[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second and final part of “Caffe Cino,” my brief history of the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway and its founder. If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to the post on 11 September to read about the beginnings of Joe Cino’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse before picking up here with the café’s growth and final curtain. (To read about the milieu out of which the Caffe Cino was born, see my two-part article “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” posted on 12 and 15 December 2011.)]
When Joe Cino arrived in New York City in the midst of a blizzard on 7 February 1948, he “didn’t have a dime,” he told Michael Smith of the Village Voice in 1965, “and I still don’t.” In November 1958, he used the $400 in savings he’d accumulated after arriving in New York as the opening capital for the coffeehouse. Until 1960, he continued to work at his day job at a laundry to support the café. Cino needed little on which to subsist, and when he really needed cash, he’d move out of his apartment and sleep on a mattress in the back of the café.
Cino and the café’s staff took no salaries and he kept the costs low. John Torrey, the Cino’s electrical genius, tapped into the city’s power system to supply the café with electricity—the lights in the café went on when the street lights did—and that helped keep overhead down immensely. (When he opened the coffeehouse, Cino had neglected to hire a waiter. When customers on that first night, mostly fiends of Joe’s, simply began to serve one another, it began a practice at the Cino of friends waiting on friends; there really never was a wait staff at the Cino--it was all volunteer.) Unlike its competition, however, the Cino was a commercial enterprise, not a non-profit experimental theater, so it wasn’t eligible for the government grants and subsidies which sustained other OOB theaters.
Customers at the Cino were required to spend a dollar for coffee or pastries from the menu as the café’s minimum, but admission for the performances was virtually nil as the performers passed the hat (a basket, actually) after each show. The artists could make maybe $15 each by the end of a week of performing (that’s about $125 today). The productions had zero budgets (usually covered by the playwright or director; the most opulent show cost a little over $300 to mount)—Cino didn’t charge for the use of the room, but he also didn’t supply anything but the lights and electricity; there were, of course, no royalty payments to the writers. Directors and designers relied on ingenuity and donated labor and goods—but no one complained. It was, if you will, DIY theater, and playwright Robert Heide recalled, “For Joe, the doors were always open: do your own thing, do what you have to do, do what you want to do.”
The reigning spirit of the café was Joe Cino. The coffeehouse reflected his personality, both for good and for ill. Soon after the place opened, Ed Franzen, who’d really been looking for a studio for his own work, split—though one rumor is that Cino dumped him and assumed the storefront’s lease. (Off-Off-Broadway’s first impresario soon took mad, volatile John Torrey as his on-and-off lover.) Caffe Cino has been glorified as a place where theater artists could work without pressure, pretensions, or career-damaging consequences, “an island where our souls can play,” as Cino playwright Claris Nelson declared. Adventurous theatergoers saw the Cino as a place to go to see the exciting edge of new theater, the kind of plays, both from writers and directors, that the commercially-minded producers of Broadway and Off-Broadway wouldn’t dare touch, the work of playwrights, directors, designers, and actors they didn’t know now, but who might be the Tennessee Williamses, Lillian Hellmans, George Abbotts, Harold Clurmans, Jo Mielziners, Donald Oenslagers, Laurence Oliviers, or Helen Hayeses of the new generation.
Despite the assertions by some, as Crespy reports, “that the Cino was a place of great innocence and fervor, where passionate, idiosyncratic artists—gay or straight—were nurtured in an aesthetic environment that gave them total freedom to create,” he warned that that wasn’t the whole picture. “For others, it was a dangerous place, a bacchanalia where drugs, sex, and death flowed freely, engendering a thrilling, yet terrifying, visceral theater.” This, too, was a manifestation of Joe Cino’s character, though many Cino habitués contend that Andy Warhol’s circle was responsible for bringing drugs to the Cino. (The artist himself began frequenting the coffeehouse in 1965.)
Cino playwright Robert Heide recalled, “The Cino also sometimes operated as a kind of way-station for wild-eyed painters, actors who doubled as hustlers, and drug addicts who slept on the floor when they had no place else to go.” He quipped, “Antonin Artaud [conceiver of the Theatre of Cruelty] would have felt right at home in this strange room, as would Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, [English occultist] Alistair Crowley, and certainly, Oscar Wilde.”
Cino himself had something of a mercurial personality. (I have no credentials for making such a diagnosis, but descriptions of Cino’s behavior sound as if he might have been bipolar: sometimes giddy, even delirious, and then alternatively depressed and morose.) It largely depended on which side of him you were on, whether you had his approval or his dismissal. Joe Cino didn’t suffer those he thought were phonies or posers—and he let them know it. Crespy describes the OOB impresario variously as “generous to a fault and sometimes petty and difficult” or “wild, dangerous, passionate.” Cino’s supporters saw him as a kind of saint or a “nurturing angel” on a “holy artistic mission.” On a tear, however, such as when he and his cohorts allegedly went out in drag to attract homophobic punks and then turned and beat them up, he looked “dark, wild-eyed, volatile.” Declared Crespy, “There was always an aura of craziness and danger about Joe.”
Already addicted to amphetamines and taking LSD, over time Cino became obsessed with his increasing weight, which he blamed for his failure to achieve a career as a dancer, and his advancing age (he turned 30 in 1961); despondent over his up-and-down love life; discouraged by the feeling he was forfeiting control of the Cino because of its growing popularity and fame; fearful of losing the coffeehouse due to increased costs, intensified scrutiny by city authorities, competition from other OOB outlets such as Café La MaMa, and changes in the theater environment, some of which were generated by the presence of Caffe Cino and its like. Heide lamented that the “dark elements won out in the end.”
Though it started with classic European scripts, the Cino’s reputation and significance to American theater was as a place for new works to be tried out, along with new staging and performing notions (although a lot of those were born more out of necessity than artistic innovation). Despite the participation of so many neophyte actors, directors, and designers, the Cino developed into a playwrights’ theater, and OOB followed in that direction as it formed. By 1963, almost every performance was a new American play.
Many new and gifted playwrights, experimenting with radical forms of dramaturgy that clashed with contemporary commercial tastes, were discovered by way of Caffe Cino, not to forget Joe Cino’s imitators in the Village café-theater dodge. (Many artists worked at both the Cino and La MaMa, as well as the other OOB theaters of the time.) As it happens, the very time that Off-Off-Broadway was being born at Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa (opened in 1961), the Judson Poets’ Theatre (1961), and the Theatre Genesis (1964)—the four founding theaters of OOB—Off-Broadway was changing from an inexpensive and innovative arena of informal atmosphere and small audiences into a commercial sphere with high costs, restrictive union rules, and demanding economics—a smaller version of Broadway. The average cost of an Off-Broadway drama in the early 1960s had reached $20,000 (about $165,000 today).
One theater-besotted 19-year-old college student, in a dialogue he wrote in 1965 for a student magazine, asked “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino”: “Where do I go to see the NEW theatre—the people writing NOW?” The young man was “looking for something fresh, something alive. A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation.” He’s transported magically to “off-off-Broadway” and “the Cino Café” where “[s]omething’s always new” and the as-yet-unknown playwrights are “trying to say something.” As a consequence, Off-Off-Broadway simply took off because it was needed, both by theatergoers and by artists. Caffe Cino was the vanguard. New York Herald Tribune cultural critic (and Village resident) John Gruen described the theater scene at the Cino in an obituary for the OOB impresario:
Twice each night, and sometimes three times, the Caffe Cino presented the outrageous, the blasphemous, the zany, the wildly poetic, the embarrassingly trite, the childish, and frequently, the moving and the beautiful.
The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s anti-war satire about the arms race, Flyspray, presented in the summer of 1960. This was followed by plays from Lanford Wilson (often credited with bringing “professional theater” to the Cino, till then a den of amateurism), Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick, and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors such as Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63), Harvey Keitel, and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse.
The Cino made another important contribution to New York life, American theater, and the nation’s culture. In a way, it happened almost by accident—or, more precisely, circumstances. Before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, it was illegal in New York State to depict homosexuality on stage. (The law, the Wales Padlock Act, was passed in 1927 and remained on the books until 1967.) But many of the artists, especially the playwrights, who patronized and worked in Caffe Cino were gay so the coffeehouse became a congenial and safe hangout for gay men, especially, to meet. Almost surreptitiously, the Cino became a pioneer in gay theater as many of the new plays featured gay themes, subjects, and characters. (Along with Stonewall, Caffe Cino is considered a landmark of U.S. LGBTQ history. The Stonewall’s still here; the Cino’s not.)
Of course, the Cino was already breaking another law the moment it started presenting performances of any kind: New York City’s cabaret law. Businesses that wanted to put on a show had to have a liquor license (even though Caffe Cino didn’t serve booze) and a cabaret license. (The same was true of places that wanted to allow patrons to dance.) Joe Cino had neither for his coffeehouse. (This is why Ellen Stewart eventually called her house the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Patrons didn’t pay an admission fee, but bought memberships in the private club—which didn’t need a license to present a performance.) To help deter the police—who might fail to enforce Wales but would close a joint for putting on an unlicensed play—from interfering, Cino plastered the front widows with posters to obscure the view from the sidewalk.
The posters themselves, designed by Cino artist Kenneth Burgess, were lettered in what Crespy labeled “a purposely indecipherable art nouveau style—later known as psychedelic,” which the New York City authorities like cops and site inspectors couldn’t read but Cino regulars could, all to disguise the goings-on inside the coffeehouse. To the uninitiated, the posters looked like abstract art. (It was like a visual version of the sound frequency only people under 25 can hear. If you were hip, you got the message; if you were square, you didn’t.)
The Cino was a magnet, drawing wanderers, seekers, hippies, theater enthusiasts, gays, and all kinds of counterculture Americans (and foreign visitors). Early on the morning of 3 March 1965, however, disaster nearly struck as a fire, believed to have started from a gas leak (though Joe Cino was convinced that it was started by his estranged and volatile lover John Torrey) gutted the first-floor storefront. Ironically, the fire occurred on Ash Wednesday. For 2½ months, Joe Cino’s café operated out of Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa in the East Village (located at 122 2nd Avenue, between 7th and 8th Streets, at the time) on Sunday and Monday nights; other downtown theater people hosted or participated in fundraisers and benefits for Cino and his coffeehouse. (Edward Albee, already an established playwright so he never wrote for the Cino, was nevertheless an enthusiastic booster of the café theater and donated the space for the largest event in benefit for Caffe Cino.)
A newly-installed fireproof ceiling at the Cino, put in when a lighting grid was added, prevented the fire from spreading beyond the commercial space, saving the building from damage and confining the destruction to the interior of the Cino. On Tuesday, 18 May 1965, the coffeehouse reopened with a production of With Creatures Make My Way by H. M. (Haralimbus Medea, known as Harry) Koutoukas, whose plays, wrote Crespy, “personify the Cino and are emblematic of the curious mix of highbrow avant-garde and lowdown pop culture that became its signature style.” A new drop ceiling was installed, along with expanded space for dressing rooms; even a compact lighting booth was built during the reconstruction. The famous memorabilia-covered walls had to be re-decorated from scratch, but they quickly regained their familiar look. That same year, Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa were jointly awarded a Village Voice OBIE Award “for creating opportunities for new playwrights to confront audiences and gain experience of the real theatre” during the 1964-65 season.
The next year, on 19 May 1966, the Cino’s most successful production opened, helping to change OOB forever after. Dames at Sea or Golddiggers Afloat—known afterward simply as Dames at Sea—with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise and directed by Cino regular Robert Dahdah ran at the café theater for 148 performances. Then it moved to Off-Broadway’s Bouwerie Lane Theatre in the East Village on 20 December 1968 and transferred to the larger Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in the West Village on 22 April 1969 and closed on 10 May 1970 after a total of 575 performances. (There was a television version which aired on NBC on 15 November 1971 and a later Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theatre from 22 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running 85 regular performances and 32 previews. There was also a London run in 1969 and a cast recording of the Off-Broadway staging released that same year.)
The central role of Ruby in Dames was played, both at Caffe Cino and in the OB première, by future Broadway star Bernadette Peters; her 1968 OB performance brought her her first Drama Desk Award. (Peters also reprised her role in regional productions at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in 1973 and at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1973. Many other regional productions have been staged since the play’s début; Dames at Sea’s been very popular in schools and community theaters.)
As momentous an achievement as Dames at Sea was for Caffe Cino, it also marked the beginning of the end. While working on a stock production in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, John (sometimes written “Jon” in the press) Torrey (sometimes spelled “Torre”), Joe Cino’s on-again-off-again lover, was electrocuted on 5 January 1967 and died. Some suspected it was a suicide, but many others believe the sometime Cino lighting expert had been performing his signature gag of “eating” electricity and it went horribly wrong. To demonstrate that electricity isn’t to be feared, he’d lick his fingers and grab the end of an electric line, causing the cable to throw sparks. When the electricity arced off his fingers, he made as if he was eating it. Cino was devastated by Torrey’s death and descended into despondency.
Torrey’s death sent Cino into an emotional spiral. Late on 30 March 1967, he returned alone to the coffeehouse, took a kitchen knife, and hacked at his body, stabbing himself in the stomach, enacting a bizarre sort of harakiri dance. He managed to call Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith’s apartment at 5 Cornela Street (likely before he inflicted the mortal wound) and got Smith, the Voice journalist, on the phone. Cino sounded so desperate that Smith rushed to the café and found Cino, still alive in a pool of blood. Smith ran for help and Cino was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in the Village, where Al Carmines of Judson Poets and Ellen Stewart of La MaMa kept vigil. He died on 2 April—Torrey’s birthday. Bernadette Peters, the sensation of Dames at Sea, sang a song from the play at his memorial service on 10 April at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the home of Al Carmines’s Judson Poets’ Theatre, along with other downtown performers and artists performing scenes, readings, and more songs from Cino plays. (Joe Cino had been buried in Buffalo, his birthplace and home of his mother, on 7 April.)
Caffe Cino reopened in May under the management of Michael Smith and others, and it lasted another year. But Joe Cino had been the living spirit of Caffe Cino and without him at the helm, or the espresso machine, “Magic Time” was never the same. The coffeehouse closed for good on 17 March 1968; the last play at the Cino was Monuments by Diane Di Prima. In 1985, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (then known as the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts) mounted Caffe Cino and its Legacy: An American Cultural Landmark, an exhibition of memorabilia and ephemera, and playwright Robert Patrick had a plaque mounted on the front of the commercial space at 31 Cornelia Street on 28 April 2008, just under 50 years after Joe Cino opened his coffeehouse: “On this site, in the Caffe Cino (1958-68), artists brought theatre into the modern era, creating Off-Off Broadway and forever altering the performing arts worldwide.” (Sometime in May 2017, the plaque was anonymously removed.)
Joe Cino’s café theater, the first OOB theater, had lasted for just under 10 years, but its impact on New York and American theater has been everlasting. During its decade of operation, the Cino presented somewhere around 250 plays. Cino had a dark side and came to a tragic end, and all wasn’t all beer and skittles at the coffeehouse, but the café-owner isn’t remembered for that. He’s enshrined in New York and theater history for his contributions as a wizard for working with artists, providing an atmosphere of complete artistic freedom to experiment, innovate, challenge established standards—even fail—and generating a new theater forum for work that would otherwise never see a stage or an audience. In 1985, Ellen Stewart insisted, “It was Joseph Cino who started Off-Off-Broadway. I would like to ask everybody to remember that.”
Joe Cino was the first of the founders of OOB to depart: Ralph Cook (b. 1928), founder of Theatre Genesis, died in 1985; Al Camines (b. 1936) passed on in 2005; and La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (b. 1919), was the last survivor, dying in 2011. Off-Off-Broadway thrives in New York City—including La MaMa E.T.C., the only one of the four founding OOB theaters still in operation. Similar small spaces live in cities across the country, and American playwriting still feels the ripples of what Joe Cino and his followers started 60 years ago in a little corner of New York. On 11 November 2017, 31 Cornelia Street, the Cino’s home, was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
[Almost seven years ago, I posted a two-part article on Rick On Theater called “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” (12 and 15 December 2011). It was principally about the genesis of Off-Off-Broadway, the non-commercial, non-union theater that began as an alternative to the commercially-oriented, union-regulated productions of Broadway and Off-Broadway. I reported in “Greenwich Village Theater” that the sipapu, the place of emergence, of Off-Off-Broadway was Greenwich Village and what, after 1964, was dubbed the East Village, and specifically, 31 Cornelia Street—the home after 1958 of the Caffe Cino. Joe Cino, the coffeehouse’s proprietor, opened his café theater 60 years ago this December. Until recently, there’d never been an extensive history of the Cino—there are few records or documents on the café’s history; it’s all in the memories of those who were there, and that's a fading population—so I thought this would be an opportune time to post a little compilation on the historic venue. I’m posting it in two parts, so come back to ROT on 14 September for the continuation of “Caffe Cino.”]
Off-Off-Broadway, the theater arena in which new artists like actors, directors, and playwrights, often get their starts in the business of show, is a New York City phenomenon. (Some cities have a vague equivalent, especially after the Off-Off-Broadway theater here made itself known in the 1960s and ’70s.) There’s no real money on the Off-Off-Broadway stage, and the working conditions are as minimal as you can imagine, but there’s a lot of experience, some exposure (agents, managers, and producers have been known to check out what are often called “showcases”—because that’s often what they are—to see if there’s some new talent or new property to interest them. It could happen . . . .).
Since the 1980s or so, Off-Off-Broadway has spread out across the city, not only to all quarters of Manhattan, but all across the city. But when the movement got started in the late 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, it was centered in Greenwich Village and what was becoming known as the East Village. The exact spot where Off-Off-Broadway began was a coffeehouse on a tree lined-block of a typical West Village lane, Cornelia Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets—number 31, the home of Caffe Cino.
The building that housed Caffe Cino, a four-story red brick walk-up with apartments above the ground floor was built in 1877 as a tenement. (There have been numerous renovations and up-grades since then to conform to changing requirements and codes for New York City buildings. Though the interior of 31 Cornelia Street, as well as the building’s utilities and safety features, have been modernized, its exterior is basically unchanged—somewhat cleaner, perhaps—from its appearance in the days of Caffe Cino.) The entrance to the ground-floor commercial space, where the coffeehouse was located, is flanked by two cast-iron pilasters. Like the street on which it stands, it’s pretty typical of the neighborhood. Nothing about it stands out—except that what went on there changed the face of New York theater forever and had a profound impact on American theater as a whole.
Joe Cino started the Caffe Cino Art Gallery, as it was first called, in December 1958 and issued a call for artist friends to hang their art on the walls of the new coffeehouse. In 1965, he told the Village Voice (in his one and only interview), “My idea was always to start with a beautiful, intimate, warm, non-commercial, friendly atmosphere where people could come and not feel pressured or harassed.” The art displays soon led to poetry readings (how Greenwich Village coffeehouse!), and that led directly to reading plays. From there it was just a short step to putting the plays on. And remember, Greenwich Village was the very center of all things avant-garde: the bohemians congregated there in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s; the Beats, who really started the “coffeehouse scene,” in the ’50s; and the hippies and Yippies in the ’60s.
(By the way, the Caffe Cino is often misnamed in the press and other sources. First of all, Joe Cino, a proud Sicilian-American, chose the Italian designation for his establishment to be different from all the other Village coffeehouses—though some reports say it was an accident from a misprint in an ad that just stuck—so it’s not “Café Cino”—and he also never used the accent mark in the coffeehouse’s name [caffè]. Unfortunately, if you want to look the place up, especially on line, you have to misspell the name to be sure to catch all the potential hits since even the New York Times called the place “Cafe Cino.” Go know, right?)
Joseph Cino (1931-67) was born in Buffalo into a traditional Italian-American family. He was attracted to dance and opera from a young age, which didn’t sit well with his three brothers and his schoolmates because they felt that an Italian boy shouldn’t be interested in dancing. It was also becoming increasingly obvious that young Joe was gay, something else that wasn’t in line with his community. As a result, though Joe and his mother were close, the frictions with his family increased and in 1948, when he was 16, Joe ran away to New York City to become a dancer.
He began a string of meaningless jobs such as waiter, clerk, receptionist, and soda-jerk—the kind of thing many performing artists do when they’re starting out—and studied dance at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side; he also studied acting, speech, and make-up. Despite a scholarship to Jacob’s Pillow, the dance center and school in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and a few gigs with dance troupes, the dance career didn’t happen, probably because Cino didn’t look much like a dancer: just five-foot-nine, he was “sometimes described as ‘roundish.’” In his 2003 history of the Off-Off-Broadway theater, David Crespy drew this picture of Joe Cino:
He had a head of thick, curly hair and dark brown eyes. His standard uniform was a sweatshirt worn inside out, jeans, and yellow boots. His cherubic face, rimmed by a scruffy, half-grown beard, was filled with a delightful warmth—his smile dazzled and according to those who knew him, he exuded love, nurturing, and an irrepressible charm. He was pudgy and at the same time graceful . . . .
After 10 years of trying and closing in on 27, he was ready to move on to something else.
One of those bread-and-butter jobs Cino had was as a waiter at the Playhouse Café at 131 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, a four-minute walk east from 31 Cornelia. Cino learned about working in a coffeehouse and, especially, how to run an espresso machine at the Playhouse Café, so named because it was just a couple of doors down from the historic Provincetown Playhouse (115 MacDougal). It was while working at the Playhouse, where occasional plays were read, that Cino saved the money from his pay, stashed in a drawer in his apartment, that he would eventually use to open his own coffeehouse, something he considered during his stint at the Playhouse. When the café closed, Cino made his move.
Cino’d been thinking about opening a café on and off since as early as 1954, he said. Among his friends were many artists, and he thought he’d hang their paintings in his fantasy joint. One of his friends (and current lover) was painter Ed Franzen, who worked at New York University in the Village. Franzen was looking for a studio where he could work and show his paintings and he knew that Cino wanted a place, too. One day in November 1958, Franzen called his friend and told him he’d stumbled on a storefront in the West Village and when Cino met the painter at 31 Cornelia Street, the incipient OOB impresario found Franzen in conversation with the landlady, who was leaning out an upstairs window. The painter introduced his future partner: “This is Mrs. Lemma.” “Oh, you’re Italian,” said Cino. “Yes,” said Josie Lemma, “what are you?” Cino answered, “Sicilian.” And a connection was made. The rest, as the cliché goes, is (theater) history.
Mrs. Lemma threw the keys to the storefront down to them and the painter and the ex-dancer went in to look the place over. Here’s how Cino recounts the rest of the historic moment:
The first thing you saw when you looked down the room was the toilet at the back. I thought, “There’s a toilet, and there’s a sink, and there’s a fireplace. This will be a counter, a coffee machine here, a little private area.” I turned around and looked and said, “This is the room, I have no idea what to do with it.”
The room was small, narrow, open, and plain. It had wood floors, exposed-brick walls, and a pressed-metal ceiling. The metal ceiling would be covered by a plaster drop ceiling when Cino installed a lighting system and Cino soon decorated his “room” with
twinkling fairy lights, strung liberally across the ceiling, and then the sprinkling of glitter dust on the floor for show nights. Festoons of hanging decorations followed—cutouts, mobiles, baubles, glitter angels, miniature Chinese lanterns, and ever more fairy lights.
In his New York Times review of Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player in 1967, Dan Sullivan observed that Cino had hung “enough twinkling lights to decorate a forest of psychedelic Christmas trees.”
When “the Cino,” as it became known, started presenting plays, the generally nondescript character of the room would change depending on the plays being produced as the participants brought in new scenery each week. The most emblematic element of the space, however, were the walls. They were soon bedecked with “glossy photos of stars and unknowns, opera posters, Christmas decorations, and crunched foil, often interspersed with paintings by Kenneth Burgess, Cino’s resident artist,” and other ephemera the patrons brought in. These became the most memorable element in the café and Joe Cino’s special domain. Memorabilia Cino felt was special, such as the résumé a young Bette Midler (who never got to work at the Cino) gave him, was stapled to the wall behind the coffee bar. If the wall décor had to be rearranged for a play or for cleaning and repainting, afterwards its original appearance would have to be reconstructed. Only Cino himself could add or subtract from the display.
Franzen and Cino opened Caffe Cino on a Friday night in early December with about 30 customers, all friends. The music Cino chose for his café, in contrast with the prevailing taste of the Greenwich Village coffeehouses for folk music—for which Cino had little regard—was opera and classical. Veteran Cino dramatist Robert Patrick (who’d eventually earn the rep as the most prolific Off-Off-Broadway playwright) recalled, “There was a jukebox, which was full of opera records.” As for the rest of the activities in the café, Joe Cino reminisced:
I was thinking of a cafe with poetry readings, with lectures, maybe with dance concerts. The one thing I never thought of was fully staged productions of plays. I thought of doing readings, but I never thought any of the technical things would be important.
The café started presenting poetry readings immediately, just as Cino had planned. Then after about five months of operation, Caffe Cino began offering play readings around “a long pine table.” The first reading was “a condensed version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest” on 7 February 1959 and the coffeehouse was packed. It was supposed to be a one-off event: “I didn’t even think of doing it again,” affirmed Cino. He didn’t want “to disturb the rhythm of the room.” But Caffe Cino immediately scheduled a Monday night reading, then soon, Tuesday, and so on, one performance a night.
They read works by Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thornton Wilder, J. D. Salinger, Noel Coward, André Gide, Anton Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, and other established American and European writers. Cino resisted giving readings on the weekends and he recalled that it was almost two years before the coffeehouse was having readings all week long. He said the performers “went to staging right away.” Not precisely: Robert Dahdah, the Cino’s most frequent director, staged Sartre’s No Exit in February 1960, the first play to be fully mounted there.
There was no actual stage at the Cino—an 8-by-8-foot piece of wood was put down to mark the acting area and it was portable so it could be set down anywhere in the café. Props, set, lighting, and costumes were minimal, no more than was absolutely necessary to perform the play (and, of course, pretty much everything was scrounged, borrowed, or, occasionally, swiped. Lighting, even with the café’s limited technical resources, was the chief artistic means of creating an atmosphere for the plays. Crespy described it as “dazzling and inventive” and recounts, “Many remember the lighting as one of the most magical aspects of the Cino.” Cino introduced each performance, always—and famously—announcing as he left the performance area: “It’s magic time!”
The “room,” as Cino apparently called his coffeehouse, was reconfigured to suit each play, with the performance space being set up in a different spot on the floor and the tables rearranged accordingly. From short scenes to one-act plays to full-lengths, the performances expanded in response to both the demand of the audiences and the avidity of the artists. (One thing about actors and playwrights: they love to work—an actor friend of mine used to like to quip: “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”) Pretty soon, says Crespy, the Cino “began to look more like a stage with a café on it.”
The café accommodated about 40 customers in its 18-by-30-foot space—the legal maximum capacity was 90, according to Robert Patrick, who often manned the door, but when there was a performance, many more than that squeezed in anywhere they could, even sitting atop the cigarette machine. The coffeehouse’s patrons, with their food and drinks at the 20 tiny café tables inches from the stage, were constantly in danger of spilling their coffee on the actors if one or the other wasn’t careful, but the closeness of the spectators and the performers turned the performance into an event they all shared. There was no separation, no distance. As Joe Cino himself put it, “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here. But this is a theatre, a mirror of all the madness of everything else that is happening.”
Soon, one performance a night grew into two by January 1961, with an 11 o’clock show. There wasn’t always an audience, but the casts performed anyway. Cino would insist that the actors “do it for the room.” That first two-fer was a 32-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which Cino called “one of the most beautiful things we had at the Cino.” The lighting, another first at the Cino, as designed by resident lighting wizard, Johnny Dodd, “was very tight, just for the actors in the performing areas. The rest of the room was dark.”
The development of the Cino as a theatrical venue was never really planned out but grew rather like Topsy. The performers, writers, directors, and production artists who put on the plays were at first friends of Cino’s, but theater folk are always on the look-out for places to ply their art, so the pool of artists widened quickly. Cino himself never performed in the plays, but after the last show, Jerome Robbins, already a star in the dance world, occasionally came by so he and Cino could dance on the small stage. The OOB impresario didn’t see himself as a producer, either; he was a café-owner who provided a place for others to work. He seldom read scripts—a habit he shared with his friend and colleague Ellen Stewart of La MaMa—and determined the performance schedule according to the playwrights’ zodiac signs!
Joe Cino insisted, in fact, that his coffeehouse wasn’t a theater, but a café. “We’re not off-off-Broadway,” he proclaimed, “we’re in-cafe.” According to Crespy’s OOB history, the Village Voice “never listed” productions at Caffe Cino in its theater section, but, until the coffeehouse’s demise, always with the cafés. Once the Cino started doing play readings, momentum took over, and the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway, as dramaturg and reviewer Cynthia Jenner dubbed it in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, pretty much created itself.
[As I noted in my introduction above, “Caffe Cino” is a two-part post, so I encourage all ROTters to return on Friday to read the final installment of the article. So far, you’ve read about the start of the coffeehouse and the inauguration of Off-Off-Broadway; in the conclusion, you’ll learn about the café’s rise and its demise. I hope you’ll also get an impression of the Caffe Cino’s importance at the time and its influence down to the present.]
[This is a continuation of the survey of theater activity in Greenwich Village and the East Village during the first decade of the Off-Off-Broadway movement. At the end of Part 1, I left off with a brief discussion of the influence of playwriting and acting ensembles on the kind of theater produced in this period and I pick up here with the next important aspect of Off-Off-Broadway: the finances—or lack thereof. (Advice to readers: Some things won’t make total sense unless you’ve read Part 1 first.)]
As I observed in passing, another thing that was missing from the Village theater scene of the ’60s was money. There was almost none involved. New York Times reviewer Mel Gussow described this phenomenon just after the decade ended: “It is theater on a shoestring. Ticket prices are minimal or nonexistent. The only profits are artistic. It is the place where one can be experimental—or even traditional—and not worry about reviews or grosses.” “The great thing about the . . . Off Off Broadway scene is that you can afford to fail there,” proclaimed the late Lanford Wilson, who got his start on the stages of Off-Off-Broadway. “You can try things that you don’t know will work. If they don’t, you might find out why.” Writer Paul Goodman, an enthusiastic supporter of this new theater scene, characterized troupes like the Living Theatre as “a group of theatre-people . . .—some of them of great reputation—who have all of them . . . given themselves, often financially unrewarded, to the development of our modern art. . . . Nobody would question that they are devoted to the growth of theatre and not to making money; they try to make enough to sustain themselves.” Many of the dramatists and directors, in fact, could have moved into decent-paying positions in the mainstream, but then someone else would have had control over their work—producers, artistic directors, business managers, executive directors—making demands on everything from casting to script revisions. (Even Joe Papp, in producer mode, was known to throw his weight around.) These artists sacrificed comfortable lives for the artistic freedom to see their work staged the way they wanted it.
The budgets for OOB productions were often under $100 (and some were as little as $35-50, though more established troupes, like the Living Theatre, could spend as much as $8,000-10,000 to mount a show). The troupes themselves subsisted on donations and public and private funding when they could get it, though sometimes political activity or leanings, like that of the Living Theatre, queered the pitch for corporate and state support. (This, of course, is why the NEA, which was launched in 1965, was supposed to look only at the artistic merit of eligible art, not the content. In the 1990s, however, certain political figures, including members of Congress and the President of the United States, bent the agency toward judging the political and social import of the art under funding consideration. When an anti-obscenity pledge, derisively dubbed the “loyalty oath,” was required for all recipients of NEA funds, many artists and producers, including Joseph Papp, refused to sign and gave up the federal support rather than accept prior restraint.) Money that came with strings attached wasn’t welcome. Shaliko founder Leo Shapiro, for instance, asserted that for one federal program, “I had to satisfy the commissar in too many ways, [so] I couldn’t do it.”
The members lived off of odd jobs, temp work, or bread-and-butter jobs like waiting tables, driving cabs, selling clothes, doing copy- or technical-editing (often overnight)—I even knew actors who held unlikely or unpleasant jobs: one actor with whom I worked who came from a family of butchers worked at that profession at a market near me in the Village and another, who called himself a char, cleaned people’s homes. There was a common unemployment scam as a way to pay the bills: instead of paying the artists a small yearly salary, the company paid its members twice as much for six months, then they could subsist on unemployment insurance for the next six. (There was also a gimmick involving the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a federal program in effect in 1973-82. By defining some of the members as trainees, the company could get a grant under CETA. The paperwork was voluminous, however, and there was government oversight that made the tactic onerous so it wasn’t used often.) Expenses for the theater, production budgets, and small payments for the artists, as well as other income came from passing the hat. For the most part, though, OOB artists worked for nothing out of devotion, either to the art in general or to the troupe’s vision. A young Off-Off-Broadway actor in 1972 put it simply: “Why do we do it? There’s only one reason. It’s to get out there and act. We love it.” (When I was trying to become an actor and was working in the Off-Off-Broadway arena, one of my friends was fond of saying, “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them.”) By the same token, Shapiro declared: “I’m a director. I love rehearsing. I love to work.”
Many of the performance spaces weren’t licensed as theaters or even cabarets, so it would have been illegal to charge an admission even if the troupes wanted to be so crass. (Ellen Stewart avoided the licensing issue by forming La MaMa as a private club. She asked for a minuscule membership fee which was often waived.) The spaces usually offered few amenities—actors and spectators not infrequently shared bathrooms, which couldn’t be used during the performance—and creature comforts like cushioned seats, legroom, clear sightlines, clean (and vermin-free) houses, air-conditioning (or even, sometimes, heat), palatable coffee, and adequate lobbies, were rare. Not a few would-be theatergoers (not to mention some reviewers, agents, or mainstream pros like directors, producers, and casting directors) were reluctant to go to the theaters and neighborhoods where Off-Off-Broadway happened. In The Off Off Broadway Book, published in 1972, Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman noted that the OOB performance spaces “were small, nontheatrical facilities, makeshift theatres in cellars, bars, lofts, storefronts and coffeehouses,” but as Elinore Lester added, “Part of the ‘sensuous experience’ which might also be distasteful to the average theatergoer is the ordinary physical discomfort that is taken in stride by OOB-niks. All of the permanent OOB spots have hard chairs, but each also has its special tribulations.” Seating capacities (legal, that is) could be anywhere from 50 or 75 up to 99, the maximum Equity allowed (after it began to set rules under which union actors could appear). Props, costumes, and set materials were begged, borrowed, and, yes, stolen. (Sidewalk scavenging was a useful skill among OOB producers, directors, and set designers.) Ellen Stewart told how she and her earliest collaborators at La MaMa had a routine of taking five-finger discounts at five-and-dimes to help mount their shows and sometimes members of a troupe were known to cash rubber checks to help assure that their play would open. The trade-off, Lester continued, was that “[m]embers of the audience are never far enough from the stage lights to feel totally blacked out. They must . . . participate in the action by keeping their chairs from grating and their coffee cups from rattling. This gives them the feeling they count as individuals . . . .” Even if the playwrights and directors wanted a “fourth wall” production, there was no room for such a convention. “The last Off Off Broadway show I saw,” recounted one enthusiastic young OOB theatergoer to Lester, “an actress in a negligee accidentally tripped into my lap during the performance . . . . I got into an all-night bull session with the playwright after the show.”
The plays that were being offered ignored all the established rules and conventions for contemporary drama. “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage,” asserted Joe Cino, “it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here.” Off-Broadway had been daring in its staging techniques, especially in its earliest incarnation at the turn of the century, but the plays were often classics or European work by established authors and their American disciples. Off-Off-Broadway swept even that limitation away, as much out of necessity as artistic choice. (A new play by an unknown author often came without royalties.) What was lost to budgetary constraints and cramped spaces, however, was made up for in enthusiasm and energy. A new style of dramaturgy, acting, and directing evolved, drawing on the techniques of Brecht, the theories of Artaud, and the innovations of Meyerhold. Realism and Naturalism just weren’t the style on the new downtown stages, any more than Aristotelian structure or Method acting were. Impressionism, Expressionism, Symbolism, montage (as defined by Sergei Eisenstein on stage before he introduced it to the new art of film), and collage were frequent influences. There was no theory being evolved, however, no manifesto of Off-Off-Broadway, no unifying social or political agenda; it was all by accident, serendipity, and happenstance: theatrical bricolage. These folks all just wanted to make theater, using whatever was available and whatever worked. (Of course, the theories did come later as academics, critics, and subsequent artists tried to capitalize on the innovations of the progenitors. As Grotowski put it: “A philosophy always comes after a technique.”) The plays, as Ralph Cook demanded, were relevant to the life going on in the Village communities in which the artists and the spectators lived. They reflected what was happening in Washington Square or Tompkins Square, or on Christopher Street or St. Mark’s Place.
Because dancers, musicians, and poets were part of the same downtown community as the actors, directors, and dramatists, performances often incorporated verse, singing, and dancing or dance-like movement. (The Village painters and sculptors, some now-famous like Larry Rivers, sometimes designed sets for Off-Off-Broadway theaters. Julian Beck himself had been an Abstract Expressionist painter before starting the Living.) The language, even with the poetic influence, was frequently profane and colloquial; the actions, which could be either hyperreal or totally symbolic and ritualized, were frequently violent, sexual (of every conceivable variety), and disturbing. Elenore Lester listed what a spectator might find on an OOB stage: “Lusty love-making in the choir loft, four-letter words echoing in the parish hall, dancers and actors in outrageous costumes or non-costumes cavorting in a vaulted church interior, hairy hippies sprawled in the church pews.” John Keating warned that there were “no restrictions of any kind” on what went on on the stages of the Village theaters, including what elsewhere would be considered immorality, indecency, or blasphemy. He added that “the experimentation ranges from the wildly imaginative to the wildly self-indulgent.” As the young spectator, a painter, in Lester’s report continued, “The plays? Man, they’re alive. Even when they stink, they’re alive.” The OOB models, the prototypes, were the Living’s Connection and The Brig, Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, Michael McClure’s The Beard, Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah, the routines of Lenny Bruce, and Happenings.
The Connection by Jack Gelber, which the Living Theatre began presenting in 1959 and kept in its repertoire through 1963, is considered by many to have been the initiating production of Off-Off-Broadway, combining as it did contemporary themes and language with live jazz music. It also put the audience into the event—they were “allowed” to observe the lives of the junkies waiting for their fix as a documentary film is being made—and posited that the world of the play was a metaphor for the lives of all of us who are, in one way or another, all waiting for some kind of “fix.” Former Marine Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig, the portrayal of brutality and inhumanity in a Marine Corps jail in Japan in the 1950s, opened on 15 May 1963 under the direction of Judith Malina on a set designed by Julian Beck (performing the same jobs they had for The Connection). The Living also presented Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities twice, opening on 20 December 1960 and 20 November 1961, and then, in a production that coincided with an uptown Off-Broadway staging, generating lots of press and winning Joe Chaikin an Obie, Man is Man (18 September 1962-31 March 1963). Other early OOB fare included Gene Frankel’s renowned production of Genet’s The Blacks which opened at St. Mark’s Playhouse (which would later become Theatre Genesis) on 4 May 1961 and ran until September 1964. It featured African-American actors in white masks. Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Albee’s The Zoo Story (in the playwright’s American début) opened in rep at the Provincetown Playhouse on 14 January 1960; they ran until 1965, though they’d moved to the Cherry Lane by that time; The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker by William Snyder opened at the Sheridan Square Playhouse on 17 September 1962 and ran until 26 May 1963; Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano opened at the Gate Theatre on 17 September 1963 in a double bill with The Lesson.
In 1962, producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder (later to team with Albee to form Albarwild, a play-producing organization and a play-development unit) presented the groundbreaking Theater of the Absurd bill, a seminal event in the early formation of the Off-Off-Broadway scene, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village from 11 February to 25 March 1962. The plays in the repertory series, all of which shared the same ten actors and were directed by, among others, Alan Schneider, George L. Sherman, Donald Davis, Albee, and Barr, were Kenneth Koch’s Bertha; Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humor; Genet’s Deathwatch; Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield; Albee’s Zoo Story, The Sandbox, and The American Dream; Beckett’s Endgame; and Ionesco’s The Killer. Such fare was for the most part unknown on other New York stages at that time. At the end of the decade, Edward Parone, the head of the Albarwild Playwrights Unit, directed an evening of 11 very short plays—six to 20 minutes—by 12 Off-Off-Broadway authors like Leonard Melfi, Israel Horovitz, Terrence McNally, Martin Duberman, and Jean-Claude van Itallie, at the Cafe au Go Go in the West Village. Collision Course opened on 9 May 1968 and covered “contemporary America” as each writer provided a humorous perspective on a serious subject, among them sex, the war in Vietnam, racism, and slums.
Of course, with so much freedom of expression and so few constraints from administrators and managers, not all the plays offered Off-Off-Broadway were top-of-the-line theater. “Once we are convinced of the artistic taste of a director, we leave everything in his hands,” explained Ralph Cook, and Ellen Stewart, who told me, “I don’t read texts, okay,” insisted, “The plays that we’re doing are the plays I want to do. I don’t interfere in how they get to be that way.” In its early days, Off-Off-Broadway was often amateurish and could be so far out that even dedicated downtown audiences might be left confused. (The popular media, particularly TV, still likes to portray OOB showcases in this light—kooky, unintelligible performances by over-serious artistes who disparage the audiences for not understanding their art. I might even suggest that the current Broadway/former Off-Broadway hit, David Ives’s Venus in Fur, which is about an audition for an Off-Off-Broadway play, engages in this depiction for humor.) Former reviewer Keating observed: “At its worst, Off Off Broadway reduces the theatre of the absurd to the theatre of the ridiculous and meaning is not so much impenetrable as non-existent. At its best it exhibits flashes of freshness and freedom rarely attempted elsewhere.” Paul Goodman characterized this new theater’s audience as “torn between fascination and the impulse to walk out in disgust,” though Lanford Wilson asserted that OOB spectators were more open to experimentation than mainstream theatergoers (who paid a lot more for their seats), even if the play ended up not working.
The theater that grew up in the East and West Villages was a spectator-oriented theater. The artists spoke to the viewers in the language they both spoke and understood. What’s more, the artists weren’t just speaking to the spectators, but those viewers were from their same community: the plays weren’t aimed at the uptown audience or one from out of town. The writers and directors were talking to the folks who lived down the block or around the corner from the theater—in the very world the Village theaters were putting on stage. Cook summed this up:
The actors, directors, and writers are members of a geographical community and are presenting plays for members of that community . . . as an integral everyday part of the life of the community. The audience, young and old, born of the streets of New York, or escapees from Ohio or Poland, come together to see themselves or their neighbors as they are, and perhaps to find the means of survival in this accelerated age.
Not only did the audiences respond viscerally to the performances, the performances responded directly to the audiences. This theater was a real-time exchange between performers and spectators while they were right there in the room together. “What is happening onstage is not a mirror,” said OOB playwright Murray Mednick; “it’s what’s happening.” The performances often involved some kind of intellectual, emotional, or physical actor-audience engagement. Michael Smith contrasted the established theater with the new:
There are few occasions for personal commitment in the commercial theatre today. The structure is industrial—the “entertainment industry”—and the product tends to be generalized, fixed, packaged diversion, coldly performed and passively to be watched; like television and the movies, it is indifferent to the spectator. . . . Seeing the theatre in these terms—to permit it to become this—denies its nature, which is to join performers and spectators in a mutual experience.
The critics, usually the reifiers of cultural significance, were simply ignored. They weren’t needed. While the Off-Broadway producers wanted the press coverage and did everything their big brothers and sisters uptown did to get reviews and news stories in the papers, the Off-Off-Broadway actors, artists, and producers turned their noses up at that whole aspect of professional theater. Indeed, when reviewers did come downtown and published on the new offerings, most coverage was inadequate and condescending (and often appeared after the show had closed). Few of the established journalists understood what was happening in the Village. For example, in a column for the New York Daily News, where he’d been a drama reporter and then senior drama critic from 1940 through 1993, Douglas Watt wrote in reference to an OOB production of Brecht’s Mother Courage by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group:
Now, I don’t pretend to know exactly what this new [Brechtian] esthetic is, if we can call it an esthetic, but I do deplore it if for no other reason than that it opens the floodgates to amateurism. Which is why I think such catchy labels as Theater of the Absurd and Theater of the Ridiculous are noxious, conferring, as they do, a form of respectability on what is all too often plain nonsense.
The 61-year-old Watt, who’d been reviewing theater in New York City for 35 years by this time, acknowledged his confusion about one of the mainstays of Off-Off-Broadway theater, Bertolt Brecht, whose plays and ideas were built into the very foundation of Off-Off-Broadway. Exceptions to this attitude (which, to be fair, wasn’t shared by all establishment reviewers) included the Village Voice (founded in 1955), the hometown paper of downtown New York, as well as inside reportage from the burgeoning alternative press that was proliferating downtown like The Villager (1933) and The East Village Other (1965)—Other Stages (1978), a monthly that covered alternative theater in New York City, and The East Village Eye (1979) came along later—and underground periodicals that sprang up (and often disappeared after a few issues). Unlike the uptown dailies, these were part of the scene. Even paid advertising, when the theaters sprang for it, was enigmatic. Because of the unlicensed nature of the spaces, which drew the ire of city agencies (often intensified by animosity to the nonconformity of the artists involved), many listings and ads, such as those for La MaMa in the Voice, omitted the address. Everybody who needed to, knew where it was; otherwise it wasn’t worth tempting fate.
By the end of the decade, the Village theater scene had changed noticeably. The OOB houses still existed—La MaMa had moved out of its rented home at 122 Second Avenue and was about to open its own building at 74A E. 4th Street—but Joe Cino was dead and Caffe Cino was gone, and Ralph Cook had left Theater Genesis which had closed its doors as well. In 1975, the derelict block along 42nd Street from 9th to 10th Avenues was officially designated Theater Row and soon became home to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theaters (now extending all the way west to 11th Avenue), moving the center of the alternative theater uptown to the Theater District. Off-Broadway institutions like the New York Shakespeare Festival and Circle in the Square-Downtown were still producing in the Village, but were by this time decidedly establishment, if still a bit edgy. (By 1970, Circle in the Square opened its own uptown theater on 50th Street just west of Broadway, competing directly with commercial producers.) The artists, especially the writers, who’d been radical outsiders in the theater world were now the nascent talent of a new mainstream: Tom O’Horgan had become a Broadway success with Hair; Terrence McNally, Sam Shepard, Leonard Melfi, and Israel Horovitz were seeing their plays in commercial productions. “Off Off Broadway has been absorbed into mainstream theater,” wrote Elenore Lester in 1968.
Actors’ Equity had entered the arena in 1966, promulgating the Showcase Code, requiring the theaters to abide by certain rules if they wanted to cast union actors. The code, periodically updated and renamed, was intended to prevent the exploitation of the actors by OOB producers, but at the same time it restricted the rehearsal period and hours, limited the number of performances, and put a cap of the ticket price the theaters could charge. If a producer didn’t sign the non-negotiable code, Equity actors weren’t allowed to work at the theater (though some did anyway, using false names in the program). Essentially, the artistic freedom that reached its pinnacle in Off-Off-Broadway in the ’60s and the collaboration among the artists began to diminish as roles of “playwright,” “producer,” “director,” and “actor” became more rigidly defined. (In 1975, when a new OOB code was handed down by the union council, actors who worked in the arena voted it down because they found it too restrictive.) By the 1980s, Off-Off-Broadway was approaching a sort of impecunious Off-Broadway with the goal of the producers, playwrights, and actors to get a show reviewed in the mainstream press and transferred to a commercial theater so they could all move on up with it. Plays no longer cost $50, $75, or $100 to stage, and bare-bones productions weren’t enough anymore. Grant money became more a necessity than a luxury, and some OOB theaters began tailoring their choices of scripts to appeal to granters and site evaluators. The epitome of this dream was Urinetown in 1999: an OOB musical that went all the way to Broadway in 2001 where it even won a passel of Tonys. (Before Urinetown was Dance With Me, which began as Dance Wi’ Me Off-Off-Broadway in 1971 and came to Broadway in 1975. Terrence McNally’s Bad Habits opened Off-Off-Broadway in February 1974 and moved to the Booth Theatre in May. The 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winner, Next to Normal, began in 1998 in workshops both out of town and in OOB spaces in New York City, moved to Off-Broadway in 2008, played at Washington’s Arena Stage later that year, and then came to Broadway in 2009, winning several Tonys.) It was less the art that drove many of the participants in Off-Off-Broadway in the last third of the 20th century than the artists’ careers.
There’s still life in the movement yet, though. In 1997, the Present Company launched the New York International Fringe Festival (from which Urinetown was picked up), one of the largest multi-arts events in the country that’s essentially an annual celebration of Off-Off-Broadway theater in spaces all over lower Manhattan. In 2004, the New York Innovative Theatre Awards (IT Awards) were founded to recognize achievement Off-Off-Broadway. At the end of the ’60s, nonetheless, “the center of gravity in advanced theater activity is again shifting,” observed Lester. “Forms are changing and so are the locations: the new ones are the streets, the parks and the college campuses . . . .” Radical theater, presented frequently on the streets as guerrilla performances, was assuming the mantel of the new “new theater.” The storefront and loft theaters of Off Off Broadway were already beginning to be the old guard. Indeed, the Living Theater’s return to New York City in 1968 after five years of self- imposed exile in Europe helped inspire many small troupes to take to the streets to agitate not so much for artistic and theatrical audacity, but political and intellectual liberties. Though those streets were all over the city and even beyond, the center, the heartbeat, was still Greenwich Village. If you looked closely at the protesters and radical artists at the hub of this activity, you shouldn’t have been surprised to find a connection somewhere to New York University, the behemoth of the East Village. The movement’s parade ground was Washington Square Park, the gathering place for the hippies, activists, radicals, and students of the Village. Assembling to confront social evils as they saw them, young artists agitated for peace, civil rights, youth power, the sexual revolution, and the decriminalization of marijuana. They often performed for free and lived together communally, with a total commitment to their causes and their troupemates. They were the counterculture in action. As one participant in the radical theater movement proclaimed in 1968: “There is going to be a confrontation between the Establishment and the dissident forces in this country within the next few years. I don’t know whether or not that confrontation is going to be bloody, but I am sure the theater is going to be a main carrier of this revolution.” Indeed, among the protesters at the 21 October 1967 March on the Pentagon was a troupe of NYU students who performed their anti-war street musical Brother, You’re Next, based on Brecht’s Man is Man, on the steps of the Defense Department headquarters. The Village had moved on from the theater of free artistic expression; it was now in the era of “movement theater.” It was a new decade.
[Most of the Off-Off-Broadway sources from which I’ve quoted in “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” were either contemporaneous or written during the period and published right after the decade ended. The most prolific reporter among my sources, Elenore Lester, wrote “The Pass-the-Hat Theater Circuit” (New York Times Magazine 5 Dec. 1965); “In the Parish Hall, the Hippies Go Ape” (New York Times 26 Mar. 1967); “. . . Or the Wave Of the Future?” (New York Times 30 June 1968); “In the Bronx, Revolution?” (New York Times 29 Dec. 1968); and “Off Off Broadway Takes Center Stage” (New York Times 31 Aug. 1975). Other sources were: “New Theatre and the Unions” (Paul Goodman, Dissent Fall 1959; in Creator Spirit Come! [Taylor Stoehr, ed., 1977]); “Observations: A New Deal for the Arts” (Paul Goodman, Commentary Jan. 1964); “Making It Off Off Broadway” (John Keating, New York Times 25 Apr. 1965); Eight Plays from Off-Off Broadway (Nick Orzel and Michael Smith, eds., 1966); “Religion and Drama Meet Off-Off Broadway” (Dan Sullivan, New York Times 20 Jan. 1968); “Off Off Broadway Aims to Be Right On” (Mel Gussow, New York Times 12 July 1972); The Off Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre (Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman, eds., 1972); “Off Off Broadway Emerging From Wings” (New York Times 15 July 1974); “What Makes Off Off Broadway Off Off?” (Stuart W. Little, New York Times 22 Dec. 1974); and Off-Off-Broadway Explosion (David A. Crespy, 2003). Other sources I consulted include: New York’s Greenwich Village (Edmund T. Delaney, 1968); Dreiser (W. A. Swanberg, 1965); “Look at New School of Dramatic Thought” (Douglas Watt, Sunday News [New York] 13 Apr. 1975); The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (William L. O’Neill, 1978); The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, 1959); The Off-Broadway Theater (Julia S. Price, 1962); The Off-Broadway Experience (Howard Greenberger, 1971); and Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater (Stuart W. Little, 1971). Of course, some of my observations came from my own experience as well.]
In the years before World War I, when the century was less than a dozen years old, an upheaval that would have cultural and artistic repercussions across the country was taking place in an obscure corner of New York City. The social, artistic, and political forces came together in what became known as the bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Intellectuals of all stripes came to work or live in this community, its distinct character, according to Edmund T. Delaney, a lawyer who wrote extensively about New York history, “somewhat richer than other parts of the city,” and influenced “American literature, art and thinking wholly out of proportion to their numbers.” The influence, across the gamut of culture and ideas, was made by a motley group including proponents of atheism, socialism, cubism, anarchism, free-thought, free-love, birth-control—”and women who bobbed their hair and smoked cigarettes.” As socialist journalist John Reed portrayed it:
Inglorious Miltons by the score,
And Rodins, one to every floor.
In short, those unknown men of genius
Who dwell in third-floor-rears gangrenous,
Reft of their rightful heritage
By a commercial, soulless age.
Unwept, I might add—and unsung,
Insolent, but entirely young.
To be sure, Villagers included “crackpots or phonies,” but many were sincere artists and thinkers and, in the words of W. A. Swanberg, biographer of Village resident Theodore Dreiser, “most were conscious rebels . . . [in] revolt against mildewed American concepts and properties . . . .” This side of Village life was summed up by radical author and editor Max Eastman, in the words of his biographer William L. O’Neill:
All that was self-consciously new in American culture—the “new women,” the “new morality,” the “new art”—could be found there. On one level Greenwich Village was becoming a showcase of the cultural revolution, on another it led the movement, serving as headquarters to . . . the Innocent Rebellion.
It’s perhaps illustrative of this “Innocent Rebellion” that at a New Year’s Eve party in 1917, several inebriated Village residents including John Reed, American painter John French Sloan, and Dada artist Marcel Duchamp climbed up the interior staircase of the Washington Square Arch, built a fire on its roof, hung Chinese lanterns, fired cap guns, and released balloons. Reading a statement, they declared “The Independent Republic of Greenwich Village,” a utopia committed to “socialism, sex, poetry, conversation, dawn-greeting, anything—so long as it is taboo in the Middle West.” With Europe at war since 1914, the United States having entered the conflict in April, and the political scene at home roiling and acrimonious, the Village independents wanted little to do with the “commercial, soulless age.” They wanted the freedom to create and go their own ways.
All this creative activity set the stage for an influx of artists “ready to espouse all the new causes—individual freedom, free love, socialism, avant-garde literature and futuristic painting.” Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, the historians of the Provincetown Players, pointed out that “with so many arts represented, drama was the natural meeting-ground, the inevitable medium of expression.” The new theater art was in the air, but wasn’t much practiced on America’s commercial stages and would therefore have been a most attractive outlet for the new ideas and artistic endeavors of the Village artists and thinkers. For example, among the participants in the Washington Square Players, which was formed in the Village but performed uptown, were journalist Reed, short-story writers Alice Brown and Susan Glaspell, lawyers Lawrence Langner and Elmer Reizenstein (later, Elmer Rice), businessman Edward Goodman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Floyd Dell, publishers Charles and Albert Boni, and sundry others. They amalgamated with the few professional actors, scenic artists, and playwrights and began a movement that started or influenced a number of interrelated theater developments across America: the art theater, the little theater, Off-Broadway, and serious American playwriting.
In the early 1900s, the “Little Theater Movement,” a nationwide phenomenon, grew into Off-Broadway in New York City. Offering artistically significant plays in an inexpensive, non-commercial atmosphere, groups such as the Washington Square Players (1915) and Provincetown Players (1916 in New York City) staged plays Broadway ignored, in small, out-of-the-way theaters mostly in (or near) the Village. Other Village-area theaters included the Cherry Lane Theatre (1924; the oldest, continuously used Off-Broadway theater in New York), Theatre de Lys (1953; renamed the Lucille Lortel in 1981), Actors Playhouse (1956), Gate Theatre (1957), Sheridan Square Playhouse (1958), and Sullivan Street Playhouse (1960; where The Fatasticks played for 41 years). Producing troupes included Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (1926), Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater (1947), Theodore Mann and Jose Quintero’s Circle in the Square (1951), Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (1954; now the Joseph Papp Public Theater), John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous (1965), and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater (1968). (Neither Off-Broadway nor, later, Off-Off-Broadway—officially designations of Actors’ Equity based on seating capacity—were confined to Greenwich Village. Theaters and companies working in those arenas were based all over the city and some were even itinerant, but the artistic and theatrical dynamic that spawned, nurtured, and fed the movements was centered in the West and, later, East Villages.) Many troupes weren’t only experimental but amateur as well, some lasting only a few years before falling victim to financial problems or their own success as artists parlayed triumphs into jobs in commercial theater and, later, Hollywood. After World War II, however, Off-Broadway attracted critical attention. Several successes transferred to Broadway, beginning with New Stages’ presentation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute (1948).
In the 1950s, the West Village and, later, the newly designated, edgier East Village (rebranded from the northern part of the Lower East Side around 1964) became the cradle of New York’s Beat generation, with its new, raw, and mold-breaking style of poetry and writing; jazz, heard in Village night clubs and coffeehouses; challenging forms of painting and art such as Abstract Expressionism, especially “action painting” (which was an impetus for the Happening) as exemplified by Jackson Pollock, a Village resident; and the revolutionary politics preached by its denizens and frequent visitors. With untried, non-commercial, or experimental plays or productions, using then-unknown talent and shoe-string budgets, Off-Broadway became an artistic magnet. Serious attention started with Circle in the Square’s hit 1952 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. In 1956, the Village Voice gave out the first Obie Awards to recognize accomplishments in this arena. (In 1964, the Obies began recognizing OOB plays; since 1986, the Lucille Lortel Awards, presented by the League of Off-Broadway Theatres and Producers, have also been given for excellence Off Broadway.) Such companies as the Living Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival, Roundabout Theatre Company (1965), Chelsea Theatre Center (1965), Negro Ensemble Company (1967), and Circle Repertory (1969, as the Circle Theater Company), many of which started Off-Off-Broadway, presented original, failed commercial, or neglected plays. By the 1970s, a split developed between commercial Off-Broadway houses such as the Astor Place (1831), Orpheum (1904), Theatre de Lys, Perry Street (1975), and Minetta Lane (1984, the first new Off-Broadway theater built in New York City in 50 years), and non-profit companies like the Ridiculous Theatrical Company (1967), Jewish Repertory Theatre (1974), Hudson Guild (1974), and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre (1977) that fostered new works and U.S. productions of European and non-Western plays. Mostly, however, real experimental and avant-garde theater had moved to Off-Off-Broadway. “Off Broadway died in 1970 and no one even sent flowers,” wrote Tom Eyen, an OOB playwright, three years later.
In response to the Eisenhower years, particularly McCarthyism and the HUAC hearings; the rise of issues like the war in Vietnam, nuclear-weapons development, civil and equal rights for African Americans and women (and, later, Latinos and gays); and proliferating consumerism, the Beat impulse evolved into the angrier and more activist ’60s. In the early 1960s, the Village theater and art scene was just developing into the exciting, vibrant, and multi-cultural world that it became known as by the end of the decade. Folk and rock music also came to the Village in the early part of the decade, and bars and clubs in the Village like the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, Googies, the Night Owl Cafe, the Fat Black Pussycat, and too many more to name became venues for singers, musicians, songwriters, and poets like Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Tim Hardin, Joan Baez, Rod McKuen, James Baldwin, and Allen Ginsberg. With this upheaval came the birth of a new alternative theater centered in the Village, inspired strongly by the writings of Antonin Artaud and the work of European dramatists: Off-Off-Broadway (a label supposedly devised by Village Voice reviewer Jerry Tallmer). Like Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold was a general inspiration for nearly all the avant-garde theater artists working or developing in the 1960s: his theories were just in the atmosphere of the time, especially in Greenwich Village. (It’s significant, I think, that the American editions of several seminal books of theatrical theory were published in these years: Artaud’s The Theater and its Double, 1958; Brecht on Theatre, 1964; Antonin Artaud Anthology, 1965; Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, 1968; Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, 1968; Meyerhold on Theatre, 1969.)
Before the start of the 1960s, Off-Broadway, with a few exceptions like, notably, the New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Joseph Papp Public Theater), had begun to become little more than a less-expensive Broadway, a commercial-theater venue. “The development of the Off Off theater,” wrote John Keating, a former review-writer for Cue magazine and one-time president of the Drama Desk, in a 1965 New York Times article, “is . . . explained by its adherents as . . . a revolt against the growing professionalism and decreasing experimentalism of the regular Off Broadway movement.” As the costs of Off-Broadway production rose, the impulse to experiment and innovate lessened. Off-Off-Broadway, with its minimal-to-non-existent budgets, became the anvil of experimentation. A founder of Circle Rep, Marshall Mason, insisted, “Off Off Broadway gives us freedom from economic pressures,” and Eve Adamson, director of the Jean Cocteau Repertory, observed, “I can afford to do a crazy play of Oscar Wilde. On Broadway no one can.” And the head of the Off Off Broadway Alliance (now the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, or ART/NY) said, “We’re the laboratory where directors, actors, and playwrights can sharpen their tools.”
Among the principal venues for the new OOB theater were the churches of the Village. Theatre Genesis (1964), for example, was actually part of the cultural ministry of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and the Washington Square Methodist Church on West 4th Street (which would later house Grotowski’s Theatr Laboratorium in 1969) had their own cultural and theatrical programs. Observed Elenore Lester, a New York Times writer who covered the new OOB arena in the ’60s and ’70s, in these and similar parishes, “a new kind of churchgoer sees underground films, original plays by young writers or hears far-out poetry or jazz liturgies.” In addition, of course, were the two most prominent OOB venues unaffiliated with a church: Caffe Cino (1958) and Café La MaMa (1961; later, the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club). In all of these places, and many others, spectators could see experimental films, Happenings, jazz bands, political speakers, and radically innovative poets. Among the hippies and protesters who frequented the Village or lived there, there were theater people, innovative writers, and radical thinkers like Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Ralph Cook, Ellen Stewart, Joe Cino, Al Carmines, Robert Hooks, Douglas Turner Ward, Joe Chaikin, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Michael Harrington, Murray Bookchin, and Paul Goodman who gravitated to the East and West Villages in the 1960s and afterward.
As this was all beginning to swirl and roil in the Village, developing into a disorderly, uproarious, and unrestrained hub of hippiedom and the counterculture, there were new kinds of theater being tried out by writers and directors—aided greatly, of course, by adventurous actors and imaginative designers and technicians—that were redefining the form, not to mention the content, of American theater. Off-Broadway had deteriorated into a place where artists went merely to get work: “The distinction between the practice of an art and the performance of a job or assigned task is lost” in the “establishment theatre,” wrote Michael Townsend Smith, OOB playwright and reviewer for the Village Voice. Finding little personal or artistic satisfaction in the established theater, whether Broadway or Off-Broadway, commercial or non-profit, the artists came to the Village to search for something they couldn’t find anywhere else. At the beginning, getting a part in an Off-Off-Broadway production wasn’t just a matter of acquiring a résumé credit, as it frequently is now, but a chance not only to be seen but to work alongside fascinating writers, directors, and designers. In Elenore Lester’s words, “Everyone is in it for love. . . . [T]hey’ll try anything if they think it’s ‘beautiful,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘real theater’ or ‘a challenge.’” Audiences, advised Lester, came for analogous reasons: “to be shook up, intellectually and emotionally.”
In 1965, a 19-year-old student who’d been traveling to Greenwich Village since his high school days when he met the Becks, hung out at Theatre Genesis, and discovered Caffe Cino, illustrated the world of Off-Off-Broadway for an Ohio campus publication. In a dialogue reminiscent of a very young man’s take on Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, a cabbie offers to take a young theater-seeker “off-Broadway” and the passenger says, “I’m looking for something fresh, something alive. A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation. A theatre where the grand tradition of theatre, ritual theatre, is joined to the . . . .” He breaks off when he realizes that Off-Broadway’s offerings differ little from what’s playing everywhere else. The cabbie, having turned into “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino,” transports them magically to “off-off-Broadway” where “[s]omething’s always new.” The cabbie instructs the young man that the new playwrights represented there are “trying to say something” as they “attempt to get back at the roots of the theatre—spoken poetry—in the most direct manner possible.” In words that echo Antonin Artaud, the cabbie explains: “We’re trying to do something basic to get at the rituals that have always formed the core of theatre.” (In seven years, that 19-year-old, Leonardo Shapiro, would be directing and creating plays with his own company, Shaliko, in the East Village. He became part of the very world he described.) To support the new theater activity came ad hoc little troupes, often in communication with European experimenters like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Michel de Ghelderode, Jean Genet, Fernando Arrabal, and Harold Pinter, and directors like Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Charles Marowitz, Joan Littlewood, Roger Blin, Jean-Louis Barrault, Giorgio Strehler, and later Jerzy Grotowski and Yuri Lyubimov.
The progenitor of the Off-Off-Broadway movement was Joe Cino’s coffeehouse, opened at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958 and closed soon after Cino’s suicide in 1967. Cino, a former dancer, had originally intended it as a place for his artist friends to display their work, then poets began reading their writing there. The first theatrical offerings were established plays by writers like Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, and Jean Giraudoux, but by 1960, playwrights began reading their scripts, and eventually staging them. The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s Flyspray in 1960. Eventually plays by Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick (the most prolific Cino writer in its lifetime) were staged and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors like Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63) and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse. Though Cino eventually built a small stage, the early productions at Caffe Cino were staged on the coffeehouse floor with the audience sitting very close around the playing area. Sets and props were minimal because of the lack of funds and the need for simplicity, and the lighting was the main source of atmosphere. Many of what would become the innovations and identifying characteristics of OOB theater were born at the Caffe Cino, but as much of necessity and impecuniousness as artistic choice and philosophy. The coffeehouse’s short life is far outstripped by the influence Caffe Cino had on New York and American theater, the Village, and Off-Off-Broadway. One Caffe Cino writer, Claris Nelson, called it “an island where our souls can play.” It was the first venue to become identified as a home for gay-themed plays before the Stonewall riots launched the gay rights movement in New York and elsewhere. Cino’s model, the coffeehouse theater, was copied by dozens and then scores of other small spaces around the city, centered mostly in the West and East Villages but fanning out to all the boroughs and even other cities and towns across the country. This all happened by word of mouth because if Off-Off-Broadway got very little press in its first decades, Caffe Cino got none. In 1967, Joe Cino committed suicide. Friends tried to keep the caffe going, but it couldn’t survive without Cino and in the face of new regulations for cabarets and clubs, and it closed in 1968. If Artaud was the OOB movement’s philosopher and Meyerhold its model director, Cino had been its stage manager. Almost no theater artist who worked in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s doesn’t owe some kind of debt to Joe Cino—if not directly, then indirectly.
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, founded in October 1961 by Ellen Stewart, a would-be clothes designer, in an East Village basement as the Café La MaMa, was seen by many to be the successor to Caffe Cino. It’s the only one of the main Off-Off-Broadway originators that’s still producing. (Ellen Stewart died at 91 on 13 January 2011, the last of the original OOB impresarios; see my homage on ROT, “The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011),” 4 April. It also provides a slightly more detailed history of the theater.) La MaMa moved about the East Village for many years until it purchased its own building at 74A E. 4th Street, still its headquarters (and for many years the residence, on the top floor, of Stewart). Stewart started La MaMa so her brother and his friends would have a place to create and perform their theater works. She dedicated the theater to the playwright and welcomed artists who were underrepresented, underfunded, and often misunderstood, at a time when the perception of what theatre could be was changing rapidly. For artists such as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Tom O’Horgan, and Philip Glass, La MaMa was an artistic refuge, especially after Caffe Cino closed. Stewart also brought international artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Andrei Serban, Kazuo Ohno, The Tokyo Kid Brothers to the U.S. to present their work at La MaMa. In addition, La MaMa E.T.C. maintains a resident company at the theater, first The La MaMa Troupe directed by Tom O’Horgan and then The Great Jones Repertory directed by Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados, the current company. Other companies and artists had residencies at the La MaMa complex, too, some for several years and others for a short time until they moved out on their own; 30 companies and artists work out of La MaMa at present. The latest troupe to be offered a residency at the theater was the Belarus Free Theater, forced into exile by the totalitarian government in their home country. La MaMa may be the busiest producer of plays in New York City—or possibly the entire country—with three theaters in its main building, a large space in the Ellen Stewart Theatre (formerly the Annex), plus a rehearsal building, an art gallery, an archive, and artists’ dormitories.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South was devoted to social outreach through programs to help people, including the controversial and unpopular, in need. The “beatnik church” supported a radical arts ministry, making space available for art exhibitions, rehearsals, and performances, ensuring that it was a space where artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Rauschenberg, unknown at that time, could experiment in their work without fear of censorship. Later, artists Red Grooms and Yoko Ono also exhibited work at the gallery. The first Happening is said to have been presented at Judson Memorial. After the church hired Al Carmines as Assistant Curate, he opened the Judson Poets' Theatre in November 1961 with The Great American Desert, a satiric Western drama by poet Joel Oppenheimer. Carmines presented experimental plays and musicals by writers such as Sam Shepherd and Lanford Wilson, and directors like Tom O'Horgan in the church's main Meeting Room. Starting in 1962, Carmines began composing and producing his own musicals, including several based on texts by Gertrude Stein, staged by the Judson Poets director Lawrence Kornfeld. In the 1980s, the church sponsored political-theater performances, such as those by Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. In 1977, Carmines suffered a cerebral aneurysm that disabled him with devastating headaches. He ceased his theatrical activities in 1981 and retired from the ministry in 1985, effectively ending the run of the Judson Poets' Theatre, the third (and the second-longest-lasting) of the four original OOB houses. Al Carmines died in 2005 at age 69.
Ralph Cook’s Theatre Genesis was housed in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, an Episcopal church on Second Avenue at E. 10th Street. Cook, a fervent civil-rights activist who’d been arrested for his activities on several occasions, had been hired in 1964 by the church’s rector as the arts curate to coordinate the arts ministry at St. Mark’s and he immediately launched the theater. The plays he staged concerned the life of the street—usually in the language of the street—and were imbued with a sense of anarchy that was laced with spirituality. Cook encouraged his playwrights, often poets before he recruited them, to work improvisationally with the actors and directors, experimenting with language to explore their world and the conflicts they encountered in their lives. The artists were working through their ideas and concerns and the spectators didn’t see a reflection of something that had already happened, but watched it happen right in front of them. The performance style, while not abandoning Stanislavsky’s psychological realism, was more subjective in its interpretation, stripping everything down to the basics and, as Artaud required, refusing to indulge or condescend to the audiences. The closeness Cook fostered among his artists was intended to build a tight community and the explorations were conducted on a personal level as the artists revealed their core humanity in plays that bore witness to what was happening outside the church. Cook viewed playwrights as seers, the only ones who could penetrate the fiction of the mass media and the illusions of capitalism. The plays, often gritty and violent, were revolutionary in form as well as content, with minimal settings in a tiny space that could be configured for a half dozen different audience-performer relationships. They were regarded as works still in progress and Cook promoted the revision and reshaping of the works even as they were before an audience. Theatre Genesis produced, among others, the early plays of Sam Shepard; Charles L. Mee, Jr.; Leonard Melfi; and Adrienne Kennedy. Ralph Cook, about whom little is recorded (including his life dates) outside his activities at Theatre Genesis, left the theater in 1969 and Theatre Genesis closed a few years later.
In the ’60s, among other shifts in approach, the theater creativity in the Village was often generated by the playwright. “[W]e are not looking for plays to produce,” explained Cook, “but writers who are at that point where they need a continuing relationship with a stage and actors in order to evolve.” In the modern era, playwrights’ theaters, like Shakespeare’s or Molière’s or, before that, the world of classical Greek drama, was rare and in the United States, mostly unknown. The mainstream theater was generally an actors’ theater, though some important directors held sway on some stages. But as the Off-Off-Broadway theater developed in the Village, the playwright—not always an established dramatist as many companies gravitated to poets in particular—became the focus of the creative impulse. It became more and more common for writers to work not just with specific groups but for them, creating plays for certain actors, even certain performance spaces.
In another Village shift in the ’60s, the experimental theaters tilted toward acting ensembles, often working improvisationally, often without a formal director. These new theaters were often collectives of artists creating symbiotically, though the focus on writers also had its influence here, with, as I noted above, authors developing work with groups of which they were also members. (In ensemble-created work, the playwright often refined scripts developed by improvisation.) These groups investigated language imagery and new ways of conveying meaning through the sounds of words and other non-verbal utterances as described by Artaud. The collaborators were inventing an Artaudian grammar of symbols drawn from their everyday experiences and those of their audiences, who connected to the performances as participants in the creative event. Robert Brustein observed that “the new theater style is intimately linked to revolutionary politics. What we are witnessing is the effort of the avant-garde to translate ‘participatory democracy’ into artistic terms, demanding a new egalitarianism that gives equal rank to everyone . . . .” It was often difficult to discern who were the principal creators of such works, the writers, the actors, or the director, as they all contributed their skills during the development process and worked as equals in an artistic commune of sorts. (In some cases, the companies were actual communes, often living together in the same lofts were they created and performed.) Groups like the Living Theatre, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre (1963), Richard Schechner’s Performance Group (1967; the predecessor to the Wooster Group, 1975), Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project (1968), Crystal Field and George Bartenieff’s Theater for the New City (1971), Omar Shapli’s Section 10 (1975), and others who lasted a few seasons or so, produced many of the iconic theater pieces of the decade. This was not the life style of the commercial theater of Broadway or Off-Broadway, or even the non-profit theater of Off-Broadway. Even when the troupe didn’t live together, the members had a common connection that often defined their art. Once the OOB bug caught hold, the agenda-free theaters like La MaMa or Theatre Genesis were joined by companies with a defining interest. There were black companies, Hispanic companies, Asian companies, even a French and a German troupe. There were theaters that focused on gay or lesbian plays, women writers, Jewish subjects, veteran’s issues. In the beginning of this development, the plays were sometimes strident and more issue-oriented than artistic, but by the end of the decade, some good theater and writing developed from the focus
[To cover this subject even at the superficial level I’m attempting here requires more space that I can manage in a single post. So I’m going to continue this discussion in a few days, picking up where I’ve left off above, starting with the financial aspects of Off-Off-Broadway theater in its first decade. I hope readers will come back later this week to see what else I have to say about the new theater activity that grew up in the West and East Villages of lower Manhattan in the 1960s. (I’ll also append a list of some of the sources from which I’ve drawn the quotations I’ve used in “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s.”)]
