[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.
09 April 2011
04 April 2011
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.]
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.]
30 March 2011
Fritz Scholder
[I recently published “’May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite” (22 October 2010) which caught the attention of Jordan Richman, a retired professor who lives in Phoenix. Richman, who did his doctoral work at the University of New Mexico, was good enough to repost the article on his blog Art Legends (http://www.artlegends.org), which features some posts dedicated to Native American culture. One of the posted items was a self-portrait and other paintings by Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), an American Indian artist in whom my family and I have had an interest for some time. Back in 2008, my mother and I went to a retrospective of his work at the National Museum of the American Indian, both the New York segment of the exhibit at the New York City satellite down at Bowling Green and, later, the larger part at the NMAI on the Mall in Washington. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian ran from 1 November 2008 until 17 May 2009 in New York and 16 August in Washington. Here’s the report on those visits I wrote two years ago.]
On 30 November 2008, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, during an all-day drizzle here, Mom and I trucked down to the National Museum of the American Indian on Bowling Green. (It's now an annex of the main NMAI on the National Mall, but until that museum was opened in 2004, the George Gustav Heye Center was the NMAI, installed in the handsome Beaux Arts Alexander Hamilton Customs House in 1994.) NMAI was holding a two-part exhibit/retrospective of the work of Fritz Scholder, half here in New York and half in Washington; the smaller half here focused on Scholder's painting and sculpture of the 1980s and '90s when he concentrated on non-Indian subjects, including his "mystery woman," a recurring subject, as well as mythical and supernatural figures. Scholder’s an artist in whom my mother has a special interest, having first seen his work with my dad in Santa Fe at the artist's studio there and then again in Dallas, where they bought Another Mystery Woman (c. 1987), a bronze sculpture that’s one of his Mystery Woman series.
Fritz Scholder is, himself, something of a curious character quite aside from his art, which has always been controversial both among the art establishment and among Native Americans. He was born in Minnesota to an Anglo mother and a father who was half German-American and half Luiseño Indian; Scholder’s a member of the Luiseño tribe of Southern California, though he’s said that you can't be something when it's only a quarter of your heritage. Scholder grew up ambivalent about his Indian heritage; in fact, it was hardly mentioned in his home when he was growing up. His father was an administrator of Bureau of Indian Affairs schools but the family lived off the reservation and Fritz went to public schools instead of the BAI schools his father had attended. Scholder said of his father's attitude toward his native heritage that the elder Scholder "was the product of the old Indian schools—he was ashamed of being an Indian." (He also spoke of the Indian schools as being a brainwashing tool used by the Anglo society to erase Native American culture and language and turn Indians into Anglos. That's exactly what they were: their very philosophy was to assimilate the Indian students. It nearly worked, too.) The artist recounted that at their wedding, his mother and father had been given many Indian crafts, such as Maria Martinez pottery (very beautiful black-on-black, very famous, and very valuable), baskets, robes, and blankets, as wedding gifts, but that his father had thrown them all out.
So Scholder grew up essentially denying his own Indian heritage, and though he was determined to become an artist from an early age (his talent was first recognized as early as 1955), he was also determined not to paint Indians. In 1967, he broke his pledge, however, when he saw how badly the Indian was portrayed in art, even Indian art, and his earliest Indian works were immediately controversial for their break with the traditional view of Native Americans in art and their gritty and sometimes seamy portraits of his own people. That year, with Indian No. 16, a featureless Indian with a firm question mark floating over his headdress, “[P]eople just freaked out,” said the artist. “I knew they would.” After Scholder achieved considerable recognition, even if he was viewed as an iconoclast and rebel, in the Southwest, where he had settled, the artist decided he needed to be received by the Eastern art world in order to be a true success. After sojourns and exhibits around the world in places as exotic as Romania, Egypt (where he painted the Sphinx and the pyramids), and Paris, he moved to New York City in 1982 (he lived in the East Village) and vowed again never to paint Indians. For nearly a decade, Scholder kept to other subjects for his work—those "mystery woman" depictions and figures of myth and the spirit world—until he again turned to Indian portrayals in the 1990s, acknowledging that one should never make pledges of that nature. Hence the title for this two-part exhibit: Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. It alludes to both the man and his work.
Whether painting (he did few sculptures, and they’re often renditions of subjects he was painting) Indians, the "mystery woman," vampires, animals, or fallen angels, Scholder's art is frequently decidedly eerie and disturbing, albeit brightly colored. The painting that was the emblem for the New York exhibit, Purgatory (1996), one of the three-part series that also includes Heaven and Hell (all displayed on three walls of the same small gallery), is a large (almost 7'x6') bust of a man in a black shirt with a purple tie, wearing a pillbox hat that looks like a black fez. The figure's face is frightening, like something from an old horror movie (think Boris Karloff in The Mummy), set in a grimace revealing a row of sharp, dripping teeth. (Another of Scholder's recurring subjects is the vampire.) The face is half shadowed, but the eye in the light half, though blue, is obscured and dark as if the socket were excessively deep, while the eye in the dark half of the face stares out brightly with a dark iris surrounded by a white cornea. The subject of all three paintings in the series was identified as the artist, who made a self-portrait every year, often on his birthday. Though not all Scholder's work is so threatening, this was the impression his retrospective gave even as there were pleasanter images among the pieces on display. Scholder said he didn't like pretty pictures (a sentiment echoed by Joan Miró when he quoted Rembrandt: "I find rubies and emeralds in a dung heap"—cited at the exhibit of the Spanish surrealist's work at MoMA which I saw at this time also).
Later, I went to Washington for two weeks at the end of the year. We drove down to the Mall to see the larger half of the two-part Scholder show at NMAI on Monday afternoon, 22 December, the day after I arrived in town. As you recall, the works exhibited at the Heye Center focused on the period when Scholder worked out of New York City and painted non-Indian subjects. The exhibit in Washington was larger and while it covered the whole of Scholder's career, from his teenage start in abstract expressionism to his late works, it was dominated by the artist's paintings of Indian subjects, the work that made him famous and successful—if also controversial. From the very start, Scholder worked in bright, often dissonant colors; pinks, oranges, blues, yellows blast out from his canvases whether they’re the youthful experimentations of his teens and early twenties or the figurative works of his middle career. His earliest works, which clearly owe a debt to such abstractionists as Roberts Rauschenberg and Motherwell (and maybe Richard Diebenkorn), are broad swatches of color on large canvases. Scholder studiously avoided figurative painting in his early years, and the works have an air of deliberation and derivation that felt to me like a young artist consciously searching for a medium that could be his, but not having found it yet. (I once saw a small show of Diego Rivera's cubist works that felt the same way—like he was trying out stuff that wasn't really "him" yet.) Scholder named Francisco Goya, Edvard Munch, and Francis Bacon as some of his influences. Ironically, after breaking his (first) vow never to paint Indians, he seemed immediately to have come into his own when he began to do so. He not only had found the style he’d manifest for the rest of his career—what I have to call "abstract impressionism," though I don't know that any such form officially exists—but he had something to say. (It’s what he seemed to have to say that made him controversial among both artists/critics and Native Americans.) He was commenting on both the world of Native Americans—their contemporary lives—and the ways in which Indians had been (and were being) depicted in American art, including Native American art. Scholder's Indian paintings seem to have fallen into three vague categories, at least as I observed them. In one, he painted the Indians he saw on the streets and in the bars of Santa Fe or Tucson; in another, he parodied, deconstructed, or travestied the conventional artistic view of Indians from the 19th century to the late 20th—those Remington depictions of the Noble Savage, for instance; and in a third, he presented what might be interpreted as a combination of these in renderings of old photographs of Indians taken in the early years of the last century, often by anthropologists and sociologists. We know from the New York City exhibit that Scholder eschewed "pretty pictures," but his Indian paintings were often also unflattering as well. His contemporary portraits included drunken Indians or Indians asleep on the sidewalk, sprawled against a storefront—the men (there are almost no women among these pictures) he saw around him. (His most iconic work is Indian with Beer Can, 1969, a man in a wide-brimmed, black cowboy hat and sunglasses, slouching over a bar with a can of Coors at his elbow, his mask-like face baring pointed, feral teeth.) The Indian communities didn't appreciate this kind of truthful art—what van Gogh called l’art véridique.
Scholder's ambivalence about painting Indians is certainly understandable from his background, but it has to be said that not only are his Indian paintings the foundation of his reputation, they’re also by far the most interesting work of his career. Ironically, it was his students at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe who turned him onto Indian paintings. Though he had abjured the subject for himself, the young artists he was teaching were exploring different ways to depict their own people and this intrigued Scholder. Artistically, emotionally, and intellectually, they’re the most complex of his works.
[A little history of NMAI: George Gustav Heye opened his private Museum of the American Indian to the public in 1922 to house and display his own collection of Native American art. He’d started collecting in 1903 and he established the Heye Foundation in 1916 to oversee it and promote the study of Indian art and culture. The museum was located at 155th Street and Broadway in Harlem until it had been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and moved to the Custom House in 1994. The Smithsonian took over Heye’s museum in 1989 and then opened the main building for the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in 2004. The Heye Center, now a satellite of the larger NMAI, maintains its own permanent collection (based on Heye’s original holdings) and exhibits.
[As it happens, the Heye Center’s just undergone a reorganization. Housed in the 1907 Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan, it’s redesigned the exhibition for its permanent collection. I haven’t seen the new installation, but since the old one was interesting as it was, I can only recommend that anyone even remotely interested in the art of the American Indian, much of which is breathtakingly beautiful and all of which is eye-opening, pay a visit to this little-known museum at the southern tip of the island. It’s free (as are all Smithsonian facilities) and open every day (including Mondays, the traditional dark day for museums, and holidays except Christmas Day). The Customs House alone is worth the trip—it’s a magnificent Beaux Arts building in its own right, a Historic Landmark, and serves as a perfect example of terrific re-use of historic architecture.
[Thanks to Jordan Richman both for his compliment of republishing my Shalako article on Art Legends and for providing the impetus to publish this report on a fascinating American artist on ROT.]
25 March 2011
“As It Is in 'Heaven'”
[For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo, interviewing him and his colleagues, friends, critics, and employers; attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing; observing classes for his Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program; combing through the company’s files and records; and generally gathering everything I could on Shaliko and Leo that might be pertinent. The Shaliko Company’s main project during that time was the production at Theatre for the New City of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, 17 September-11 October 1992, and I attended most of the rehearsals starting on 10 August. Shortly before opening, Leo, Karen, and I decided to try to get a little early publicity by submitting an article on the work-in-progress to the Village Voice, and I set out to write it, a description of the work-in-progress. The result was published as "As It Is in Heaven" on 22 September 1992.
[In a recent ROT article, I wrote about the controversy of reviewing plays in previews and I cited Linda Winer’s Newsday column of 25 December 2010 on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark as an example of a good way to split the difference between an actual review of an unfinished production and covering only the news of accidents, injuries, safety measures, and production costs. I also mentioned in passing that I’d done something similar myself when I wrote the article on Blue Heaven, so instead of republishing Winer’s article, I’m republishing my own.]
* * * *
A young man strolls into a cafe and sits at the table of a woman kneading clay. Two musicians wait silently on the bandstand. “Lend me a dollar fifty,” says the man. “I want some scrambled eggs.” Not looking up from her clay, she scolds him for eating “things that clog you up.” They’re only a few feet from my table, and I hear the whole exchange. Even so, a woman with a video camera broadcasts it onto a TV across the room. The man, whose name is John, goes to the bandstand and plays a bluesy riff on the piano, picking up the rhythm of the cook’s slow chop-chop-pause from the kitchen. John has AIDS but the artist, Aria, warns him that AZT “ruins your liver.” “Honey, I found delicious ways to ruin my liver,” John replies. He doesn’t speak the words, though—he sings them.
What kind of cafe is this? No, it’s not Cop Rock returned to haunt us. I’ve been watching rehearsals of Blue Heaven, Karen Malpede’s new play under construction, like the Heaven Cafe, at Theater for the New City. Halfway through rehearsals, it’s quite different from what I pictured from Malpede’s script. Under the direction of Leonardo Shapiro, founder of The Shaliko Company which is co-producing the play, this environmental production where the spectators sit amidst the action in the cafe (which opens a half hour before performances for drinks and snacks) is becoming a sort of live-action, low-tech virtual reality experience.
Later in the scene, Jill (Christen Clifford), a teenage junkie who’s lost a leg, and Dee (Sheila Dabney), her older companion, have joined other regulars at the Heaven. Aria (Rosalie Triana) has just read the newspaper account of the death of another artist who was her lover’s wife. Names are never used, though the videographer will shoot the headline, but you’re expected to recognize Ana Mendieta who fell or was thrown from the apartment she shared with her husband, Carl Andre, in 1985. “Did you know her?” asks John (Nicky Paraiso). There is a long pause as the jazz duo starts playing; Aria answers, a sharp sob over her body mike: “No.” Suddenly, Dee and John, circulating among the tables, begin detailing Mendieta’s art while Jill offers personal commentary on it. They taunt Aria with suspicions about her lover, whose art and character Sada (Lee Nagrin), Buddha-like owner of the Heaven Cafe in her booth, extols through the speakers. The characters appear on the TV monitor as they speak. The dialogue is rhythmic; accompanied by Gretchen Langheld’s sax-and-guitar composition, it becomes a jazz oratorio. It builds to a nearly intolerable tension until Jill asks the question that began the stichomythia: “Did you know her?” Aria’s amplified anguished murmur briefly halts the build: “No.” It starts again, but this time I watch Aria’s stony-faced reaction on the monitor.
Blue Heaven isn’t just a stylized slice of urban life or, like Song of Singapore, merely a reconstructed cafe. Set on the eve of 1991’s Persian Gulf war, several things in particular distinguish it—two that intrigue me most. First is Malpede’s poetic distillation of our world. “All of us experienced the war,” Malpede points out, “and most of us also experienced the death of Ana Mendieta. These are two contemporary historical events that are part of our lives.” True, but more immediately, her characters’ daily efforts just to carry on are totally familiar to me. If I don’t actually know these people, I’ve encountered them over and over again in my neighborhood and in places like the Heaven Cafe.
The second allure is the immersion in the action—being not only in the cafe, but in communion with the performers. “That’s why people go to cafes,” Shapiro tells me; “they want community.” He’s instructed his cast, who perform as actual presences not just fictional characters, to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices with theirs,” so they speak of themselves through the dialogue. “Elements of this play remind me of The Brig,” remarks George Bartenieff who plays Herbie, the cook. TNC’s co-founder compares the “intensity and emotional demands” he felt in that 1963 Living Theatre production with Blue Heaven’s: “It’s like living the experience, not just pretending.” My closest theatre adventure to what I project this will be was Jim Cartwright’s Road when I paid a visit to a block in an English rust-belt town and was given a resident’s-eye-view of its reality. But Road was about Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, while Blue Heaven is about my own America. Also, Shapiro insists, “The play is about what happened last year. The production is about what’s happening now.” As he sees it, we’re all in it together.
Another difference from Road: Blue Heaven isn’t all unrelenting naturalism and illusionistic acting. Intermixed with realism are moments of broad theatricality: aside from the sung dialogue, video broadcasts and amplified voices, there will be scenes behind a scrim or with film and numerous effects, tricks and gags. Much of this hasn’t been introduced yet, but I’ve seen some of the masks, wigs and funny faces—there is considerable humor in Blue Heaven—and I’ve heard what Shapiro has asked his technical director for. Besides, there is the war in act two.
Theater for the New City is at 155 First Avenue at 10th Street and tickets for Blue Heaven will be $10, with drinks and food extra. Performances are at 8 p.m., Thursday through Sunday, September 10 through October 11; call (212) 254-1109 for reservations. Displayed for sale in TNC’s lobby will be original art commensurate with the downtown nature of the Heaven Cafe.
[Blue Heaven ran into internal difficulties which aren’t relevant here, and it didn’t get good reviews when it opened. Playwright Malpede, whom I’d interviewed before rehearsals began ("An Interview with Karen Malpede," Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 8.1 [1993], reprinted as "Karen Malpede" in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996]), as well as during the work as part of my research for the TDR article, retitled the play Going to Iraq, which is what she’d called it before the Shaliko-TNC production. I don’t believe the play’s been published under either title, Blue Heaven or Going to Iraq; I’m also not aware of any other productions other than the TNC staging, except a reading over WBAI radio in March 1992.]
20 March 2011
Reviewing the Situation: 'Spider-Man' & the Press
Then Ben Brantley published a review of Spider-Man in the Times on 8 February, the Tuesday after what would have been the opening date before the producers postponed it the fifth time till 15 March. Many other outlets also ran reviews of the production. Most were quite negative, though much of the tone really sounded like sour grapes to me. Brantley actually said that he thought everyone in the audience was there to see an accident, and it sounded to me like he was, too. Maybe I read too much into his prose, but it felt to me as if Brantley, at least, wanted the show to be bad so he could pan it.
(I’m not going to capsulize or comment on the content of the reviews themselves. First of all, since I haven’t seen the play, it wouldn’t be fair and, second, there are plenty of sites on the web where a reader can find articles about the controversy which include quotations. Of course, you can go to the individual publications themselves and read the notices for yourselves. The main publications, aside from the Times, are the Daily News, New York Post, USA Today, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Variety, and New York magazine. Like Newsday and Bloomberg News, the Newark Star-Ledger ran a review earlier. Several of the review writers said they expected to re-review the production after its official opening. Several others said they wouldn’t. For my purposes on ROT, it’s enough to note that all the notices were poor to awful. The important point here is that they were written and published.)
The editors and reviewers all say that there was no collusion, according to Patrick Healy in the Times the next day, but the word obviously went out since almost all the press ran reviews. The producers are raising a ruckus over this, for obvious reasons: they think the notices are premature since they’re still actively working on the show. "The PILE-ON by the critics was ridiculous and uncalled for,” declared Rick Miramontez, press agent and spokesman for Spider-Man. “Their actions are unprecedented and UNCOOL!" The day the notices came out, he pronounced it “a huge disappointment. Changes are still being made, and any review that runs before the show is frozen is totally invalid.” I understand this, and I actually support them to a certain extent. In his book The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272), on which I commented on ROT, Kirk Woodward wrote of reviewing a play in tryouts:
The problem is, of course, that these reviewers bring back judgments on what are essentially works in progress. Someone may evaluate the way you’re dressed once you’re ready, but to pop into the room while you’re half-clothed and say, “That looks awful!” is absurd. No more absurd, though, than to report on a work in its tryout phase.
Kirk was writing specifically about out-of-town tryouts, a practice that isn’t followed much anymore, but the principal still holds—and applies in the current case of Spider-Man. In my ROT commentary on Writing Reviews (November 2009). I declared:
Even when the producers charge the same for a seat at the preview as they do for post-opening tickets, they’re still previews. You’re watching a dress rehearsal, you understand. The cast is still working, and sometimes things haven’t gelled—might even be changed before opening. Reviewers who see a performance before opening night aren’t seeing the finished product.
I still believe that, even in the face of the phenomenon of Spider-Man since, as I also wrote:
In many shows, the first time everyone has gone through the entire play with full tech and costumes the way it’s supposed to be seen by the audience is the final dress rehearsal. . . . In new plays, it’s not unusual for new lines and even new scenes to be inserted within days of opening; new songs can be added to musicals. Because of the labor-intensivity of the rehearsal period plus the union regulations, technical adjustments are often brought in at the last minute: costumes don’t fit quite right yet, set pieces haven’t been tested, lights aren’t focused right. . . . It’s more like the first time a cook makes a new recipe—it’s not really ready for primetime.
The further back from opening night you see a play, the less stageworthy it will be—though by “critics’ previews” the show’s supposed to be “frozen.” That only means no more changes can be made; it doesn’t mean the work is complete. To be fair, though, Brantley did write, “I would like to acknowledge here that ‘Spider-Man’ doesn’t officially open until March 15 . . . ,” thus noting that he saw a preview over a month before the production is now scheduled to open. The rest of the column, however, was phrased just like any other New York Times theater review (except, perhaps, a little more negative than most): there was no way to distinguish this review from one of a production that had completed its previews and had been deemed to be “finished.” In my view, that’s the incorrect approach.
Some in the press (and on the blogs) have described the relationship between reviewers and producers as an implicit contract. The producers give the media outlets free tickets for their shows, usually a pair of the best seats, in exchange for the promise that the writers will only see the performance when the producers want them to and won’t publish reviews until after a specific date, the “press opening.” Some critics of the move to review Spider-Man early have characterized it as a breach of the agreement. Others see it as a signal to re-examine the convention. On Huffington Post, arts journalist Leonard Jacobs cast the contretemps as a way to look at “what constitutes a critic and who decides,” because part of the argument review writers are using to justify publishing early is the fact that blog reviewers and on-line writers, with no sense of the obligation that traditional press writers have, are writing reviews or critiques whenever they buy a ticket and see the show. Isaac Butler, who on 5 January wrote on his blog, Parabasis, a detailed critique of Spider-Man, appended a note to his post in which he acknowledged: “I paid full price for my ticket and I have no deal with producers where they give me free tickets in exchange for waiting to see a show when they want me to. I also think that custom is somewhat arcane and should be rethought.” If blogger-reviewers can publish without limitations, where does that leave the print or broadcast reviewer? Some critics and defenders of the advance publication have debated that such web‑‘viewers such as Butler aren’t “critics” anyway and their posts aren’t “reviews.” (Jacobs pronounced, “Butler's post is quite manifestly a review.”) If sour grapes had been on the menu last 8 February, is it any wonder? The traditional journalists find themselves at the back of the line while all this good stuff is happening on their beat. Part of this response, I’m sure, is also a foreboding that Jacobs explains:
If a blogger-critic can attract thousands of readers a week (it can happen now, and will happen more in the future), and if a blogger-critic can buy tickets for a show and write about it, what will prevent that blogger-critic from generating even more readership, even more influence? What will press agents and traditional-media critics do then? How long will tradition, protocol and reality exist in opposition?
If you subscribe to this fear—and it’s certainly not at all beyond possibility, the way newspapers are shrinking and dropping arts coverage as more and more people turn to the ‘Net for news and information anyway—then there’s reason for traditional journalists to fight for a piece of the action. If the producers and some unspoken agreement that was put in place long before they were born are taking away their ability to cover their beat, why shouldn’t they fight back with the means that are at their disposal?
(I must confess here that this discussion has made me consider my own position. I, too, am a blogger and I write about theater, among other subjects. I don’t consider what I publish on performances reviews, but let’s be honest: they are critical analyses of productions even if they don’t fit any academic or journalistic definition of “review.” Now, I generally avoid previews; I like to see a play when the creators have decided it’s finished. But what if I do see a play before it opens? Would I blog on it? I don’t rush my reports onto ROT; I give myself the leisure of taking my time writing down my thoughts—and I even do a little research sometimes, which takes a bit more time. But would I publish before opening? I suspect I would, since I “don’t write reviews,” and I buy my own ticket, and I don’t write for a traditional media outlet. Those are all the same excuses the pre-reviewers (as Jacobs might call them) are using now, because the Isaac Butlers are already doing it. That may be why I feel kinship with the journalists even as I disagree with their final approach.)
Though I sympathize with the reviewers’ position more than a little, at least as I’ve stated it here, I think both sides are behaving improperly. The retributive tone of the reviews is unbecoming—and may make a reader wonder about the writer’s objectivity and sincerity. Are those really his opinions? Is she just twisting the knife while she has a chance? The Spider-Man reviews that appeared in February made it sound to me as if the reviewers and editors were pissed that the producers were holding them off (and charging full price for tickets—several of the writers stated what they’d paid for their seats), so they’ve taken a kind of revenge by panning the show in advance of its actual opening, hoping to damage it. I hope that’s not true, but that’s how it seemed to me.
Further, the insistence that the show’s cost is a reason to review it early is specious. The waste, if that’s what it turns out to be, might make us angry, but it’s no justification for breaching the producer-journalist compact. It may be worth reporting in context, such as to ask why, with such immense expenditures, the sets are so cheap-jack (if Brantley’s assessment is accurate). But it seems unnecessarily mercenary to harp on Spider-Man’s price tag as a rationale for going to print. (What’s the logic? They’re spending like Bernie Madoff, so I get to take a shot at them early? How does that make sense?)
Another claim used to justify the pre-reviews is that the play’s selling tickets and spectators are flocking to the theater, but they don’t know what they’re buying. Really? Isn’t that just a little arrogant? It presumes, first, that the reviewer is really just a consumer reporter whose responsibility it is to judge a product for sale and advise the paying customer whether it’s worth the price or not. I know that some arts journalists think of themselves that way, but most, I believe, see themselves as reporters covering the special field of the arts, in this case theater. Second, it assumes that the ticket-buyers need the reviewer’s opinion in order to make a decision, that the spectators can’t decide for themselves; and third, it takes for granted that there are no other viable sources of information available to the theatergoer—which is patently untrue since they’ve been arriving at the Foxwoods Theatre in droves even without formal reviews based, I would guess, on the scads of articles, reports, and rumors flooding the press, TV, and the ‘Net all this time. No, what this argument sounds like to me is frustration that everyone else is getting in their licks, and the traditional review writer is being left out. It sounds a little juvenile, doesn’t it?
I’ve proposed that journalists write on the production, even critically, not in a review per se, but in a report on the production, its status, its newsworthiness, and its issues. I don’t object to a writer assessing the quality of the production in such a report, but only as a work in progress. If a show’s been in previews for months, like Spider-Man, some evidence of the artistic work should be visible—and it’d be fair game for “reporting” (as opposed to “reviewing”). I don’t think this freedom ought to apply to a show in the normal run of previews, about four weeks, before opening. Though it seems wrong to write an actual review of a show that’s not finished, even if the official opening has been delayed for months because of problems, I think writers can say what they saw at the preview and describe the problems, as well as the assets, that are being presented to paying audiences. It’d be acceptable, for instance, for the writer to point out moments or aspects of the show that look promising, even though that promise isn’t fulfilled yet. I think a writer can couch this in terms that make it clear that work is still in progress and that the current state of the production is not its final form. That way readers can determine if they want to see the show now, in its interim condition, or wait till opening and see it finished. They know where they and the writer stand.
Linda Winer’s Newsday column on 25 December last year is a perfect example of what I have in mind. She reported on the aspects of the production that have been in the news (“four premiere push-backs . . . , four high-profile injuries, 19 previews at full price . . . , and public investigations by state and federal safety agencies”) and she commented on the current state of the show (“safety measures are being secured and director Julie Taymor is said to be making much-needed changes to the meandering book”). Winer also remarked on the reviewing debate (“it seems that critics are now the only interested parties who can't see the bride before the wedding”). So she was behaving like a reporter on the theater beat, but she didn’t avoid making critical comments (“the surprisingly conventional Broadway-pop score by U2's Bono and the Edge”; ”Joshua Kobak [the flying Spidey], and his daring (especially in a fight scene with Patrick Page's terrific Green Goblin) was a highlight of the show”). Like a news reporter, too, Winer wrote about some non-performance elements of the experience, like audience reaction (“. . . he admired the sets and the special effects”; “. . . he was wowed by the stunts, but acknowledged that ‘the sense that something unsafe might happen is spectacular.’”) And to complete her approach, Winer acknowledged she was describing a work still in progress: “I understand that is the official purpose of previews.” Winer’s article, while including critical appraisal, was a report; it was comprehensive in its coverage, forthright and open, well written and even witty—a perfect model for what I think reviewers should have aimed for in their pre-reviews (though no one else did, from my perspective).
As for the producers, they may be relishing all the coverage, even if it’s been negative for the most part. (No publicity is bad publicity, I guess.) And maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re running in previews for so long. I remember a Papp production of Timon of Athens in 1996 that ran a month in previews and didn’t officially open until a week before it closed in order to keep the press out. Circle in the Square began previews of Hughie starring Al Pacino on 25 July 1996 and didn’t open until 22 August for a scheduled closing date of 31 August (though the theater added an extension until November). In the commercial theater, producers of Home Sweet Homer with Yul Brynner, knowing it wasn’t a good show, stayed on the road for a year before coming to Broadway and suffering from the reviewers’ opprobrium. (After 11 previews, Homer opened and closed on 4 January 1976. I think it may have gone back on the road, trying to outrun the New York reviews. I saw the show at the Kennedy Center in Washington—which had produced it—before it came here, and it was pretty awful.) In 2006, the producers of the stage musical Lord of the Rings tried to run their show, which was getting terrible reviews I recall, all over the place, mostly outside the U.S.—it may have been a Canadian product. I assume they lost a lot of money (and I don’t know if they’re still running somewhere like Canberra or Auckland), but my guess is that they knew the show would be lambasted in the New York press, so they kept it out for as long as they could to make money before the inevitable dénouement; they never did get into New York in the end. Considering how much they’re spending on Spider-Man, its producers obviously need to recoup as much of the cost as they can before they let the press affect their box-office appeal. (I don’t know if the economics works for them, with $65 million at stake, but I can guess that that’s their strategy. They’ve also been using focus groups to get spectator feedback—like a TV producer or a candy manufacturer.) Spider-Man isn’t doing out-of-town tryouts (they say their elaborate tech makes that impractical), so they’re using previews for the same thing. Unfortunately for the producers, previews in New York City don’t actually prevent the New York press from getting into the theater; it only means that convention is supposed to prohibit the reviewers from publishing before the play opens. Obviously that only works for a limited time. They got caught in February; we’ll have to see if anything comes of the publication.
With the wasted money—not to overlook wasted talent and energy—I don’t have much sympathy for the producers on this. Everything I’ve read, not just the reviews, tells me this is an unworthy effort. (If, as some say, Taymor’s working as if this were a movie, not a stage play, it’s kind of shameful since she’s a product of the stage, not film. Linda Winer, by the way, asserts Taymor’s intent is “to compete with arena rock, the Spidey movies and video games.”) The photos with the Times review showed characters in cartoon/comic book costumes. That’s more reminiscent to me of Disney on Ice than a legit stage musical. Taymor’s reinterpretation of the Lion King cartoon figures was brilliant—but she used stage conventions and traditions (intercultural ones to a great degree) to accomplish that, and that was fantastic. But this is almost like live-action CGI—the designers just translated comic book characters to 3D. It’s not interesting to me, theatrically speaking. The writing sounds like it’s just a pastiche of scenes with no cohesion, and until the February reviews, no one said much about the music that I’d read. The names most associated with Spider-Man, along with Taymor, are Bono and The Edge, the composers. Why hadn’t anyone written about their work? It made me suspect it isn’t very good—at least not for the purpose it’s intended. (My suspicions seem to have been right: Brantley subsequently dismissed the music without really describing it and even Jay Lustig, a pop music reviewer who wrote the Star-Ledger’s early notice of the production last January, didn’t say much about the U2 team’s contribution. Peter Marks of the Washington Post wrote half a paragraph panning the score and Charles McNulty gave it a whole ‘graph of bad-mouthing in the L. A. Times.)
If the producers are going to throw away $65 million on this kind of muddle and then diddle the press (not to mention the spectators) the way they have, I don’t feel particularly well disposed toward them. I still think the reviewers ought to have held off on running actual reviews and opted for something more reportorial, as Winer did. The producers don’t deserve complete indemnity, especially since, as it seems, they’re benefiting from the other coverage at the same time, but given the (perhaps unlikely) chance that Taymor, et al., might manage to fix the mess, they deserve the shot. Maybe the distinction is too small to matter, but the way I look at it, at least, is that a review is a final judgment, while an interim report is an honest appraisal of where the work is right now. Linda Winer has proved it can be done right, and her approach should be honored and emulated.
[When stories concerning Spider-Man started to appear, I began thinking about whether there was some aspect of the production about which I wanted to write. I found I wasn’t terribly interested in the show itself despite its reported cost, and even the safety question, the subject of much of the news coverage, didn’t move me to offer an opinion. When Charles Isherwood wrote his column in January about the early reviews, I thought again about writing something for ROT, but I wasn’t sufficiently engaged in the issue to feel that I had anything different to say than was already being published. When the debate heated up, however, with the publication of the February reviews in the Times and other periodicals, I was moved to express an opinion of my own that I think is a little different from those that have been published. So, I’ve added my voice to the conversation—which is, of course, how this process is supposed to work.
[For readers who are interested, here are the sources of the articles mentioned, referenced, or quoted in my ROT article: Charles Isherwood, “Review A Preview? Untangling A Web,” New York Times 8 Jan. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 9; Linda Winer, “Shedding a little light on ‘Spider-Man,'“ Newsday, 25 Dec. 2010, http://www.newsday.com/columnists/linda-winer/shedding-a-little-light-on-spider-man-1.256926 (Winer’s article isn’t accessible unless you subscribe to Newsday); Jeremy Gerard, “Spidey Flails in Taymor’s Tale of Spider Woman,” Bloomberg 26 Dec. 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-27/spidey-green-goblin-flail-in-taymor-s-tale-of-spider-woman-jeremy-gerard.html; Ben Brantley, “Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread.” New York Times 8 Feb. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 7; Patrick Healy, “’Spider-Man’ Early Reviews Set Off A Storm,” New York Times 9 Feb. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 5; Leonard Jacobs, “Ensnaring Theatre Critics in the Spider-Man Web,” Huffington Post 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonard-jacobs/ensnaring-theatre-critics_b_806101.html; Isaac Butler, “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark,” Parabasis [blog] 5 Jan. 2011, http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/2011/01/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark.html; Jay Lustig, “'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' – a review,” Star-Ledger [Newark, NJ] 18 January 2011, http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2011/01/spider-man_turn_off_the_dark_-.html; Peter Marks, “'Spider-Man' on Broadway: No superpowers needed to sniff out this stinker,” Washington Post 7 Feb. 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704088.html; Charles McNulty, “Theater review: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' at Foxwoods Theatre,” Los Angeles Times 7 Feb. 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/theater-review-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-at-foxwoods-theatre.html. A couple of sites that I looked at but didn’t name are: John Simon, “Spiderman Birthpains,” Uncensored John Simon [blog], 29 December 2010, http://uncensoredsimon.blogspot.com/2010/12/spiderman-birthpains.html; and Mark Kennedy, “'Spider-Man' Musical Reviews: Too Early To Critique?” Associated Press, on Huffington Post 8 Feb. 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/spiderman-musical-reviews_n_820088.html. Some other pertinent sites include: David Cote, “Tune In: David Cote on WQXR's Arts File Friday,” Upstaged [blog], on Time Out New York 5 Jan. 2011, http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/upstaged-blog/672707/tune-in-david-cote-on-wqxrs-arts-file-friday; and Jeff Lunden, “Angry Reaction as Theater Critics Cross the Line on 'Spider-Man,'” Hollywood Reporter 28 Dec. 2010, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/angry-reaction-theater-critics-cross-66191.
[After I wrote this article, the New Yorker published John Lahr’s review of Spider-Man (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2011/02/28/110228crth_theatre_lahr). Furthermore, a brief notice appeared in the New York Times reporting that the producers had hired a music constultant for the score. Included in that short announcement were unconmfirmed reports that Spider-Man’s producers were talking to a script doctor and a co-director, and that the opening date might be postponed for a sixth time. Later, the producers announced an expanded creative team, a three-week shut-down of preview performances in April and May to revise the play, and a delay of the opening until 14 June 2011. The cost of the production is now reported to have climbed to $70 million.]
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