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"Metaphysical
Lessons In the Dream Logic of Richard Foreman" Richard Foreman's theater tends to wither in the description of it. From the time of his earliest plays in the late 1960's, he has stocked his work with enough visual and verbal conundrums to keep disciples of abstraction babbling through years of exegesis, but the fact is that there is simply no satisfactory way to invoke what the experience of sitting through his plays is like. They exist fully only in the moment of their performance. And to try to boil them down to synopsis or allegory is to make them sound both pretentious and slightly bogus. Accordingly, to watch "My Head Was a Sledgehammer," the most recent offering of Mr. Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is to be swept into a dazzlingly self-contained, thoroughly exhilarating universe that seems in the viewing–as does the best of Mr. Foreman's work–logical, rational and disturbing in the way that individual dreams can be. It is a testament to Mr. Foreman's hypnotic artistic control that only afterward do you scratch your head and wonder what it was all about. At its worst, this sort of abstract theater, even from Mr. Foreman, can leave one with the impression of watching someone else's hallucination and becoming annoyed and embarrassed by its self-indulgent opacity. In "Sledgehammer"–in spite of Mr. Foreman's continuing use of adapted Brechtian distancing techniques–one has the invigoratingly dangerous sense that the hallucination is occurring inside one's own head. "Sledgehammer," which has been designed and directed by Mr. Foreman on the tiny stage of the St. Mark's Theater, takes place in an environment that suggests a sort of nightmare classroom of the mind. There are three tall bookcases, their shelves stocked with objects ranging from disintegrating hooks to garbage-can lids and Jell-O molds; blackboards that appear to have been endlessly scrawled upon and endlessly erased, and rows and rows of white sheets if scribbled on paper. Staring at the stage is like looking at a drawing for children in which objects are hidden in an obscuring maze of lines. And among the plays's joys is simply letting different props and aspects of the set drift, surprisingly, into consciousness, with the consequent impression that one has somehow called them into being. The process is compounded by Mr. Foreman's trademark use of strings that dissect the performing space, constantly forcing one to shift one's alignment of vision. Moving through this environment are three principal characters, all portrayed with a masterly blend of otherworldly eeriness and visceral anxiety. There is the piratical-looking professor (Thomas Jay Ryan), a hunchback with a scratched face and an anguished, guttural purr of a voice; a male student (Henry Stram) who wears plus-fours and whose manner shifts between sycophancy and rebellion, and a female student (Jan Leslie Harding), who is dressed in layers of black and exudes a menacingly detached aura of sensuality They all wear head mikes, and their voices seem to be emanating, disorientingly, from the same place. Their dialogue has something to do with the forms of knowledge and perception and their ineffability. The professor, who Is given to create rhymes "whose technique is they don't rhyme," announces at one point that he wants "to be the place (through which truth passes...." The admission seems both to torture and delight him. "Truth revealed," as he says subsequently, "takes the unfortunate shape of everything that isn't true." In lines that often, in context, possess the shapely elegance of epigrams, the students bait and question the professor with unsettling mixtures of hostility and sensuality. "Do I have your permission to get torn to pieces by contradictions?" asks the male student who from time to time seems to shift identities with the professor. "What does your internal time say now?" drawls the woman, whose cryptically sexual presence seems to arouse distinctly unacademic reactions in her mentor. The pursuit of knowledge is a dangerous and frenzied process here. Papers and blackboard have a magnetic charge that violently draws and repels the academics. Abrasive bells and sharp flashes of light hurl the ensemble–which also includes four dunce-capped lackeys with Karl Marx beards who scramble on and off stage as a slapstick chorus of functionariesÑonto the ground. Symbolic objects–as obvious as Edenic apples and messages on salvers delivered by the flunkies and as enigmatic as long baguettes, yellow golf balls and single white gloves–appear and disappear. Just as every statement in the play is answered by a contradiction, so does Mr. Foreman continually undermine our perceptual responses. The background music, which ranges from a soothing Philip Glass-like repetition of piano notes to ominously hyper, Felliniesque tunes, changes as soon as we become accustomed to it. And the lights dim and brighten as if the pupils of one's eyes are contracting and dilating. None of this description can capture the ingeniously channeled energy nor the ecstatic humor that infuses the play, which takes the form of surreal visual jokes, precisely choreographed vaudeville routines and, above all, the manifest frustration of its knowledge-seeking professor, who is, one presumes, a sort of self-mocking stand-in for Mr. Foreman himself. Ultimately, there are no concrete answers in this endlessly mutating universe. Mr. Foreman, as always, seems far more interested in journeys than in destinations, in the intransitive rather than the transitive. And if "Sledgehammer" has a moral, it seems to be that to try to reduce life to a formula is to deny its confounding multiplicity. It is important to note that the ways in which Mr. Foreman gives life to this metaphysical uncertainty this time around are purely, even brazenly theatrical. Mr. Foreman may be constantly subverting the techniques he employs. ("This happens! This really happens!" proclaims one he of the actors. "But if mere actors speak this, then it no longer happens.") Yet he has also brought them to a degree of extraordinary polish. After 20-odd dogged years in the theater, he has clearly become one of its sophisticated calibrators.
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"Ideas
Incorporated" On consecutive evenings in the East Village, a few blocks from each other, you can currently see a play from 1636 and one from that, taken together, handily demonstrate what we always knew to be true: that the theater is one and indivisible that its representations, no matter how realistic in detail, are always the image, never the thing itself; and that ideas are no use there unless they dance. And dance they certainly do, if not always as gracefully as they might, in both The Illusion and My Head Was a Sledgehammer. Both Corneille's eccentric early pasticcio and Richard Foreman's quite traditional (for Foreman) new piece are explicitly theater of the mind, telling stories that test alternative ways of seeing life rather than presenting a unified view. Both center on a sage with visionary powers, and it's probably a comment on 358 years of progress that Corneille's wise man, the magician Alcandre, runs the show and knows what's what at every moment, while Foreman's, named only "The Professor," is more the evening's victim than its controller. In Corneille, the unfettered consciousness may at times threaten to leap reality's bounds, but by and large is kept firmly in its place; in Foreman, it is the show, running wild in every direction, at every moment. Foreman's lucky actors, in contrast, are miked, and have only to whisper his paradoxes into the eerie overall soundscape of his bells and buzzes and crashes and tape-looped blasts of Dixieland–the sound, you might say, of thinking deconstructed into its component blips. I've written on Foreman's work so many times begin to resent the impossibility of the task especially since the best explications are always built so gracefully into the work itself. As The Professor cogently puts it, "Truth revealed, believe it or not, takes the unfortunate shape of everything that isn't true," What else can a critic do but agree, and sit back to enjoy the giddy, witty, Dadaist party via which Foreman graphs the joyously futile process of trying to pin down the unpindownable truth? One might note that Thomas Jay Ryan isn't the most charismatic actor to embody the locus of Foreman's visions, all the more when he's flanked by an exceptionally lively Henry Stram and a Jan Leslie Harding in sublime deadpan control. But Foreman's communion with his intent is so complete, his skill at articulating it onstage so secure, that it hardly matters if the actors he invites to his party are more or less exciting. Always the same, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a Foreman event is always different. And you always come out feeling refreshed by the way his ideas dance.
"Avant-Gardist
Celebrates the Tragic, Fallen World" As a playwright and director with a philosophical bent, Richard Foreman is a practicing metaphysician in the experimental theater. During the last 25 years, his plays–40 of them since he originated his Ontological-Hysteric Theater–have repeatedly analyzed the imbalances between art and life. Even while he has branched out to become a director of opera and plays by others, his contribution remains instantly identifiable. Whatever he does, he leaves sight and sound tracks as his signature, and his art has always had a deeply intellectual foundation. In rehearsal at St. Mark's Theater with his new play, "My Head Was a Sledgehammer," Mr. Foreman is at the electronic controls, interjecting suggestions to his actors and orchestrating the mechanics of the enterprise. With a mournful mien that extends from his eyes to his mustache he is a younger, avant-garde doppelganger of Broadway's David Merrick. As the author fine-tunes the performance, a spiderlike chandelier revolves like a fan in a Singapore hotel; string–a Foreman trademark–crisscrosses and stratifies the stage, and Oriental carpets cushion the walls. Actors in black dunce caps rush by as a professor prepares to lecture at a blackboard. The source of "My Head Was a Sledgehammer" is Friedrich Hšlderlin's fragments for a play about Empedocles, the Greek philosopher "who was destroyed because he tried to bring down to people a kind of truth not meant for humans." Mr. Foreman's version is, he says, "a gloss" on the original, and deals with a professor who "through silliness and, weirdness tries to introduce his students to the poetic method." Coincidentally, Eric Bogosian, who is a friend of Mr. Foreman's, will soon open his new one-man show, "Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead." Mr. Foreman jokes, "I thought we might have a Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud about who stole the title." Serendipitous
Adventures Bizarre humor remains endemic to his work, although these days Mr. Foreman is, for personal reasons, more dour. His father died last year and Ms. Manheim, who is the playwright's wife, is very ill and doctors have been unable to discover the cause of her malady. Some time ago, she stopped acting. At 56, he Is feeling more contemplative. Asked to comment on his plays, he apologizes for risking pretension, and says: "If you were going to ask Heidegger what his next book was going to be about, he would say, 'About Being.' Well, all of my plays are about that." He might have added that the subject is also about being Richard Foreman. The plays, which are continuing chapters in the serial of his mind, start with half-page scenes in his voluminous notebooks. Periodically, he harvests his entries for material that is thematically related. During an intensive eight-week rehearsal period, he processes these excerpts through his directorial imagination, and searches for a scenic environment "in which those lines of dialogue can have some reverberation." He continues: "People might be amazed if they saw how carefully we worked, how much material is thrown out and how much we change. Usually my cast is in agony because they think l!m throwing out all the best parts." In any traditional sense, his art lacks narrative. Things happen and then happen again. Scenes can be switched, without disturbing the work's intention. He is "much more interested in juggling ideas than In telling a story." To illustrate the approach, he recalls a statement made by John Gassner, who was his play-writing teacher at the Yale School of Drama: "Richard, you have talent, but you have one problem, which is that you get a strong dramatic effect and you just want to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it." Eventually, the playwright took that criticism as a compliment. That was exactly what he was trying to do, to find an effect worth repeating, "the one effect you never tire of." Before going to Yale, Mr. Foreman graduated magna cum laude from Brown University. He had always had a scholarly streak, but only gradually was he able to accommodate it in his theater. At first, he wrote plays in a Murray Schisgal vein, one of which was considered for Broadway as a vehicle for Alec Guinness. The English actor declined the offer, saying that he liked the play but felt that he was the wrong actor to portray an overweight, middle-class Jewish man from the Bronx. In retrospect, Mr. Foreman says, "With his great chameleon quality, I suppose he could have played the part." The author's career charged in the opposite direction. Taking inspiration from the independence of underground filmmakers of the 1960's, he asked himself what he wanted to see onstage. He had an image of a nonsequential, idiographic theater in which "people faced each other across a space and said a few abrupt things, then moved and said a few more abrupt things." Beneath the apparent anarchy was a sense of order and mystery, even an Aristotelian logic. From the outset, his theater has had a strong literary base, drawing on works of philosophers, with whom he has one-way dialogues. Oddly, he has always had an ambivalence about his profession. Given a choice, he might prefer to be home writing or reading Eric Vogelin on the history of consciousness. "I've always been a rather withdrawn fellow who is occasionally dragged out into society to put on a play," he says. "I'd be a hermit if it wasn't for theater." Compensating for his shyness, he is an integral part of the performance, with his tape-recorded, sepulchral voice offering wry asides on the drama. For Mr. Foreman, as a poet-philosopher, the plays are meant to be instructive. He explains: "Art is trying to redeem, to learn how to dance with the problematic aspects of the world. It's easy enough to imagine a beautiful world, and to celebrate it, but I would rather learn how to celebrate the fallen world we live in. People have looked at me awry when I say that I think my plays are pictures of paradise. There are obviously plenty of very aggressive, unpleasant elements in them, but I would like to think they are subjected to a kind of esthetic massage." His distinctive brand of performance art communicates with a seismic, prop-dominated theatricality. From the beginning, he has tried "to build the potential for unexpected collisions into the physical materials on stage." The design–aural as well as visual–is fraught with peril, especially for the actors. "If a table has a fat leg or wobbles in a funny way that automatically suggests trouble," and breakaway furniture results in breakaway comedy. Despite his devotion to a theater of ideas, the playwright has an active interest in more popular aspects of culture. As an admirer of Jule Styne, he harbors a dream of directing a production of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," his favorite musical. But he has no interest in reviving his own plays (although "Dr. Selavy's Magic Theater," a musical collaboration with Stanley Silverman was brought back some years ago. The works exist in the moment for the audience that is watching. Reflecting on his theater, he says, "To me, art is really 99 percent courage, the courage to follow your vision and to remember what your particular vision is. It's a struggle not to let your mastery take you down the easy road, and in spite of what some people think, I have a mastery in certain areas. I have to cast that off so that I'm back in a naked condition confronting the material of my life." Question
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