Richard Foreman
I am probably the most radical artist to have ever come from Scarsdale.*
—Richard Foreman
I WAS TEMPTED TO NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE. Starting is always the hardest part.
Google “Richard Foreman” and one of your first hits will invariably be the treasured playwright and director’s New York Times obit, which lists a cavalcade of prestigious awards as calculable proof of both his profound significance and old-school avant-garde don’t-give-’em-what-they-want bona fides. The first search page will inevitably include a link to Ontological.com, homepage of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the company Foreman established in 1968 to stage Angelface, his first produced play, at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York. While the site could use updating, it contains info galore on the eighty shows that Foreman wrote and directed himself or staged by other authors; the films and videos he sporadically created; and the numerous books he published, including scripts, manifestos, essays, and one 1997 novel, No-body. The transcribed “notebooks” section of the site features more than fifty downloadable files of free-floating dialogue that he offered up for others to use in their own productions. Not enough? You should visit the Foreman page at the PennSound website, a virtual trove of performance documentation, interviews, readings, and even the sound loops from his 2001 show Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty! Too much? You could simply skim Foreman’s bountiful Wikipedia page, given that I just corrected it. Someone had named the artist Kate Manheim—Foreman’s remarkable widow, who for many years was his star actress—as being his first wife. She was his second. The brilliant film critic Amy Taubin preceded her. Now you know!
Foreman departed our 2025 reality in early January, at age eighty-seven. His last few weeks were spent in an intensive care unit, mostly asleep. A small group of friends and colleagues visited him daily, providing words and company and sometimes a little music. But they were never sure if he could hear any of it, and slightly uncertain whether he actually wanted them there in the first place. Socially aloof—not really the kind of guy who checks in to see how you’re doing—Foreman in falling into a coma may have at last arrived to the place he always desired to be: floating in the purely interior landscape of his unremitting deep thoughts. He spent decades creating unparalleled plays that single-mindedly dared to penetrate this psychic threshold with their sense-stimulating, trancelike discombobulation. It could very well be that the only thing holding him back from achieving unadulterated cognitive deliverance was, and had always been, his body. The actual moment of his passing was so tranquil that it seemed almost un-Foremanlike.
I am stalling again.
As a delay tactic, this would be an ideal place to quote one of the many devotees who have written so eloquently about Foreman’s work in their substantial books and essays. I am a blood-oath member of a vigorous cult who vigilantly believe Foreman was one of the most extraordinary artists of the past century—or this millennium—in theater or any other medium. Like me, those ardent followers probably struggled to convey what the visceral experience of a Foreman production felt like. Regularly staged behind large Plexiglas sheets that forced the audience to watch reflections of themselves perceiving the show, the plays had mesmerizing ways of generating momentary amnesia in viewers. It was far more than just spacing out. Lacking an apparent story or discernible narrative, your eye/mind/attention/consciousness (yes, all of these things, all at once) were left to track the taut zebra strings traversing the prop-laden set. You could also get lost attempting to read the splintered English and Hebrew letters running atop a stage festooned with wacko props and occult imagery. Foreman designed every detail of his productions with sketches and hot-glued maquettes that he remade as many as twelve times for any given show. Considering the Kabbalistic dollhouse sensibility of his sets, it makes a certain sense that he treated his actors like automatons. Performers intoned their fractured lines with peculiar patterns, rhythms, and elongated syllables, further separating words from definitions, questions from answers. The goal was to execute highly choreographed, ultra-precise movements, all while staring directly at the audience. Fingers exactingly perched, every gesture laced with intention, his actors betrayed a motivation that bore no relation to the Method and had everything to do with, well, mystery.
What I meant when I said that Foreman’s theater caused amnesia was wrong and should have been edited out. I wanted to express that the plays have wavelike structures that oscillate between moments of relative stillness and fastidiously staged pandemonium. In a way, his works resembled tableaux vivants that would carefully stalk the stage for a little over an hour, questioning their own existence in space and time. His art trafficked in dense philosophical ideas, but you never had to actively analyze it to follow along. How could you, with all the buzzing sounds and blinding lights aimed right in your face? The goal, as a viewer, was to absorb the barrage of stimuli and forgo active comprehension. It must be remembered that Foreman’s work was primarily concerned with the goings-on inside his head—not yours. Here again comes that problem of requiring a body, and an audience, when all you need to make great art is a big throbbing brain.
Whether they were delighted or repelled by it, those who witnessed a Foreman play probably recognize what I’m inadequately trying to articulate. They comprehend the difficulty of describing the highly unorthodox brilliance of Foreman’s theater to a noninitiate. As epiphanic as they are to read, his scripts don’t provide much idea of how the elliptical actions and dialogue were staged. It is curious yet totally understandable that the most thrilling documentation of Foreman’s oeuvre—via Paula Court’s and Babette Mangolte’s spellbinding photos, for instance, or the animated Super 8 shorts, shot one frame at a time by Kirk Winslow, available on PennSound—exquisitely fails to properly capture his work. The iconic, jaw-dropping images in his indispensable first book, Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos (1976), which rates a 9.3 or higher on the weirdness scale, cannot encapsulate the expansive range of what was once a piece of live theater. The photos and films are beautiful and potent because of their distinct compositional choices, yet it’s important to remember that we’re looking at another artist’s work, not Foreman’s. But, you know, that’s life, isn’t it? All you can do is wish you’d been there. Given the roughly 185 linear feet of materials that constitute the Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim Papers at New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections, you have ample opportunity to lose yourself in fomo.
After many years of threatening to quit the theater, Foreman finally made good on his promise in 2013 with the last play he wrote and directed, Old Fashioned Prostitutes. Over the next decade he created a number of feature-length digital videos and spent time revising old texts; his theater days were truly in the past. He was busy thinking about other things. As saddening as it was to see him walk away from his life’s pursuit, one could not help but respect his insurmountable indifference to it. What more did he need to do? Last year, while talking to Foreman about his writing, I commented that the meaning in his plays was often produced by the collision of two contradictory things. His response—a pretty tidy epitaph for his epic career—was, “I don’t think of it as being contradictions. It just automatically happens. The idea is this: Once you get the idea, it falls apart. Step one is normally followed by step two, but that’s too boring. So . . . do something different.”
Andrew Lampert is an artist, archivist, and writer based in New York.
* Richard Foreman, in conversation with the author, 2024.
The book Richard Foreman: No Title (2025), edited by Andrew Lampert with an introduction by Jennifer Krasinski, is available now from the Further Reading Library.
Foreman will be celebrated at this summer’s Venice Theater Biennale (May 31–June 15), which is being organized by the event’s artistic director, Willem Dafoe. The Wooster Group will present its re-vision of his 1988 play Symphony of Rats, and Dafoe will stage a performance of the Foreman text No Title with actress Simonetta Solder.
Two film and video series organized by Lampert—“His Head Was A Sledgehammer: Richard Foreman in Retrospect” and “Foreman’s Favorites”—will be presented at Anthology Film Archives, New York, May 21–28 and May 29–June 9, respectively.
