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"I make a religious theater, which I've always been afraid to admit -- fear of derision," says Richard Foreman,
surveying the set of his new play, Lava, in which humpbacked actors nibble
doughnuts, smear lipstick on their faces, and do a number of silly dances. "Of courses," he adds dryly, "I combine it with a lot of junk and tackiness...."
At 52, Foreman is one of American theater's most original
playwright- directors. He has staged classics for Joe Papp (including the long-running
Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center, starring Raul Julia), composed a series of absurdist musicals with Stanley Silverman, and tailored plays to the specific talents of avant-garde superstars the Wooster Group. But the basis for his small yet ardent following is the plays he presents as the Ontological-Hysteric Theater: intensely personal, playful, cerebral collages of cryptic poetry, exotic tape loops, and dense visual images.
Since his plays are radically unlike most theater, I ask Foreman how he imagines people should look at them. "Here's an analogy I've often used with actors: the play is like a child's top with very beautiful pictures painted on the sides. But when you send it spinning, the pictures blur and are subsumed by the hum and the energy of the revolve. I want people to watch and connect with the energy of the mechanism, the humming."
Lava grew, he says, out of the sentiment he expressed picking up his 1987 Best Play
Obie Award of Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good: "Now I can do a play everyone will hate." The four actors onstage spend most of the time listening and reacting silently to the director's voice (represented onstage by an oscilloscope) musing about "moral cosmic issues" in language closer to spiritual or philosophical texts than most plays. "I'm trying," says Foreman, "to be honest about the fact that, like 99 percent of the people in the world, I'm fascinated by my own voice."
7 Days, December 13, 1989
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