who could penetrate the fiction of the mass media and the illusions of capitalism. The plays, often gritty and violent, were revolutionary in form as well as content, with minimal settings in a tiny space that could be configured for a half dozen different audience-performer relationships. They were regarded as works still in progress and Cook promoted the revision and reshaping of the works even as they were before an audience. Theatre Genesis produced, among others, the early plays of Sam Shepard; Charles L. Mee, Jr.; Leonard Melfi; and Adrienne Kennedy. Ralph Cook, about whom little is recorded (including his life dates) outside his activities at Theatre Genesis, left the theater in 1969 and Theatre Genesis closed a few years later.

In the ’60s, among other shifts in approach, the theater creativity in the Village was often generated by the playwright. “[W]e are not looking for plays to produce,” explained Cook, “but writers who are at that point where they need a continuing relationship with a stage and actors in order to evolve.” In the modern era, playwrights’ theaters, like Shakespeare’s or Molière’s or, before that, the world of classical Greek drama, was rare and in the United States, mostly unknown. The mainstream theater was generally an actors’ theater, though some important directors held sway on some stages. But as the Off-Off-Broadway theater developed in the Village, the playwright—not always an established dramatist as many companies gravitated to poets in particular—became the focus of the creative impulse. It became more and more common for writers to work not just with specific groups but for them, creating plays for certain actors, even certain performance spaces.

In another Village shift in the ’60s, the experimental theaters tilted toward acting ensembles, often working improvisationally, often without a formal director. These new theaters were often collectives of artists creating symbiotically, though the focus on writers also had its influence here, with, as I noted above, authors developing work with groups of which they were also members. (In ensemble-created work, the playwright often refined scripts developed by improvisation.) These groups investigated language imagery and new ways of conveying meaning through the sounds of words and other non-verbal utterances as described by Artaud. The collaborators were inventing an Artaudian grammar of symbols drawn from their everyday experiences and those of their audiences, who connected to the performances as participants in the creative event. Robert Brustein observed that “the new theater style is intimately linked to revolutionary politics. What we are witnessing is the effort of the avant-garde to translate ‘participatory democracy’ into artistic terms, demanding a new egalitarianism that gives equal rank to everyone . . . .” It was often difficult to discern who were the principal creators of such works, the writers, the actors, or the director, as they all contributed their skills during the development process and worked as equals in an artistic commune of sorts. (In some cases, the companies were actual communes, often living together in the same lofts were they created and performed.) Groups like the Living Theatre, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre (1963), Richard Schechner’s Performance Group (1967; the predecessor to the Wooster Group, 1975), Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project (1968), Crystal Field and George Bartenieff’s Theater for the New City (1971), Omar Shapli’s Section 10 (1975), and others who lasted a few seasons or so, produced many of the iconic theater pieces of the decade. This was not the life style of the commercial theater of Broadway or Off-Broadway, or even the non-profit theater of Off-Broadway. Even when the troupe didn’t live together, the members had a common connection that often defined their art. Once the OOB bug caught hold, the agenda-free theaters like La MaMa or Theatre Genesis were joined by companies with a defining interest. There were black companies, Hispanic companies, Asian companies, even a French and a German troupe. There were theaters that focused on gay or lesbian plays, women writers, Jewish subjects, veteran’s issues. In the beginning of this development, the plays were sometimes strident and more issue-oriented than artistic, but by the end of the decade, some good theater and writing developed from the focus

[To cover this subject even at the superficial level I’m attempting here requires more space that I can manage in a single post. So I’m going to continue this discussion in a few days, picking up where I’ve left off above, starting with the financial aspects of Off-Off-Broadway theater in its first decade. I hope readers will come back later this week to see what else I have to say about the new theater activity that grew up in the West and East Villages of lower Manhattan in the 1960s. (I’ll also append a list of some of the sources from which I’ve drawn the quotations I’ve used in “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s.”)]

'Fragments of a Trilogy': La Mama 1976

[Thirty-five years ago around this time of year, I saw the La MaMa production of Fragments of a Trilogy conceived and directed by Andrei Serban, one of his first projects in the United States, with music by Elizabeth Swados, who was just beginning to show the talent and imagination for which was soon to be known. Ellen Stewart, the remarkable figure who led La MaMa for almost 50 years and was one of the founders of Off-Off-Broadway theater, had brought those two talents together out of a gut feeling that they would be a fit, and she was right. They went on to collaborate on several more theater projects, and Stewart continued to recruit and produce theater artists by intuition and an interest in their personalities more than any study of their work or analysis of their art—and she established an incredible record of accomplishment that way. Serban and Swados, along with some of the cast members of Fragments went on to become stars in their fields, as did many artists who appeared early in their careers at La MaMa. Stewart—Mama to all who knew her—died at 91 on 13 January, leaving as a legacy her artistic children and the memory of productions like this one.

[I originally wrote this review (most of the play reports I publish on ROT aren’t precisely reviews, but this one was) on 23 February 1976, a few days after I saw the innovative production. Fragments was first performed at the La MaMa Annex (now renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre) on 21 June 1974 and immediately became a sensation. Mel Gussow, who reviewed the production for the New York Times in 1974 and then again in 1975, called it “nothing less than a reinvention of theater”; Walter Kerr, although he preferred the traditional versions, declared, “Something distinctive has been wrought and set before us . . . .” It played for years on and off. Stewart had heard of Serban’s work when she was in Europe in 1966, though she hadn’t seen any of it and hadn’t met him. She decided to bring him to the U.S. in 1969 and introduced him to audiences and critics here. (She had done the same for Jerzy Grotowski in 1967, another theater artist largely unknown in this country who came from an Eastern Bloc nation from which visas to visit the West were hard to arrange.) Serban directed Medea at La MaMa in 1971; it was eventually removed from the trilogy and wasn’t performed by the time I saw Fragments. Electra had been developed in 1973 for a Paris festival; The Trojan Women was created at La MaMa in 1974.]

The La Mama Experimental Theater Company’s current production, Fragments of a Trilogy: The Trojan Women and Electra, which finished its run this weekend at 66 E. 4th Street in New York City’s East Village after several years in the making, if nothing else was a fascinating experiment in language as dramatic action. As produced by the Great Jones Repertory Project created and directed by Andrei Serban, the plays were presented in ancient Greek with some lyrics of The Trojan Women in such languages as Mayan, Nahuatl (a dialect of the Aztec people), Inahien and Aztec.

The experiment began with a seemingly interminable waiting period among a crush of humanity in an outer room of the theater which serves as the lobby and lounge. Not only was I standing on my feet, but so were several other people whom I did not know. We were buffeted and bumped and overheated while trying to read outsized programs. Finally, after instructions on how to behave (follow the performers’ directions from area to area and maintain silence) , the actors made a procession through the lobby and we followed—or rather were carried along—after them into the theater proper.

The theater was a large, rectangular room at the far end of which was a standard proscenium stage with a bare wooden construction resembling a large wooden scaffold. Along both sides of the room were more scaffold—like constructions that increased step—like in height as they receded to the back. Half of the back wall was similarly built up, but the other half, to the right of the door, was built to resemble a Mayan pyramid with a steeply raked ramp running up to a platform off the right and left of which ran stairs to a further playing area for The Trojan Women. An additional “pyramid,” reached by a long straight staircase reminiscent of the Man of La Mancha set, was added for Electra, with a small platform in the center of the room.

The first half of the program, The Trojan Women, which La Mama called an epic opera based on the play by Euripides, was mostly chanted or sung to music composed by Elizabeth Swados and played on flute, drum and trombone. The ostensible concept of both plays was to engage the audience visually and auditorially without resorting to the intellect. We were constantly assaulted by sounds and sights calculated to hit directly at our emotions. We were not expected to understand what we heard, but to fee’ it viscerally. The cast used the words for the sounds they could produce rather than the semantic meanings they conveyed.

The Trojan Women started with the audience standing in a mass several hundred strong in the theater room with the actors on the pyramid where the women were subdued by the victorious Greek soldiers. From there, the crowd was guided by chanting performers from place to place as they progressed around the various playing areas, including parts of the floor in our midst. (These scenes often took place in a tumbrel-like cart.) We witnessed Hecuba (Jane Lind) do a fire dance on the scaffold and be dragged away with a noose around her neck, Cassandra (Valois Mickens) predict doom to an unheeding multitude, Andromaca (Priscilla Smith) anoint her son, Astianax (Diane Lane), for his execution and Helen (Joanna Peled) be stripped, begrimed and raped. All this while we remained standing and crowded together like refugees from a present-day Troy. If it were not for my feet, it might have been an effective way of tangibly demonstrating how war brutalizes everyone: the victors, the vanquished and the innocent victims. However, much of this went on too long, such as the rape sequence and the preparation of Astianax for execution. Mercifully, we were finally directed to sit down and a mad scramble ensued as we grabbed seats on benches, platforms and cushions. The rest of the program was viewed from these positions along the two sides and half of the back wall. From these seats we were witnesses to the final humiliation of the Trojans—Astianax thrown from the pyramid, their enslavement and shipment to Greece. There was a marvelous scene in which a young weaver (Neal Harris) commits a ritual suicide on the pyramid and falls in slow motion down the ramp. It was also an interesting reversal of Greek dramatic usage to cast a young girl as Prince Astianax.

After a much needed intermission—also mostly standing—the program resumed when we were reushered into the theater for Electra, originally developed by La Mama in Paris in 1973. This was called a miracle play and was more chanted than sung, although Ms. Swados’s music was still featured. La Mama’s Electra, based on Sophocles, outlined the Oresteian legend from the murder of King Agamemnon (Richard Jakiel) by his wife, Clytemnestra (Joanna Peled), and her lover, Aegistus (William Duff-Griffin), when Orestis (Batrick Burke) was a child, through his return as a young man to revenge his father’s death and rescue his sister, Electra (Priscilla Smith), from servitude and grief. Orestis leaves Electra wedded to Pilades (Charles Hayward) as the new queen in Mycenae.

By the time we reentered the theater and were seated for Electra, we were so exhausted by the previous ordeal, the rasping wailing of Ms. Smith’s Electra was monotonous and enervating rather than stimulating and moving. The chanting of the chorus, punctuated by muted bells, became soporific and victory of the righteous Orestis and Electra over the sinful Clytemnestra and Aegistus was a merciful end to a long assault on one’s ears rather than holy vengeance.

The final analysis of the experience is that it was intellectually interesting (an ironic adverb, considering the intention of the program), physically exhausting and too long. One show would have been plenty—without the waiting and standing. The idea was good, but for me the application did not work. I do not believe that I am less receptive to emotional assaults, but too much tends to be anesthetic. I was glad for the cool evening walk home.

The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011)

Ellen Stewart, founder and director of the Off-Off-Broadway production house La MaMa E.T.C., died on 13 January, ending an era in New York theater. André De Shields, a prominent actor who got his start at La MaMa and sits on its advisory board, characterized her passing as “a paradigm shift of tectonic proportions.” Stewart, 91 at her death, was the last of the original Off-Off-Broadway producers, the small band of enthusiasts who in the 1960s launched the performance arena that was arguably the most vital and vibrant in the theatrical history of the city—and maybe of the whole country.

When Off-Broadway, the first important reaction against Broadway commercialism, itself became prone to commercial influences by the late ‘50s, New York’s theater artists launched the Off-Off-Broadway movement to focus on new plays, new writers, young actors and directors, and the innovative theatrical styles and techniques coming out of Europe after World War II. The first Off-Off-Broadway “theater” is generally accepted to have been Caffe Cino, founded by former dancer Joe Cino in the West Village in 1958. Cino originally intended his cafe to be a combination coffeehouse and art gallery, showing the work of his artist friends. He added poetry readings, and by 1961, Caffe Cino was hosting play readings and, soon, small productions were being mounted, spotlighting new writers.

The success of Caffe Cino inspired other small spaces to open and Cino’s coffeehouse was followed by the Judson Poets’ Theatre in 1961 (established and directed by Al Carmines who died in 2005 at 69), Stewart’s Café La MaMa in 1962, and Ralph Cook’s Theatre Genesis in 1964. (Stewart used to quip that Cino was the father of Off-Off-Broadway—and she was the Mama.) Then the dam just broke and small theaters began opening in storefronts, basements, lofts, church halls, Y’s, coffeehouses, and bars—just about anywhere in the city from downtown Manhattan (long before there was a TriBeCa), SoHo, the East and West Village, Chelsea, the fringes of the Theater District, the Upper West Side, and Harlem and East Harlem to Downtown Brooklyn and the other boroughs. Little or no admission was charged and production budgets were frequently under $50. The critics, usually the reifiers of cultural significance, were simply ignored. They weren’t needed: Off-Off-Broadway was spectator-oriented and the artists spoke directly to the community about their shared lives without the intermediation of the critics. Some of these theaters went on to become New York institutions and produced for decades into the ‘70s and ‘80s; a few became Off-Broadway producing houses and acquired the cachet of an established playhouse with an impressive reputation. But many lasted just a few years, sometimes only as long as the founding personality remained in command, foundering when that person retired, was removed, or died.

Joe Cino committed suicide in 1967 and Caffe Cino closed the next year. Theatre Genesis ceased operations a year after Cook left in 1969. Carmines suffered a brain aneurysm in 1978 and the Judson Poets’ Theatre ran until 1981. Only Stewart stayed around through the ‘80s and ‘90s and made it into the 21st century at the helm of La MaMa E.T.C., the only original Off-Off-Broadway theater to last beyond a few decades. (There is no indication now that La MaMa will close; it continues to produce under the leadership of Stewart’s co-artistic director, Mia Yoo. Still, nearly everyone says that La MaMa was Ellen Stewart, that she was “the guts of the place.”) In fact, it can easily be said that Ellen Stewart was the embodiment of Off-Off-Broadway, both its energy and spirit and its history. In many ways, she also represented the characteristics that made up the Off-Off-Broadway artist in its early days: she wasn’t a theater pro; she sort of backed into the business without starting out in that direction; she was a true bohemian, a woman who went her own way irrespective of mainstream trends, sometimes knowing she was doing it and sometimes simply unaware of the practices she was flouting. It didn’t matter, because her interest was in giving artists—the writers, directors, composers, actors, designers—a forum for their wares, their talents, and their ideas. In its beginning, that was what Off-Off-Broadway was meant to do; it’s why the earliest performances were called “showcases”—because that’s what they were.

Village theater and art in the early 1960s was just developing into the exciting, vibrant, and multicultural scene that it became known as by the end of the decade. Greenwich Village had been the center of New York’s bohemian life since the 19th century, attracting radical thinkers and artists in nearly every field, but after World War II, the West Village and the newly designated, edgier East Village became the cradle of New York’s Beat generation, with its new, raw, and mold-breaking style of poetry and writing; jazz, housed in the (not always tobacco) smoke-filled coffeehouses and night clubs; challenging forms of painting and art such as Abstract Expressionism, especially “action painting” as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, a Village resident; and the revolutionary politics preached by its denizens and frequent visitors. In response to the Eisenhower years, particularly the McCarthy probes, and the rise of issues like the war in Vietnam, nuclear-weapons development, civil and equal rights for African Americans and women (and later Latinos and gays), and proliferating consumerism, the Beat impulse evolved into the angrier and more activist ’60s. Folk and rock music also came to the Village in the early 1960s, and hipsters liked to go to bars near Washington Square, venues for singers, musicians, and songwriters like Tim Hardin and Bob Dylan, and poets like Allen Ginsberg. With this upheaval in the Village came the birth of the alternative theater inspired strongly by the writings of Antonin Artaud and the work of European dramatists and directors. Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, were especially motivated by Artaud’s ideas, and the Living in turn heavily influenced the artists and groups that came after their departure in 1963 for a self-imposed European exile.

Oddly, among the first homes for the new experimental theater were the churches of the Village. Theatre Genesis, for example, was actually part of the cultural ministry of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, and the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and the Washington Square Methodist Church on West 4th Street (which would later house the first U.S. visit of Jerzy Grotowski’s Theatr Laboratorium in 1969), among others around the city, had their own cultural and theatrical programs. In addition, of course, were the two most prominent Off-Off-Broadway venues unaffiliated with a church: Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa (the predecessor of La MaMa E.T.C.). In these places and many others, spectators could see experimental films, Happenings (first presented at Judson Poets), jazz bands, political speakers, and radically innovative poets. And there were new kinds of theater being tried out by writers and directors—aided greatly, of course, by adventurous actors and imaginative designers and technicians—that were redefining the form, not to mention the content, of American theater.

Off-Off-Broadway has, of course, become almost as institutionalized as Off-Broadway did before it. There are permanent ensembles who are looking for the next hit that’ll move on up to Off-Broadway, to Broadway (everybody remembers Urinetown in 1999—an Off-Off-Broadway musical that went all the way to Broadway where it even won a passel of Tonys), and to film or TV success. The actors, singers, and dancers want to get into a show that will either take them along with it to the commercial arena or make them bankable. The directors and writers want the same, and the producers want to be the next Joe Papp or Lynne Meadow. Even by the time I got to it, in the mid-‘70s, there was a commercial tinge to most of what was happening Off-Off-Broadway—though, to be fair, there were still many producers and artists who just wanted to try new things and expand their artistic horizons in ways that the commercial and established theater wouldn’t permit. Stewart and La MaMa were nurturers of this strain of Off-Off-Broadway and they continued to be so throughout the history of the theater (and, I hope, beyond). Even so, La MaMa has had a hand in many productions, artists, and writers that have gone on to mainstream and commercial success. (Thank Heaven it did, too. When the theater looked as if it were breathing its last because of a debt crisis in March 1992, the former La MaMa actors, directors, and writers who’d made it to financial well-being came to Stewart’s rescue.)

Ellen Stewart, who was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1919, grew up there and in Chicago. (Some sources assert she was born in Chicago and moved to Alexandria.) She bore the cultural imprint of both regions, speaking, for instance, in the Cajun lilt of central Louisiana bayou country but with the steel spine of a life-long Chicagoan. She came to New York City in 1950 to become a fashion designer, but worked at a variety of bread-and-butter jobs to support herself. One of those jobs was porter (a fancy name for a go-fer) for a designer at Saks Fifth Avenue, where her co-workers dubbed her “Mama.” She wore her own creations to work and they caught the attention of the store’s affluent customers so Saks hired her as a designer. At this time, Stewart was living in the East Village, just then beginning to be seen as a separate neighborhood instead of merely the northern blocks of the Lower East Side because of the presence of artists, musicians, Beatniks, and students (both NYU and Cooper Union are prominent occupants of the district). Attracted by low rents, often for large, open spaces ideal for studios, this influx brought inexpensive restaurants and coffeehouses, galleries, and stores and boutiques, which catered to and welcomed the hip, young, often impecunious residents. Among those moving into the neighborhood were stage artists, all of whom were finding it hard to get work in theater. Stewart opened a boutique for her designs in the basement of a tenement at 321 E. 9th Street, and on 21 October 1961, she invited her theater friends to do their plays there after store hours. Stewart called her theater, which cost her $55 a month in rent, Café La MaMa—coffee and cake were served and no admission was charged; artists were “paid” by passing a basket—because a license for a coffeehouse was easier to get than one for a theater. (One of Stewart’s friends suggested “La MaMa,” invoking Stewart’s Cajun-Creole exoticism, instead of her simple sobriquet “Mama.”) The first performance on 27 July 1962 was an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s short story “One Arm,” a transfer from Caffe Cino, and those first participants grabbed spectators off the street—though many, once coaxed inside, came back, asserted Stewart. The 25-seat basement wasn’t even a suitably appointed theater, as Stewart acknowledged in an anecdote. Examining the room, Andy Milligan, the director of One Arm, asked Stewart, "Do you have any lights?" "Just what you see," replied Stewart. The director told her to empty and wash four two-gallon cans of tomatoes and Milligan showed Stewart how to convert the cans into lighting instruments. With no money for supplies, Stewart and the directors and writers found ways to get their props, make-up, and other small necessities by working a “certain system,” as Stewart put it, at five-and-dime stores: they shoplifted. La MaMa had no sound system and no music source except the radio, so Stewart became adept at finding the appropriate music for each show on the dial and retuning the radio right before an announcement or commercial came on. That was Off-Off-Broadway in the beginning.

Stewart had constant trouble with city inspectors from the license, fire, health, and buildings departments, which had regulatory jurisdiction over public performance spaces and seemed to target her particularly. Moreover, she recalled, her neighbors wondered, “What was that colored woman doing with all those young white men in her basement?” thinking she must be running a brothel. Stewart had been arrested twice on building violations and spent a few nights in the Women’s House of Detention at 10th Street and 6th Avenue in the West Village (now the garden of my local library branch!). So in 1963, Café La MaMa moved several blocks south to a loft above a flower shop at 82 2nd Avenue to prevent a third arrest, which would make Stewart a felon under New York law, preventing her from ever getting a license to do anything again. The theater reopened with Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, directed by John Thompson, on 28 June and on 12 March 1964, Café La MaMa officially became the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. As an ostensibly private club, the 74-seat space was free of the city regulatory restrictions to which the cafe had been subjected—though Stewart never turned anyone away: if you couldn’t afford the dollar or two membership, Mama would take care of you. The new theater’s first show was The Drunkard by William H. Smith, a “temperance” melodrama from 1844 directed by Donald Brooks. The newly designated La MaMa E.T.C., as it’s universally known, soon became a real mecca for new theater, however, devoted to staging a new work every week by the likes of Jean-Claude van Itallie, Lanford Wilson, and Sam Shepard. Theatergoers started to know that something worth noting was happening down at La MaMa, long before the press and the academics did.

Harassment by city agencies didn’t stop with the renaming—Stewart took to sitting on the front steps to prevent inspectors from interrupting performances—and La MaMa moved again in November 1964. After the closing performance of James Wigfall and Steve Gary’s Dear Friends, according to La MaMa’s own website (other sources say it was Paul Foster’s Balls), the La MaMa audience all chipped in and picked up the whole kit and kaboodle—set, props, seats, coffeepot, pictures on the walls, and all—and, as the La MaMa archive records, “The procession up the avenue with the audience carrying the furniture is how we moved.” Back up at 9th Street, the new space at 122 2nd Avenue opened on 11 November with David Novak’s The Wedding of the Panda directed by Arthur Gorton. Each successive move brought La MaMa to ever larger spaces with greater seating capacity (122 2nd was officially still 74, but could fit 115 if packed to the gunnels), and with each increase came more interest from playwrights and directors looking for less cramped spaces to try out their scripts and ideas. Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, the first full-length play written for Off-Off-Broadway, requiring a cast of 25 actors, opened at La MaMa’s third theater on 20 January 1965 under the direction of Marshall Mason. (Mason and Wilson would go on to found the Circle Repertory Company in 1969 with Tanya Berezin and Robert Thirkield.) Despite a low-profile for publicity, relying almost entirely on word of mouth—La MaMa’s listings in the Village Voice bore no address or telephone number—the membership was now about 3,000. The theater remained in place for over three years, enough time to establish itself firmly in the imagination of both theater artists and theatergoers as an important and vital place for new and exciting performance. As Stewart assured me once, “Everything at La MaMa is unique.”

In April 1968, the lease at 122 2nd Avenue expired, but Stewart had secured grants to subsidize the purchase and renovation of La MaMa’s own building. While that space was being prepared, the company moved into its fourth location, a transitional theater on the second floor of 9 St. Mark’s Place. It opened on 8 January 1969 with Jeff Weiss’s The International Wrestling Match, directed by Ricardo Martinez, and closed on 27 March with Concept I & II, written and directed by Lawrence Sacharow. On 2 April, Stewart opened Tom Eyen’s staging of his own Caution: A Love Story in La MaMa’s new, permanent home at 74A E. 4th Street, the hub of its buzzing hive of artistic activity up to today. In August 1970, Stewart purchased the building at 47 Great Jones Street around the corner for rehearsal space and studio classrooms, and on 18 October 1974, the 299-seat La MaMa Annex (renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2009) opened at 66 E. 4th Street with the now-famous production of Fragments of a Trilogy, conceived and directed by Andrei Serban with music composed by Elizabeth Swados. (The Annex, two doors west of the main theater, also contains a dormitory for visiting artists.)

When Stewart inaugurated Café La MaMa, none of the pioneers really knew what they were doing. They learned as they went, but they broke rules more because they didn’t know them or because they had no alternative than because they were rebelling against anything. Stewart proclaimed:

No one in our beginnings had any idea about changing theatre, or setting up an alternative theatre, or doing anything about Off-Broadway. We were a little group of people who wanted to write plays and who would be in these plays and who really didn’t know too much about theatre at all; certainly I knew nothing.

Though Stewart and her troupe, like most Off-Off-Broadway companies, shunned critics, few newspapers were very interested in what they were doing at first because, for all their enthusiasm and energy, the quality was uneven and the acting and directing were often laughable. When La MaMa was in Copenhagen in 1965—because the European press did cover La MaMa performances and Stewart thought that if she could get good notices on the continent, she could bring them back as proof of La MaMa’s success—the East Village impresario acknowledged that the Danes “loved our spirit, the love that seemed to come from us, but they all agreed we could not act and knew absolutely nothing about theatre.” But the company set out to learn and, after being laughed out of the Actors Studio, created its own style, largely invented by Tom O’Horgan, whose interest had been music and opera. Lee Strasberg later quipped to Stewart that it was good for La MaMa that the Actors Studio hadn’t taken the company on as students because then, the La MaMa style of theater wouldn’t have evolved.

That style had its source in La MaMa’s origins, though it didn’t become identifiable for a few years. Since she started Café La MaMa, Stewart supported non-establishment writers, directors, and theater companies from around the country and the world. She accepted Postmodern theater well before the mainstream culture did and La MaMa staged one of the first gay plays, Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, workshopped there as separate one-acts in 1978 and ’79. Among La MaMa’s stage innovations were breaking the fourth wall and arranging the audience seating specifically for each production, as in Fragments of a Trilogy, and using nudity (Rochelle Owen’s Futz!, 1967, as staged by Tom O’Horgan), cross-gender casting (Split Britches’ Double Agency, 2002), and audience participation (Paul Foster’s Tom Paine, 1967, also directed by O’Horgan). Stewart habitually declared, “La Mama E.T.C. is an experimental theatre club, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre,” but in the 1970s, La MaMa shifted from focusing strictly on new plays and writers to innovative directors. Stewart’s vision stressed playmaking rather than playwriting so her artists were moved to express the text through visual, kinetic, and aural means. The troupe in time evolved, as Stewart put it, “a theatre that goes beyond the word but always began with a text,” and La MaMa productions often intermixed music, sound, movement, dance, visual effects, and lighting with acting and speech as principal parts of the performance text. All the innovations which marked La MaMa events when the techniques were introduced have become part of the mainstream director’s and playwright’s toolkit.

Over the decades, Stewart and La MaMa played nursemaid to many artists and not a few groups. The well-publicized list of artists who made early appearances on Stewart’s stages includes Harvey Fierstein, Sam Shepard, Tom O’Horgan, David and Amy Sedaris, Wallace Shawn, Richard Foreman, Lanford Wilson, and so many more it’s impossible to name even a fraction of them. La MaMa also provided a home to groups like Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre (Viet Rock, 1966), Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret (Brecht's Ashes 2, The Million, 1984), John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous (Cockstrong, 1969, among others), Lee Breuer’s Mabou Mines (Mother, 1994), Hanay Geiogamah’s Native American Theatre Ensemble (Na Haaz'an, Body Indian, 1972; Coyote Tracks, Foghorn, 1973), Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver’s Split Britches (Double Agency, 2002), and Richard Schechner’s East Coast Artists (Amerika, 1994, and others). In January 2011, La MaMa hosted the Belarus Free Theater, a troupe that’s in severe political trouble in its home country, as part of the Under the Radar festival, produced by the Public Theater; BFT has been scheduled to return in April to La MaMa, which has offered the company an “artistic residency.” Of course, there was the La MaMa Repertory Company from the late ‘60s, directed first by O’Horgan, which became the Great Jones Rep Company in 1974, under Serban. These artists and the many others Stewart supported were those for whom art is their means of communication, regardless of what form that may take. “Non-establishment” not being the same as “anti-establishment,” however, she asserted that politics held no interest for her—“none whatsoever.” This attitude even got her into some difficulty with the African-American community in New York: Stewart asserted that some black activists during the volatile ‘60s resented her because she didn’t focus her productions on theater for black people or black political plays. Playwright Amiri Baraka, who wrote and directed the La MaMa production Money: A Jazz Opera in 1983 and was a fervent black nationalist in the ‘60s, confirmed this, adding, “Ellen was very free and open, but at the same time, she was determined to do things her own way. It was an interesting contradiction.”

While she was at once nurturing and demanding, freeing and restricting, open and controlling, Stewart was indeed in command of her own universe. As we heard from Baraka, the producer generally went her own way irrespective of anyone else’s opinion. “Ellen’s will is so strong,” said Gretchen Green, a former La MaMa managing director who now sits on its advisory board, “she’s just an incredible example of how to get things done and how to get them done your way.” “No one,” reported playwright van Itallie, “dared ignore La Mama.” Stewart may not have told her artists what to do or how to work, but she could let them know when she was unhappy or displeased. “She scolds me, she pushes me, she worries about me,” reported Talking Band co-founder Paul Zimet, a playwright and director. Actor Bill Irwin recalled that Stewart had a “shame on you” tone of voice when she needed it, as well as a “weary Mama voice” when a project didn’t work out. “Whenever she yells or gets mad, it only belongs to the work, to the world of the work,” recalled Michael Sirotta, a resident composer at the theater. “Working at La Mama has been a love affair; it’s been a hate affair.” Everyone who worked at La MaMa could feel Stewart’s lash occasionally, Sirotta said. She even once yelled at an entire audience—at a 1985 performance of Mythos Oedipus in Delphi, Greece—because they were seated in the wrong part of the amphitheater.

Mama Stewart could be bitter, too. She resented the fact that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which she saw as being in the same business as La MaMa, got millions of dollars in grants and subsidies while she struggled to stay afloat. Harvey Lichtenstein’s BAM and Papp’s Public Theater became institutions, and Stewart said that her religion—she was a practicing Catholic—taught her that whatever happened, it was because it was meant to be that way. If Lichtenstein got $3 million from the NEA and she got $300,000 . . . well, that’s how she kept from becoming an institution and was able to keep doing what she liked to do. She also felt that her lack of profile, especially in the academic theater world and its journals, was because people like Richard Schechner, a professor at NYU's Department of Performance Studies and editor of The Drama Review, dismissed her as a dilettante. Yet in 1980, when Michael Kirby, also an NYU professor, was editor of TDR, he wrote that Stewart, as the producer of avant-garde theater, was arguably the most important figure in her field. And in 1985, she received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, recognizing her accomplishments and providing her the money to open La MaMa Umbria, the artists’ retreat she built in a 14th-century convent in Spoletto in central Italy.

In the early ‘90s, I was working with Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company as a sometime dramaturg and, in 1992-93, as a writer composing a profile for The Drama Review of him, his company, and their work. I spent seven days a week for months on end going to rehearsals or performances of various stage projects, observing classes of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, and attending meetings between Shapiro and his collaborators. The Shaliko Company had been performing at La MaMa since 1983, so much of this activity took place at one of Stewart’s facilities. Of course, Stewart famously didn’t attend rehearsals (unless asked) and didn’t hang around her artists at work, so I would never say that I got to know her, but I did meet her, even interviewing her for the Shaliko profile. And, obviously, I observed the effect she and her institution had on the artists and their work. (I also interviewed Shapiro over many hours and he spoke often of Stewart.) Now, I don’t suppose my impression of Ellen Stewart is especially informed or that my perspective is unique—in fact, many artists have said the same things about her—but having spent so much time in her orbit, I want to add my voice to the encomiums that have appeared since her death. I saw what she meant to the artists who worked at La MaMa; Shapiro’s memorial in 1997, for instance, was held in the La MaMa Annex because it was the one location in New York City (he died and is buried in New Mexico) that meant the most to him and those who attended. Each of us who’d known Shapiro knew him in connection to many locations in the city, but we all knew him in connection with La MaMa.

Everyone who knew Stewart called her “Mama,” even her elders. She was the wet nurse for an awful lot of New York theater, and she had her way of nurturing the artists she respected and supported. Her biggest gifts to the playwrights and directors whose work La MaMa housed were space, time, and freedom. She didn’t meddle or kibitz, she didn’t read scripts, she didn’t look in at rehearsals. She gave the artists a room to work in and time to develop their projects. The freedom she offered was the freedom to fail. Her support, and invitations to return, weren’t contingent on success, either in the press or at the box office. She offered no financial support, and the theater had precious few assets to dole out—no costume shop or set and prop storage the companies could raid. Production budgets were entirely the responsibility of the producing company. The company could use La MaMa’s press rep and, of course, its box office staff, but they were both pretty rudimentary and many troupes, like Shaliko, had their own publicists even if they used La MaMa’s services as well. (When Shaliko resided at the Public, by contrast, they received no money, but had access to NYSF’s hoard of costumes and set pieces, its efficient and effective publicity machine, and its cachet. The trade-off was that Papp could interfere with the project if he felt like it—he acted like a producer, in other words—and a resident company could be asked to find other quarters if Papp was displeased with the work.)

La MaMa, of course, had never been about the work, the product; for Stewart, it had always been about the people, the artists who were doing it. She judged artists not on their proposals, résumés, or track records, but on an almost mystical individual response to their personalities. “It’s not voodoo,” she insisted. “It’s what I get from a person.” Shapiro’s history with The Shaliko Company was tortuous, for instance. He’d started the company in 1972, installed it at the Public in 1974, and then disbanded it in 1976. He restarted Shaliko in 1980 for one season and when he tried again in 1981, he had no home base. He turned to Stewart, who maintained, “I think I was the one that encouraged him to start again.” Asked why she would be so interested in someone who’d never worked at La Mama before, she answered: “It’s just that I thought that he should come back, that’s all. There wasn’t any particular thing about his work. I just felt very strongly—very strongly—that he should come back and that he should rebuild.” Stewart said no to projects or artists in which she wasn’t interested, but, she said, “If my mind tells me I want to do this, then I do it.” She didn’t require artists to bring her their ideas or clear their projects with her: “I have my own way of knowing about things,” Stewart explained. “People either beep to me or they don’t,” she would offer.

The East Village impresario pretty much stayed out of the way. “I don’t read texts, okay. It’s very seldom that I even see a show that goes on here at La MaMa,” she insisted. “I’m not a scholar. I don’t go to rehearsals.” Moreover, “I’m not a person to go into an in-depth analysis about anybody about anything,” she explained. “You see, my particular interest is the person involved . . . . I don’t go watching what Leo [Shapiro] does,” said Stewart, for example. “I like to know he has a place to show his work; I know that he has the ability to do work, and I like to encourage that. That’s it. I’m like that with everything at La MaMa.” Of Shapiro she said, “I never ask him about what he’s going to do”; artists who “beeped” to her were “very secure here,” Stewart promised. Of Shapiro’s return to Shaliko, for instance, the impresario added: “I thought that he had some promise and that he should come back. I liked him as a person . . . and he’s been here ever since.” As Shapiro himself put it: “Ellen’s given me a place.”

Nevertheless, Stewart could be very protective and solicitous of her artists. ”You let yourself become one of them and you use whatever skills you have to enhance what they have, what they do,” she proclaimed. “This is my philosophy.” But what Stewart did best was stand in the breech: “Ellen doesn’t allow rules to get in the way of the work you’re doing” asserted Stacy Klein, director of the Double Edge Theatre, a La MaMa presenting company. David Diamond, coordinator of the La MaMa International Symposium for Directors in Umbria, said, “Ellen is happiest when she is creating something. She is truly the most creative person I’ve ever met. As a mentor, an inspiration, she is the embodiment of the philosophy that anything is possible.” In her own words, Stewart affirmed, “I enjoy everything I’m doing because I do what I want to do, always hoping something good will come to whoever is concerned. My good comes from the fact that they’ve done the work I wished they would do with me.” Even though she kept a distance from her artists—she often called them her “babies” or her “kids” and André De Shields wrote of being one of her “spirit children”—Stewart seemed to think of their work as hers as well. When I was talking to her about Shapiro’s work there, she spoke of what “we were going to do” and “what we did before.” If she was a mother to her artists in the beginning, though, she was a much more remote figure when I saw her at work; Schechner characterized her as “more Queen Victoria than Gaia.” Of course, she was well over 70 by the time I met her and had been at it for 30 years. As I mentioned in passing, she had also experienced the fright of nearly losing La MaMa to financial disaster just at the time I was observing Shaliko. If she wished to be an éminence grise rather than a visible presence, who could blame her? Though she took up directing late in her career (her first directorial credit: The Cotton Club Gala in 1975), hands-on wasn’t her style anyway. If an artist asked her for advice or counsel, she’d give it—but it might not be what the artist expected to hear. When Shapiro, who’d been an artist-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, became discouraged with the place, he went to Stewart and told her he was quitting Trinity. “Well, honey, you’ve gotta have a job,” he remembered her berating him. “Mama, I really cannot stand it,” he bridled. “I’ve gotta come back here and do what I really do.” Then Stewart suggested, “Well, honey, you get them to send the students to you.” He did, and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, administered from Hartford but taught at La MaMa in the East Village, was conceived. And Shapiro didn’t quit. “She’s really gifted in that way,” he added.

Shapiro may have wanted to install the Trinity College program at La MaMa because his company was based there; the head of the Trinity dance department, who would oversee the program, had her own reasons. On a visit to the theater during an exploratory field trip to New York City, she met Stewart and saw how the students responded very strongly to “the spirit of La MaMa and the experimentation and also very much its sense of down-to-earthness and community.” The Trinity performing arts departments wanted to use “the great acting, dance, and performance art theaters in New York City” to expand and “La Mama is the nexus of all that.” If the late Joe Papp’s Public Theater is, as its reputation has it, the busiest theater in New York City, La MaMa must be a very close second. Aside from the 99-seat First Floor Theatre, 74, as La MaMa’s East 4th Street home is called, also houses The Club on the second floor. A 125-seat cabaret space where performance artists frequently appear, The Club used to be in the basement of 74 and in 1985, I saw the late Danitra Vance there doing a one-woman performance reminiscent of an edgier Whoopi Goldberg show, before she came to prominence on Saturday Night Live. (The basement now houses the La MaMa Archive, the extensive repository of documents recording the history of the theater from its beginnings, and, along with it, the history of Off-Off-Broadway.) In 1984, Stewart launched La Galleria, a non-profit art gallery at 6 E. 1st Street, whose mission, like the theater’s, is “to nurture artistic experimentation,” concentrating on the East Village art scene.

On the top floor of 74 are three small, sun-lit rooms that since 1969 comprised Stewart’s living quarters. She literally lived “above the shop,” and the building having been renovated without installing an elevator—in 1968, no one thought it would be necessary—Stewart reached her memorabilia-crammed apartment, the walls lined with art from her travels, by climbing the four flights from the street level. Later, when she became weakened by age and illness, someone had to carry her up and down the stairs to and from the rooms which became even more cluttered with medical equipment. When it came to hardships and disappointments, however, Stewart insisted, “I’ve never thought about the difficulties in my life, except when I thought I was going to lose La MaMa.” Stewart continued, “Then an article appeared in The New York Times.” That was on 10 March 1992: the Times had announced that La MaMa had a $176,000 deficit and that the theater needed $150,000 to finish the season that was ending on 30 June. Mama Stewart rejoiced that “people sent money from all over the world,” pulling the theater back from the brink.

Stewart had recognized the importance of multicultural and international art exchanges before it was hip and academic conferences or graduate courses on the subject were conceived. A true Internationalist, the Off-Off-Broadway producer’s search for theater talent recognized no borders, ranging across Europe (including Eastern Europe), Asia, the Middle East, South and Central America, and Africa. Through the years, Stewart established satellite companies in many countries: currently operating are La MaMa Bogota; La MaMa Tel Aviv; La MaMa Melbourne; La MaMa Umbria, the retreat; and La MaMa Tokyo, a jazz club. More significant to me than Stewart’s importation of American avant-garde theater abroad, though, was her introduction of international theater culture to the U.S., arguably the most insular cultural enclave on the planet. La MaMa played host to many foreign artists whose work was barely known in the U.S., like Andrei Serban (Romania), whom Stewart was the first to employ in this country, Jerzy Grotowski (Poland), Ohno Kazuo (Butoh dancer from Japan), Maria Elena Anaya (dancer from Mexico), Peter Brook (England), Mark Sadan (Israel), Tan Dun (composer from China), Joe Kodeih (Lebanon), Denise Stoklos (Brazil), Rina Yerushalmi (Israel), Tadashi Suzuki (Japan), and Tadeusz Kantor (Poland). Productions Stewart herself directed were invariably imbued with multicultural influences and techniques, even before such concepts had become common on stage or at academic conferences.

If there was an overriding philosophy by which Stewart ran La MaMa, however, it was a lesson she learned from Abe Diamond, an Orchard Street fabric dealer who gave her material from which she fashioned the dresses that got her noticed at Saks back at the beginning. “Papa” Diamond adopted Stewart as his “artistic daughter” and, parading her around the Lower East Side to show off her creations, he explained that she “must always have a pushcart; that if I pushed the cart for other people it would take me wherever I wanted to go.” The pushcart was her own outlet with which she could serve others’ needs and sell her wares—either fabric or artistic. La MaMa was her pushcart, she always insisted, and it would always be a pushcart, not an institution like the other theaters she saw burgeoning around her in the ‘60s. “Institutions tie people down; they are not Stewart’s thing,” wrote Cindy Rosenthal, an arts writer who published an extensive profile of the producer and the company in TDR as recently as 2006. “It was more important for her to move around, to keep pushing her cart into more corners of the globe.” Ellen Stewart has pushed her cart to the end now.

[By coincidence, La MaMa is announcing it’s 12th Annual La MaMa International Symposium for Directors. Featured artists will include Ping Chong, Tina Landau, Ruth Maleczech, Dijana Milosevic (Serbia), Luca Ronconi (Italy), Hjalmar-Jorge Joffre-Eichorn (Bulgaria), JoAnne Akalaitis, Dorcy Rugamba (Rwanda), Marco Martinelli (Italy), Ermanna Montanari (Italy), and others, offering workshops for professional directors at La MaMa Umbria International in Spoleto, Italy this summer. The symposium takes place from 15 July-15 August 2011 at La MaMa Umbria. There will be two two-week sessions, each featuring at least four teaching artists and special guests. In addition, participants visit local cultural sites, attend arts festivals and community fairs and meet local artists. For registration information, visit http://e2ma.net/go/9113718186/3458096/103424231/35181/goto:http://lamama.org/programs/la-mama-umbria-international/directorssymposium/. Also at La MaMa Umbria will be the 5th Annual Playwright Retreat, 3-13 July; the 1st Annual Master Acting Workshop, 17-27 August; and a special workshop by Cricot-2, a Polish ensemble (Teresa and Andrzej Welminski), 13-26 June.

[After I wrote this memorial to Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, one of the premier playwrights of Off-Off-Broadway and one of La MaMa’s early mainstays, died (Thursday, 24 March) at 73. I plan to post some sort of memorial to Wilson, a playwright I enjoyed immensely, very soon on ROT.

[In a few days, I’ll also be publishing an old review I wrote of a 1976 performance of Serban and Swados’s Fragments of a Trilogy, one of La MaMa’s most famous productions. Come back to ROT and see what I made of that show 35 years ago.]