La MaMa Experimental Theatre – A Lasting Bridge Between Cultures: The Dialogue with European Theater in the Years 1961–1975 (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) 1032372222, 9781032372228

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La MaMa Experimental Theatre – A Lasting Bridge Between Cultures

This book focuses on the role of La MaMa Experimental Theatre within Avant-garde theater during the 1960s and 1970s. This study investigates the involvement of the Off-Off Broadway circuit in the Avant-garde experimentations both in the United States (New York specifically) and in Europe. This exploration shows the two-way influence – between Europe and the United States – testified by documents gathered in years of archival research. In this relevant artistic exchange, La MaMa (and Ellen Stewart as its founder and artistic director) emerges as a key element. La MaMa’s companies brought to Europe the American culture and the New York underground culture, while their members learnt European training techniques by attending workshops or taking part in the research of Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook, and brought their principles back to the United States. This book goes through a chronological path that presents some key cases of collaboration between the above-mentioned European masters and some La MaMa’s artists and companies: Tom O ’Horgan and La MaMa Repertory Troupe, the Open Theatre, Andrei Serban and The Great Jones Repertory Company, La MaMa Plexus. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies. Monica Cristini is Researcher at the Department of Cultures and Civilizations, University of Verona, Italy.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

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La MaMa Experimental Theatre – A Lasting Bridge Between Cultures The Dialogue with European Theater in the Years 1961–1975 Monica Cristini

This book is published as a final result of the project La MaMa Experimental Theatre: a lasting bridge between cultures – MariBet, that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840989. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Monica Cristini The right of Monica Cristini to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cristini, Monica, author. Title: La MaMa experimental theatre—a lasting bridge between cultures : the dialogue with the European theater in the years 1961-1975 / Monica Cristini. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advanced in theatre & performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023025802 (print) | LCCN 2023025803 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032372228 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032372822 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003336235 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. | African American theater— History—20th century. | Theatrical companies—New York (State)—New York—History— 20th century. | Experimental theater—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Experimental theater—Europe—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN2297.L36 C75 2023 (print) | LCC PN2297.L36 (ebook) | DDC 792.097471—dc23/eng/20230801 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025802 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025803 ISBN: 9781032372228 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032372822 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003336235 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To Ellen Stewart and to the other women who made twentieth-century theater great.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Preface: “A movement of energy”: “New Theatre” xi exchanges between the United States and Europe CINDY ROSENTHAL

Introduction

1

1 Approaching experimental theater in New York

4

2 Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)

27

3 Sharing cultures: the European tours

50

4 Developing a new kind of theater

85

5 Two new companies at La MaMa

114

6 A multicultural venue in New York

146

Bibliography169 Index187

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of three years of research, conducted in the context of the European project La MaMa Experimental Theatre: a lasting bridge between cultures – MariBet, that could not have been completed without the invaluable support of the several scholars, colleagues and friends who have helped me along the way. My first thanks go to the professors who were supervisors in the project: Simona Brunetti (University of Verona), Marvin Carlson and Peter Eckersall (Graduate Center – CUNY), and the directors of the two departments that hosted MariBet, Arnaldo Soldani (Department of Cultures and Civilizations, UNIVR) and Frank Hentschker (The Martin E. Segal Theater Center – GC – CUNY). Their support was fundamental in the planning phase and in the three years of research work. Special thanks go to Simona Brunetti for her generous assistance also during the drafting of the book and for its proofreading, and to the Research Officers of University of Verona, who supported me during the project. My gratitude goes to Cindy Rosenthal for her sincere friendship, for sharing her enthusiasm for my research and her invaluable suggestions during the writing. Special thanks also go to Carlo Vareschi, a tireless collaborator in correcting the proofs in English, whose generous help was essential for the realization of this book. I am also in debt with my editors at Routledge, Swati Hindwan, Laura Hussey, and Catherine Susan Jacob, and with Edward Tosques, who translated the book. This monograph would not have been shaped without the indispensable availability of access to archives and consultation of documents made possible thanks to the invaluable collaboration of the archivists even during the difficult period of the pandemic, in which they labored to facilitate the consultation of the numerous unpublished documents. I thank the La MaMa Archives and Mia Yoo, Artistic Director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, who granted me access to the archive and the use of its sources; Ozzie Rodriguez, director of the archives and enthusiastic custodian of the La MaMa memory; Sophie Glidden-Lyon and

x Acknowledgments Shigeko Suga, for their invaluable collaboration and patience in answering my many questions. I also thank the artists and La MaMa’s folks who took the time to be interviewed and shared with me memories of important moments in the history of La MaMa: Sara Galassini, Maud Dinand, Kim Ima, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Onni Johnson, Bill Ruyle, Andrei Serban and Joel Zwick. My gratitude also goes to Filippo De Capitani, Adriana Garbagnati, Jared McNeil, Claudio Scarabottini and La MaMa Umbria International. A particular gratitude also goes to Eugenio Barba, for his hospitality at Odin Teatret and his generous willingness to talk to me about his encounter with Ellen Stewart. Special thanks also go to the BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music and to Louie Fleck, who kindly devoted his time to me even during the archive’s period of closure; to Cara Gilgenbach of the Department of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University, for her generous help; to the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts DivisionBilly Rose Theater Division, and to Paul Friedman for his assistance. Last, but not least, thanks also to the Odin Teatret Archives, to Simone Dragone for his wonderful support and to the Odin Teatret staff for their warm hospitality. Lastly, I thank my Italian colleagues Alessio Arena, Sonia Bellavia, Andrea Capuzzo, Matteo Casari, Francesca Cecconi, Andrea Cominetti, Sara Fontana, Arianna Frattali, Ester Fuoco, Leonardo Mancini, Samantha Marenzi, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Maria Rita Simone, Gabriele Sofia, Elena Zilotti; my friends AnnAliki Antoniou, Silvia Cafarelli, Alberto Corradi, Myriam Guglielmi, Paola Palma, Giulio Spiazzi, Dimitri Vezyroglou, and my family, who supported me in Italy and in the United States during my years of research and in the writing phase, first of all my partner Sebastiano, for his help in the book’s design phase and correction. The translation from Italian to English is by Edward Tosques, with proofreading support by Carlo Vareschi, Sebastiano Festa and Cindy Rosenthal. The images in the book are published with the kind permission of La MaMa Archives and Odin Teatret Archive. The research made use of the consultation of unpublished documents thanks to the kind collaboration of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection, BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Public Library – Performing Arts Division-Billy Rose Theater Division, the Department of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University and the Odin Teatret Archives.

Preface “A movement of energy”: “New Theatre” exchanges between the United States and Europe Cindy Rosenthal As I read Monica Cristini’s book manuscript in the spring of 2023 in New York City, the news of the death of Caffe Cino and La MaMa playwright Robert Patrick reverberates in avant-garde theater circles across the United States, while the premiere of composer and librettist Elizabeth Swados’ The Beautiful Lady wows critics and spectators at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre. These artists were part of the Zeitgeist that Cristini – and Michael Kirby and Marco De Marinis before her – call “The New Theatre.” The downtown experimental theater scene, post-COVID times, is once again thriving – La MaMa celebrated the re-opening of its landmark 74a East 4th Street theater building with East Village neighborhood festivities and the ringing of La MaMa founding director Ellen Stewart’s iconic bell on February 9, 2023. Although Stewart, Patrick and Swados are no longer with us (and sadly, we lose key players of the 1960s theater arts scene with every passing day), Cristini’s timely monograph is heartening. Her book brings the energy and urgency of the many powerful voices and visions that contributed to The New Theatre to the fore, and from a fresh theater historical perspective. Cristini, an Italian scholar of Avant-garde theater, excavates and analyzes new and significant connective tissues between US experimental artists of the 1960s and the work of lauded European “masters” of the period – Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Andrei Serban and Eugenio Barba. Her research delves deeply into this “cultural cross-pollination” as she describes it, illuminating and interrogating the impact of collectively creative ensembles and the workshop model for theater making via intercultural, global exchanges. Richard Schechner and The Performance Group, J­ ulian Beck, Judith Malina and The Living Theatre, Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, Joel Zwick and the La MaMa Plexus Workshop, the Native American Theatre Ensemble, the Jarboro Players and Tom O’Horgan and the La MaMa Repertory Troupe take center stage in Cristini’s book. Cristini turns a sharp lens on Ellen Stewart’s choice to launch the La MaMa Repertory Troupe’s and O’Horgan’s reputations by sending them

xii  Cindy Rosenthal on three momentous multi-country European tours in the mid-1960s. Cristini’s analysis draws distinctions between these tours and assesses Grotowski’s growing influence as auteur and teacher on O’Horgan, the La MaMa Repertory Troupe performers and their repertoire of New Theatre plays. Investigating touring practices and exchanges on the other side of the Atlantic too, Cristini sheds light on Peter Brook’s community-building agenda through the workshops he organized with Luis Valdez and Hanay Geiogamah in New York, California and Minnesota. Cristini details how these hybrid sessions worked – with the sharing of ritual practices and performance techniques, Brook and his collaborators built creative and cross-cultural alliances between his international company and the pressing political agendas of El Teatro Campesino (the farmworkers’ theater) and the Native American Theatre Ensemble. Cristini points to the different outcomes for these ensembles in the aftermath of these exchanges. Cristini also makes clear that Stewart’s ongoing commitment to present her playwrights’/directors’/companies’ work at international festivals was central to Stewart’s goal of raising their prominence and prestige back home. Stewart was forward-thinking in attaching vital importance to her groups’ participation in international conferences. She understood that the visceral and intellectual exchange of methodologies and techniques at these festivals was integral to the development of The New Theatre. I was privileged to speak with Stewart in the years before her death in 2011 and can attest to the intense personal pride and satisfaction she felt in witnessing this kind of “cultural cross-pollination”, which became a hallmark of La MaMa’s productions, both internationally and at its theater home in New York City. Increasing the size and diversity of the La MaMa “family” was always integral to Stewart’s mission and vision. Cristini documents and analyzes many important, critical successes of Stewart’s international and intercultural forays, but in the book’s final chapter, she turns to a significant critical failure. Here, Cristini includes her translations of Italian white critics’ unfavorable responses to performances by the African American Jarboro Players, a troupe Stewart sent to Italy in 1972 to perform at the Milano Aperta and Venice Biennale festivals. Cristini notes that although the majority of the Italian critics wrote disparagingly of Ed Bullins’ (Clara’s Old Man) and Richard Wesley’s (Black Terror) plays, reacting with surprise and disappointment at the “naturalistic” and “old-fashioned” style of these works, these critics were missing Stewart’s point in presenting these plays for white European intelligentsia at the festivals. Stewart wanted theater’s “universal language” to communicate the truth of the African American experience – the “realism” of Black lives and stories, previously unknown to most European whites. Cristini ends this section with the perspective of one Italian critic who got the message,

Preface  xiii realizing that these plays reflected a time, a people and a culture, providing an authentic picture of Black life in 1970s America.1 Cristini’s book resonates with vivid accounts and testimonies of scholars, critics, performers, directors, playwrights – a carefully curated collection of celebrated and lesser-known voices. Here Cristini quotes Priscilla Smith, a luminous performer in many manifestations of The New Theatre, intensely memorable in The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 and in Serban’s and Swados’ Fragments of a Trilogy, who speaks of her connection with diverse and disparate audiences, who were deeply responsive to the intercultural creation that was Trilogy, and the experience of completing “a circle” with them. Another striking example of “cultural crosspollination”: “It was almost as if they became aware of the fact that a circle had existed, that they had assisted, that a movement of energy had been there between them and me”.2 This volume fills a critical gap in theater history scholarship – expanding our understanding of the interconnections between the radical Avant-garde in the United States and their European counterparts, focusing especially on the impact of “masters” abroad. For the next generation of theater artists and theater historians, there is no better time for a fresh take on The New Theatre. Notes 1 Roberto De Monticelli, Non si salva niente della civiltà bianca, «Il Giorno», 7 ottobre 1972. Monica Cristini’s translation. 2 Priscilla Smith, in Diane Cartwright, Priscilla Smith of The Great Jones Repertory Project, «The Drama Review», vol. 20, n. 3, September 1976, pp. 75–82, p. 82.

Introduction

This book is the result of three years of research work on La MaMa Experimental Theatre: a lasting bridge between cultures – MariBet, a project funded by Marie Skłodowska Curie Action within the European Union’s program Horizon 2020. The idea of studying the collaborations between Europe and America in the years of the theatrical Avant-garde, starting with the role that Ellen Stewart and her Café La MaMa played, came to me while reading about two Italian groups in New York in the 1970s. In 1977, Memè Perlini’s (Amelio Perlini) Teatro La Maschera presented Locus Solus at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, while at the same venue Giancarlo Nanni’s La Fede staged Franziska. As members of the Cantine Romane circuit, they were two major exponents of the Italian experimental theater of those years. In expanding my research, I came to learn that the New York Café had also hosted many other companies from all over the world. Later, after reading two books that have been essential for me – Cindy Rosenthal’s Ellen Stewart Presents,1 and La MaMa dell’Avanguardia, edited by Moreno Cerquetelli2 – I ascertained that some La MaMa companies had been on tour since the early Sixties in Europe, where little was known about the “New Theater”, as Michael Kirby called the American Avant-garde theater.3 This provoked some questions, to which it seemed high time to provide answers, given the temporal distance from the events of those years, which now allows for a broader and more objective investigation. How much do we owe to the relationships established between the artists of the two continents for the flowering and development of the theatrical Avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies? How important was the artistic exchange between the United States and Europe in learning about each other’s culture, history and socio-political conditions? What was the role of Ellen Stewart and her Café La MaMa in facilitating these exchanges? Who else besides her nurtured the collaborations that enabled theatrical experimentation to grow and spread?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-1

2  Introduction It was the search for answers to these questions that led to MariBet, a project based at the Department of Cultures and Civilizations of the University of Verona and at The Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The research, mainly carried out on archival materials, has yielded results that have partly confirmed or enriched what was already known of our theater history but has also brought to light peculiar facts and aspects that have opened new perspectives on that history. First, and once again, it highlighted the importance of Ellen Stewart as a promoter of cultural exchanges and collaborations. While not coming from the theatrical field, Stewart was able to grasp the potential of an art whose expression acquired the value of a universal language that could be common to all cultures. An art that at the same time was the bearer of the American culture of the Sixties, of the artistic research of the New York experimental scene and of the counterculture groups fighting for civil rights in those years. In Europe, these aspects were just partially known and above all filtered and sanitized by cinema and television. The Living Theatre, La MaMa and the other experimental theater companies heralded the numerous facets of the American culture of that era. By sending the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, under Tom O’Horgan’s direction, to France and Denmark, Ellen Stewart helped spread to Europe the dramaturgy that had flowered in the Off-Off Broadway environment. Along with the works of young playwrights, Europe became familiar with both a new acting style and a different way of approaching theatrical research, alternative to that developed by European masters. Through initiatives that proved crucial – such as sending its companies on European tours and organizing residencies for many groups – La MaMa also favored a cross-fertilization among New York artists, which contributed to defining that distinctive part of the American Avant-garde which was Off-Off Broadway theater. La MaMa’s participation in numerous festivals in France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Denmark, Sweden and other European countries enabled its companies to spread the heterogeneous theatrical research that had arisen within the New York underground milieu and at the same time establish new relationships with European and non-European groups. Ellen Stewart also deserves credit for having recognized the importance of research on actor training, at the time carried out by those who, in later years, would be hailed as the masters of European theater. From as early as 1965, Stewart was pushing her artists to get to know those masters, to rely on their methods and to embark on their own research on actor training. A commitment that saw her supporting the Open Theatre and its workshops (also hosted at La MaMa), promoting ongoing training for O’Horgan’s company, funding Andrei Serban’s research as well as a full-fledged training company called La MaMa Plexus Workshop.

Introduction  3 In investigating the relationship between United States and Europe, I have focused on a few companies that, among those belonging to La MaMa, played a significant role in cultivating relations with Europe, without wanting to belittle the importance of the other groups that were part of La MaMa. Thus, the protagonists of this essay are La MaMa Repertory Troupe, the Open Theatre (for the period it was hosted at La MaMa), The Great Jones Repertory Company, La MaMa Plexus Workshop, the Jarboro Players and the Native American Theatre Ensemble. What has emerged is a fruitful process of mutual influence between the American and European theaters, which stimulated further research and developments in the Western Avant-garde. It should not be forgotten that the theater of the Sixties and Seventies was an important vehicle for discussing the political events raging in those years, stimulating public reflection on important issues and events such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. An artistic research not confined within the walls of the theater buildings but breaking out into the streets, universities and other venues of social aggregation. This book aims to enhance the history of the theatrical Avant-garde through a careful re-reading from a new perspective. It deals with a theater that has mainly been studied for its great masters and leading groups, but which also relied on the work of small companies and artists who have often been overlooked because they are relegated to amateur circuits and local realities, despite having taken part in the flowering of the Avantgarde. A movement marked precisely by its heterogeneity, diverse initiatives, research and creative processes. By investigating the collaborations, friendships and exchanges that arose in the wider theatrical environment of Europe and the United States, we have thus been able to reconstruct an initial mapping of the encounters that fed the experimental theater of the second half of the twentieth century. A map that will be enriched over time but which allows us to narrate the early history of those collaborations. Notes 1 Cindy Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents. Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2017. 2 Moreno Cerquetelli, ed., La MaMa dell’Avanguardia. Il teatro di Ellen Stewart, i rapporti con l’Italia, Edizioni Internazionali, Roma 2006. 3 Michael Kirby, The New Theatre, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 2, Winter 1965, pp. 23–43.

1 Approaching experimental theater in New York

1.1

A few blocks beyond Broadway

Off-Off Broadway theater, which arose in the early Sixties, had a specific territorial slant while squarely belonging to the broader movement of the American Avant-garde, which grew up in the same years. It developed in a well-defined New York City neighborhood and took its inspiration from the many artistic, musical and aesthetic currents that emerged in those years in the Big Apple, also giving life to a fertile osmosis that would nurture that same community. It is no coincidence that the critic Richard Kostelanetz considers the first happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1958)1 and The Living Theatre play The Connection (1959) as the precursors of the more radical experimentation of the following years – two works that undoubtedly marked the American Avant-garde and that were presented for the first time in New York.2 Unlike other movements, Off-Off Broadway had no specific manifesto3 but came about as a reaction to the commercial theaters of Broadway and Off-Broadway, increasingly subjected to a box office system.4 Distancing itself from these production centers, which had long since abandoned experimentation in favor of attracting mass audiences, what took shape first in Greenwich Village and later in the East Village5 was a theater devoted to artistic experimentation, indifferent to a paying public and based on selffinancing in order to safeguard its creative freedom. Robert Patrick, one of the first playwrights who contributed to creating what we might define as the new alternative theatrical circuit, talks about this in a short piece that paints an accurate picture of the aesthetics and practices of the first founding period of Off-Off Broadway. The widespread explosion of experiment in American theatre in the Sixties was in several ways unique: 1 It was original. Many of the prime experimenters were ignorant both of the history of the Avant-garde and of their contemporaries in other countries. DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-2

Approaching experimental theater in New York  5 2 It was free. Neither box office, nor critical, nor academic, nor religious, nor political standards were imposed from without; there was no money, we were not reviewed, we were uneducated, and, until notoriety came, we were not subject to persecution for unusual subject matter. 3 It was spontaneous. There was no movement, no credos, no manifesto. 4 It was individual. Never before had theatre been treated like painting or poetry, as a private, personal art placed before the public without pandering. The principal influences on our work were two: 1 Poverty. Without prospects and/or ambitions for careers, money was not an element present or expected. This led to invention. The original emphasis in off-off Broadway styles was on writing and performing, creating all effects through these two devices. Scenery, costuming, lights and music came later, and even then they were devised from the simplest materials, and imagination. 2 Pop culture. Most of us came from places virtually without theatre. Comic books, movies, television, and magazines were our fount. In striving to re-create effects we were familiar with in these media, we came to understand and expand the stage.6 Hence a theater that initially appeared to be amateur or created by novice artists working together to create a new form of entertainment that differed from the kind offered by traditional theaters. The shared approach was one of research and experimentation, dictated as much by the creative drive that animated these young people as by their slender means and the consequent need to make room for ingenuity. Spontaneity was perhaps the common denominator of their first offerings, a characteristic of both their acting (which at times lacked any real training) and their productions, cobbled together in a very short time and with makeshift means. Indeed, there was no shortage of objects, borrowed or picked up off the street. A spontaneity that also marked the writing, which, unhitched from any well-defined style, became the author’s personal expression and rendering, which embraced the oneacter form. Here the limited time did not allow too many reworkings or readjustments, except those suggested by the actors themselves during the few rehearsals scheduled before the debut. The preparation of a work took from one to three weeks, depending on the time available to the participants. A spontaneity, it must be said, that was a common trait of the Avantgarde which the Off-Off Broadway theater helped to create and which was also founded in the research of John Cage, who, though operating in the

6  Approaching experimental theater in New York music field, elaborated principles that would be fundamental in the “New Theater”.7 Cage matched the importance of sound quality with the way it was generated, considering it a significant part of the musical experience and thus emphasizing performance and attention to the musicians themselves. The basic concepts of duration and spatiality, which highlight the environmental and directional aspects of sound, found fertile ground in the field of theater and the visual arts, where the new forms of Happening, Events and Performing Arts alternated with theatrical experimentation. But Cage also influenced theater and dance with “chance methods”, which combined to determine a work’s alogical structure and which were based on giving the musician a say through improvisation. Indeterminacy and improvisation were also featured among the many creative approaches to theater, where the actors, in developing their performance, were free to choose between different alternatives or to intervene with improvised parts during the performance.8 And it was again Cage who, with his Theatre Piece (1960), encouraged eliminating the traditional division between the different forms of expression, a work in which musicians, singers, actors and dancers could participate, together with experiments carried out with Merce Cunningham and his dance troupe. But Cage’s influence on theater could also be considered direct, since many artists of the experimental theater developed their creative approaches under the influence of Cage’s New York seminars. Although the dawn of America’s Avant-garde is conventionally identified with the staging of Erik Satie’s The Ruse of Medusa, which Cage himself produced at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948,9 the first play attributable to Off-Off Broadway, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, was performed at Take 3, a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street, in September 1960.10 This production kicked off what defined itself as the “New York underground scene”,11 which, while adopting some elements of mainstream Avantgarde, unlike it lacked any political or aesthetic manifesto. As already mentioned, the Off-Off Broadway circuit included young actors with some training but little stage experience, and novice playwrights whose works had not yet made it to the more commercial Off-Broadway, but also artists operating in New York in the same period, whether in the realm of Pop Art – Andy Warhol at the top of the list12 – or Happening, Minimalism and Performance Art, as well as the Beat Generation poets and the musicians John Cage and Philip Glass. Also, Off-Off Broadway plays were only rarely performed in theater buildings, and when they were, these were in Off-Broadway circuit theaters. Instead, preference was given to the cafes that enlivened the East Village and Greenwich Village, places with a space used as a stage or churches and galleries temporarily adapted for individual productions.13

Approaching experimental theater in New York  7 The theatrical experience offered to the public in the cafes gave birth to a completely new type of event, in which the separation between actors and spectators, guaranteed in the traditional darkened hall, was impossible owing to the tight spaces and consequent proximity of the actors. The audiences, made up mostly of so-called OOB-niks, neighborhood habitués, often went to the theater to be intellectually and emotionally shocked by the short one-acters being offered, in which the limitations on the use of language imposed on the Off-Broadway scene of the Sixties were largely trespassed. Sometimes, they chose a venue without even knowing the title of the work they were going to see. In their first years of activity, underground theaters did not advertise their shows or even put-up posters. Their only news source was the independent «The Village Voice», a neighborhood newspaper that announced each evening’s offerings and published few reviews.14 Audiences learned about the performances by word of mouth. Off-Off Broadway theater developed mainly in the East Village, which in the early Sixties was still considered part of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy, where many apartment and store rents were cheaper than in Greenwich Village, which by then had become a mecca for New York’s middle class. In the East Village, artists set up their studios amidst a proliferation of cafes and clubs hosting soirée readings by Beat Generation poets who had moved in from San Francisco, among them Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and the first theater plays. The streets were quiet, and the neighborhood residents got to know each other by hobnobbing in the cafes. The numerous venues that made up the Off-Off Broadway circuit all intended to give young novice playwrights the chance to see their works staged after having been rejected by the Off-Broadway theaters, which favored plays by well-known writers.15 Some of the most popular places in Greenwich and the East Village were the San Remo and Cedar Tavern, favorite haunts of theater people, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Gallery, the Five Spot and the Gaslight, which hosted poetry and music soirées. Another important meeting place was the Stonewall Inn, known for the Stone Wall Riot of June 28, 1969, which spawned the Gay Liberation Front movement.16 In the early Sixties, there were numerous venues (including theaters and churches, cafes and art galleries, basements and lofts) that hosted these performances, though many of them lasted the blink of an eye, as the theater critic Michael Smith notes. Off Off-Broadway has witnessed many births and deaths. The Living Theatre began in off-off Broadway style; after turning professional, it sponsored many experimental Monday evenings-plays, music and

8  Approaching experimental theater in New York dance concerts, poetry readings, films, happenings. Off-Broadway is dark on Monday nights and the theatres can be rented fairly cheaply. Many individuals and groups have appeared for a few Mondays and then disappeared. The American Theatre for Poets flickered in and out of existence for several years, subsisting on gifts and bringing together poets, painters, and dancers as well as actors for seasons at various small theatres. The Hardware Poets’ Playhouse, founded a few years ago upstairs from a midtown hardware store, was paid for by its members. It produced plays by them and by a small group of poets, and its atmosphere was that of community theatre. More recently given space by church, it apparently ran out of money. The Bridge, on St. Mark’s Place, was opened last year, but has devoted itself mostly to underground films and dance. Peter Schumann, a remarkable puppeteer for adults, performs at his own Bread and Puppet Theatre in a loft on the Lower East Side.17 Despite the brief duration of many initiatives, and owing to the coalescence of certain fortuitous conditions, the sharing climate of Lower Manhattan favored artistic collaborations and the flourishing of new trends. The unconventional Off-Off Broadway theaters, with their low-budget plays, helped break down the barriers between actors and audiences and cancel certain dichotomies, such as those between art and business, low and high culture, center and periphery: “the residents of Lower Manhattan may have been subterranean, but their position deep inside America’s media capital enabled them to reshape the larger culture by causing the underground to go pop”.18 It was an ecosystem marked by a fluidity of roles, which often overlapped. Authors became the stage directors of their own works, but at times also of others’; some actors became writers and some musicians became directors. This experimental atmosphere facilitated different staging approaches and challenged artists to struggle with tasks they had never faced or techniques they had hitherto ignored. Cultural exchanges took place on several levels. The neighborhood artists came from all over the United States and from many other areas of the world, bringing with them the experiences they had accumulated in very different geographical and cultural areas. In those years, the East Village was a zone free of taboos and racial marginalization. It was a neighborhood where integration was taken substantially for granted, and collaboration between different art sectors was stimulated by a meshing of experiences encouraged by the numerous shared spaces that made it up, such as the four main venues: “Two basements and two churches became the performances’ pitch, establishing a structural difference above all with the performative modalities of

Approaching experimental theater in New York  9 the professional system”.19 These were Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa (later La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club), Judson Memorial Church and St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. The trend of using non-theatrical spaces was actually begun in New York a few years earlier by The Living Theatre, which in August 1951 staged four plays in a living room at 789 West End Avenue, kicking off the Theatre in the Room.20 The Living Theatre, unlike other Off-Broadway troupes that essentially went commercial, was first of all a community of artists with sociopolitical ideals and common approaches to life. Its experience was crucial in the founding of Off-Off Broadway, especially the heterogeneous events advanced by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in the 1940s and 1950s, such as the Monday Night Series, organized in an attempt to generate a creative dialogue between different art forms. Some of the participants of these informal evenings – whose programs varied and hosted dance performances, short theatrical performances, musical concerts and poetry recitals – would later become protagonists of the downtown New York City scene: Joseph Chaikin, Lawrence Kornfeld, Warren Finnerty, Rochelle Owens, John Cage and Merce Cunningham but also Bob Dylan, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, the poets Diane di Prima and Frank O’Hara and the filmmaker Shirley Clarke, founder with Jonas Mekas of the experimental New American Cinema Group and director of the film The Connection (1961), based on the play of the same name staged by The Living Theatre in July 1959.21 In 1964, the company closed down for financial reasons, left the United States and remained for a time in Paris, as a guest of the American Center for Students and Artists, which the following year was to be joined by the troupes that Ellen Stewart sent over to familiarize Europe with Off-Off Broadway theater. It was in Paris that The Living Theatre, in October 1964, staged Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, a happening made up of nine scenes, each lasting no more than fifteen minutes, against capitalism and militarism.22 Many testimonies survive of the theater scene of the time, which help paint a lively portrait, such as that of Steve Ben Israel, a musician who worked with the Living Theatre. I’d been working in the Village as a jazz drummer. Around 1958 I was hanging out and noticed these little theatres springing up everywhere. I went to a benefit for the General Strike for Peace, and met Julian Beck and Judith Malina. One day I was in a cab that stalled on 14th Street, noticed their theatre, got out and went up to see them. They invited me to stay and see The Connection. I walked out saying that’s what I would do with my life. They were opening Brecht’s Man Is Man and hired me to play Sunday performances for Joe Chaikin. At that time we were the only rep theatre in New York.23

10  Approaching experimental theater in New York 1.2

Four venues for a big family

The first cafe to systematically host readings and plays was Caffe Cino, whose programming was dominated by the works of young authors who took part in the community of actors, directors and technicians (but also painters and performers), which gravitated around the venue and also swelled the ranks of the audiences. Joe Cino opened the place with the intention of running a cafe but offered its walls to display the art works of his friends. It was a privileged place for artists for the absolute freedom of expression that the Italian American manager himself encouraged.24 The small club’s customers were inevitably involved in the performance because the actors, not being separated by a stage, acted at the same level as the tables where they sat. Paul Foster, one of Off-Off Broadway’s most prolific playwrights, recalls that “the audience was packed close together. They touched the confines of a hot stage. When the actor turned, you felt the breeze of his gesture on you”.25 Hence, the only limitations on experimentation were the cramped spaces of the venue and purely economic issues. The shows were offered free of charge, and spectators were required to consume a one-dollar minimum, which was why several performances took place in the course of an evening. Such constraints favored a spare stage and the one-acter as a short theatrical form with no more than two or three actors on a stage located at the center of the venue.26 Again, it is Paul Foster who relates: If you did a show, it had to exercise invention and wit because they were cheap. It had to be on a small floor space because that’s all there was. You rehearsed on that space, you built your set there, you even slept there sometimes and you played there. Rehearsal buildings, scene shops, costume rooms … didn’t have them.27 The locale, whose walls were decorated year after year with multiple layers of photos, paintings and leaflets announcing the evenings, had about fifteen small tables, a few accessories taken off the street and a counter with an espresso machine. A small space used as a toilet also served as a dressing room for the actors. The ex-dancer Joe Cino did not always read the plays offered to him but chose works based on the impression their authors made on him and produced them on a shoestring. The cafe, which welcomed artists from different backgrounds, political affiliations or the most disparate conditions, was also a favorite destination for the gay community in a historical period (the early Sixties) when being homosexual was still taboo, and a man could be arrested for wearing women’s clothes in public. Caffe Cino staged plays with very different contents, whether works inspired by comic

Approaching experimental theater in New York  11 book heroes, or challenging the respectable and right-thinking society created by consumerist propaganda, or starring gay characters, such as those of Lanford Wilson and Robert Patrick, who contributed to defining as what Kembrew McLeod calls, rather than gay or queer theater, a “free theater”. Cino, together with his artists, “transformed social life by performing openly gay identities in ways that had been suppressed elsewhere in the country”.28 The first poetry readings and the music and dance soirées offered in the late Fifties were soon replaced by theatrical performances, with the staging of one-acters specially written by the authors who frequented the venues. In addition to Patrick and Wilson, the writer Harry M. Koutoukas, the director Andy Milligan, the playwrights Paul Foster, Sam Shepard, Tom Eyen, Robert Heide and Doric Wilson were regulars who, along with many others, became part of the community that gravitated around the cafe. A few minutes’ walk from Caffe Cino was another important movement venue: Judson Memorial Church, located south of Washington Square, which opened the Judson Gallery in 1958 with an exhibit curated by Allan Kaprow.29 The following year the Judson Poets’ Theatre project was inaugurated, sponsored by the pastor of the diocese Alvin Carmines, who wrote the musical scores for the plays, directed in the main by Lawrence Kornfeld, a playwright and director who had previously directed some of The Living Theatre’s Mondays Night Series. The works staged there were by well-known authors, among whom the name of Gertrude Stein stands out, but there too precedence was given to promoting young writers such as Maria Irene Fornes, Rosalyn Drexler, Sam Shepard, Diane di Prima, Joel Oppenheimer, Ruth Krauss and Alex Kemeny. Many of the performances were set up in the choir space, where a specially erected platform functioned as a stage, while the productions that required more room were set up on the ground floor in the church’s main hall. Two one-acters were put on each evening, for three or four consecutive weekends, with a one-month suspension devoted to arranging new productions, whose sets were created in collaboration with the artists who joined the Judson Gallery. There too, admission to attend the performances was free, and at the end of the evening, donations were collected to cover production costs. The artists themselves were unpaid. The works were chosen by Carmines, who sometimes took over the direction and oversaw the programming, exercising the least control possible and without interfering in the artistic choices. Once a play was accepted, no censorship of any kind was applied to its staging.30 Another important project promoted was the Judson Dance Theatre, which brought together many dancers from Merce Cunningham’s New York studio. The first show, A Concert of Dance # 1, was performed on July 6, 1962, staged by a group of dancers, musicians and artists from

12  Approaching experimental theater in New York Robert Dunn’s choreography course31 held at Merce Cunningham’s studio from 1960 to 1962. Twenty-three dancers participated in a performance lasting a few hours, curated by fourteen choreographers. It broke all preexisting formats and laid the foundations for the Avant-garde movement of post-modern dance. They rejected the codification of both ballet and modern dance. They questioned the traditional dance concert format and explored the nature of dance performance. They also discovered a cooperative method for producing dance concerts. For young artists who did not want to be judged by older authorities in the field, or who wanted the freedom to experiment in a familiar space that was easily accessible, this was an alternative to uptown juried concerts […].32 Judson Church thus became the privileged venue for many young dancers who, like their fellow playwrights and actors, found a space where they could present new works and, above all, experiment together with other artists. Here too, the new dance forms were rooted in John Cage’s theories and practices, whose structure became alogical, devoid of any plot or character, and often lacked any relationship to the music that accompanied it, giving life to what Michael Kirby called “non-matrixed performing”.33 The church financed its productions on $200 a year, while additional funds were donated by other organizations and artists.34 Like Caffe Cino, this venue was also part of the network of collaborations established among artists but also among venues, which in effect made Off-Off Broadway the most collaborative initiative of the Sixties. Sally Banes highlights this, explaining how one of the most widespread trends in the Avant-garde, in which the New Theater also took its place, was the formation of communities. American society in the Sixties was marked by a strong sociopolitical rupture: artists, like other young people, cut their family ties and found an alternative to the family in the shared space of a community where they could bring about cultural and social change.35 An example of this was the experience of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, located on the corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street, where the young Reverend Michael Allen took up service in 1963. In 1964, together with director Ralph Cook, he founded the Theatre Genesis, a project to support young playwrights and at the same time to reopen a dialogue between the church and the neighborhood community. Harry Koutoukas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sally Ordway, Pat Branch, Tom Sankey and Leonard Melfi were among those who offered their works here. Sam Shepard, one of the first writers to join the group, incorporated rock‘n’roll songs into the staging of his plays. His The Rock Garden and Cowboys were the two works that debuted the entire project on October 10, 1964, in a

Approaching experimental theater in New York  13 room with dark walls used as a theater.36 The stage was at the floor level, the lights positioned on the steam pipes that ran along the ceiling and the public was seated in folding chairs in a space that was easily adaptable to different performances. In support of the playwrights, Theatre Genesis also organized weekly workshops for them, to establish a long-term relationship between the venue and the writers, at the same time presenting unproduced works through readings. The theatrical performances were fashioned in the personal style of Ralph Cook, who remained far from conventional stage realism, offering instead a more abstract dimension that reflected the restless and ever-changing life of the St. Mark’s community.37 Michael Allen, who had participated in the civil rights marches with Martin Luther King, Jr., considered the church an important means for changing society. St. Mark’s became a meeting and welcoming place for all, regardless of whether they were believers or not. On Sunday morning a single mass was celebrated, bringing together black and white parishioners who until then had attended separate religious services scheduled at different times. Allen, convinced that art was a great vector of change, launched the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project (supported by funds from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), and invited the Beat poets to give their readings in the church rooms on evenings when young people could perform alongside the most important Beat exponents. In his book This Time, This Place, Reverend Allen explains that “certainly at that period in the sixties, a lot of the truth, a lot of prophetic speech was taking place in the artistic world .... What I was trying to do was make it possible for these prophetic voices to be heard or seen… That is the role of the church at its best”.38 The longest-lasting of the four major circuit venues, Café La MaMa, contributed in an essential way to theatrical experimentation, but also to spreading Off-Off Broadway theater abroad. In 1958, Ellen Stewart, a fashion designer, rented a basement at 321 East 9th Street to start up her own independent production, but in 1961 turned it into a cafe to help two friends stage their plays. After a first move to a loft at 82 Second Avenue in 1964, she changed its name from Café La MaMa to La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (ETC), since as a private club, it could avoid the harassments of local authorities. Like the other venues, it was raided several times by the various city departments, from firefighters to inspectors of public premises, who cited the illegality of its license or various other petty infractions that inflicted temporary closures. La MaMa also opened with the aim of giving visibility to the works of young playwrights, which Stewart produced, initially subsidizing the business with the income from her work as a fashion designer. The first Café was located in a very small space and, like the Cino, had just a few

14  Approaching experimental theater in New York tables where spectators were offered a hot drink. The programming of the shows, which were free to the public, was very varied, and the stage was set up with a few cast-off objects (at first just a mattress that functioned as a stage).39 But this in no way hindered the productions. In the first year of its opening alone, Ellen Stewart promoted twenty-eight works, fifteen of which by new writers, herself financing set-up costs. In most instances, she even supported the artists, who received no real pay except for a small weekly sum to cover expenses, by letting them crash at her place. In the Sixties, many writers found their artistic headquarters at Café La MaMa. Among them, the most assiduous were Julie Bovasso, Ed Bullins, Rosalyn Drexler, Tom Eyen, Maria Irene Fornes, Paul Foster,40 Adrienne Kennedy, Bruce Kessler, Leonard Melfi, Rochelle Owens, Robert Patrick, Sam Shepard, Megan Terry and Jean-Claude van Itallie. Many new dramas were produced exclusively within the Off-Off Broadway circuit, but for some writers, the Café proved to be a springboard toward a successful career, as it was for Paul Foster, Rochelle Owens and Jean-Claude van ­Itallie.

Figure 1.1 Times Square at La MaMa, May 18, 1967, directed by Tom O’Horgan. Photo Credit Conrad Ward. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

Approaching experimental theater in New York  15 At Café La MaMa, authors had at their disposal a wide choice of actors, directors and stage equipment for the realization of their works. Ellen Stewart, once the drama to be realized had been approved (here too, as with Caffe Cino, this occurred by personal whim without any precise rules),41 did not intervene in the staging, leaving full creative freedom to the young artists. The writers perfected their dramaturgical craft with the support of the directors and actors, in an approach that became a core value of this theatrical movement. Experimentation took place on the stage, and the text was continually revised thanks to the opportunity to try out its onstage effectiveness.42 Sometimes, it was the author herself/himself who oversaw the direction, and the actors could change in the different productions. A play might be presented at multiple venues that collaborated with each other, while the stage sets, technical crews and actors were not always the same. The reminiscences of the protagonists of the founding years of this underground movement clearly depict the climate of collaboration created in the theater world, which united all the artists, sparking an osmosis that animated the New York experimental circuit and the Avant-garde theater in general. The shared enthusiasm for experimentation and the willingness to collaborate among the members favored the flourishing of a widespread creativity that led to a new way of conceptualizing and undertaking theater, based more on the exception than on the rule. It is important to bear in mind the very climate in which Ellen Stewart founded the Café La MaMa, as an environment that supported her ideas of collaboration and sharing, in which artists and colleagues supported her in the development of projects which contributed to the diffusion of Off-Off Broadway in America and abroad, such as the first European tours of the groups connected to La MaMa, as we will see later. The artists and venue owners planned shared events and swapped productions that had initially remained on the bill for just a few evenings or a week. On the other hand, both playwrights and actors worked with several theaters, which, as already mentioned, in the early years had no stable company but rather made use of the large pool of artists and technical crews that had coalesced in Greenwich Village and the East Village. An example of collaboration and solidarity were the benefit evenings in support of needy theaters, such as those La MaMa hosted in 1965 when Caffe Cino was being renovated after a fire. Ellen Stewart made her rooms available on Mondays for Cino’s programming: “she and Joe would introduce the shows, standing side by side while Joe announced, ‘Good evening, everybody, and welcome to Mama Cino!’”.43 On March 15th of the same year, a second benefit to help Joe Cino was organized at The Writer’s Stage Theatre. Other evenings were organized by the writers H. M. Koutoukas and Edward Albee and by the director and stage manager Ronald Link, who planned an event at the Sullivan Street

16  Approaching experimental theater in New York Playhouse on April 26th, involving the participation of many others.44 The relationship that united Greenwich Village show-business people was illustrated in a brochure created for one of these events, in which the writer H. M. Koutoukas talks about the value that Caffe Cino had for neighborhood artists. We had always known THE CAFFE CINO, we had always taken it for granted. It has been as much a part of the Village over the last eight years […]. It was always mentioned casually, like someone next door or in the family. A cup of coffee … a play … a new idea that didn’t quite come off. We had absorbed it … it was like the Post Office or the Mafia …. a fact in our lives. Now it’s [sic] collage walls are no longer there, Joe’s not behind the expresso machines in one of his eccentric hats. So suddenly it sinks in. What’s gone is a part of each and every one of us. That little caffe theatre had become as much a part of our pattern as eating or walking. All that is left is an empty time from 8:00 until Midnight …. the time that had been CINO time. Oh yes, there were other things too, hot chocolates, brought over by Hope, without a cheque, nor mention of one … that was perhaps the surest thing, Joe Cino’s ability to ESP out that you’d not eaten … never a mention to it …. Steamed eggs and hot chocolate. There was no charging it at Cino’s, if you were hungry you ate. If you were hungry you ate, if you had an idea you could work on it, if you had a dream that wasn’t quite possible, you could dream it, and pretend it was just on the verge of happening … and no one dare ever remind you that it might not. […] For eight years Mr. Cino has been dedicated to us … some of us are trying in a small way to pay him back … the debt is ours.45 1.3

A non-literary theater?

Even if dramaturgy is not the main subject of this study, we cannot fail to open a short parenthesis to discuss it. As we have seen, unlike what happened in Off-Broadway theater, which staged texts of well-known authors, in the Off-Off Broadway circuit, the productions arose above all from the need to make known new theatrical works by young writers. Therefore, the starting point for the staging was the dramaturgical text. The playwrights worked on their plays independently, taking into account the characteristics of the space that would host the staging and the actors who would take part in it, but sometimes, they also collaborated with the actors themselves. There were also cases in which the author wrote his or her own drama directly inspired by the experimentation of a group, as happened

Approaching experimental theater in New York  17 for Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright who became part of the Open Theatre (which also took shape in the context of the New York circuit), following a practice that would become more widespread over time.46 It is useful to dwell on this matter since, although Off-Off Broadway was a phenomenon that arose from the writing of plays and the desire to stage them, these writings were relevant for the portrait they drew, not so much of American society as such, but of the counterculture that flourished in New York in the Sixties and that reflected and reacted to the sociopolitical reality of the time. Both their themes and their style allow us to outline the social and artistic context in which the artists and personalities of underground theater moved, demonstrating the extent to which the exchanges and collaborations between them were crucial for the evolution of the New York scene. We have already seen that, in the sharing of spaces and evenings, the resonances with other arts were many and appeared both on theater stages and in a new dramaturgical style partly influenced by European dramaturgy but also by other artistic currents that enlivened the New York scene. First, Beat poetry, recognizable in explorations of the rhythms and sounds of language that went beyond the meaning of words. The theatrical texts were also influenced by the counterpoint of the Jazz experimentation that, as mentioned, in recent years had found an appreciative public in the Lower East Side clubs and was exerting a strong social impact, but that was also formative for the Avant-garde scene.47 The first cafes that offered combined performances of reading and jazz improvisation, such as the San Remo, Cedar Tavern or Gaslight Café, also offered their stages to poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. The spontaneous writing adopted by young playwrights was irreverent and undisciplined. As David Crespy points out, in addition to experimenting with the Beat Generation, dramaturgy also owed its development to the American Theatre for Poets group, founded by poets and playwrights Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), an important link between the Beat scene and the experimental one. The poetry readings presented by the American Theatre group initially evolved into workshops for the creation of new works and, later, into wholly staged events. Further, it should not be overlooked that many playwrights were poets before becoming theatrical authors.48 The new dramaturgical style reflected the overall theatrical trend of offering an unstructured performativity, with an expressive modality actually derived from the figurative arts. As with the happenings, in the events presented by the Fluxus group (both influenced by the work of Kaprow but also by Cage and Marcel Duchamp)49 and in Performance Arts, in Off-Off Broadway theater too the dramaturgical structure left room for absorbing any accidental aspects related to the reaction of the public and to what happened in the surrounding environment.

18  Approaching experimental theater in New York It should be recalled that in Greenwich Village, and in the area that would later be called SoHo, important art galleries opened. In the artistic field, there was a widespread use of materials and iconography belonging to mass culture, with the figurative scene being dominated by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In the sharing of spaces, Pop Art was also a powerful influence on the Off-Off Broadway scene, often inhabited by colors and objects that referred to the works of visual artists. There were also references to Camp, marked by stylistically eccentric shapes50 whose comic vision of the world found its ideal location squarely on the East Village stages. The theater challenged respectable American society by violating its cultural taboos and resorting to an imagery considered scandalous at the time because of the glaring sexual references in the texts and the onstage action. Pop was also the symbolism that the dramaturgical language was built on, with frequent references to icons and myths familiar to an audience that knew their mythology. The reality of Hollywood films, also widely familiar, was instead a source to be drawn on in the metaphorical use of speech,

Figure 1.2 Melodrama Play at La MaMa, May 18, 1967, directed by Tom O’Horgan. Photo Credit Conrad Ward. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/ Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

Approaching experimental theater in New York  19 but the language adopted was also vernacular, immediate and shared by the Village community.51 It was typically American, with a free and casual approach devoid of the formality that characterized the dramaturgy of other cultures: “it’s a terribly exciting, energetic use of language”.52 Nonetheless, the staging was experimental even though the plots often developed in a familiar context or in everyday life. Starting with dramas that, rather than reflecting on ideas told stories, a large use was made of comic expedients similar to TV sit-coms. The structure of the plays was influenced by the most varied forms of entertainment, inspired as much by Greek tragedy as by soap operas, Hollywood films, stand-up comedy, burlesque and the dramaturgy of the absurd.53 Although the works were written within the same movement, no style common to the various authors emerged. While until the Fifties, it was possible to identify distinct forms or artistic schools that could categorize the works of writers and playwrights, by the Sixties, this was no longer the case. In this period of intense experimentation, it became difficult to identify any real connection between different works, since the visions of the various playwrights were so highly personal. United as they were in reacting to sociopolitical situations and events that determined America’s history of the time, those works developed more from a personal feeling for something perceived as wrong in society than from any shared political ideology. Hence, there was no truly common vision.54 While the works of some groups were directly linked to political issues such as the Vietnam War or to social ones – we refer here to The Performance Group, The Living Theatre, the Open Theatre and the Bread and Puppet Theatre – others posited themselves in a showbiz dimension that remained starkly entertaining and humorous. The underground writers were formed in the period of social and cultural transition that marked the passage between the Fifties and Sixties. They experienced at firsthand some of the most important events of American history and culture: the early protests against the Vietnam War, the advent of rock‘n’roll, the expansion of mass communication, the Feminist, Native American, Black and Gay rights movements and the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Malcolm X.55 The Off-Off Broadway movement was started by “the first generation to think of itself collectively as a generation”,56 made up of middle-class kids who rebelled against the values of their parents’ generation, speaking out against the status quo and the inequalities in American society. Lastly, a strong influence came from Europe, as much on issues of content as on those of literary style, from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and even more so from the dramaturgy of the absurd. In the wake of academic interest and thanks to some publication in university journals of monographic works on European theater, especially in

20  Approaching experimental theater in New York «The Tulane Drama Review»,57 in the Fifties, the Off-Broadway theaters began to offer the first productions of the works of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter.58 Even actor Julie Bovasso of the experimental Tempo Playhouse,59 and director Herbert Blau, on his return from Europe in 1959,60 contributed to this trend by staging some of the works of these authors. The extent to which the theater of the absurd strongly influenced OffOff Broadway was stressed by Elenore Lester, who wrote that for young playwrights, the plays of Genet, Ionesco and Beckett now represented tradition.61 The rest of the Avant-garde also nurtured a strong interest in the theories of Antonin Artaud (The Theatre and Its Double was published in English translation in 1958),62 Bertolt Brecht and Gertrude Stein, which contributed to the birth of the new dramaturgical and performative style.63 From the merging of these different influences and inspirations, new forms of writing arose that went beyond the boundaries of the well-known American dramaturgy both in their radical content, often considered scandalous, and in their structure. Ionesco’s works, his reflection on the alienation imposed by mass culture and his critique of bourgeois conformism, were reflected in the farcical style mocking American respectability of the early works of Rosalyn Drexler (Home Movies, 1964) and Rochelle Owens, who in Futz (1967) explored sexuality by describing the violent explosion of repressed passion in the story of a young man, living in a strait-laced rural town, who falls in love with his pig. The concept of sexual identity probed in the works of Genet, The Maids (1947) and The Balcony (1956), became fertile ground on which the new playwrights openly explored the theatrical representation of gay sexuality. This was the case of Lanford Wilson and his The Madness of Lady Bright (1964) – the long monologue of an elderly drag queen who, tortured by loneliness and memories, goes mad alone in her apartment – but also of Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick and H. M. Koutoukas, who were linked to Caffe Cino. On the Brechtian side, elements of his works can be found in those of Megan Terry’s Viet Rock (1966) and Jean-Claude van Itallie’s War (1963). With its works, Off-Off Broadway gave rise to a theater that in the context of the Avant-garde could be defined as unique in favoring a new type of experimentation that, starting from the written text and spreading throughout the United States, profoundly transformed American theater.64 It should also be recalled that a fundamental contribution to defining the new dramaturgical form was the East Village milieu and its venues, where the authors “were able to gain experience side by side with actors, directors and technicians, constantly getting onstage feedback”.65 The critic and historian Massimo Dini attributes the high level of theatricality of the works of these authors to the special sensitivity they acquired by working in the difficult conditions imposed by the unique environments that hosted their staging.

Approaching experimental theater in New York  21 Their writing too reflected the sense of community that distinguished the Lower East Side. The young playwrights worked in the same neighborhood and adopted a shared language with the Village audience. As already mentioned, their works were constructed on symbology and on the emblematic images familiar to it and were often written by taking into consideration the specificity of the public itself. Further, the writers who collaborated with a particular venue tended to maintain the same style that the audience of that venue expected, as was the case with Robert Patrick, who wrote his one-acters specifically for Caffe Cino.66 And in the early years of Off-Off Broadway, when the press still did not review or announce the plays, it was precisely the assiduous and loyal public that guaranteed the popularity of plays never mentioned by theater critics.67 Lastly, the one-acters, written in function of their realization, also left ample room for the actors. While the playwrights wrote thanks to the opportunities offered by the promoters of the Village scene, the actors were able to test their acting skills in real time before audiences. It was no accident that H. M. Koutoukas defined these short plays as “performance pieces”.68 Many writers were aware of the importance of the actors, since with the few resources available for staging and a limited time in which to capture an audience’s attention and win it over, the actor’s charisma was essential to the success of the work. At the same time, the underground writer grasped the opportunity granted by the proximity of the stage to the public, which she or he sometimes addressed directly, emphasizing the theatrical artifice and the tangible presence of bodies and objects on the stage more than their significant functions. Often it was not just the meaning of the object that mattered, but its physical, three-dimensional presence. Enthusiasm, spontaneity and love for experimentation united the young playwrights who gave life to the movement. In the first in-depth article presenting the movement more than five years after its birth, Elenore Lester wrote in «The New York Times», Most of the writers on the OOB circuit write as though they were born into the world the day after some metaphysical H-Bomb exploded, and they accept this blasted world as the natural environment and proceed to play around in it with a great deal of gusto.69 Notes 1 Allan Kaprow’s play lent its name to this type of performance, a definition later attributed to other dramatic forms, from the more strictly theatrical ones to parlor games. See M. Kirby, The New Theatre, cit. 2 See Richard Kostelanetz, American Experimental Theatre. Then and Now, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 2, n. 2, Autumn 1977, pp. 13–24, p. 19. 3 However, it must be said that, even if there was no real manifesto, some artists belonging to the circuit, such as Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theatre, Richard

22  Approaching experimental theater in New York Schechner of The Performance Group, and Judith Malina and Julian Beck of The Living Theatre published the intentions or objectives of their theatrical research in journals or newspapers. 4 Off-Broadway theater, whose main venues were the Cherry Lane and the Provincetown, became widespread between the Forties and Fifties as an alternative to the Broadway scene (conditioned by commercial interests and with a very limited repertoire) to give space to experimentation in theaters with fewer than 300 seats. In its first years, it staged European works deemed unsuitable for middle-class Broadway audiences and new dramas whose subjects and styles seemed likewise unsuitable for mass audiences. But by the end of the Fifties Off-Broadway became a replica of Broadway, with an increasing focus on box office dividends and less interest in the experimental aspect of staging. It was then that, in non-theatrical spaces – cafes, galleries, churches, lofts and basements – with no more than a hundred seats and very small stages, the Off-Off Broadway movement (more radical and less organized than Off-­ Broadway) arose with the aim of prioritizing artistic experimentation and giving young authors a chance to present their works. For more information, see Arnold Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History, Routledge, London and New York 2000; Anna Sica ed., Uptown-Downtown New York Theatre from Tradition to Avant-garde, Mimesis, Milano 2005. 5 Two neighborhoods located, respectively, in the southwest and southeast areas of Manhattan. Greenwich Village was home to Beat Generation writers, jazz musicians and visual artists between the Forties and Fifties. 6 Robert Patrick, American Experimental Theatre. Then and Now, «Performing Arts Journal», Autumn 1977, Vol. 2, n. 2, pp. 13–24, p. 15. 7 See M. Kirby, The New Theatre, cit. 8 An example is the play The Marrying Maiden, presented by The Living Theatre in 1960 and 1961, in which some actions are inserted at intervals according to a system that provides for choosing between about 1.200 different scene directions indicated on a batch of cards. In this case, it was an onstage director who gave the basic directions to the actors. See M. Kirby, The New Theatre, cit. 9 A production conceived through a collaboration between John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller, directed by Arthur Penn. For further information, see Marco De Marinis, Il Nuovo Teatro (1947–1970), Bompiani, Milano 1995, and A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre, cit. It should also be recalled that The Living Theatre was among the first generation of Avant-garde experimenters, staging works in the early Fifties by Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht and Federico Garcia Lorca. The first phase of the group’s research aimed at reviving poetic drama. Founded in 1947, the following year, The Living Theatre presented its first production in a basement on Wooster Street. 10 Two months later, Jerry Tallmer, critic for «The Village Voice», coined the term Off-Off Broadway for the new circuit. It was theatre critic Michael Smith who reported its origins in one of the first articles on the movement, The Good Scene: Off Off-Broadway, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. X, n. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 159–176. 11 Mary Boylan, Caffe Cino: Take the IND to 4th Street, «Other Stages», April 19, 1979; see also Stephen James Bottoms, Playing Underground. A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2009. 12 The Factory was Warhol’s studio, where artists and musicians collaborated, among them Lou Reed. It was located not far from the East Village, in Midtown

Approaching experimental theater in New York  23 Manhattan at 33 Union Square. Warhol was a key connective figure, as were Café La MaMa’s founder Ellen Stewart; the playwright Harry M. Koutoukas; Patti Smith, who began her career in the Off-Off Broadway theater; the dancer and filmmaker Shirley Clarke; and the performer Hibiscus. See Kembrew McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground. New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, Diy Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock’n’Roll Glitter Queen who Revolutionized Culture, Abrams Press, New York 2019. 13 It was a common phenomenon in the Western theatrical Avant-garde. We recall Italy’s Cantine Romane circuit, which found space in warehouses and basements, but which in many respects differed from Off-Off Broadway. See Franco Quadri, L’avanguardia teatrale in Italia, I, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino 1977; Daniela Visone, La Nascita del Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1959–1967, Titivillus, Corazzano 2017; Salvatore Margiotta, Il Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1968–1975, Titivillus, Corazzano 2013. 14 The first issue of «The Village Voice» came out on October 26, 1955. It was founded by the writers Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf, together with their psychologist friend Edwin Fancher, who assembled a small editorial team that gave excellent coverage of what was going on in fashion, art, literature and music circles. It was Jerry Tallmer who covered the small theaters and understood the potential of Off-Off Broadway. The newssheet joined and was joined by other periodicals published in the Downtown area, such as «The Villager», founded in 1933, «The East Village Others», published from 1965 to 1972, the «SoHo Weekly News» and many others that have come and gone over the years. See John Strausbaugh, The Village. A History of Greenwich Village. 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, Harper-Collins Publishers, New York 2014. 15 Later, actual associations were formed to support writers even in the more commercial Off-Broadway sphere. Some of these organized events for young artists, such as the Playwrights Unit, founded in 1963 by Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder and Edward Albee, quartered in a small West Village theater. Their intention was to support young playwrights and help them develop their works in a commercial direction, offering weekly performances with free admission. See S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 16 See Simon Hall, Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long Sixties, «Journal of Contemporary History», vol. 43, n. 4, October 2008, pp. 655–672. 17 M. Smith, The Good Scene: Off Off-Broadway, cit., p. 160. 18 K. McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground, cit., p. 7. 19 “Due scantinati e due chiese divennero il territorio dello spettacolo, stabilendo una differenza in primo luogo strutturale con le modalità performative del sistema professionistico”. Giulia Palladini, Lo spazio del La MaMa, in Moreno Cerquetelli (ed.), La MaMa dell’Avanguardia. Il teatro di Ellen Stewart, i rapporti con l’Italia, Edizioni Internazionali, Roma 2006, pp. 11–69, p. 14. Author’s translation. Elenore Lester in 1965 counted the productions of about 400 new works and more than 200 new writers presented in Off-Off Broadway theaters. See Elenore Lester, The Pass-the-Hat Theatre Circuit, «The New York Times», December 5, 1965. 20 These were Crying Backstage by Paul Goodman, Ladies’ Voices by Gertrude Stein, He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No by Bertolt Brecht, and The Dialogue of The Young Man and the Mannikin by F. Garcia Lorca. See A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre, cit., and Cristina Valenti, Storia del Living Theatre. Conversazioni con Judith Malina, Titivillus, Corazzano, Pisa 2017.

24  Approaching experimental theater in New York 21 The film was censored in the United States and screened only privately at Judson Memorial Church after a prior screening was stopped by the police, who raided the D. W. Griffith Theatre on October 5, 1962. It had achieved great critical acclaim at the 1961 Cannes Festival. For more information, see K. McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground, cit. 22 See A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre, cit. 23 Steve Ben Israel, “Fuck the Curtain”: An Oral History of Off-Broadway, «The Village Voice Archive», May 20, 2019. 24 Located on Cornelia Street, a block from Washington Square Park, it was a meeting place for the folk and Beat scene in the early Sixties. South of it was Judson Memorial Church. The cafe, which began staging one-acters in 1959, closed in 1968 after the death of Joe Cino (1967) and the attempt of «The Village Voice» critic Michael Smith to carry on with some of the playwrights. 25 Paul Foster, A Nurse in A Madhouse, «Chelsea Clinton News», March 10, 1979, p. 29. 26 In many instances, a small group of artists and writers rotated around each venue, agreeing each time on what play to present. See S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 27 P. Foster, A Nurse in A Madhouse, cit. 28 K. McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground, cit., p. 16. As for Caffe Cino and the other Off-Off Broadway venues, J. Strausbaugh also speaks about it in The Village, cit. See also Wendell C. Stone’s study, Caffe Cino. The Birthplace of Off-Off Broadway, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 2005 and Steve Susoyev and George Birimisa (ed.), Return to the Caffe Cino, Moving Finger Press, San Francisco 2007. 29 After the success of Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts at the Reuben Gallery (1959), Kaprow was called on to organize the shows and expositions in 1959 and 1960. 30 See S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 31 Robert Dunn had attended John Cage’s courses on musical theory at the New School for Social Research. 32 Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body. Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964, Duke University Press, Durham and London 1993, p. xi. 33 M. Kirby, The New Theatre, cit. 34 J. Strausbaugh, The Village, cit. 35 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963. Avant-garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Duke University Press, Durham and London 1993. 36 K. McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground, cit. 37 M. Smith, The Good Scene: Off Off-Broadway, cit. 38 Michael Allen, This Time, This Place, Bobbs Merril Company, Indianapolis, Kansas City and New York 1971. The text is quoted in Ada Calhoun, St. Marks Is Dead. The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., London 2016, p. 121. 39 Over the years, with the spread of the movement, some venues obtained larger spaces and stages thanks to grants from private foundations that enabled them to purchase more suitable premises. In addition, actors and directors, more self-confident from their previous experiences, tried their hand at more demanding productions, and the playwrights wrote works in several acts that called for large casts. On the first fifty years of La MaMa, see C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents, cit., and Barbara Lee Horn, Ellen Stewart and La MaMa. A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press, Westport and London 1993 (a useful

Approaching experimental theater in New York  25 text for biographical reconstruction, but after a comparison with La MaMa Archives, we ascertained that not all data are correct). 40 A friend of Ellen Stewart and cofounder of La MaMa, he was one of her most faithful collaborators. See David A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theatre, Back Stage Books, New York 2003. 41 Those close to her remember that Stewart gave more importance to the impression she had of people than to the work being offered. Since she was no theater expert, what mattered to her was giving enterprising and gifted young people a chance to pave the way to the show-business world. 42 D. A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit. 43 M. Boylan, Caffe Cino: Take the IND to 4th Street, cit., p. 3. 44 See Robert Heide, Cockroaches in The Baubles, «Other Stages», April 19, 1979, pp. 8–9. 45 H. M. Koutoukas, And so the Cino, in Caffe Cino Benefit, flyer, March 15, 1965. T-CLP, Caffe Cino (New York), New York Public Library – Performing Arts Division – Billy Rose Theatre Division. 46 See Robert Pasolli, A Book on The Open Theatre, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Kansas City and New York 1970. 47 In the early Sixties, the Free Jazz Movement was founded, affiliated with the Black Power Movement, which arose after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. See Michael Sell, Avant-garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2008. 48 See D. A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit. 49 Happenings were not completely structured works that offered a new relationship between artist and audience. The spectator followed the event from different perspectives and was physically a subject, sometimes a target, of the performative action. See Susan Sontag, Happenings: On Art of Radical Juxtaposition, in Against Interpretation and other Essays, Penguin Books, London 2009, pp. 263–274. 50 Susan Sontag speaks of it extensively in Notes on “Camp” (1964), where she describes this sensitivity as a love for what is not natural, for artifice and exaggeration, but also as a feature of objects or present in people’s behavior. There are camp films, furniture, clothes, music and buildings. Anything that contains a large element of artifice can be labeled as Camp. The androgyny of Greta Garbo but also the sensuality of Gina Lollobrigida or an exaggerated machismo are camp. See S. Sontag, Notes on “Camp”, in Against Interpretation, cit., pp. 275–292. 51 Robert Patrick, American Experimental Theatre. Then and Now, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. II, n. 2, Autumn 1977, pp. 13–24. 52 Gautam Dasgupta, Michael Earley, and Bonnie Marranca, The American Playwright. A Life in the Theatre?, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 4, n. 1/2, May 1979, pp. 33–51, p. 42. 53 See S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 54 G. Dasgupta, The American Playwright, cit. 55 Assassinations that took place, respectively, on November 22, 1963, and on February 21, 1965. 56 D. A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit., p. 21. 57 «The Tulane Drama Review», later called «The Drama Review», was founded in 1955 at Carleton College in Minnesota and then transferred to Tulane University in New Orleans in the early Sixties, with its new director Richard

26  Approaching experimental theater in New York Schechner. It distinguished itself as a major scholarly journal devoted to experimental and Avant-garde theater (from the end of the Sixties, its definitive headquarters became New York University). Since 1963, the journal has dedicated monographic issues to Happenings, The Living Theatre and Open Theatre but has also introduced America to the works of Jerzy Grotowski and other American and European groups and artists. In the early Sixties, it published articles on Beckett, Ionesco and Antonin Artaud. 58 See Annette J. Saddik, Contemporary American Drama, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2007. 59 See Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman, The Off Off Broadway Book. The Plays, People, Theatre, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis and New York 1972. Julie Bovasso (1930–1991) was a dramatist and actor of theater and cinema who directed many works in the Off-Off Broadway theaters and from early on collaborated with Café La MaMa, where she also staged her two-act play Gloria and Esperanza (1969). 60 See A. J. Saddik, Contemporary American Drama, cit. 61 See E. Lester, The Pass-the-Hat Theatre Circuit, cit. 62 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double. English translation by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, New York 1958. 63 It was The Living Theatre that first focused attention on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and on the works of Gertrude Stein, some of her plays it staged – in addition to the aforementioned Ladies’ Voices, we recall Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, performed in December of 1951 at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. The two founders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, were particularly interested in Stein’s lectures on the polyvalent nature of theatrical time and her experiments with language. See Bonnie Marranca, Introduction in C. van Vechten ed., Gertrude Stein. Last Operas and Plays, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1977 and M. Sell, Avant-garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, cit. 64 Crespy lists and describes the most important Off-Off theaters in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Washington, DC, illustrating their activities. In this regard, see the last chapter of D. A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit., ‘Creating your own Off-OffBroadway’, pp. 161–187. 65 “fossero messi in condizione di farsi le ossa fianco a fianco con attori, registi, tecnici, avendo di continuo la possibilità di un riscontro sul palcoscenico.” Massimo Dini, Teatro d’Avanguardia Americano, Vallecchi, Firenze 1978, p. 66. Author’s translation. 66 See G. Dasgupta, The American Playwright, cit. 67 Many of the texts were not published, unless they won Pulitzers, Tonies or other critical awards. Only after the first years of experimentation, when the Off-Off Broadway circuit had achieved notable success in the New York theater scene, did the press begin to pay attention to the productions and texts presented, consequently favoring their publication and the possibility of being restaged even in areas other than the experimental one of the East Village. 68 See S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 69 E. Lester, The Pass-the-Hat Theatre Circuit, cit. In an earlier article, John Keating talks about the Off-Off Broadway movement and introduces the main venues. See John Keating, Making It Off Off Broadway, «The New York Times», April 25, 1965.

2 Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)

2.1

A family of playwrights and artists

Ellen Stewart, originally from Chicago, Illinois, arrived in New York in 1950, where she worked for a long time as a fashion designer. Health problems led her to take a break and travel to Morocco. During this journey, she realized that she wanted to change the course of her life. Once back in the United States, thanks also to the encouragement of some writer friends, she decided to help out young artists so that they could have the time and resources to work free of economic worries and pursue their careers in the theater world. It was her own past experience that inspired her. In the early period of her life in New York, Abraham Diamond encouraged and supported Stewart in her desire to be a fashion designer, and later became a sort of adoptive father, in spite of their different cultural milieus. Diamond, a street peddler of fabrics, had welcomed the young woman into his family and every week gave her fabric samples, with which she made her clothes, creations that secured her first designer job at the Saks warehouses.1 Following Diamond’s example, Stewart accepted the requests of two friends, Paul Foster and Fred Lights (considering the latter a brother, since they had grown up together in her mother’s household), to share the basement she rented at 321 East 9th Street, leading to what would become a true theatrical enterprise. Café La MaMa was founded with the help of artists from the East Village, including actor and director Ross Alexander and lighting technician, performer and director Andy Milligan, but support was also given by Joe Cino, who sent some of his collaborators to lend a hand. Ellen Stewart, not at all a theater expert, left the artists full freedom both in the staging and in designing the plays’ advertising posters, pasted only to the entrance door to the hall in order not to attract the attention of the police and the agents of the different city departments, who from time to time forced the neighborhood cafes to close for non-compliance with city DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-3

28  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)

Figure 2.1 Ellen Stewart circa 1969 at La MaMa 74A East 4th St. Photographer Unknown. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

regulations. The public was informed of the scheduled performances by word of mouth and a few lines published each Thursday in «The Village Voice», which in the Cafes and coffeehouses column would report “A New Play every Fri. Sat. and Sun. nite at 9 & 11 P.M.”,2 without indicating the title of the work. The program and the organizational process were like those of Caffe Cino. The shows played on Wednesday to Saturday, free of charge, with the request for a one dollar minimum for a drink. As at the Cino, a collection basket was passed around among the spectators for donations at the end of the evening. The take was then divided among the artists, while Ellen Stewart financed the production from the profits she earned from her work as a freelance fashion designer. She personally hosted artists and entire companies, welcoming them into her apartment and tending to their needs, convinced that in order to encourage creativity they had to be free of all material constraints and able to devote themselves completely to their art.

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  29 Joe Cino also tended to the artists, making his Caffe a home for them (some even camped out there), but Stewart’s devotion was like a mother’s for her children. Giulia Palladini also talks of the family management of Café La MaMa in her The Scene of Foreplay, stressing how Stewart’s management and organization were linked to her maternal instinct. In literally feeding young artists and at times even taking care of their families, in personally choosing the works to be produced and providing total support for their production, Mama Ellen Stewart provided a unique, personal style to her theater. As Palladini writes, “she not only built her pushcart, she also started taking care of fashioning its wheels, negotiating its position in the city, and establishing its distinctive style and identity”.3 It is important to keep this peculiarity in mind because, along with the idea of a theater as a source of artistic and cultural exchange that was the basis of her activity since the very beginning, it was fundamental to her approach as an impresario and heralded her success in the United States and around the world, where La MaMa and its founder were seen as one and the same thing. All who witnessed Ellen Stewart’s experience of collaborating with the New York coffeehouse expressed their gratitude toward her. She was a tenacious, intuitive woman, who supported young playwrights economically and morally, with the sole aim of facilitating their work in every possible way. A patron who was able to provide the conditions in which the artists could create, affording them the means and space to shape their art through the modern concept of artistic residence. She explained this herself in an interview in which she stated, I don’t think of myself as a director. I think of myself as one who encourages people to explore their potential. You let yourself become one of them and you use whatever skills you have to enhance what they have, what they do. This is my philosophy.4 2.2

The beginning of a cultural cross-pollination

The first work of which we have a trace, Tennessee Williams’ One Arm, directed by Andy Milligan on July 27, 1962, and previously presented at Caffe Cino, marked the beginning of a long series of collaborations at Café La MaMa. In assembling the list of productions of the early Sixties, one cannot help but notice how many of these were subsequently presented in other Off-Off Broadway venues, emerging from a collaboration with another location (almost always Caffe Cino), or revived after being staged in other East Village theaters. As already mentioned, in the experimental theater community, exchange and collaboration were a distinctive feature, determined by both economic needs and the urban distribution of its spaces, which were located at a few blocks from each other when not on the

30  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) same street itself. This philosophy, which underlay the successful spread of the movement and the flowering of its experimentalism, consolidated over the years without the least rivalry between its many venues, each with its own distinct style. Although they shared a similar experimental approach and a single intent, we have already seen that the varied, numerous t­ heaters over time displayed specific thematic or dramaturgical preferences of certain writers and took on the character of the predominant genre in their respective productions. But the collaboration between venues and mutual support was the strength that sustained the entire movement, ­inspiring a true process of artistic osmosis. Ellen Stewart defined this as “cross-pollination”, and it was also the principle on which she based her activity from the very beginning and on which it is useful to dwell because it was the common thread that ran through her varied undertakings over time. From this perspective, Café La MaMa was actually like an organism growing from year to year and from project to project, living and breathing precisely from the numerous collaborations that Stewart nurtured and supported, between groups from different ethnic backgrounds and artists from various sectors, but also among New York and international theaters and institutions. Hence, cross-pollination was a process that opted for collaboration and cultural exchange as the foundation of artistic growth. The sharing of creative work between artists and

Figure 2.2 One Arm. Poster advertising the performance staged at Café La MaMa. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  31 companies – belonging to different cultures or from different backgrounds – led to an inevitable intersection of styles and methods that gave rise each time to new approaches and theatrical solutions. Stewart was absolutely certain of the enrichment that an exchange of knowledge could bring about, supporting and encouraging the process as much as possible by pushing the artists of Café La MaMa to make contact with other realities, and inviting masters and companies from abroad to her theater. Confirmation that it was a principle she followed from the very start comes from the archival documents, which report the names of foreign authors in the lists of the staged works. September 21, 1962, was in fact the date of the first production of Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal’s The Two Executioners, while on October 5, 1962, Korean Pagoon Kang Wouk’s Head Hunting was presented, both directed by Andy Milligan. The 31st of the same month saw the US premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Room, a drama that La MaMa staged without requesting permission from the author, who, however, granted it after showing up in the small basement during rehearsals to contest its staging. The British Dylan Thomas’s Holiday was staged on December 21st, while on January 11, 1963, André Gide’s Bathsheba ushered in the new year.5 The list is still long and contains the names of other important European authors, such as Beckett and Ionesco (whose works, as we know, were staged in Off-Broadway theaters starting in the late Fifties) and those of Arab and African artists, such as the Moroccan mime Samuel Avital, a pupil of Étienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault, who later founded his Center du Silence in Colorado in 1971. A list of productions that testifies to the international approach that distinguished La MaMa and ­differentiated it from other New York venues. However, it was Paul Foster’s one-act play Hurrah for The Bridge that marked its first real collaboration with a foreign company. Its debut at La MaMa took place on November 20, 1963, and it was performed in 1964 by a Colombian company in Bogotá and would later be included in the repertory of La MaMa’s first European tour in 1965.6 The numerous works produced in those early years gave rise to new collaborations with young authors and sometimes led to further cooperation with the venue they were most associated with and to frequent co-productions. In the early Sixties, these were mostly short works that, requiring the participation of few performers, were well suited to the first two spaces that hosted the Café, the small basement at 321 East 9th Street and the loft at 82 Second Avenue. This changed, however, starting with the move to its third location at 122 Second Avenue, where the size of the space allowed for more elaborate productions.7 The first complete drama to be produced, on January 20, 1965, was Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, with Marshall W. Mason’s staging, in which he directed thirty-three actors on stage.

32  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) But 1965 was also an important year because, in addition to seeing the European tour of Ellen Stewart’s actors, it marked the presence of the Open Theatre at La MaMa with the staging, on December 15th, of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Dream, directed by Peter Feldman. During the same year, some works by Sam Shepard, a playwright we have already encountered in the group of writers who collaborated with the Theatre Genesis, were also produced: his Rocking Chair and Dog were presented on the evening of February 10th. These authors would go on to make Café La MaMa a truly experimental theater. Jean-Claude van Itallie’s trilogy America Hurrah was acclaimed in both the United States and Europe, being produced for the first time in 1965 by Ellen Stewart, with the presentation of the one-act plays that make it up, America Hurrah: A Masque for Three Dolls and Pavane: A Fugue for Eight Actors on April 28th, and in its entirety on May 5th, with the title The Interview: Three One Acts (TV was the third one). In addition to Hurrah for The Bridge (1963), The Recluse and Balls, also by Paul Foster, debuted in 1964 on the stage of the 82 Second Avenue loft, respectively, on June 6th and November 3rd. The same year also saw the production of some works by Tom Eyen, one of La MaMa’s most prolific playwrights: “Frustrata” or, the Dirty Little Girl with the Paper Rose Stuck in Her Head Is Demented was presented at the same venue on May 7th; My Next Husband Will Be a Beauty and The White Whore and the Bit Player were staged on August 27th, thus opening a long series of successful productions. 2.3

The collaboration between venues

I don’t just want contemporary theatre, I want abstract theatre. The new playwrights are creating a new kind of theatre. They say it with new words. Our theatre is much more subliminal, much more subconscious. We have LSD, peyote, mescaline, all these things for brain-searching, to go into the subconscious. I don’t mean you take these things and write – it’s much more than that. A phenomenal thing has taken place in the new generation of playwrights. Freud is almost obsolete. But out of that we have become much more acute on an unconscious level. This is what theatre is going to be, and the world is going to have to get ready for it. Because we’re old and we’re jaded, and you have to get underneath – you really have to stimulate the subconscious.8 Ellen Stewart and the directors of the other Off-Off Broadway locations were aware of the importance of what they were doing, the fact that they were creating something new. They all seemed to work, though not programmatically, with the common intent of giving a new form to theater

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  33 and offering a stagecraft that could be an alternative to that of institutional or repertory theater. It was also an alternative to the Avant-garde that was flourishing in those years, that of the groups trying to dictate the reform canons of the experimental theater. This movement, while arising and developing locally in the downtown of New York City, contributed to renewing the American scene as a whole and became part of the artistic experimentation of the moment, influencing it in its own way. The new OffOff Broadway dramaturgy also pushed artists to seek and develop training techniques that led to new forms of acting, alternative to the style popularized by the Actors’ Studio, which was more suited to the commercial scene. As already mentioned, the working approach that witnessed a continuous exchange and collaboration of playwrights with multiple venues facilitated the definition of a new theater that made it possible to experiment with different actors and directors. The venue that La MaMa collaborated with most was Caffe Cino. The two theaters often hosted co-productions or fundraising events to support each other. We have already seen Stewart’s participation in fundraising for the reconstruction of Caffe Cino after the fire, and the hospitality she offered for its productions on some weekday evenings until its premises could be rebuilt. Another event that highlighted solidarity within the OffOff Broadway community was BbAaNnGg!, organized by Robert Patrick from November 3 to 7, 1965, at La MaMa to raise the funds needed to cover the costs of renewing the electrical wiring at its 122 Second Avenue location, which the city administration had shut down for a breach of safety regulations. The program, also sponsored by Judson Church, presented twenty-six short skits offered by as many artists.9 The print materials announcing these initiatives always contained brief statements from those who collaborated with the venues. In the case of the benefit for reconstructing Caffe Cino, some testimonials by the playwrights of Joe Cino’s circle were published, while BbAaNnGg! program included Robert Patrick’s dedication to Ellen Stewart, testifying to the esteem in which she was held by the artists and, once again, her special approach to running the Café. Except for the big ones like Sun, Rain, and Wind, Forces of nature are hard to find. So people who’d rule as a rule will require Guns, planes and bombs, fraud, faith, force and fire. Kings and princes are often vital, But before they can work they need a title. Politicians need the will of the people, Preachers need history, God, and a steeple. Businessman need electric brains,

34  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) Lovers need advertising campaigns. But few and fair and far between Is the natural, actual, absolute queen Who lives for her people, her people for her – Helen, Elizabeth, Marilyn were, And one is among us, to rally around – Ellen, our muse and our mother! Astound!10 The performance, made up of different genre pieces, also drawing on films and the visual arts, was reviewed by Michael Smith in «The Village Voice» on November 11th. The critic, after introducing the reasons for the evening, explained how “the responses to this challenge indicated some of the ways the newest generation of New York playwrights are thinking”,11 once again highlighting the collaborative approach of the entire movement, while Ed Sanders came to the defense of the coffeehouses in his general support of Off-Off theaters against their persecution by city inspectors and police, in a provocative article he wrote for «Fuck You/A Magazine for the Arts», which he had been publishing since 1962.12 From 1963 to 1965, the Democratic leader Ed Koch promoted a cleanup campaign in anticipation of the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, and in the same years, the NYC Police Department carried on an operation to remove the patrons of night spots, ordering the closure of strip clubs, cabarets and bars, and especially targeting the most gay-tolerant activities or those hosting drag shows.13 For the police, even the cafe theaters became a symbol of outrage, given their frequent opposition to city politics, and so the city forced them to shut down by citing one or another of the many provisions that regulated the licenses of the premises that offered live shows or food service. Neighborhood committees were also waging a battle against the coffeehouses, erroneously lumping them together with the rowdiest night spots. To cope with the problem, the cafes set up some associations. An example was the Greenwich Village Cafe Theater Association (GVCTA), comprising seven venues that previously had belonged to the similar Greenwich Village Coffee House Association: Bitter End, Cafe Bizarre, Gaslight Cafe, Phase 2, Thirdside, Take 3 and Café Wha? The association proposed rules of conduct and a code of ethics to meet the needs of the local inhabitants, prohibiting the use of loudspeakers outside the premises and any kind of noise after 11 P.M., as well as denying service to inebriated persons and requiring price indications on table and front-door menus.14 However, most of the problems were caused by the non-payment of a license and the consequent periodic fines that obliged shutdowns by the Buildings Department and the Licensing Department, which seemed not to have a very clear idea of how to define the activity of cafes that offered

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  35 stage performances, not knowing whether to categorize them more as restaurants or as cabarets. In the New York of the early Sixties, there were only two types of licenses for clubs offering live performances: the one for cabarets, which was very expensive and supported by the sale of alcohol, and the one for theaters, which imposed very restrictive safety rules, room sizes and equipment. The matter was obviously also a major concern for Ellen Stewart and Joe Cino, both of whom tried to find a way out together with other artists and directors in a meeting held at Caffe Cino in 1964.15 Ellen Stewart finally reached a definitive solution after she was subjected to yet another inspection by the city authorities, on March 12, 1964, which changed the status of her place from a coffeehouse to a private club with the new name of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (ETC). A private and no longer public space, which put on plays only for members who, at the cost of a dollar a week for a membership card, could attend the performances free of charge.16 The same year, on November 3rd, a new, memorable move took place, when spectators were invited to carry the furniture to 122 Second Avenue, following Stewart in a long procession. The event, which itself turned out to be a performance, took place after a staging of Paul Foster’s Balls, a La MaMa-Cino co-production as made explicit in the program. Evidence of the collaborations of Ellen Stewart’s Café with other venues were also Leonard Melfi’s Birdbath and Sam Shepard’s Chicago, both written for Theatre Genesis, and part of the works the two groups of La MaMa presented on their 1965 Europe tour. But the collaborations that Stewart established went also beyond the confines of the experimental scene to present her authors’ works on the Off-Broadway theater stages. In November 1966, America Hurrah made its debut at the Pocket Theatre after having been presented in Europe. In the same period, Megan Terry produced Viet Rock at the Martinique Theatre, co-directed by herself, Joseph Chaikin, and Peter Feldman after its debut in May at La MaMa, and at Stage 73, Paul Foster’s Tom Paine was presented in March 1968. These productions show that despite the difference in intent, the boundaries between Off-Off Broadway and Off-Broadway were not so clear-cut but were blurred by a constant coming and going of the artists between one stage and another. As Cindy Rosenthal and James M. Harding explain in The Sixties, Center Stage, “Time and again in the Sixties, Broadway musicals, mainstream dramas, and experimental performances all participated in a complex dialogue about politics, society, and culture. That dialogue began on the main stage as often as it did in off-off-Broadway venues”.17 The layout seemed very clear to Ellen Stewart, who in promoting young playwrights did not miss an opportunity to work simultaneously on several fronts. In those years, she was involved in organizing the first tours, sometimes chaperoning the companies in Europe, though she was also careful

36  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) to keep the New York stage alive by inviting new artists to her theater, in addition to keeping her eye on the institutional stages and promoting new collaborations with associations that were part of it. Of particular note was the Playwrights Unit, founded in 1963 by Albarwild Theater Arts, Inc.’s (ABW), whose members included playwright Edward Albee and directors and producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. The project’s aim was to give young playwrights the chance to produce their works with the participation of professional actors, directors and technicians who worked in the Off-Broadway circuit. The performances of the Playwrights Unit were hosted at the Cherry Lane Theatre and the Village South Theatre on Vandam Street. Edward Albee initially funded the entire program with the proceeds from his hit play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with later support coming from the Rockefeller Foundation and other major sources. In the spring of 1965, an event called the New Playwrights Series was organized at Cherry Lane, where ten plays were presented, including Paul Foster’s Balls and Lanford Wilson’s Home Free!, while two years earlier, in December 1963, JeanClaude van Itallie’s War opened at the Village South Theatre.18 The organization’s policy was that if a play was successful, it would complete its planned run of performances; if not, it was removed from the signboard and substituted with the next production. Besides, success was not always guaranteed, especially since the works that got staged were often written with a specific location and audience in mind, namely the coffeehouse that the author collaborated with. According to Stephen J. Bottoms, the problem of a possible bad reception depended on the context in which the play was staged.19 While the one-act plays were well suited to cafe spaces, where the intimate relationship between actors and audience could guarantee a good impact, this did not apply to the institutional theaters, where, even in the case of the Playwrights Unit, the one-act play was part of a multiple bill in order to fill out the evening, and in the darkened hall, there was no intimate relationship with the audience. As for the public’s reception, we must take into account that Broadway audiences were not necessarily familiar with the language and themes of underground theater, and that some Off-Off Broadway works were written for the specific space of a particular venue, and so aimed at the tastes of its audience. The project offered authors a concrete opportunity to encounter audiences that were different from those of the experimental theater and at the same time to stage their works in the space of an institutional theater, dealing with both its advantages and its limitations, which did not exist in the Off-Off Broadway venues where the authors generally worked. The downside of greater earnings was the lack of control over staging. While at La MaMa the writers had some say in it by choosing the actors, participating

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  37 in the rehearsals and sometimes even directing, in the Off-Broadway theaters, the choices were the exclusive purview of professional producers and directors. However, compromising could ensure other advantages. While an Off-Off Broadway production allowed greater leeway for experimentation, the staging in an institutional theater, with a good turnout of public and especially the guaranteed presence of critics, could pave the way to publishing the play and hence to greater career opportunities for the playwright. It was certainly an advantage that Ellen Stewart took into consideration in her implementing various strategies to steer the attention of critics toward the works of young writers. Even if not all the evenings were equally successful, the Playwrights Unit program lasted for approximately ten years and functioned as an important link between the two New York scenes, promoting the visibility of many authors. Some of them would go on to receive the prestigious Obie Award of «The Village Voice» for Off-Broadway theater, later extended to the experimental circuit as well.20 2.4

The role of Ellen Stewart in the Off-Off Broadway movement

Ellen Stewart was an inexhaustible source of innovative initiatives for promoting Off-Off Broadway theater, making her an exemplary patron of the arts in the Lower East Side community. The varied strategies she implemented to support the writers and artists of the experimental circuit demonstrated her supreme managerial skills in knowing how to seize both the opportunities for organizing promotional events and activities and the financing opportunities offered by the various foundations. She left nothing to chance but elaborated a very precise strategy that she revised according to the circumstances of the moment, making optimal use of the opportunities that came her way to help the artists who congregated around her. To attract the attention of critics, she organized events not only involving her Café but also the entire Off-Off Broadway community, such as the Coffee House Theater Festival (which she programmed at the Village South Theatre from June 1 to 7, 1964), where La MaMa staged two products of its family, Paul Foster’s The Recluse and David Starkweather’s Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee, both directed by Robert Dagny. On this first occasion, there were few, and not all positive, reviews in the newspapers: Coffee House Theater Festival Presents 2 Plays, published by Paul Gardner in «The New York Times» on June 2nd, panned the two works while appreciating their structural correctness and mocked the Off-Off Broadway circuit in general. Arthur Sainer’s review in «The Village Voice» (published June 6th) was kinder, appreciating Sala Staw’s

38  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) and Bryarly Lee’s acting in The Recluse, an opinion Judith Gayle Harris shared in «Back Stage», where on June 12th, she published just a few lines of lukewarm appreciation. The Recluse by Paul Foster is a moving and imaginative fantasy about an old woman’s battle with the various facets of her personality. Sala Staw was the recluse and Bryarly Lee as her alter ego were excellent. The play moved swiftly to a theatrically exciting macabre climax, holding the audience spellbound from beginning to end.21 On June 15, 1965, the first Off-Off Broadway Theater Conference took place as a discussion between groups and artists of the circuit, and in August 1968, Stewart collaborated in organizing the Brandeis Interact International Theatre Festival at Brandeis University, where Tom O’Horgan staged Megan Terry’s Massachusetts Trust. Archival materials testify to the participation in the festival of numerous foreign companies. The list includes the Caravan Theatre from Cambridge, the French Le Grand Theatre Panique, the Traverse Theatre Club from Scotland and the Club de Teatro Experimental La MaMa of Colombia.22 What Cindy Rosenthal defines as the first festival of its kind in America23 was probably organized in the wake of Stewart’s experience in Europe between 1965 and 1968. In fact, it was during the European tours that Tom O’Horgan’s company got the chance to take part in numerous international and university festivals where Stewart was also at times present and so was able to make contact with artists and companies from all over the world and where she learned about the work that Jerzy Grotowski was doing with his Teatr Laboratorium. And, apropos of Grotowski, Ellen Stewart, in collaboration with the New York University and specifically with «The Drama Review», co-sponsored his first activity in America, where he directed an acting workshop for university students in November 1967. Stewart was highly sensitive to the importance of collaboration and cultural exchange and sought contacts with associations operating on an international basis. Even if not much space is usually given to them in studies on Off-Off Broadway which dealt also with La MaMa, these were important initiatives because they contributed to creating the multi-ethnic community that distinguished the Café. They were also indicative of the commitment that Ellen Stewart maintained on several fronts in pursuing her short- and long-term projects and in the network of relationships that she built over the years and which brought her theater international recognition. In the early Seventies, Stewart founded, with the Filipino artist Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, the Third World Institute of Theatre Arts Studies (TWITAS), an association committed to promoting and facilitating encounters between American and foreign companies, both in the United States and

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  39 abroad. The organization sponsored workshops and festivals in various countries, including Japan, the Philippines, Korea, India, Nigeria, Uganda, Peru and Mexico.24 La MaMa’s collaborations with the UNESCO International Theatre Institute were also frequent. In 1968, Ellen Stewart was invited to join the Third World Committee, a body of that same association, where she collaborated with Martha Coigney, director of the American session. They worked together on several occasions in which foreign artists were hosted in New York, not least sharing the organization, in 1973, to support Peter Brook’s activities at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Third Journey of the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT). This commitment of Stewart, Guidote-Alvarez and Coigney greatly contributed to spreading New York’s underground theater at an international level and, through the numerous collaborations established, to the growth and development of all the Avant-garde theater, which was nurtured by those collaborations the world over. However, Ellen Stewart’s contribution to the Off-Off Broadway movement was not aimed solely at promoting her artists in America and abroad, where she made her theater the ambassador of the entire movement; another important and crucial contribution was her involvement in some delicate matters affecting New York’s alternative circuit. An example was her direct participation in the dispute involving the Off-Off Broadway theaters and the Actors Equity Association, the American union that protects show business workers. The association was prohibiting member actors from appearing in theatrical performances unless they were paid union wages and therefore from taking part in Off-Off Broadway productions – for which they received a symbolic pittance that almost always came from the public’s offerings at the end of the representation. The regulation created problems for East Village theaters which, while basing their productions on a large number of novice or non-professional artists, also included actors who appeared in Off-Broadway productions and were Equity members, further proof of how the boundaries between experimental and institutional theater were blurred. Hence, the issue affected most of the circuit’s venues, which did not work for preset earnings but remained free from the limitations imposed by the commercial theater in order to preserve their freedom to experiment, and consequently they could not afford to pay artists union-scale wages. The measures taken by Equity, which fined the actors who collaborated with the coffeehouses, were becoming more and more frequent over the years, and mainly targeted La MaMa, probably in light of its numerous productions. In 1966, the union sanctioned Marilyn Roberts and Patrick Sullivan for participating without a regular contract in Robert Heide’s production of Why Tuesday Never Has a Blue Monday, staged at 122 Second Avenue on

40  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) August 10th of the same year. Ellen Stewart firmly opposed the association’s action by directly entering the dispute. She did not believe the reason Equity gave for fining the two actors, namely to force Off-Off Broadway to pay their artists union-scale wages, but claimed instead that it was to protect Off-Broadway’s earnings. The tightening of the rules by the union seemed to derive from the complaints of the institutional circuit theaters, which found themselves having to reduce ticket prices in order to compete with Off-Off Broadway, which was now attracting more and more audiences. Stewart’s refusal to comply with the rules imposed by Equity, and thus appease the commercial theaters, brought about a reduction in the collaborations of unionized actors, who, fearing sanctions, preferred not to appear in her productions. This was why La MaMa suspended its activity and went dark from October 12 to November 9, 1966.25 Lawrence Sacharow, a director active in both New York circuits, intervened in support of the theater with a letter to «The New York Times» published on November 6th. Sacharow wrote that he had had the honor of directing performances at Café La MaMa, whose high production level was also due to the professional input of actors enrolled in Equity who were willing to take part in new works. He explained that it would be impossible for the Café to pay what Equity required from the sole support of its association fees (which, as already stated, were a dollar a week) and that the closure of La MaMa would deprive the less affluent audiences of their only chance to attend a play. Sacharow pointed out that Stewart’s audiences were not those of Off-Broadway and that there were also people who could not afford the cost of a ticket to a play on the commercial circuit, concluding that “many of us in the theater would feel it a great loss if the cafe were forced to close due to the rigidity of the Actors Equity ruling”.26 Ellen Stewart’s strong opposition to complying with the commercial theater rules made her an ambassador for Off-Off Broadway and led to her winning the dispute with the actors’ union. Her firm support for the implicit principle of the non-commercialization of theater, which underpinned the entire Off-Off Broadway movement, led her to achieve a compromise that all venues were able to benefit from. Equity eventually accepted, and with a new Showcase and Workshop Code eased its restrictions, allowing member actors to perform without a wage as long as the play was offered free of charge and no offerings were collected from the public. Furthermore, for La MaMa, which required the payment of a membership fee to attend the plays, the union granted a particular exception: “The Union recognized the importance of experimental theater in general”, Dan Sullivan wrote in «The New York Times», and Miss Stewart’s kind of experimental theater in particular. As long as La Mama remained technically a private club (the dues are $1), Equity

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  41 members would be allowed to perform there for nothing under the union’s Showcase and workshop production contract.27 The Café’s reopening on December 7th was inaugurated with Give My Regards to Off-Off Broadway, an irreverent satire portraying the world of experimental theater, written for the occasion by Tom Eyen.28 In reviewing the event in «The New York Times», Dan Sullivan provided a portrait of a typical La MaMa production. Mr. Eyen’s targets are strictly contemporary: Viet Rock, happenings, op art, La Mama itself. New-fashioned, too, in the freedom (sometimes, alas, carelessness) with which Mr. Eyen and his director, Ron Link, have tossed together this long inside joke. […] The friendly laughter of Give My Regards is rather a novel sound of Off Broadway, and it was surely an appropriate sound for La Mama’s return. The cast included several smashing girls, particularly Maggie McGuire as a former O.O.B.-star who makes it big on Broadway but whose heart is still down here in the gutter, like yours. Lucy La Silvay was the heroine – a 1999-version of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard – and Elsa Tresko was Mother Cleo (read: Ellen Stewart). The men included Richard Portnow as a naive O.O.B.-writer and Barry Wolaski as one of those fuzzy East Village clerics who say things like “Religion is what’s happening, baby”. The set was designed of aluminum foil and plastic by a young man named Saito who got to America by convincing a Japanese airline that it ought to fly him here to study art (which he is now doing at the Art Students League). The music was by Walter Harris. The curtain went up late on opening night because Mr. Harris couldn’t get to the theater until after the TV performance of Blithe Spirit. He is 15 years old and he had to write a report on the program for his high school English class. That’s La Mama.29 Another goal that Ellen Stewart pursued over time was to ensure artists not only a theater but a space in which to experiment, which she engaged in fundraising to obtain. In 1963, the Government Commission for the Arts established the National Endowment for the Arts, which began to make awards in 1965, allowing theaters to receive federal funds to support their activity.30 Stewart, who until then had financed La MaMa’s productions out of her own pocket, undertook a fundraising activity to guarantee the Café’s survival and the subsistence of its collaborators, and with great foresight, she also set about to purchase new spaces that would guarantee them

42  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) a theater and rehearsal rooms. Sometimes, the criticism was leveled against her of exploiting the privilege of private financing, about which she later demonstrated how far-sighted she was in building a theatrical enterprise that still lives on today, thanks to the acquisition of the buildings where the theatrical halls, rehearsal spaces and offices are located. In 1967, La MaMa received a Ford Foundation Grant of $25,000 and a W. McNeil Lowry and Rockefeller Foundation Grant of $65,000 (plus $5,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts),31 which enabled it to purchase its first building at 74 East 4th Street, which it renovated to house its theaters. The following year, Stewart managed to finance the sojourn in New York of the young Romanian director Andrei Serban by applying to the Ford Foundation for a grant for him. Again, with a Ford Foundation Grant that she received in 1974, she acquired a former television studio at 66 East 4th Street, where she had a large theater hall built. And in 1985, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Grant worth $300,000, with which she bought a former thirteenth-century convent in Italy’s Umbrian hills, which, once renovated, became the location of La MaMa Umbria International, a center that each year hosts international workshops and symposia devoted to artists, and that is still active today. The acquisition of these facilities allowed Ellen Stewart to fully realize her goal, which had been the basis of her activity since first opening Café La MaMa in the basement of 321 East 9th Street, that is to fully support artists so that they could be free to devote themselves to their art. We have seen how since the very beginning in 1961, whenever unable to offer artists an accommodation, she hosted them in her own apartment and supported them in their private and artistic lives. She gave them the space to experiment in the more convenient locations on Second Avenue, but from the moment she acquired the East 4th Street buildings, La MaMa ETC and La MaMa Annex (to which were added the rehearsal space at 47 Great Jones Street in 1970, La MaMa Rehearsal Spaces, and La MaMa Gallery at 6th East 1st Street in 1983), she offered a true artistic residence to the companies that collaborated with the theater. Furthermore, the coexistence of several groups and the sharing of experimentation facilitated the process of cultural cross-pollination that Stewart considered the foundation of artistic growth. In that fertile creative environment, the members of the various companies participated in their respective training activities or could collaborate in the staging. This is also confirmed by Joel Zwick, an actor and director at La MaMa since the late Sixties, who talks of the participation of some actors belonging to Tom O’Horgan’s group in the training sessions offered by La MaMa Plexus, the company that he directed and that Ellen Stewart and Stanley Rosenberg had founded in 1968, or how the Plexus members themselves attended the workshops led by Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theatre.32 The first resident

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  43 group, La MaMa Repertory Troupe (which Stewart founded together with Tom O’Horgan on his return from their first European tour in 1966), and the Great Jones Repertory Company led by Andrei Serban, also took advantage of these exchange and sharing practices. From 1964, Tom Eyen, who in 1967 founded the Theatre of the Eye, had been steadily collaborating, and from 1965, the Open Theatre had also been at La MaMa. Other groups were added over the years, contributing to an ever greater multi-ethnicity and internationality. In 1970, the Jarboro Players (initially called GPA Nucleus) was formed, a group that counted among its members a majority of African American actors and staged their works in the context of the Black Theatre. In the early seventies, La Mama Chinatown and the ETC Company were also established. The former presented the dramas of contemporary artists belonging mostly to the Asian tradition; the latter, directed by John Braswell and Wilford Leach, was devoted to reinterpreting and staging classical texts through the use of music and dance. Another new member that joined the community in 1971 was Mabou Mines, founded in Canada by a group of artists from different artistic sectors and directed by Lee Breuer, which took a highly experimental approach. The year 1972 saw the arrival of NATE, the Native American Theatre Ensemble, a group of artists devoted to spreading and conserving the culture of Native Americans and staging their original works. Last, but not least, it is worth mentioning Playhouse of the Ridiculous, directed by John Vaccaro, a group with a strongly satirical approach, formed in the mid-Sixties and residing at La MaMa from the early seventies.33 2.5

1965. La MaMa goes to Europe

In the early Sixties, there was no commentary on Off-Off Broadway plays in the mainstream New York press. We have already seen that the first articles that gave adequate space to the circuit were published only in 1965,34 and that Stewart did her utmost in New York to promote the works of the young playwrights who collaborated with the Café, going so far as to organize festivals to raise awareness of downtown scene. Nonetheless, mainstream critics continued to ignore the circuit, and reviews were regularly published only by «The Village Voice» and a few other alternative publications. One of the possible reasons was the reduced run compared to OffBroadway, which ran plays for several weeks or even months, while in the Village, a production rarely ran for more than two or three evenings, an insufficient period for word to spread about them and to attract the attention of critics. The problem likely also had to do with the quality of the productions. While numerous dramas were being produced, a good

44  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) staging was not always achieved – an outcome also confirmed by the reviews of «The Village Voice», at times unfavorable to some performances. Therefore, few productions were reviewed in the first half of the Sixties, and it was no coincidence that they were almost always the ones staged in Off-Broadway theaters or produced by Albarwild at Cherry Lane or at the Village South Theatre, as was the case for Home Free! and Balls, produced in the context of the New Playwrights Series. However, some events occurred between 1964 and early 1965 that suggested to Ellen Stewart a new strategy. On May 16, 1964, Hurrah for the Bridge, Paul Foster’s work, which had already debuted in New York, was staged in Bogotá, at the Cali Festival. In the Spanish translation, Que Viva el Puente, staged by the University of the Andes Touring Theatrical Company and directed by Edgard Negret, the production received in recognition the chance to participate that same year in the International Theatre Festival in Erlangen, in Germany.35 The Danish director Jens Okking was present at the German festival and asked Paul Foster’s permission to translate the work into Danish and to stage it, together with The Recluse, at the Aarhus theater. Ellen Stewart went with Foster to attend the play produced by the Svalegangen Theater, thus establishing a first contact with Denmark. The second circumstance occurred in May 1965, when two assiduous La MaMa actors, Mari-Claire Charba and Jacque Lynn Colton, financed by their parents, went to Paris, where they performed The White Whore and The Bit Player (written by Tom Eyen), at the famous bookshop Shakespeare & Co. Despite the difficulties of circulating in the capital and reaching the bookshop because of the demonstration by electrical agency workers, who had organized a strike on the same day, the performance nevertheless seems to have been discussed in the Parisian press.36 Again in Paris, in early 1965, at the American Center for Students and Artists, the Off-Off Broadway Theatre Evening cycle was programmed to present the New York underground circuit. Here Charba and Colton staged The White Whore and the Bit Player, Frustrata, New York, Intermission and The Family Joke. It was on the occasion of this event that the two actors came into contact with the French center, and Ellen Stewart exploited the opportunity to contact David Davis, its director, and asked him to found La MaMa Paris and start up a new collaboration.37 The program was divided into two cycles of plays. The first took place from February 25th to 28th and featured three one-acts on the same evening, directed by Jacque Lynn Colton: David Starkweather’s The Family Joke, the French writer Daniel Mauroc’s Intermission and The White Whore and the Bit Player. It is interesting to note that these works were not exclusively American since they included Mauroc’s drama, and that

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  45 the cast was made up of American and European actors (not only French but also some British artists and a Swede then residing in Paris), as well as the group of technicians. The second cycle of works was staged from April 2nd to 12th and also included various directors: Tom Eyen’s drama “Frustrata” was directed by Colton, and Daniel Mauroc’s New York by the author himself. Original musical scores were prepared for both plays, and the printed flyer provided short biographies of the artists and background on Café La MaMa. Off-Broadway theater has traditionally been the fertile ground in New York for the discovery and training of new playwrights, actors and directors. But a new form of Off-Broadway has recently appeared. It is referred to as coffee-house theater, or Off-Off-Broadway. The coffee-houses cling precariously to their right to exist and to encourage new talents. One of the most outstanding is “La Mama”. Run as a club by a courageous woman, Ellen Stewart, it is enthusiastically supported by many hundreds of theater-goers.38 Given the outcomes of these few experiences abroad, Ellen Stewart decided to send her artists to Europe, certain that once she got a response from the European critics she would at last attract the attention of New York mainstream newspapers too. The approval of the critics was necessary not only to attract audiences to theaters but for publishers to consider publishing the plays as a launching pad for staging them on the Off-Broadway circuit and spreading them beyond New York’s borders: an essential requirement for boosting the professional development and success of the playwrights. Stewart then got in touch with friends and acquaintances to help her organize the European tour. One of the intermediaries with the Europeans was Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, a playwright whose works were also staged at La MaMa. Linked to Ellen Stewart by a close friendship, the German-born writer knew important intellectuals and artists in Germany and had collaborated and shared her skills with Stewart since the early years of the Café’s opening.39 In fact, it was Yorck who had introduced Stewart to the painter Clifford Wright, husband of the Danish journalist and writer Elsa Gress. The couple, who were friends with some of the artists of the Black Mountain College group who had moved to New York, owned an art school, the Decentre Artistic Centre, in Glumsø, Denmark. Ruth Yorck wrote to them, strongly recommending that they host the American actors, convinced that they could be of help to the group once they arrived in Europe. Instead, the chance for a real meeting between Ellen Stewart and Elsa Gress took place in Denmark, when Stewart and Paul Foster went there to attend the staging of the author’s works, in which some actors of the

46  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) Glumsø school also took part. Gress and her husband were fascinated by Stewart’s ideas and willingly offered to collaborate with La MaMa, eager to contribute to the spread of the still young Off-Off Broadway movement.40 Ellen Stewart, who can talk both ears off the Devil, soon convinced us that her ideas, and their realization, must be exportable in a world where talk about the spread of culture, the cultivation of the arts and everything connected therewith is vigorously rampant, while the efforts to actually realize any of this are less apparent. We agreed to supply house and goodwill and whatever material and spiritual aid we were capable of, and Ellen – La Mama – went home and stamped money out of the ground, by extra jobs as a fashion designer and general exertion of witchcraft, to send a handful of her actors to Denmark – without much visible chance of making out economically or just find a foothold.41 Before the companies officially left for the tour, Ellen Stewart sent the actors Charba and Colton to Denmark, where they performed some works at the Jazz Club Montmartre in Copenhagen and at the Svalegangen in Aarhus. On the same occasion, Elsa Gress sponsored their participation in a television show in which, together with the two Danish actors Jytte Abi Idstrøm and Frits Brun, they introduced La MaMa and spoke about their experience at the New York coffeehouse.42 Ellen Stewart thus combined two companies, one directed by Tom O’Horgan and the second by Ross Alexander, purchased a one-way ticket for the eighteen young people to cross the ocean by ship and organized their stay thanks to the hospitality of the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris and that of Elsa Gress, who made her school available. The two groups left in September 1965 on a tour in Paris and Copenhagen. The plan was for each company to perform for three weeks in one city and then swap places with the other for three subsequent weeks. Hence, this first official occasion marked the beginning of the long dialogue between La MaMa and Europe. It was thanks to these first tours that the companies of the American Café, and Ellen Stewart herself, came into contact with many European artists, establishing with some of them longlasting collaborative relationships, fostered through mutual invitations, participation in shared activities, hospitality and collaborations. Stewart carried out her project of cross-pollination also by inviting foreign companies to La MaMa, giving them a chance to live and work in its spaces and thus fostering encounters and exchanges between foreign actors and resident companies, as happened in 1963 when the Israeli writer and director Mark Sadan was a guest at La MaMa, or in 1970 when the eighteen members of the Japanese company Tokyo Kid Brothers sojourned at La MaMa for six months.43

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  47 All these exchanges subsequently led to further collaborations and the affiliation of many theaters around the world to La MaMa in New York. Thanks to its collaboration with Israeli artists, La MaMa Tel Aviv was founded in 1970; La MaMa Tokyo was opened by a musician who collaborated with the Tokyo Kid Brothers. Many satellite theaters of Café La MaMa were thus established over the years – in London, Amsterdam, Toronto, Singapore, Serbia, Lebanon, Morocco, the Philippines, South Korea and Uganda – which, while not always having a direct relationship with the New York Café, worked with the same philosophy of intercultural exchange and collaboration.44 Notes 1 Ellen Stewart used to stress that she and Diamond were linked by a family-like bond despite the cultural differences, as she was a Black American woman of Catholic faith while he was a Polish Jew. The story of the first experiences of New York life is the subject of many interviews Ellen Stewart has given and that are reported in many publications. See, in particular, Cindy Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart La Mama of Us All, «The Drama Review», vol. 50, n. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 12–51, and by Ellen Stewart, Ellen Stewart and La Mama, «The Drama Review», Women and Performance Issue, vol. T86, n. 2, June 1980, pp. 11–22. The article is a transcript of Stewart’s speech at the Millennium Film Workshop on March 26, 1979, as part of a series of seminars organized by Howard Guttenplan, director of Millennium, at La MaMa. 2 C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents, cit., p. 10. 3 Giulia Palladini, The Scene of Foreplay. Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2017, p. 115. Of the same author see Com-memorare Ellen Stewart, la Mama: narrazione e custodia di una parentela, «Culture Teatrali», n. 21, 2011, pp. 233–253. 4 Ellen Stewart, in C. Rosenthal, La MaMa Presents, cit., p. 23. 5 The data comes from the list of works produced in the Sixties, kindly provided to the author by Ozzie Rodriguez, director of La MaMa Archives. 6 It was precisely on the occasion of the first production in New York that the bell tied to a cart used for the show became the symbol of the Café, used by Stewart to attract the attention of the audience in a gesture that became part of each evening’s opening ritual. 7 From 1961 to 1963, the Café La MaMa was in the first basement Stewart rented, then moved for a year to 82 Second Avenue and from 1964 to 1968 to 122 of the same street. After a very short four-month period at 9 St. Marks Place pending the renovation of the building purchased by Stewart, it found its permanent home in the building at 74A East 4th Street. 8 Ellen Stewart in the interview held by Michael Smith in 1966, in M. Smith, The Good Scene, cit., p. 167. At other times Stewart also spoke of a theater that could communicate with the subconscious, such as during Andrei Serban’s productions of Greek tragedies in the Seventies. 9 These included actor Kevin O’Connor, playwrights Tom Eyen, Sam Shepard, Leonard Melfi, Ted Harris, the writer and critic Michael Smith, the photographer Phill Niblock, Lanford Wilson, Ruth Yorck and the Open Theatre. 10 Robert Patrick, in BbAaNnGg!, «Playbill», p. 1, courtesy La MaMa Archives.

48  Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965) 1 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, «The Village Voice», November 11, 1965. 1 12 Ed Sanders, poet, singer and writer, political activist and journalist, printed the independent magazine thanks to the availability of the materials provided by The Living Theatre and disseminated it to the public through street distribution. See K. McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground, cit. 13 See John Strasbourg, The Village. 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues. A History of Greenwich Village, Harper Collins Publishers, New York 2014. 14 See W. C. Stone, Caffe Cino, cit. 15 Richard F. Shepard reports the meeting in an article entitled Coffeehouse Theaters Join to Present New Play, published in «The New York Times» August 8, 1964. 16 C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents, cit. 17 James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, Pulling the Curtain on False Dichotomies, in James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (eds.), The Sixties, Center Stage. Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2020, pp. 3–23, p. 13. 18 D. A. Crespi, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit. and, by the same author, Paradigm for New Play Development. The Albee-Barr-Wider Playwrights Unit, in J. M. Harding and C. Rosenthal (ed.), The Sixties, Center Stage., cit., pp. 117–137. 19 S. J. Bottoms, Playing Underground, cit. 20 In recognition of the commitment carried out by Ellen Stewart and Joe Cino in the first years of the foundation of Off-Off Broadway, in the 1964–1965 edition, a special Obie Award was assigned to Café La MaMa and Caffe Cino for “creating opportunities for new playwrights to confront audiences and gain experience of the real theatre”. W. C. Stone, Caffe Cino, cit., p. 114. 21 Judith Gayle Harris, So Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee and The Recluse, «Back Stage», June 12, 1964. 22 The communication materials of the festival have been consulted courtesy of the La MaMa Archives. 23 C. Rosenthal, La MaMa Presents, cit. 24 See D. A. Crespy, Off-Off Broadway Explosion, cit. 25 W. C. Stone talks about the matter in Caffe Cino, cit. 26 Lawrence Sacharow, ‘Drama Mailbag’: The Case of Cafe La Mama, «The New York Times», November 6, 1966. 27 Dan Sullivan, La Mama Re-Enters, Laughing, As Equity Gives Café Its O.K., «The New York Times», December 9, 1966. 28 Only the performance of Bruce Kessler’s The Contestants on November 9th preceded this official reopening. 29 Dan Sullivan, Cafe La Mama Reopens with Laughter and Regards to Equity, «The New York Times», December 9, 1966. 30 See S. Banes, Greenwich Village, cit. 31 Jack Poggi published the results of a survey on theatrical resources in Theater in America. The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1968. 32 Information gathered in an interview Joel Zwick did with the author on August 10, 2021. 33 We thank Ozzie Rodriguez for making available the data on the companies. 34 See on this the already quoted E. Lester, The Pass-The-Hat Theatre Circuit, cit., and J. Keating, Making It Off Off Broadway, cit.

Café La MaMa presents the Off-Off Broadway movement (1961–1965)  49 35 On returning from Germany, the group stopped in New York, where they presented the work in Spanish at the Sheridan Square Playhouse thanks to a La MaMa-Cino co-production. The play was staged on a Monday (closing night in the Off-Broadway season), with the entire Colombian cast. In confirmation of the above, once again the mainstream press gave a space to Off-Off Broadway only when the works were staged in institutional theaters. The author specifies: «The two coffeehouses are among the more assiduous caffeine dispensaries that specialize in noncommercial, low-budget theater that lends a platform to unknown playwrights who, in the biggest theater town of all, outnumber the available stages». See R. F. Shepard, Coffeehouse Theaters, cit. 36 The fact is reported by Ellen Stewart in Ellen Stewart and La Mama, cit. 37 See E. Stewart, Ellen Stewart and La MaMa, cit. 38 Off-Broadway Theatre Evening, printed leaflet. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. 39 The writer suddenly passed away in Stewart’s arms on January 19, 1966, while the two women were waiting to attend Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade produced by Peter Brook at the Martin Beck Theatre. The following year Ellen Stewart would program at La MaMa, in honor of the writer, the Ruth Yorck Golden Series, that is some evenings in which nine full-length plays by playwrights belonging to Off-Off Broadway were staged. 40 See M. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance, cit. 41 Elsa Gress, Boxiganga. Teater Som Livsform, Spectator, Copenhagen 1968, p. 82. 42 Ivi. 43 Ivi. 44 See C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart La Mama of Us All, cit.

3 Sharing cultures The European tours

3.1

Tom O’Horgan and his troupe: introducing Off-Off Broadway to Europe

The two groups that Stewart sent arrived in Europe in the autumn of 1965: in Paris, at the American Center, the company directed by Ross Alexander, and in Denmark, at the Aasø Skole in Glumsø, the one of Tom O’Horgan. A single poster advertised the performances scheduled between the beginning of October and December 20th at the two venues and announced the staging of twenty-two one-act plays by Alexander, O’Horgan, the Danish director Jens Okking and the French Jean-Loup Philippe. Among the American actors, to whom French and Danish artists would later be added, we read the names Seth Allen, Marie-Claire Charba, Jacque Lynn Colton, Jerry De Luise, Marjorie LiPari, Victor LiPari, Kevin O’Connor, Michael Warren Powell, Shirley Stolyar and Stefan Sztybel. The plays staged were representative of the entire Off-Off Broadway circuit, since not all of them were produced at La MaMa but also at other venues. This was the first comprehensive slate of plays of New York experimental theater to be officially presented in Europe. It is therefore worth dwelling on the titles of the works, staged in groups of two or three per evening. From October 3rd to December 20th in Paris, Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah and War, Adrienne Kennedy’s Rat’s Mass, Ross Alexander’s Little Mother, Mary Mitchell’s Who Put the Blood on My Long-stemmed Rose?, Robert Sedy’s Waiting Boy, Harvey Perr’s Spies, Ruth Yorck’s Lullaby for a Dying Man, Lanford Wilson’s Home Free! and The Madness of Lady Bright, Paul Foster’s Hurrah for the Bridge, Sam Shepard’s 4H Club, William Hoffmann’s Miss Victoria, Leonard Melfi’s Bird Bath, Jean Reavey’s Window, Tom Eyen’s “Frustrata” and Harry Koutoukas’ My Orpheus. In Denmark, the series opened on October 8th with a performance cycle ending on December 12th. The staged plays were the already-mentioned America Hurrah, Spies, Hurrah for the Bridge, Miss Victoria, 4H Club, Bird Bath, War, Rat’s Mass, Little Mother, Lullaby for a Dying Man, DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-4

Sharing cultures: the European tours  51 Waiting Boy and Who Put the Blood on My Long-stemmed Rose? Plus Bruce Kessler’s Son of Fricka, Gerald Schoenwalf’s The Circus, Paul Foster’s The Recluse, Alex Civello’s The Circle and Ross Alexander’s After the Ball.1 While O’Horgan’s company in Denmark enjoyed quite good success, thanks also to Elsa Gress’ commitment to presenting the young actors to the press and institutions, Ross Alexander and his company in Paris failed to gain public and critical favor. In a letter dated October 23, 1965, addressed to Ellen Stewart, the Paris group wrote that their morale was low because of the absence of reviews and the lack of funds for the trip to Denmark, where they had to move and hoped to be more successful.2 Stewart, who in the meantime had joined the company, in an article described the incident that led to the interruption of the Paris tour and saw David Davis himself oppose the staging of some works. We certainly didn’t impress the Parisians because the night I put JeanClaude van Itallie’s America Hurrah in the American Center for the Arts in Paris, David Davis, who was the head of the establishment, gave me 24 hours to get out of Paris. Well, this man was so upset, if you think about it, because it was 1965, and when Seth Allen began to draw the cock on the wall – there was absolute silence in a room which was about this size. Although he allowed me to set up tables with candles on them like La Mama, he meant “Get out!”.3 The American group worked all night to pack the stage costumes and the large masks created by Robert Wilson4 into a crate and load it onto the car of a freight train for Denmark. Later, in a letter to Stewart dated December 7th, Ross Alexander complained that the company had not worked even in Denmark because, in his opinion, the members had no idea what it meant to work as a group and apologized for the failure. His regret is understandable, though taking into consideration that the companies were made up of actors accustomed to working with constantly different people and for a very short time on account of the quick stagings in the Off-Off Broadway venues. Hence, it was their first experience of continuous collaboration. Having acknowledged the difficulties encountered, Alexander’s group already dispersed at the end of this first tour, with some of the actors returning to the United States, while others joined O’Horgan’s company to continue their European experience. Vice versa, the company that performed in Denmark got another type of response, where the critics welcomed the young American artists, nicknamed the Mamaists and spoke of a new American experimental theater. The stagings of the short one-act plays recalled the informal Camp and Pop style typical of Off-Off Broadway theater, making use of a few essential

52  Sharing cultures: the European tours scenic elements. The acting technique emphasized the physicality of the actors, who performed actions that at times could be defined as acrobatic. The Danish guests proved to be an effective sponsor for the young company. Elsa Gress’ publicity endeavors ensured a large audience turnout at Comediehuset Hall, the small Copenhagen theater that Clifford Wright drove the actors to each evening in his car, thrilled by the enthusiasm that animated his young charges, as it is reported in the book Boxiganga written by Gress. Three new one-act plays were staged each week, thanks also to the collaboration of the Indian sculptor Raman Patel (who shared the studio with Wright), who designed the props. The group’s daily work involved setting up the plays scheduled for the same evening and the three works to be presented the following week. In these insanely hectic weeks the day and night did not have one free hour for them or for us, who got so involved in this life which was theater and theater which was life, that we pushed our own work aside accomplishing miraculously, more even then, for we were infected with the unflagging energy the group had brought with them, and the capacities for living together and confronting difficulties without turning a hair that they developed as a group here.5 Several factors differentiated the destinies of the two companies. The success of the Danish company can be attributed to Tom O’Horgan’s bravura in directing the actors and creating a close-knit group with them, also thanks to the scheduling of daily rehearsals. And the support that Elsa Gress and her husband, Clifford Wright, offered the group was fundamental, greatly facilitating the company’s successful reception in Danish theaters. In fact, from the information we have obtained, the company sent to Paris does not seem to have been well attended to, even if in some letters the actors mentioned David Davis’ contacts with the press, while it is clear that Elsa Gress took on the responsibility of embodying in her own country the role usually covered by Ellen Stewart in New York. After the period planned with Elsa Gress, the actors moved on to Paris where, as happened with their colleagues, they encountered a rather lukewarm reception. They then decided to return to Denmark and stay there until the end of February 1966. There they acted at public institutions, especially universities, academies and high schools in the cities of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Lund. Elsa Gress always chaperoned them, introducing the evenings in Danish, thus enabling the audience to better understand the dramas staged in English. In the same period, O’Horgan’s company was also invited to Sweden and England, where it performed in cellars, salons and proper theaters.6 From these first experiences with the new company, Tom O’Horgan began to develop his poetic and personal dynamic style that would typify

Sharing cultures: the European tours  53 his future productions. Drawing on his musical knowledge, O’Horgan created a theater that can be defined as lyrical, with a collective performance based more on the rhythm of the action than on the content of the piece,7 a style appreciated in Europe by audiences and by critics alike. In a review published in «Politiken», Harald Engberg stressed the high level of American amateur theater and the fact that among the Mamaists, there was more than one talented performer, so that the Danish public considered the company to be highly professional.8 The «Berlingske Tidende» stated that “The Recluse, by Paul Foster, set in a fabulous cave, was touching, grotesque and intensely sinister”.9 And the critic Per Gudmansen, in an article published in «Actuelt» on October 19th, described an exhilarating theater evening, a cocktail of Genet, Dickens and Grand Guignol.10 Hence, in Denmark, there was critical acclaim: during the second part of the tour, at the beginning of 1966, the American company was once again applauded, establishing itself as a worthy ambassador of New York theater. «Roskilde Tidende» commented on it in a review published in January, in the second phase of the tour of O’Horgan’s company. The coffee-house theatre is an aspect of the American reaction to spiritual impulses. The La Mama Repertory Company works with whatever material is at hand and manages to create, at times, art that will remain in the consciousness of the spectator after the fact. According to Elsa Gress, the La Mama Theatre is among the best experimental theatre groups. If the other experimental theatre companies work towards becoming as good as this group, the possibility of an American theatre generation of real quality is certainly present. […] This American experimental theatre shows many possibilities the theatre holds as a form of expression, with more possibilities than the ones shown. This was apparent, not least because the actors were eminent, with the self-control and a scenic discipline defying anything we have seen on a Danish stage.11 However, the critic of «Jyllands-Posten», in a review of the staging of John Ford’s play This Is the Rill Speaking, compared the La Mama Troupe with The Living Theatre, present in Denmark at the same time, describing ironically the latter as amateurish. The ace of the La Mama performance is its fantastic resilience in characterization, often varying from crude caricature to gentle tenderness. The piece was done in the round and, in the brilliant choreographic sureness of the direction, the scenes became luminous with grace and humour.

54  Sharing cultures: the European tours Four actors managed the many roles – a terrific proof of the strange and wonderful mobility and elasticity of this group. There were many people in the Barn, and that was certainly as it should be. It would have made much more sense if the Danish National Television had given its prime Friday evening time to this La Mama group, rather than to the fatally amateurish so-called Living Theatre that filled the screen with its big bluff.12 The Living Theatre had been in Europe since 1964 in voluntary exile, initially housed in the same Parisian American Center that hosted Stewart’s companies, where it staged Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, a collectively created performance comprising nine short scenes, also starting from some exercises extrapolated from the training conducted with Joseph Chaikin and the newborn Open Theatre. The previous year Judith Malina and Julian Beck had been on tour in London with the company, where they had presented The Brig.13 The Europe of 1965 knew little of American theater beyond the overseas Avant-garde The Living Theatre. Eugenio Barba, who in those years was renovating a farm in Holstebro, which would become the definitive headquarters of the Odin Teatret (founded by him in 1964 in Oslo), was aware of the New York theater and the activity of the Off-Off Broadway circuit thanks to the Italian magazine «Sipario», which had devoted attention to it. Barba recalls that the experimental ferment that animated Danish theater in those years was activated by two main trends, that of Odin Teatret, which spread the Grotowski spirit, and the one imported by La MaMa.14 These were the first years of the diffusion of Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical research, recently presented outside of Poland. In those years, the European Avant-garde was also developing, strongly influenced, like its American counterpart, by the theories of Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and by the work of Grotowski himself and of The Living Theatre. Hence, Tom O’Horgan’s company brought forward a type of theater that relied heavily on the actor’s physicality and was based mostly on the expressiveness of the ensemble but still largely depended on direct collaboration with the author – unlike much of the Avant-garde, which developed a collective approach to stage writing. A theater that fully fit in with the theatrical research of the Sixties, while keeping a lively focus on entertainment, finding counterparts in the English Fringe Theatre, with which La MaMa would soon came into contact, and later in Italy’s Teatro delle Cantine Romane.15 Ellen Stewart probably became aware of Jerzy Grotowski’s experimentations thanks to some articles by Eugenio Barba devoted to the Polish master, which appeared in «The Tulane Drama Review» in the spring of

Sharing cultures: the European tours  55 1965 and which described the daily training that the actors underwent at the Teatr Laboratorium in Opole and Grotowski’s theatrical research.16 In January 1966, Stewart wrote to her actors in Denmark, telling them about the Polish master, anticipating that there was great interest in him in New York. She urged her young actors to ask Eugenio Barba to introduce them to Grotowski, so that they could attend his workshops. Everything suggests that Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen were waiting for the young actors, since Stewart wrote that she had met both of them in Europe and informed them that the company would go to Opole. A first meeting likely took place between the American actors and Grotowski in Denmark instead, since a letter sent on January 31st by Victor LiPari shows that in early February, Grotowski was a guest of Elsa Gress and met Tom O’ Horgan.17 Some actors in the group went to Holstebro in the following months and took part in Grotowski’s training techniques through the workshops held by Eugenio Barba and the other members of Odin Teatret. Once back in America, the idea was to transfer what they had learned to the rest of the company, as an enthusiastic Paul Foster commented in a letter to Eugenio Barba, where he suggested that, when back in the United States, they would put into practice and propagate what they have learned.18 Ellen Stewart thus established her first real contact with European experimental theater, leading to a long, successful series of encounters and collaborations which, as we shall see in the next chapters, would involve many companies and artists orbiting around La MaMa and some of the most important European masters, those who would leave an indelible mark on the Avant-garde theatrical research from the Sixties onward. Thus, a network of relationships was woven that would prove to be fundamental in developing the Avant-garde itself, in Europe as in the United States, where artists from different cultural backgrounds initiated a dialogue based on principles that, while deriving from different sources, discovered a common identity. It was these relationships and collaborations that nourished artistic research, contributing significantly to developing the Avant-garde in the West. 3.2

Back to New York after the European success

La MaMa Repertory Troupe returned to New York in the spring, preceded by the favorable press comments that followed its adventure in Europe. Michael Smith, in his Theatre Journal column in «The Village Voice», wrote that he had thought its European success was due more to the curiosity aroused by the foreign company than to the group’s actual skill, but that he changed his mind after witnessing some productions he considered excellent.19

56  Sharing cultures: the European tours Dan Sullivan talked about it in «The New York Times», focusing on Ellen Stewart’s vision of Off-Off Broadway theater, apropos of which she did not consider apt its definition as underground. Abstract theater sums up Off-Off Broadway better, she feels. Its playwrights have in common, not a message, but a manner of presentation that reflects (and implicitly condemns) the world of IBM abstraction we all live in. […] the method at La Mama, and at other Off-Off Broadway centers like Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino, is fantastic; symbolic; poetic; and – a favorite word of Miss Stewart’s – ‘subliminal. Even if the audience feels it can’t comprehend the message, it is digested at a subliminal level. Our playwrights are the true playwrights of today, and certainly the playwrights of tomorrow’.20 Ellen Stewart took the opportunity to organize 6 From La MaMa, a twoevening event hosted at the Off-Broadway Martinique Theatre, during which O’Horgan’s group staged some of its European productions. This Is the Rill Speaking, Bird Bath and Thank You, Miss Victoria were the one-act plays on the first night; War, Chicago and The Recluse concluded the brief event. The names of Ellen Stewart, La MaMa and Tom O’Horgan now appeared frequently in New York’s dailies, although the critics were not always as benevolent as in Europe. Stanley Kauffmann of «The New York Times» was rather unfavorable in his review of the first bill staged at the Martinique, not considering the acting good and complaining about limitations in the cast. He even disliked the one-act plays presented, stating that he expected something better from playwrights of experimental theater. However, he was more positive toward the second part of the bill, in which he appreciated above all Chicago, for Kevin O’Connor’s acting and Tom O’Horgan’s direction, and War. The scripts by Messrs. van Itallie and Shepard may be called antiplays. They exist in contrast to the theater as usually practiced – not as attacks on it but (one may say) as relief from it. These authors are simply playing – following the fantasies of their characters as they bubble out of an initial situation. Surely one function of an experimental theater is to make such playing possible, and here it has been amusingly and affectingly done. Besides presenting these two plays, La Mama’s double bill promotes two exceptionally promising talents. Kevin O’Connor, the principal actor, and Tom O’Horgan, the director, are both admirably at home with the realities of the stage and the intangibles of volatile imagination.21 Overall, most of the reviews dwelt on the scripts and were limited to only a few comments on the performances. However, the press seemed unanimous

Sharing cultures: the European tours  57 in recognizing the effectiveness of the ensemble directed by O’Horgan, confirming how much the young actors had been able to show to take advantage of the months spent in Europe to consolidate the company’s unity. The feedback received in New York led Ellen Stewart and the director to reflect on the need for greater preparation for the actors, a problem that recurred even when, during the same year, Brice Howard of National Educational Television decided to produce some Off-Off Broadway dramas, including Pavane (later titled Interview, one of the one-acts that made up America Hurrah), Sam Shepard’s Fourteen Hundred Thousand and The Recluse under the sole title Three From La Mama. In this instance, the direction was assigned to Tom O’Horgan, but only a few of the actors of the original cast were chosen. Ellen Stewart, so aware of the need for training that she had already suggested that her actors join Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, went to the Actors’ Studio asking for the availability of a teacher for the company’s members, but her request was turned down. In agreement with Tom O’Horgan, she then set up a permanent daily workshop for the group, in which he came up with a set of exercises taken from his previous training experiences (both in theater and as a musician).22 3.3

The training at Odin Teatret and the influence of Jerzy Grotowski

As previously stated, during La MaMa Repertory Troupe’s second European tour, some actors were hosted at the Odin Teatret, where they could at last put into practice Eugenio Barba’s training routine based on Grotowski’s. Marylin Roberts, Jacque Lynn Colton, Victor LiPari and Rob Thirkel therefore followed the preparation designed for the actors of the Odin Teatret. With them was also Stanley Rosenberg, who would remain at Holstebro for a whole year. It was an experience of considerable importance for La MaMa, as it marked the beginning of a change in the concept of actor preparation. It is therefore useful to set forth the details of the research of the two European masters, to get an idea of what kind of work Ellen Stewart’s actors underwent in Denmark. In the first period of activity, the training Eugenio Barba offered was especially aimed at artists with little experience, who formed the majority of his group; subsequently, with the planning of the spring and summer seminars, it would also be open to professionals. It should also be remembered that Odin Teatret, while devoting ample space to the acquisition of acting technique and stage behavior, over time became a true center of theatrical culture, devoted to the production of new works, sociological research and theoretical seminars, also offering lectures and workshops in schools.23 It was a way of thinking about the company that we find in part at La MaMa and that can also be detected in the approach Joseph Chaikin gave to the Open Theatre.

58  Sharing cultures: the European tours Eugenio Barba, who studied in Poland with Grotowski from 1961 to 1964 (at the Teatr 13 Rzędów,24 later called Teatr Laboratorium), and spent six months in India learning the fundamentals of Kathakali, in those years devoted himself to defining a corporeal technique that enabled actors to acquire an extra-daily behavior that helped them capture the spectator’s attention. The Italian-born director therefore conceived a style of rigorous training that employed the exercises he had acquired in Poland but that was also greatly influenced by Kathakali, especially in regard to the behavior of Indian dancers on the stage. Barba himself speaks of the principles on which he based his theatrical concept in an article where he explains how both the actor who creates the action, and the spectator who reacts to the modulation of the energy that animates the stage behavior, participate in the dramatic action of the performer. A concept that is found in the idea that led Grotowski to consider theater as a ritual in which both actor and spectator take part, which in the Polish director’s vision is borne out in the action on stage. At the Odin Teatret, as at the Teatr Laboratorium, physical training therefore took on ever greater importance, since the acquisition of the technique and the definition of extra-daily behavior were essential prerequisites for guaranteeing the effectiveness of the action itself. Every movement, every gesture, the way of walking, all the kinetic possibilities, the corporeal expression, the colour of the voice, its intonation and nuances, all these elements must be part of a composition whose effect is dependent on their physical shock value, which the actor must consciously work into the role’s structure. A brief movement is already, in and of itself, a micro-pantomime which informs us about the character, about his intentions and plans. Every single sentence is made into an action by means of the intonation of the voice. Every sentence is seen to contain a whole series of other sentences which are not part of the logic of the spoken words. The structure of a role is closely linked to the actor himself. His psychosomatic characteristics are a skeleton upon which the entire role is based. This is not to say that the actor must play himself but that he must take his particular attributes into consideration […].25 Eugenio Barba thus offered a type of training that was continually modified and individualized to meet the needs of the individual actor, an idea that made theatrical training a central activity and that in the early Sixties emerged as completely new in Europe. In the first period, the work was not developed individually, as would happen later, but made up of group sessions that were the same for everyone and that included, in addition to the exercises borrowed from Grotowski, a part of the training that Kathakali dancers underwent (devoted, for example, to the eyes and hands) and those of mime and ballet.

Sharing cultures: the European tours  59 It was a demanding training, made up of plastic exercises (focused on movement of the joints) and physical exercises (acrobatic or involving the execution of sequences of positions), determined by the personal justification supporting the action. In the memoirs of Torgeir Wethal, one of the first members of the Odin Teatret, it is described as a physical obstacle to be overcome, a result to be made better, improved […]. Since then, the training has had many different points of departure and has taken many different forms, but its essence has always been technical. We have used our training to search for forms of expression, not content.26 In the year that Ellen Stewart’s actors were guests of Odin, the training was divided into two daily sessions. The first, devoted to various exercises mainly drawn from martial and acrobatic arts, took place from seven in the morning to twelve noon. The second, from five to eight in the evening, was divided between improvisation and work on new plays. One of the most practiced exercises was Cat chain, as Iben Nagel Rasmussen, actor of Odin, describes: It was Torgeir who first showed us the chain. I remember that afterwards Eugenio said: “So, now it’s your turn to do the same”. I gaped

Figure 3.1 Eugenio Barba guides actors in Odin Teatret training 1966. Photographer Roald Pay. Courtesy of the Odin Teatret Archives.

60  Sharing cultures: the European tours

Figure 3.2 Odin Teatret Training 1967. Photographer Roald Pay. Courtesy of the Odin Teatret Archives.

and couldn’t understand what was happening when the others in the room began to stand on their heads or tried to make a bridge. Because what I had seen was not an exercise. It was Torgeir’s world, something fine and light that shone through his body and the ten exercises. What impressed me was not that he went into a bridge or stood on his head, but the amazingly astral way (so it seemed to me) in which he did it. I didn’t see an ordinary body but a kind of spiritual, shining body. We learned the exercises and put them together. The chain was to be motivated with a personal story, personal images. We showed the work one at time. This moment was extremely important for us because it contained a little moment of performance. We saw how each person’s chain was different from that of the others, even though the exercises were exactly the same, and how the whole sequence became a kind of training poem, where rhythm and energy were modulated following dramatic principles.27 Considered a process of self-definition, the training was supposed to develop a self-discipline that enlivened the actor’s presence, where personal justification determined the quality of energy. Barba’s work was inspired by Grotowski’s research, which, though developed on Stanislavsky’s principles (of an actor who gives rise to real, credible actions and of the needing for daily training), was focused on the action and not on the psychological aspects of the character, which

Sharing cultures: the European tours  61 instead was what marked the approach of the American Actor’s Studio.28 In the United States, the training proposed by the European masters was therefore seen as a valid alternative to the various methods taught in New York, almost all derived from Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, more suitable for the realistic acting of commercial theater than for preparing Off-Off Broadway actors. The actors of the East Village coffeehouses were on stage for the limited time required by the short works of the young playwrights, and to capture the public’s attention, they relied greatly on a strong physicality and on their own expressive skills. For this reason, the seminars Grotowski offered at Odin Teatret from 1966 onward became not only a point of reference for artists and the entire theatrical culture of Europe but also aroused interest overseas, attracting American actors, directors, critics and scholars.29 The first Danish seminar was held over a fortnight in the summer of 1966 and was open exclusively to Scandinavian actors. The instructors were, in addition to Grotowski, the actor of the Teatr Laboratorium Ryszard Cieslak; Stanislaw Brzozowski, principal actor of the Henryk Tomasewski pantomime theater in Wroklaw; and Eugenio Barba. Subsequently, two annual seminars were organized: one lasted a week in spring, on a chosen theme, such as the Commedia dell’Arte and Noh theater; the second, lasting longer, was held in summer and devoted entirely to training. Grotowski

Figure 3.3 Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba during a seminar at the Odin Teatret in 1971. Photographer Roald Pay. Courtesy of the Odin Teatret Archives.

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Figure 3.4 Odin Teatret Scenic Language seminar, 1969. Photographer Torgeir Wethal. Courtesy of the Odin Teatret Archives.

was present until 1969, and other European artists were also invited along with him, such as Dario Fo, the creator of abstract mime Étienne Decroux, the American director Charles Marowitz (Peter Brook’s collaborator in 1963 on the Theatre of Cruelty project with the Royal Shakespeare Company), Joseph Chaikin, actor and director of the Open Theatre, opera singer Jolanda Rodio, Ingemar Lindh, Ives Lebreton and Jacques Lecoq. From 1967, the seminars were also open to participants from abroad, and many American actors and critics joined, including some artists belonging to the resident companies of La MaMa.30 Grotowski did not intend his exercises – divided into physical and plastic – to constitute an actual system but rather a way to recognize the actor’s own biological impulses.31 Vocal training was also associated with these to manage breathing and strengthen the voice by rediscovering its timbres, intonations and resonators, through daily exercises taken from Chinese practices and yoga. It operated on the body and on the inner self, with the aim of rediscovering the roots, the “underground” and the “founding areas” of theater art.32 Eugenio Barba wrote about Grotowski’s training in one of the first articles about him published in the United States in «The Tulane Drama Review» (later «The Drama Review») in 1965.33 Thanks to this essay and to others that the scholarly journal published, interest in Grotowski spread

Sharing cultures: the European tours  63

Figure 3.5 Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba during a visit of Grotowski at the Odin Teatret in 1971. Photographer Roald Pay. Courtesy of the Odin Teatret Archives.

throughout the country with the first news of his quest for a new actorspectator relationship, and his approach to the work of the actor on her or himself, as Barba introduced in that very first article. To play a part does not mean to identify with the character. The actor neither lives his part nor portrays it from the outside. He uses the character as the means to grapple with his own self, the tool to reach secret layers of his personality and strip himself of what hurts most and lies deepest in his secret heart. We are dealing here with the painful, merciless process of self-discovery without which there can be no artistic creation, no communication, no unveiling of the fearsome questions we carefully avoid in order to preserve the comfort of our everyday limbo. The actor deliberately breaks the shell of his social identity.34 In his book Alla ricerca del teatro perduto (1965), Eugenio Barba describes the exercises practiced by the actors at Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium: the physical ones, to loosen up the muscles, include somersaults, jumps and flights; the plastic ones, devoted to the study of opposite vectors, were based on Étienne Decroux’s technique and on ancient European and oriental theater. Respiratory were vocal exercises were then practiced, exercises of the mimic mask (based on François Delsarte’s studies), of the eyes (taken from

64  Sharing cultures: the European tours Kathakali and introduced by Barba himself), and rhythmic practices for relaxation and expressiveness.35 In the wake of the writings disseminated in the United States and of the artists’ European experience, Richard Schechner, Ellen Stewart, «The Drama Review», and some professors of New York University worked – with no few difficulties, since Poland belonged to the Soviet bloc – to get Grotowski and the Teatr Laboratorium company to New York to give a seminar for students of New York University’s School of the Arts from November 6 to 30, 1967. The project was co-financed by the university, «The Drama Review», and the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Ellen Stewart, promoter of the initiative from the start, hosted in her theater, for a few selected spectators, performances in Polish of The Constant Prince, which had premiered in 1966 at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris.36 The seminar is mentioned in an interview Jerzy Grotowski gave to Schechner and published in «The Drama Review» in 1968, in which he describes the creative practice of the Teatr Laboratorium, based on a collaboration between the members of his company. From his answers and the comments of Richard Schechner and Theodore Hoffman, who attended the workshop, we get a partial picture of the approach Grotowski brought to the seminar and see how this was of considerable importance for an initial exposure to his training technique and the principles his work with actors was based upon. The interview spoke of the specific indications he gave to students during the plastic exercises (exercises plastiques), such as “surpass yourselves” or “go beyond”, and reviewed what had already been made known in part through the previous articles in «The Drama Review». Below is an excerpt that refers to the principles transferred during the New York University seminar. These principles were taken up also by Eugenio Barba in the training sessions at Odin Teatret and transmitted to Tom O’Horgan’s actors during their stay in Denmark. When I say “go beyond yourself” I am asking for an insupportable effort. One is obliged not to stop despite fatigue and to do things that we know well we cannot do. That means one is also obliged to be courageous. What does this lead to? There are certain points of fatigue which break the control of the mind, a control that blocks us. When we find the courage to do things that are impossible, we make the discovery that our body does not block us. We do the impossible and the division within us between conception and the body’s ability disappears. This attitude, this determination, is a training for how to go beyond our limits. These are not the limits of our nature, but those of our discomfort. These are the limits we impose upon ourselves that block the creative process, because creativity is never comfortable.37

Sharing cultures: the European tours  65 In a later passage of the interview, they talked about the imposition of silence even in the course on individual work, a practice Hoffman considered unique, commenting that “this was hard to get because it runs against our tradition where we are all sympathetic collaborators responding with love to our fellow actor”.38 In his explanation, Grotowski illustrates how external silence functions as a stimulus for the actor and that the inner silence of his thoughts facilitates creativity. He specifies that, if this were not the case, thought would guide it, conditioning it. The article also goes into the specifics of the exercises, which “are personal; they develop around certain principles but their exact physical shape depends upon the individual performer”39 and must be performed one after the other so that they constitute a seamless unit, as we already saw in Cat chain. The principles on which they are based are: “(1) to relate the physical to the psychic; (2) to surpass fatigue; (3) to follow one’s innermost associations; (4) to avoid ‘beauty’ and ‘gymnastics’”.40 In watching Mr. Grotowski work with the students one was struck most by his intense personal concentration on each, his avoidance of formulas and generalized solutions. He spoke, laid hands on people, followed them around, and watched with deep intensity. Ryszard Cieslak, the actor from Mr. Grotowski’s troupe who assisted Mr. Grotowski in the course and who demonstrated the exercises plastiques, worked in complete harmony with Mr. Grotowski. He, too, emphasized the necessity for finding personal solutions. Mr. Cieslak constantly advised students to ‘have courage’, to go beyond what they thought they could do. ‘Not force, but balance’ was his wise advice. Mr. Cieslak’s mastery of the exercises was complete: he was a perfectly trained actor, the only one most of us had ever seen.41 Grotowski’s research thus reached the United States in two ways: by direct transmission thanks to his sojourn in New York, which after his first experience in autumn 1967 would recur in the following years, and indirectly through the word-of-mouth transmission of its principles and exercises by the actors who participated in the seminars held at the Odin Teatret, or who spent time in Denmark to practice training with Eugenio Barba. 3.4

The second and third European tours

The years 1966 and 1967 saw Ellen Stewart busy organizing new European tours for her company. The second was scheduled for the autumn of 1966, a period in which Roberts, Colton, LiPari and Thirkel spent time in Holstebro to practice training and in which the group took part in some university theater festivals, such as the Zagreb International Festival,

66  Sharing cultures: the European tours where in September, it staged Rochelle Owens’ Homo and van Itallie’s Pavane. Numerous companies were present. The brochure of the event, printed in several languages, gives the names of student companies coming from Manchester, Warsaw, Zurich, Stockholm, Berlin, Perugia, Parma, Bucharest, London, Utrecht, Sofia and Ljubljana. The «New York Post» covered the festival, reporting the enthusiasm of the public and critics for the American group. On its September 17th number about the staging of Pavane, we read: “They did this marvelously, with a brilliant assortment of different shades in voice, mimics and gestures, ranging from the deafening to the delicate”.42 Later, from October 18th to 23rd, the La MaMa Repertory Troupe performed at the Pistolteatern in Stockholm with Pavane, Chicago, This Is the Rill Speaking, War, Homo and Tom LaBar’s Tattoo Parlor. War, This Is the Rill Speaking and Homo were then scheduled for October 29th in Durham (UK). The company was also a guest of Elsa Gress, in Denmark, where it remained to shoot Boxiganga, a film Gress wrote and Tom O’Horgan directed. Inspired by Renaissance scenes taken from a Spanish work of 1603, it was produced by Statens Film Central, the Danish state film and television center. The film tells the story of a group of touring actors by contrasting humorous scenes, and mirrors in many details the story of the New York company in bringing its plays to European countries.43 The critics were increasingly enthusiastic, and the company returned to Europe again the following year with an ample program of performances in various countries. On June 4th and 5th, it was at the Experimenta Festival in Frankfurt; then, again in Germany, in Munich and Heidelberg; in June, it came also to Italy, in Turin, and participated on July 1st and 2nd in the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Then followed dates in Stockholm, Aarhus and Holstebro. It took part in the Edinburgh theater festival and eventually went on to London, Belgrade and Warsaw.44 In his directing, O’Horgan applied his musical education, dealing with the staging more as choreography, mounting the play by combining the dance, acrobatic and vocal exercises that the actors had practiced in their training sessions. The audience had no problem following the work despite the language difference because O’Horgan focused mostly on physical acting, giving less prominence to speech, and acted on the spectators’ senses with all expressive means.45 He left much freedom to the actors and made use of multiple styles – passing from acting to singing, alternating dance steps with coarse, haphazard movements – and united the performers in a lively and brilliant choral recitation with a sustained rhythm (as in Futz, in which the chorus of actors intervenes constantly, commenting on the events and inciting the main characters to action). Speech was also used in

Sharing cultures: the European tours  67 its musical sense, and the stage movements were proximate to dance and acrobatics. The Swedish critic Jonas Cornell wrote about Rochelle Owens’ Futz and Paul Foster’s Tom Paine, observing that La MaMa staged a physical theater with a direct, sensual meaning in no need of interpretation.46 Another Swedish critic, in commenting on O’Horgan’s direction, compared La MaMa to Grotowski and The Living Theatre. He has shown that it is possible to create a theater style between the extremes of modern group theaters – Grotowski’s disciplined sacral theater and the Living Theatre’s open group chaos. A theater style where the severity of Grotowski and the spontaneity of the Living Theatre are connected to form a natural unity, characterized not only by concentration and relaxation but also by the sense of humor and playfulness and a sense of the burlesque.47 Echoes of the company’s successes also reached New York: «The Village Voice» published an article by Ingmar Bjorksten, who wrote from Stockholm about how the example of the young American company had contributed to renewing Swedish theater ever since its first visit in 1965. Despite its brevity, this article is of great interest since it confirmed how much La MaMa had contributed to introducing Europe to Off-Off Broadway theater, its authors and the acting and staging techniques that were being experimented in New York’s East Village cafes. At the same time, O’Horgan’s company, together with the others on tour in Europe in the same years, such as the Open Theatre and The Theatre of the Eye, participated in renewing theatrical research by bringing new productions and experimenting with different acting styles, thus contributing to the development of the entire Western Avant-garde. A movement that grew through the single experiences of groups and individual artists, but that owed much to the encounters and collaborations that took place between them. In presenting Ellen Stewart’s company, Bjorksten spoke of a new type of theater, which did not rest on the old principles of American theater or have anything to do with what The Living Theatre was presenting. He therefore regretted the incomprehension shown in German newspapers when the American group took part in the Experimenta Festival.48 In Stockholm, the New York company staged four works, including Tom Paine and Futz, and held a workshop attended by many critics and actors. Seeing what La Mama had already achieved in 1965 convinced us that from Off Off Broadway were emerging not only successful new ways for

68  Sharing cultures: the European tours actors to interact on stage, but also a new American drama. The Swedish theatre was quick to assimilate its principles. The first Off Off Broadway playwright introduced in a Swedish translation was Megan Terry, whose Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place received an astonishingly convincing production in the fall of 1966 at the Stockholm Municipal Theatre Studios, then toured the provinces. Directed by Sten Lonnert […], it proved not only that Swedish actors could perform this kind of text, but that the form could survive transplantation into a new language and environment. […] one can state as fact that the new trends in the American theatre have become new trends in the Swedish.49 In July, the La MaMa Repertory Troupe was in Spoleto with Tom Paine and for the first time was present at the Festival dei Due Mondi (which also saw Jerzy Grotowski with his staging of The Constant Prince), while The Theatre of the Eye, one of Stewart’s resident companies, presented Tom Eyen’s Sarah B. Divine!, directed by the author himself.50 In September, Paul Foster’s work was also staged in some cities in Great Britain, where critics noted a style that was now peculiar to the American company: “the production has true creative vigor and this respect is a triumph in communication. It succeeds in that most ambitious theatrical aim of breaking down the frontier between the players and audience”.51 In London, the reviews shifted between lukewarm and enthusiastic, but often the negative opinion of the performances was attributed to the theater space that hosted it, with references that these were works that certainly had a greater impact in more intimate spaces, such as cafes, compared to when they were performed in a theater with the canonical division between audience and stage.52 Tom O’Horgan himself also spoke of this in an interview with the London journal «Prompt»: This theatre (the Vaudeville [of London]) is not the answer; it does not function for new plays. We need a stage which is closer to the audience. This theatre has a tradition for Charlie Girl, Sweet Charlie, one of those Sweet Whatsit things. We need a three-quarter round. This theatre should be bombed.53 On the other hand, his direction was greatly appreciated for the spectacularity of emphasizing group acting, while giving a lesser prominence to individual performance. In the same period, the Open Theatre with America Hurrah was also on the London stage, in a performance open only to members of the English

Sharing cultures: the European tours  69 Stage Society to avoid censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, who did not grant approval to Motel. In this instance too, there was a good audience response, and the critics did not miss the chance to compare the Off-Off Broadway theater to its British experimental counterpart. What these companies reveal, apart from their own high-spirited intensity, is a sad gap in the British theatre. For where is our equivalent theatre? Where can our dramatic young try out new things, be too clever or absurd, make fool of themselves, fall flat on their faces, and produce the occasional masterpiece? Nowehere [sic]. And we’re too complacent about the lack. […] The impact of the two companies – not only in choice of subject matter, but in presentation and style – could help to loosen up British theatre, and make it more free-wheeling.54 The presence of O’Horgan’s company favored the development of the cross-pollination process that Ellen Stewart would promote throughout her career and that would become one of the cornerstones on which she would base her theater’s activity.55 In this regard, among the various activities she undertook, her participation in festivals that spread throughout Europe in the Sixties was of considerable importance. Theatrical festivals were held in many cities, for a week or more, and hosted artists and companies from all over the world, becoming recurrent appointments over time. These were important occasions for attending new productions, sometimes world premieres, but above all because the artists, almost always hosted at the expense of the festival organization, were able to stay for the entire duration of the event and thus participate in its various initiatives, taking advantage of meetings and exchanges that spawned new collaborations and productions. It is probably also thanks to the presence of American theatrical companies in Europe that interest in American experimental theater led the prestigious Italian magazine «Sipario» to devote in 1968 a special issue to it edited by Aldo Rostagno, an Italian critic and director who lived in New York. The issue, entitled America urrà: il teatro della rivolta (America hurrah: the theater of revolt), gathered different types of articles on American companies, theaters and productions but also published the writings of the major representatives of the movement, proving to be, more than a presentation, a veritable manifesto of American theater.56 The first section introduced the American situation with an article by Richard Kostelanetz on the experimental scene and partly on The Living Theatre. There was an essay by Robert Pasolli, previously published in

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Figures 3.6 Summary of the Italian magazine «Sipario», special issue 272, December 1968.

Sharing cultures: the European tours  71

Figures 3.7 Summary of the Italian magazine «Sipario», special issue 272, December 1968.

72  Sharing cultures: the European tours «The Drama Review»,57 on the new authors of the Sixties, of key interest to Italian readers because of the chart listing the names of groups and theaters with specific indications concerning them (type of stage, seasons and authors represented, and type of audience), which provided a clear overview of the New York scene. Aldo Rostagno opened the second section on Off-Off Broadway theaters and experimental groups, with an interview with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, followed by Joseph Chaikin’s essay introducing the creative methods of the Open Theatre, Ellen Stewart’s presentation of Café La MaMa, and an article on The Performance Group with materials on Dionysus in 69. This part closed with two writings on Theatre Genesis and The Playhouse of the Ridiculous. The third section analyzed Broadway and included a long piece by John Lahr on Hair, while the fourth was on Black Theatre, with the translation of Ed Bullins’ manifesto A Short Statement on Street Theater,58 and a list of the major theaters and companies that were part of the movement in America. Theater outside of New York was the topic of the fifth part, with a presentation of the major groups of the American Avantgarde, followed in closing by an essay on workshops and a final article on Happenings. It was a prolific edition that also included the first translations of some important works, including America Hurrah, LeRoi Jones’ Home on the Range, Sonia Sanchez’ The Bronx Is the Next and three scenarios by Bread and Puppet. In the following issue, «Sipario» published the translations of other new dramas, Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Serpent: A Ceremony, Sam Shepard’s La Turista, and Rochelle Owens’ Futz, at last making available to Italian artists some of the most representative works born in the context of New York theater. 3.5

A case study: censure and fortune of Futz

Futz tells the story of Cyrus Futz, a young man in love with his pig Amanda, and of an entire village that seeks revenge against him, to the point of killing him. The story is actually an allegory of personal freedom, which denounces the petty, hypocritical respectability that characterizes certain communities of rural America. The drama had been presented to the public in a reading organized in the apartment of LeRoi Jones (a friend of the author) on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1960, and published in 1962 by Hawk’s Well Press. The play had been chosen to be produced by The Living Theatre, but the project stalled due to the group’s problems with the government and subsequent exile in Europe. In March 1967, Futz was finally produced by Ellen Stewart and directed by Tom O’Horgan. It won three Obie Awards: Best

Sharing cultures: the European tours  73 Play, Best Director and Best Actor. In 1969, it was adapted by Owens and O’Horgan and debuted as a film in New York.59 The theatrical production saw on stage all the members of the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, who, in a choral recitation, put on a multi-voiced narration of Futz’s plight. In O’Horgan’s direction, the special physicality of

Figure 3.8 Futz at La MaMa in 1967, directed by Tom O’Horgan. Photo Credit Conrad Ward. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

74  Sharing cultures: the European tours the acting that distinguished the company, together with the choice to have the actors enter the stage shirtless, wearing only a hat and overalls, greatly enhanced the work’s sensuality. The action was presented on and around a central platform, which some performers climbed onto in turn to play different characters, while the others below accompanied the action as gobetweens linking the characters themselves and the spectators seated along three sides of the stage. It seemed natural to me to do this way. It was very sculptural. The guys, were young, good-looking kids, and they might jump down, and with everybody around, and the actors were breathing close to you, and the piece itself being on a disturbing subject. They were unbuttoned and loose and it was a very athletic play, and part of the game was to see how much you could see, I suppose. It seemed natural to me to do it this way.60 O’Horgan’s was a total, physical theater that involved the audience with a rhythm marked by sound from the movements of the actors and thanks to a musical employment of voice, which here included animal cries, noises and shouts. In the mise en scene, the unrealistic sounds and movements that highlighted the director’s particular style acted as a basso continuo.61 The movements of the actors were associated by Michael Smith with the vocabulary of Grotowski and The Living Theatre. In fact, Smith considered O’Horgan’s approach not entirely original, because it was influenced by the experience of the company’s actors with Eugenio Barba’s training, and because Grotowski’s exercises were employed in the staging. However, the judgment was overall positive and Smith highlighted how O’Horgan had actually co-opted the technique “to jazz it up”.62 O’Horgan and company have just begun to explore the new style, but already the effect is startling, stirring, and sometimes beautiful. The method is similar to Grotowski’s, however only in appearance. […] Basically O’Horgan is illustrating the text, by literally representing the images by underscoring the mood of the action […].63 Joyce Tretck of «Show Business» wrote an enthusiastic review judging the performances of the actors credible and impeccable and recognizing that the effectiveness of the cast was due to the harmony of a group that had long been working together.64 The appreciation for the first performances in New York (scheduled between March and May at La MaMa) was followed by the discordant opinions of European critics, who in the case of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival asked for the play to be cancelled from the festival program.

Sharing cultures: the European tours  75 Futz was then staged on July 27th in Holstebro, during the summer seminar organized by Odin Teatret, with a production featuring the actors who had taken part in the Danish company’s training sessions. Ellen Stewart, in a telegram to Stanley Rosenberg (who was still collaborating with Odin Teatret and was Barba’s assistant director for Kaspariana), expressed her enthusiasm for the presentation of Futz in Holstebro.65 A performance that was described by Erik Aschengreen in the Danish «Berlingske Tidende» as a strange and exciting piece of theater, and although he defined the show as disgusting, considered it so powerful and transgressive that it was impossible not to be intrigued by it. He praised the actors, their body control and the director’s ability to realize his vision on stage.66 In Italy, the production caused an uproar. In «Sipario», the critic Corrado Augias defined Futz as a sensational show and dedicated a long passage to the on-stage action. In the middle of a small deck is a low platform on which the actors appear, engaged in the real action or in what is just reconstructed from memory. All round them stand the other actors, who act as a chorus to events, exchanging comments or supplying narrative links such as “and then Futz said…” as in a Brechtian exercise. Where O’Horgan’s direction expresses its purest majesty is especially in two scenes. The first is the reconstruction of erotic foreplay – always seen from the hero’s reminiscences – which, in its obsessive development, will lead Mr. Futz to homicide. The sensuality of this scene is nearly irresistible, enhanced in equal measure by the bravura of the two actors, the lighting, the movements, and the quiet choral sobbing and tongue-clucking that all the other actors carry on around the deck, swaying rhythmically. The other scene is of his mother’s visit to him in jail on the eve of his execution. Seth Allen (who with this interpretation won an award for best Off Broadway actor) is insuperable in expressing his farewell to the world in the name of a deviant lust that finds an outlet but no consolation in a last sexual intercourse with his mother.67 At Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, both the themes dealt within the work and the scenic solutions O’Horgan adopted provoked a bombshell dispute involving journalists, political groups and the festival organizers themselves, bringing the play into the limelight not only in Scotland but internationally. The fuse was lit by Brian Meek’s article in the «Scottish Daily Express» on August 23rd, which spoke of Futz as a work praising bestiality, a criticism that alarmed Mrs. M. Robertson Murray (a government civil servant), who asked the Lord Provost of Edinburgh to organize an extraordinary meeting of the judiciary to suspend the performances so that the good name of the festival would not be tarnished. However, the commission

76  Sharing cultures: the European tours chose not to take action against its staging at Barrie Hall, since it was open only to members of the Traverse Theatre Club. Mrs. Robertson, who was known to have based her assessment only on Meek’s review, without having seen the play, again urged censoring it, because the possibility of paying five pounds to be a temporary member of the Club made the show – described as an orgy of bestiality, incest and indecency68 – effectively open to the public. In the end, the artistic director of the Traverse Theatre organized a debate on the matter and invited Brian Meek to participate in the discussion and to give an account of the moral implications of his writing, but on balance, the numerous articles and interviews published in the local newspapers only piqued the public’s interest. The long queues at the box office therefore forced the Traverse Theatre Club, which had planned on using a room for only 58 spectators, to rent a larger room that could accommodate more than 200.69 In instances like this, interpreting what was reported in the newspapers of the time is of great interest, since it not only helps reconstruct the events but, by providing an albeit sketchy portrait of the society in which the episode took place, allows us to reconstruct how the play itself came across in different situations and contexts and to analyze the individual circumstances. The request to censor Futz in Edinburgh is a clear example of misunderstanding of the production’s intentions due to the ignorance of certain critics of the social and cultural milieu in which the work itself was created and of its inherent message. In this regard, the extracts from two articles published on August 24th and 25th in the «Scottish Daily Express» are useful for further study, since it was the same newspaper in which the review that unleashed the fracas appeared and which tracked the entire affair. Both articles, one by Brian Meek himself, give a brief account of the debate organized by Gordon McDougall, artistic director of the Traverse Theatre. Last night Festival Fringe Society president Mr. R. J. Buchanan, J.P., said: “If the Lord Chamberlain has granted a licence for a play to be presented, we certainly could not say that it should not go on”. Treasure McKay, with whom Mrs. Robertson Murray will raise the Futz matter today before the meeting of the town council, said: “No comment”. La Mama Club director Mr. O’Forgan [sic], from Chicago, said: “I think the Scottish Daily Express article is mildly outrageous. It is unfair. We certainly do not think we are producing pornography. I think the article takes a rather narrow view and entirely misses the point of what we are trying to do”.70

Sharing cultures: the European tours  77 Meek rebuts, ‘Struggle’ I was placed in a panel which included author David Benedictus, Ronald Bryden, the drama critic of the Observer, and Gilliam Freedman, who wrote, among other things, The Leather Boys. None of these worthless condemned Futz – the Observer man said little, the whole argument seemed to bore him, and the chairman, Dr. David Stafford-Clark, as impartial as a Red Guard on May Day, had to have his say too. Mr. Tom O’Horgan, La Mama director, accused me of failing to understand the meaning of the play. “It is about a man’s struggle for personal freedom”, he said. When I asked if this point could not be made without obscenity the actor who plays Futz yelled: “You’re just too stupid to see it”. This was a better line than mose [sic] of the ones he had in the play. Rubbish I asked Mr. O’Horgan if he was going to push physicality to the limit as he claimed, why he did not use a real pig. “Oh we have”, said he, to wild laughter. Further demonstration of the humour of the audience came when two men sang a song which included the line “Teenage cremation, oh how I cried when you fried!”. There was also a sketch about a policeman who chopped up a man with Samuri [sic] sword. This juvenile rubbish almost brought the house down! Despite the fact that the odds were over 60–1, I was not allowed to have the last word. But I can now. Futz is a thoroughly bad play. It is not only disgusting it is a disgrace to the Edinburg Festival fringe. I HOPE THE MEN OF EDINBURGH HAVE THE GUTS TO FOLLOW THE LEAD OF THE TWO BRAVE WOMEN.71 3.6

La MaMa gives a stage to the Open Theatre

In the autumn of 1965, while O’Horgan’s company was on tour in Europe, Ellen Stewart offered the Open Theatre a space at La MaMa, allowing it to stage shows one week per month. The group was officially formed in 1964, after a period of experimentation that began in 1963 with The Living Theatre, thanks to the initiative of some members who had set up a workshop shared with writers and directors. The Open’s initial lineup included

78  Sharing cultures: the European tours actor and director Joseph Chaikin, directors Peter Feldman, Jacques Levy and Roberta Sklar, playwrights Jean-Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry and Michael Smith, and critics Richard Gilman and Gordon Rogoff, but they would alternate over time with other writers and actors.72 The idea was to focus on investigating new forms of writing and acting, allotting second place to performance production. It was an experiment that took place in a close relationship between actors and playwrights, who finished drafting the work only after a workshop period in which the actors labored on improvising themes or leads offered by the writer himself and on exercises suggested by Joseph Chaikin. From the outset, the Open Theatre chose not to produce plays, so as to avoid distraction from research work, and hence only a select audience of friends and acquaintances could attend the first show-demonstrations that dated back to the formation period of the group in December 1963.73 The same basic rules were applied at each workshop. Chaikin had to be present at the experimentation and direct rehearsals before any performance, and the actors who took part in the staging had to be the same ones who worked on the research. In 1965, the Open had a total of forty-six members, including artists, writers, actors and volunteers who took care of organizational and administrative matters and associated members. Many of them had already collaborated with Off-Off Broadway venues and with La MaMa. At Ellen Stewart’s Café La MaMa, the company was a guest in the autumn of 1965 and the following year. The first presentation show was scheduled from October 27 to 31, 1965, directed by Joseph Chaikin and Peter Feldman, and simply called Open Theatre Improvisations. In December Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Dream was presented under Peter Feldman’s direction. In 1966, Sharon Thie’s Soon Jack November, directed by John A. Coe (January 11th), The Trial of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, directed by Tom Bissinger (March 30th); on April 27th, Bertolt Brecht’s The Clown Play and Megan Terry’s theater game Comings and Goings, both directed by Chaikin. In the spring, Megan Terry’s protest work Viet Rock was staged, developed from a workshop on the war in Vietnam held by the writer on Saturdays between 1965 and 1966.74 In the period in which Ellen Stewart was their host, the group devoted more attention to putting together performances, even if most of the work was still focused on the workshops conducted by its various members. The presence of the Open Theatre also offered an important opportunity for the other artists who collaborated with La MaMa to approach a new type of workshop and to sit in on or participate in the research and training taking place in the workshops offered by Feldman and his collaborators. In the summer of 1966, Joseph Chaikin (who did not take part in all of the activities promoted at La MaMa by his group) was in England, invited

Sharing cultures: the European tours  79 by Peter Brook to the Royal Shakespeare Company to take part in the staging of US. It was there that Chaikin met Jerzy Grotowski for the first time and was able to observe his exercises and the rigor of his training. On his return to the States, the American director taught The Cat and some other correlated exercises to the Open Theatre’s members. Chaikin met Grotowski again the following year, during his first visit to the United States, invited by the New York University to give a seminar for students. The artists of the group attended a workshop offered by Grotowski supported by Richard Cieslak for demonstrations and by JeanClaude van Itallie, who translated from the French for the group.75 It was a training in which physical exercise functioned as a means for connecting action to the impulses that derive from the depths of the actor’s self.76 The members of the Open Theatre were very impressed by Grotowski’s methods, and some of his exercises became an integral part of the physical training sessions, such as those for endurance and control of one’s body. However, the group’s workshop methodology remained unchanged, adhering to Chaikin’s approach, by then an established feature of the group.77 During his visit, Grotowski was able to watch the group at work and to offer corrections in performing the sequences of his exercises. The Cat, the exercise that has had the greatest popularity among American artists, is described by Robert Pasolli in the very sequence Grotowski had corrected during the seminar at the Open Theatre.78 (1) Lie on your stomach and clear your mind. Relax and be aware of the various parts of your body touching the floor. (2) Wake your body up, like a cat getting ready to spring. Stretch your arms out in all directions. Placing the palms of your hands flat on the floor next to your shoulders, lift your head slowly and turn it in various directions, stretching your neck. Rise your chest slowly off the floor, shifting your weight gradually to your hands. At the point where your chest is completely off the floor, lock yours elbows and knees, tuck your toes under, and raise your body as high as it will go, stretching up from your hands and feet in an arch of which your buttocks are the apex. (3) Flex that arch several times by dropping your buttocks and snapping your head up, then immediately raising your buttocks and dropping your head. (4) Walk your feet up toward your hands and back again; walk your hands back toward your feet and forward again. (5) In the push-up position, but with your head and shoulders lowered slightly, imagine that a small ball is rolling slowly down your spinal column, vertebra by vertebra, from the small of your back to your head. When the ball gets to your neck, realign your body so that it will roll slowly back where it came from. Repeat several times. (6) Swivel your body at your hips, bending the knees and swooping down towards the floor. (7) Again in the push-up position, turn

80  Sharing cultures: the European tours your body so that you face to the side. Bring the knee of your upper leg toward your ear and stretch your head toward it over your shoulder. At the same time, push your foot out and away, in an attempt to extend the leg. This is like a fight between your upper and lower leg, with the latter eventually winning. Repeat with the other leg. (8) Duck one shoulder under and roll over onto your back.79 Joseph Chaikin met Grotowski once again in July 1969, at the summer seminar organized by Eugenio Barba at the Odin Teatret, where both taught, along with the Colombaioni brothers,80 Roberto Vitali, Jolanda Rodio, Yves Lebreton and Ingemar Lindh.81 This time, Chaikin disagreed with Grotowski’s approach to theater. In a letter to van Itallie, he wrote that the Polish master was too severe, and that the general atmosphere reminded him of a monastery, with Grotowski in the role of the priest. At Holstebro, everything seemed excessively spiritual, and so enigmatic as to seem a sort of cult.82 What was peculiar to the Open Theatre was an approach to theatre research outlined in the various collaborations and in the successive arrivals of new members. The group’s approach was also based principally on the knowledge that Chaikin had acquired during his education in America and that evolved through his personal experience of working with actors: a different training concept from the one of Grotowski or that of Eugenio Barba. Notes 1 La Mama Experimental Theater Club Presents: Off-Off Broadway Theater, poster of the first European tour. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. Some of these one-act plays are analyzed in Bonnie Marranca, American Playwrights, cit. 2 In a letter to the Paris group, Stewart complains of a lack of press attention in New York as well, despite her efforts to send local critics information about the tour. Correspondence between the companies in Europe and Ellen Stewart is kept at the La MaMa Archives, in record La Mama Repertory Troupe. First European Tour (1965–1966). 3 E. Stewart, Ellen Stewart and La Mama, cit., p. 16. 4 Among the photographs kept at La MaMa Archives, there are some images from 1965 that portray Ellen Stewart in the Paris workshop temporarily set up for creating the masks. 5 Clifford Wright, in E. Gress, Boxiganga, cit., p. 94. 6 Martin R. Russel, Tom O’Horgan, Staging the Outrageous: A Chronological Study of His Theatre, Dissemination to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre, CUNY, New York 1997. 7 Bill Simmer and Robb Creese, The Theatrical Style of Tom O’Horgan: “The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria”, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 21, n. 2, June 1977, pp. 59–78.

Sharing cultures: the European tours  81 8 Harald Engberg, American Experimental Theatre Troupe at “Comediehuset”, «Politiken», October 19, 1965. For convenience, of the articles cited hereafter, reference will be made to the English translation, probably edited by Elsa Gress herself, together with the original press release in Danish, in “La Mama Repertory Troupe”, cit., Courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 9 La Mama Surprises, «Berlingske Tidende», November 2, 1965. The stage directions were: “a cellar crammed with the refuse of a lifetime”. The photos taken in Denmark (kept at La MaMa Archives) show a stage filled with props on the floor, on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, with very dim lighting, which probably made the stage space look like a cave. 10 Per Gudmansen, Gloomy Merriment in the Comediehuset, «Actuelt», October 19, 1965. 11 The American Surplus¸ «Roskilde Tidende», January 26, 1966. 12 La Mama Makes Living Theatre, «Jyllands-Posten», February 3, 1966. 13 A. Aronson, American Avantgarde: A History, cit. 14 The testimony is part of the interview released by Eugenio Barba to the author. Rome, September 30, 2022. 15 On Rome’s cellars (Cantine Romane), see the already-cited D. Visone, La Nascita del Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1959–1967 and S. Margiotta, Il Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1968–1975; on Fringe Theatre see Sandy Craig, Dreams and Deconstructions. Alternative Theatre in Britain, Albert Lane Press, Ambergate 1980 and Catherine Itzin, Stages in the Revolution. Political Theatre in Britain since 1968, Eyre Methuen London, London 1980. 16 Eugenio Barba and Ludwik Flaszen, A Theatre of Magic and Sacrilege, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 9, n. 3, Spring 1965, pp. 166–189, and Eugenio Barba and Simone Sanzenbach, Theatre Laboratory 13 Rezdow, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 9, n. 3, Spring 1965, pp. 153–265. 17 La Mama Repertory Troupe. First European Tour (1965–1966), cit. 18 Paul Foster, letter to Eugenio Barba, October 21, 1966. The correspondence is kept at the Odin Teatret Archive, Odin-Letters-B1, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 19 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, «The Village Voice», March 17, 1966. 20 Dan Sullivan, Six from La Mama – and Their Ma, «The New York Times», April 10, 1966. 21 Stanley Kauffmann, Last 3 Plays of ‘6 From La Mama’ Offered at the Martinique, «The New York Times», April 13, 1966; see also, by the same author, Theater: ‘La Mama’ Bill: First 3 of 6 Plays Open at The Martinique, «The New York Times», April 12, 1966. 22 E. Stewart, Ellen Stewart and La Mama, cit. 23 Eugenio Barba, Teatro, Solitudine, Mestiere e Rivolta, Edizioni Di Pagina, Bari 2018. 24 Theatre of the Thirteen Rows. 25 Eugenio Barba, Teater i bakeveje, «Samtiden», 8, 1964, cited in Erik Exe Christoffersen, The Actor’s Way, Routledge, London and New York 2003, pp. 15–16. 26 Torgeir Wethal in E. E. Christoffersen, The Actor’s Way, cit., p. 49. 27 Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Ivi, p. 52. 28 Eugenio Barba’s training technique refers not only to Grotowski but also to the other masters of the European tradition: Vsevolod Meyerhold’d, Jacques Copeau and Étienne Decroux, promoters of a physical theater for which training

82  Sharing cultures: the European tours was a fundamental element. See Ian Watson, Towards a Third Theatre. Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, Routledge, London and New York 2007. 29 About the Odin Seminars, see Simone Dragone, Le origini del seminario. Il Teatro Laboratorio come nuovo Sistema di produzione, «Il Castello di Elsinore», vol. XXXV, n. 85, 2022, pp. 89–113. 30 Eugenio Barba, Lands of Ashes and Diamonds. My Apprenticeship in Poland, European Contemporary Classics and Black Mountain Press, Aberystwyth, Wales 1999. For details on the organization of the seminars from 1966 to 1969, see Scandinavian Theatre Laboratory for the Art of Acting, Activities, 1966–1972, Odin Teatret – Activities_B10, and Work program, Activities B7B. Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 31 Margaret Croyden, Notes from the Temple: A Grotowski Seminar, «The Drama Review », vol. 14, n. 1, Autumn 1969, pp. 178–183. See also Jennifer Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski, Methuen, London 1985. Grotowski’s seminars were also recorded and transcribed by Marianne Ahrne in their original French version, kept at the Odin Teatret Archives. 32 Mirella Schino, Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories in Europe, Routledge, London and New York 2013. 33 E. Barba and L. Flaszen, A Theatre of Magic and Sacrilege, cit., p. 172. 34 Ivi, p. 173. 35 Eugenio Barba, Alla ricerca del teatro perduto. Una proposta dell’avanguardia polacca, Marsilio editori, Padova 1965. 36 The information is reported in a diary page kindly made available to the author by Jean-Claude van Itallie during an interview given by the playwright on April 9, 2021. 37 Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner and Jacques Chwat, An Interview with Grotowski, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 1, Autumn 1968, pp. 29–45, p. 33. 38 Ivi, p. 34. 39 Ivi, p. 36. 40 Ibidem. 41 Ivi, pp. 37–38. 42 Café La MaMa Scores Again at Festival, «New York Post», Saturday, September 17, 1966. Courtesy La MaMa Archive. 43 E. Gress, Boxiganga, cit. 44 The dates are listed in a program in the folder La Mama Repertory Troupe/3th European Tour, courtesy La MaMa Archive. 45 Elsa Gress, The Lost Years, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 3, Spring 1969, pp. 115–119. 46 Jonas Cornell, A Theatre Which Is Present, «Expressen», July 11, 1967. 47 Mario Grut, Theatre as Life Itself – But a Little Bit More, «Aftonbladet», July 19, 1967. The British translation, edited by Harald Brockmann, is present in the folder La Mama Repertory Troupe/3th European Tour/Sweden, Denmark + Holland July-August 1967, courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart private collection. 48 La Mama und ihre Spiele, «Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung», June 7, 1967. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. 49 Ingmar Bjorksten, Going Off Off Broadway the Swedish Way, «The Village Voice», August 24, 1967. 50 In this period, Tom Eyen also collaborated with La MaMa. He was the author of the first works that Marie-Claire Charba and Jaque Lynn Colton brought

Sharing cultures: the European tours  83 to Europe in the spring of 1965. Many of his one-act plays were performed at La MaMa from 1964, and in 1967, he founded a company called The Theatre of the Eye Repertory Company, based at Stewart’s Café. The heroines of his dramas are the divas of history, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Marilyn Monroe, ironically depicted. His directions would lead many young female actors to success, paving their way to the Broadway scene and to Hollywood cinema, such as Helen Hanft, Bette Midler, Candy Darling, Shirley Soler and many others. On the subject, see Zarko Kalmic, The Many Mad Women in Tom Eyen’s Life, «After Dark», December 1974, pp. 30–38. 51 J. K., ‘Tom Paine’ Outstanding Theatre, «Glasgow Herald», September 5, 1967. 52 Charles Marowitz, Marowitz on La Mama, «Prompt», n. 9, 1967, pp. 24–26; B. A. Young, Tom Paine, «The Financial Times», October 18, 1967. 53 Rebecca Cox and Eric Bass, La Mama on La Mama, «Prompt», n. 9, 1967, pp. 18–23. 54 John Walker, America Hurrah, Lonsdale Boo, «Town», September 1967. 55 An aim that Stewart also pursued in the United States, where in Baltimore she granted the rights to present the works produced by La MaMa to Leslie Irons and Clifford Pottberg, who managed a space in free concession, opened in 1967 as a club (at 853 North Howard Street), where the plays were staged by amateurs. 56 America urrà: il teatro della rivolta, «Sipario», n. 272, Dicembre 1968. 57 Robert Pasolli, The New Playwrights? Scene of the Sixties: Jerome Max is Alive and Well and Living in Rome…, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 1, Autumn 1968, pp. 150–162. 58 Ed Bullins, A Short Statement on Street Theater, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre (Summer, 1968), p. 93. 59 Rochelle Owens, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 2, Gale, Detroit 1985, pp. 255–269. 60 M. R. Russel, Tom O’Horgan, Staging the Outrageous, cit., p. 79. 61 Namely like the harmonic-instrumental support that in Baroque music accompanied the melodies from the beginning to the end of the musical score. 62 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, «The Village Voice», March 9, 1967. 63 Ivi. 64 Joyce Tretck, Futz. “Astonishingly Real”, «Show Business», March 11, 1967. 65 Telegram from Ellen Stewart to Stanley Rosenberg, June 5, 1967, Odin Teatret Archive – Activities – B30. Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 66 Erik Aschengren, Strong Meat at La Mama, «Berlingske Tidende», August 4, 1967. Courtesy La MaMa Archive. 67 “Nel centro della ristretta pedana una piattaforma appena rialzata sulla quale appaiono gli attori impegnati nell’azione reale o in quella solo ricostruita dalla memoria. Tutt’intorno gli altri attori che fanno coro alla vicenda passandosi l’un l’altro certe batture o pronunciando le didascalie “e allora Futz disse …” come in un esercizio brechtiano. Dove la regia di O’Horgan sfiora la più pura maestria è in particolare in due scene. La prima è la ricostruzione dei preliminari erotici – sempre visti dalla memoria del protagonista – che porteranno, nel loro sviluppo ossessivo, il signor Futz all’omicidio. La sensualità di questa scena è quasi irresistibile e vi contribuiscono in egual misura, la bravura dei due attori, le luci, i movimenti, il coro di sommessi gemiti e schiocchi di lingua che tutti gli altri attori eseguono intorno alla pedana ondeggiando ritmicamente. L’altra scena è quella della visita in carcere della madre, alla vigilia

84  Sharing cultures: the European tours ormai dell’esecuzione. Seth Allen (che con questa interpretazione ha vinto il premio come migliore attore dell’Off Broadway) è insuperabile nell’esprimere il suo addio al mondo in nome di una deviata lascivia che trova sfogo ma non consolazione in un ultimo amplesso con la madre”. Corrado Augias, Il caffè come luogo teatrale, «Sipario», XXII, n. 254, June 1967, pp. 25–27, p. 27. 68 J. K., Bailie Seeks Magistrates’ Meeting to Consider Action against Play, «The Glasgow Herald», August 25, 1967. 69 George Hume, BESTIALITY! Woman Bailie Backs Express Protest, «Scottish Daily Express», August 24, 1967. 70 Ivi. 71 Brian Meek, Futz Furore, «Scottish Daily Express», August 25, 1967. 72 Robert Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and New York 1970. 73 The first performance, From an Odets Kitchen, was scheduled over two evenings held in December 1963 at the Sheridan Square Theatre; the next, at the Martinique Theatre, was given in April 1964. On both occasions, the group staged some improvisations taken from the training sessions and short works created during the workshops with the writers. 74 The dates are given in the production list at La MaMa, kindly made available by La MaMa Archives. For more information, see R. Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre, cit. 75 Jean-Claude van Itallie, in an interview granted to the author on April 9, 2021, recalled that Grotowski asked him not only to refer what he said but also to transmit to the participants the energy that animated his indications, to interpret them by also transmitting their tone, to shout when he shouted. 76 Carol Martin, After Paradise: The Open Theatre’s The Serpent, Terminal, and The Mutation Show, in James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (eds.), Restaging the Sixties. Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2009, pp. 79–105. 77 Van Itallie testifies that one influence was above all the intensity with which Grotowski related to theater, an aspect that in his opinion Grotowski, Chaikin and Peter Brook had in common. 78 R. Pasolli, A Book on The Open Theatre, cit. Descriptions of exercises are at pages 97–101. 79 Ivi, pp. 97–98. Following The Cat, there is a detailed description of other exercises, such as The Big Tower, The Candle, The Small Tower, The Head Stand, The Shoulder Stand, Slow-motion Walk and Tense-up. These trainings, performed consecutively, later became part of a workshop held by Lee Worley for new members joining the group. 80 Romano, Mario, Nani, Willy and Carlo Colombaioni were brothers belonging to a family of jugglers, tightrope walkers, acrobats and clowns, famous in the Fifties for having starred in various films by Federico Fellini (La Strada, Amarcord). They had been invited to Odin Teatret to hold seminars on improvisation and the Commedia dell’Arte. 81 On the seminars, see Activities, 1966–1972, Odin Teatret – Activities – B10, cit. 82 Joseph Chaikin, correspondence with Jean-Claude van Itallie, July 1969. Barry Daniels papers, Correspondence of Joseph Chaikin files, 1969, Kent State University Libraries, Department of Special Collections and Archives.

4 Developing a new kind of theater

4.1

From a theater of playwrights to a theater of directors

Joseph Chaikin and Tom O’Horgan began their collaboration with La MaMa at two different periods, but both were guests of Ellen Stewart, with their respective companies, starting in 1965. A year that saw the inauguration of artistic residencies in the Lower East Side venue, with a kind of hospitality that would spread throughout the theatrical world in the years to come, and that in the Sixties was perhaps more the prerogative of large centers, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). It was a fundamental initiative in that it offered groups a workshop space where they could experiment on an ongoing basis and therefore had the time and space needed to meet and work together. As already mentioned, the sharing of spaces in the same venue encouraged the collaboration of artists from the different companies, who could participate in their respective training programs or in the productions themselves. An artistic exchange that Ellen Stewart facilitated from the start by sending the plays of Jean-Claude van Itallie, a former member of the Open Theatre, to Tom O’Horgan so that he could stage them during his tour in Europe. The one-act plays War and Motel were in fact directed by O’Horgan in Denmark and France. At the same time, the hosting of groups at La MaMa fostered the formation of stable companies in the Off-Off Broadway theater and led to a new approach to experimentation which, while it went beyond the usual practice of artists migrating from one venue to another (according to the play their patrons chose to produce), also fell in line with the custom of the more commercial circuit, in which already consolidated groups took turns on the stages of the theaters in Broadway. However, La MaMa Repertory Troupe, together with other companies that would form shortly after, welcomed artists who already knew each other from having collaborated on one or more productions in the East Village cafes but who rarely had experienced an ensemble work in a well-established group before joining O’Horgan’s. DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-5

86  Developing a new kind of theater What characterized these new companies were their very different acting and staging styles, which over time became very distinctive. The same was true for the choice of the works they produced. In the case of the Open Theatre, they were originated in the context of the workshop; in the productions of the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, the choice favored works that matched the highly physicality of their acting. As for The Theatre of the Eye, they staged plays which were written expressly for the group by Tom Eyen who was both playwright and director. Hence, from the mid-Sixties, there was a notable shift in the very concept of Off-Off Broadway theater. With the advent of stable ensembles, an established repertoire alternated with new experimental productions. No longer were works staged for just a few days or a week but designed to be restaged in both the venue that produced them and other American theaters and cities. Production time expanded, and at the same time, the research carried out by the different groups became ever more sharply focused. While at the beginning of the Sixties the productions widely differed from each other in content and style, toward the end of the decade, the performances created by a group were increasingly linked to each other by their style and the poetics developed by that company. The chance to benefit from training and workshop experimentation led artists to identify themselves as a group, especially when they could experience a communal life enhanced by increasingly frequent tours both in Europe and in the United States. It was an aspect that the companies Stewart hosted had in common with other groups belonging to the Western Avantgarde, many of which were not limited to sharing only work time but also participated in actual commune-type arrangements, with mutual support from the members even in the obligations of daily and family life. For some groups, first among them The Living Theatre, communal life became an overall, essential work premise, increasingly based on collective creation and on a complete sharing of ideas and intentions. This occurred especially for the most politically active companies engaged in protest theater such as in the United States, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre or Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, involved in the social issues of the farm workers. The Open Theatre’s workshops and the daily training sessions, such as that chosen by Tom O’Horgan for La MaMa’s first company, brought about a more professional approach and the abandonment of the amateurism that originally characterized Off-Off Broadway. The previous chapter showed how the research for an actor’s training, as an alternative to what the various New York schools were offering, was dictated by the desire to promote Off-Off Broadway on commercial theatrical stages. However, what also emerged from this was a desire to maintain the freshness that developed from the freedom of expression and

Developing a new kind of theater   87 experimentation typical of the underground scene of the early years, in addition to its marked spectacularity, which was now preserved thanks to the multiple elements and expressive registers employed in the staging. The mix of acting, music, dance and song was increasingly intensified in both O’Horgan’s and Tom Eyen’s productions, as well as in some of the Open Theatre’s works. Hence, there was a shift from a playwright’s theater to a director’s theater. It was an evolution that gradually emerged throughout the Off-Off Broadway theater. This change was favored by Ellen Stewart with her support of various companies, offering them hospitality and subsidizing the research needed for new productions. In some instances, she was the one who financially supported the artists, so that they could concentrate on training and shared work for the time required. This phenomenon found its place in the lively New York scene, where other key groups to the development of the American Avant-garde were emerging from analogous training projects and workshops, differentiating themselves from those that had preceded them: theatrical collectives based on standard production strategies that clearly distinguished the roles of director, actor and author. Arnold Aronson explains this well when he writes that “what made the new ensembles different from their predecessors was the ostensible elimination of this organizational structure, the self-consciously non-hierarchical creative process, and often a belief in the collective as a model for their social and political philosophies”.1 One example was The Performance Group founded by Richard Schechner in 1967 after Grotowski’s seminar at New York University, for which, as for the groups based at Stewart’s theater, the main objective was to develop an ensemble whose training and creative process were shared and pursued in the quest for a new, common theatrical language. A quest that, as for other Avant-garde protagonists, was inspired by the theories of Antonin Artaud and motivated by the need for a different type of relationship with the audience, which became an integral element of the community itself. It was a way of thinking not entirely new in America, since it had a precursor in The Group Theatre that Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg had founded in 1931 with the aim of overcoming the current production rules through a new form of training, together with a theater produced by the ensemble conceived as a community. The Group Theatre had also created a new approach to actor training through the founding of specialized schools whose teaching was based on the Stanislavsky Method and directed by members of the company. Stella Adler had opened her New York studio in 1949; Sanford Meisner was director from 1935 of The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre (opened in New York in 1915 as the first professional conservatory for actors); and Robert Lewis, Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan had founded the Actors’ Studio in 1947.2

88  Developing a new kind of theater 4.2

Ensemble is the key

The first director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club was Tom O’Horgan. After starting his acting career with a one-man show and having directed short dramas in a few Off-Off Broadway venues, including the Caffe Cino, he arrived at La MaMa in 1964, invited to direct Jean Genet’s The Maids, the first of a long series of productions. At Ellen Stewart’s theater, collaborating initially as director and later also as artistic director, he developed his personal poetics and a style heavily influenced by his previous musical training. O’Horgan’s vision of the stage as a place to explore “the realities of color, movement and the plastic arts”3 supported his research up to his 1968 musical triumph Hair, and other successful productions both in the experimental Off-Off Broadway and on Broadway. As could already be seen in his first European productions, what he sought were new expressive languages through an extremely physical theater whose different elements he orchestrated by organizing them in musical terms and focusing more on the rhythms of the performance than on its narrative or political contents. O’Horgan employed many styles, drawing on burlesque, court masques or seventeenth-century Italian intermezzos, mixing music, song and choreographic elements with humorous but also violent or sensual ones, and alternating direct speech with narration.4 His expressive research took shape on stage in an architecture of bodies, in which the movement of the actors dictated its variations. It was no accident that many critics identified the company’s effectiveness in its ensemble acting. In allowing the performers’ maximum expressive freedom O’Horgan guided them toward a group identity. His workshop activity was fundamental for the group, as it enabled the actors to familiarize themselves with each other, understand each other’s personalities and respective abilities. This took the form of shared research work in which company members learned to react and relate first as people and subsequently in the roles of their respective characters. This activity laid the ground for the creative work, in which scenic solutions were discussed and developed.5 In the same years in which O’Horgan took his first steps in La MaMa, Joseph Chaikin – who had served as an actor in The Living Theatre since 1959, recognized both in the Off-Broadway commercial circuit and in the experimental one – brought, along with the other members of the Open Theatre, a new orientation to creative work and the new approach to acting, better suited to staging Avant-garde works. The group, which founded a workshop whose members in their turn directed sessions on the technical or creative aspects of acting, underwent many changes over the years due to the alternation of old and new members and periods of instability due to a focusing on different aspects, such as pure experimentation or the production of plays.6

Developing a new kind of theater   89

Figure 4.1 Poster of Open Theatre Ensemble Improvisations at La MaMa, October 27, 1965, directed by Joseph Chaikin. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

90  Developing a new kind of theater In 1967, Joseph Chaikin took over the management of the Open Theatre and returned to his original idea of a workshop focused mainly on research. He structured the work in four weekly sessions, leaving less space for specific workshops held by the group’s other members and concentrating his experimentation on just one project at a time. His aim was to explore non-realistic acting, dreams, myths and poetry, the interaction of the ensemble and a new relationship with the spectators, which might lead to a more sensitive reciprocity between actors and the audience.7 In the autumn of 1967, the company attended a seminar held in New York by Jerzy Grotowski, which delineated a more rigorous and structured approach to physical training. O’Horgan and Chaikin had very different ideas about staging, but they shared the concept of a shared artistic creation no longer centered, as was the case with the Method, on individual work on the character. The two directors were openly fascinated by Artaud’s poetics and probably followed the example of The Living Theatre, basing their experiments on the idea that collective creation was indispensable for shaping an energy that could emotionally involve (or upset) the audience. Chaikin could not feel the presence of an ensemble behind the stagings of The Living Theatre and was of the opinion that an essential step was developing a sensitivity toward the members of the company in perceiving their rhythm, a sensitivity that the group led by Beck and Malina had not acquired despite its communal life. To achieve this, Chaikin came up with a set of exercises to experiment in workshop sessions at the Open Theatre, and to avoid the emergence of those automatisms or familiar patterns that can be the consequence of a shared life on a daily basis, he offered short-term workshops that contained constantly new variations in their working approach.8 Also, since he considered it essential to extend the sense of community to audiences, Chaikin developed specific techniques for creating a meeting space between actors and audience. One of these was Expecting, an exercise in which an actor improvised a scene where he developed the character based on the presumed expectations of the spectators and reacted to the stimuli they gave off (or that the other characters gave off, if the aim was to focus on the interaction between actors). Empathy with the audience could also be created through specific scenic actions. For example, during the monologues of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s one-act play Interview, the actors would address the spectators directly, narrating what was going on with the character. The training and experimentation phases proved to be precious for both actors and writers. As he wrote in a short 1966 article, van Itallie was able to further elaborate his ideas and give them concrete form through the suggestions that emerged from the Open Theatre’s research.

Developing a new kind of theater   91 In September of 1963 Gordon Rogoff, to whom I had shown a couple of my plays, suggested I come with him to a loft on 24th Street where a group of actors were working together improvisationally and were looking for playwrights to help them in some new fashion. The group was the Open Theater, and had been in existence a few months. At that time there was nowhere, to my knowledge, that an unknown playwright with a few unconventional one-act plays could go to see his work performed sympathetically, to say nothing of a place to experiment with actors and directors. I had just finished reading Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double. I had ideas about possible huge non-human figures (I had written one called America Hurrah), and plays involving improvisation (I had written one called War). What was needed from my point of view, and indeed, as it turned out, from many people’s, was a place to work that had a totally different kind of spirit from that existing anywhere in the theater in New York. It was from this evident need on the part of actors, directors, and playwrights that the Open Theater was born.9 Brecht’s idea of theater as a place of entertainment and education was the substantial assumption on which Joseph Chaikin based his research. For him, theater was a space for investigating human beings and life, and developing new languages, but also for meeting and celebrating, shared with the spectators, which might also affect their lives: “You’re there in that particular space in that room, breathing in that room… That’s what the theater is. It’s this demonstration of presence on some human theme or other and in some form or other”.10 Tom O’Horgan, who was also inspired as much by Artaud as by Brecht, pursued the objective of establishing a new relationship with the audience by breaking down its defenses through the theatrical experience, forcing spectators to focus on themselves, to free what was hidden in their unconscious and guide them toward a sort of catharsis. The principle of a shared ceremony between those on stage and the audience also led to a shift from the usual practice in the use of space by both abolishing the fourth wall and shattering the physical limits (already weak in the Off-Off Broadway theater venues) that separate actors from spectators. Both American directors reflected the poetics of Jerzy Grotowski, for whom the lively and immediate contact between actors and spectators, united in a community, was one of the mainstays of theater as a work of art. In his theorizing and experimentation, Grotowski saw the director as a figure who brought together actors and spectators. An idea that he would experiment with and put into practice to bring about a completely common space that no longer presented any physical or aesthetic delimitation between performer and observer and in which performers and spectators became simultaneously observers and observed, co-actors in the ceremony of theater.11

92  Developing a new kind of theater But the question of space, and in particular that of eliminating the limits that separate hall and stage in resolving the dynamics of the actor-spectator relationship, was dear to all the theatrical Avant-garde. In Viet Rock, the Open Theatre led its actors to establish real physical contact with the spectators, an invitation that The Performance Group addressed to the audience itself, urging them to take an active part in the stage action in Dionysus in 69.12 For its part, The Living Theatre, again in the wake of Artaud’s theories, promoted a communion with the public in its European experiments, as happened with Antigone in 1967. However, the key to a true communal relationship with audiences was often seen in the ensemble acting that both guest directors at La MaMa indicated as a prerequisite for an effective performance. In Richard Schechner’s 1964 interview, Chaikin criticized the American training systems that referred to the Lee Strasberg Method because of the excessive attention it gave to introspection on character, since it focused on a type of individual research, excluding a collective work. Further, the in-depth analysis of text and character that it prioritized led to defining a set of actions that in most cases remained unaltered and did not take into account one’s fellow actors, who shared in the performance and the audiences, which changed with each performance.13 On the contrary, the research of the Open Theatre focused on a collective creation organized around the needs that emerged from the different situations. Hence, each actor, while working on her or himself, also focused on the personal impulses that emerged in response to the actions of fellow actors on stage. In short, he/she always worked in relation to others. In the midst of the protests and movements of the Sixties, in a period marked by a strong push toward communal life and a need for new types of human interactions, O’Horgan too found an answer in his quest for a new relationship with the audience. His theater, full of powerful images and spectacular effects, offered a disruptive on-stage energy that, with songs, dances and acrobatics, aimed at a true sensorial bombardment of the audience, to awaken it from the torpor caused by mainstream theater. An effect that he also achieved by pushing the action into the audience space, as in Futz, where the lead actors and the narrating chorus alternated between the audience and acting spaces, or by requesting the actors to address the spectators directly for an actual exchange on the dramatic themes, as in Tom Paine. His quest for a total theater that involved the spectator also materialized in the encounter between the different arts and in the definition of a theater whose scenic elements were not functional to the narration but organized in musical terms, following the rhythms of the performance and with the frequent presence of a chorus that comments on the action reciting or singing.14 This research was pursued in his workshop through training focused

Developing a new kind of theater   93 on group coordination through collective exercises, or practiced in pairs, based on movements and actions performed at variable rhythms to encourage the actors to work together and help them to abandon the Method’s individualistic approach.15 To give a better idea of the type of work that the group undertook, the following excerpt describes a session on the creation phase of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (by Fernando Arrabal, produced in 1976 at La MaMa and later brought on its European tour), a play that O’Horgan did not fully define in rehearsals, leaving some changes up to the actors from one performance to the next. In one exercise used throughout the rehearsal process of The Architect, two actors stood on one side of the room and two others stood opposite them. They were instructed to move very slowly across the space, taking perhaps ten minutes to get there. During this time, they were to perform five activities that could be repeated if the actors wanted, but all five had to be accomplished within the time limit. First, they had to do a physical exercise or execute a gesture. They had to remove one article of clothing, they had to say a speech from the play, they had to exchange an article of clothing, and, at one point, they would embrace someone. On the opening night in 1977,16 O’Horgan asked them to do this exercise to clear their minds. They focused on a particular problem they had been having, whether it involved character, a speech, or understanding the play itself. O’Horgan wanted them to manifest the problem in the five actions.17 Both Chaikin and O’Horgan based their training on techniques and systems drawn from the American tradition and the Method variants of the American masters but also on the training and principles of the European masters, such as Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski. However, the two American directors developed – through research carried out both in their workshops and in on-stage experimentation – two new and original approaches to actors training and to creative work that suggested a method suitable for Avant-garde theatrical experimentation as an alternative to the by then predominant Method. O’Horgan recognized the need to train his actors on their return from Europe, by creating a personal approach based on his theatrical and musical background. On his part, Chaikin pursued his idea of a workshop as a place of experimentation by developing, in parallel with the European masters, a training technique for actors that was wholly American. However, in both cases, some of the exercises advanced by Barba and Grotowski were adopted in physical training, considered useful for freeing up the actor and making her or his body more malleable and receptive to creative impulses.

94  Developing a new kind of theater What needs to be stressed here is the importance that the encounters and collaborations between American and European directors had for promoting theatrical research. Thanks to the tours of the Open Theatre and the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, and to the seminars that Barba and Grotowski offered, there was a cross-fertilization of knowledge and practices between America and Europe. Merit must also be attributed to those who encouraged and facilitated this osmosis. In this sense, the contributions of Ellen Stewart, Richard Schechner and other American personalities were fundamental, as were those of Eugenio Barba, who in Europe favored exchanges through the activities of the Odin Teatret, and of Peter Brook, who, not surprisingly, for the production of US invited Grotowski and Chaikin to work with him in London. This anti-Vietnam War play was a collective creation, the product of three and a half months of rehearsals, also with the input of Grotowski and Chaikin.18 Furthermore, the various training approaches that emerged on the two continents created the conditions for developing an eclecticism and diversity in the approach to acting that would become one of the mainstays of Avant-garde theater. 4.3

From training to collective creation

The workshops, which stressed the group’s communal dimension, also forged a process of discovery and knowledge of oneself and one’s own personal abilities, thanks to the training and acquisition of a technique. The experimentation was essential for discovering one’s potential, as Joseph Chaikin highlighted: What we know of another person comes through the voice and the body. If the voice of the actor is limited to the reporting of the sounds we use for conversation and the body is fastened to the repertoire of sitting, standing, and fending off, there is the same potential for articulation as there is over coffee and Danish. I don’t mean simply that physical and vocal range is important, but that a total sensitivity is – so that the jaw or the torso can accomplish as clear a description as the full use of the body. The first thing we always have to do is unlock the body and the voice from the ruts into which they fall in everyday life, and move from there. […] The balance we have to keep is how to discourage ourselves from going in directions which are noncreative, indulgent, and in imitation of constrictive social attitudes, while at the same time leaving ourselves open and available to the tides which are full of life and energy, informed from a vast and

Developing a new kind of theater   95 infinite place which enlarges. The first requires blocking, the second entails being out of the way; this is a hard balance to maintain.19 Contrary to the psychological approach, which simplifies human experience and bases its work on the mood or sensations of a single character, at the Open Theatre, the actors searched for a way to embody their rhythm and their shape. By working on rhythm and the unconscious, and not on emotional memory, the actors did not completely identify with their characters and remained detached from them. Here technique became functional to the creative process.20 What we try to do is to find a metaphor, images on the stage which are somewhere between the dream and an event of actuality, and there’s somewhere in … these very private metaphors that we will meet. … [By] metaphor I mean the ways things in the dream are metaphors for different kinds of situations that we can’t see very easily, but they exist inside. But in a dream they come out in one picture, they come out in one image.21 This approach can be traced back to that adopted by the Russian director Michael Chekhov, and before him by Rudolf Steiner, who influenced the former. They both constructed the character by an introspective technique that addressed the unconscious and not the emotional memory, thus avoiding the risk of excessive emotional involvement caused by psychological introspection. It was no coincidence that Chekhov’s acting technique, widespread in the United States in the Forties and Fifties, was familiar to Joseph Chaikin and other members of the group.22 Chaikin, like Chekhov and Stanislavsky himself in the ultimate evolution of his method, also relied more on the relationship linking movement or gesture to feeling rather than on emotional memory. The idea of the Open Theatre as a permanent workshop also took shape from the impulse of actors who, like Chaikin, had previously been students of Nola Chilton, who until 1962 (the year she moved to Israel) in her courses in New York had offered a non-naturalistic approach to acting. Starting with the Method, Chilton had developed exercises for approaching non-naturalistic scenes, useful for working on character.23 Some of these, which followed the principle of physical adjustment, were developed by Chaikin in his Sound-and-movement technique. In Chilton’s exercises, the behavior corresponding to the specific movement of an object was investigated by trying to physically reproduce it with gestures or by the impulsive physical responses to the stimulus of a color or sound. Instead, Sound-and-movement involves the execution of pure

96  Developing a new kind of theater actions, free from emotions and everyday behavior. The actors exercised in pairs, creating a dramatic event that started from the reciprocal exchange of an action (which did not exclude sounds), whose dynamics and form were heightened each time by the partner’s kinetic impulse. The same type of exchange could also take place between several people arranged in two opposing rows, between which physical action was the only means of communication, to the exclusion of elements deriving from everyday behavior. In both cases, each movement was generated by a kinetic impulse that in turn led to an emotion. Emotional experience was thus generated by the action itself. Peter Feldman spoke of this technique in 1972, in his speech at the international symposium New Methods of Educational Drama, in Amsterdam, where he also held workshops with young American and Danish non-professionals. Feldman described Sound-and-movement as a very useful exercise for teaching observation and concentration, freeing the body, reducing inhibitions, promoting contact between actors and developing a sense of communication between them. Above all, he explained how they lead to irrational experience through the atmosphere of play.24 It was a simple technique, followed by other more elaborate, improvisationbased ones, such as The Odets Kitchen or Inside-Outside, which explored the dynamics and inner impulses that regulate the relationships between the characters, even though actions improvised simultaneously by different groups of actors.25 From the start, Chaikin, like O’Horgan, also adopted some theatrical games that the actor and pedagogue Viola Spolin26 had devised to distance the actors from the tendency toward psychological introspection and to free them from acquired automatisms. She published the exercises of her improvisation-based system in her 1963 book Improvisation for the Theater.27 These were actions with a very simple structure that gave actors the elements from which to start using their bodies in a non-naturalistic way. Some were used to gain awareness of space, such as Walking in space and Touching the air, while others involved using imaginary objects, such as Passing and receiving and Molding the object. Other games were based on improvisation, such as Transformation, in which the actor had to follow her or his instinct and break with freely established circumstances, accepting the changes and variations made by a partner and seeking her/his way to join in the modified action.28 In the Open Theatre workshops, what might be transformed was the theatrical style of a scene or an improvised dialogue by the actors. The author’s input completed the transformation, which could also result in the definition of the character. This exercise inspired Megan Terry’s Calm Down Mother and Keep Tightly Closed in a Cold Dry Place.

Developing a new kind of theater   97 Within the group, the actors themselves held workshops for their fellows, focusing on the skills obtained in their respective education. They shared the objectives of a new approach to scenic creation and of a non-naturalistic acting that arose from a collaborative process in shared experimentation.29 Specifically, Chaikin investigated new ways to establish a more sensitive interaction both between the actors and between artists and audiences, making use, as in his work on character, of musical and somatic methods focused on rhythm and on physical and non-psychological impulses.30 A research aimed at the direct transmission of sensations no longer conveyed by the intellect but by the kinetic impulses that moved the bodies of the actors according to different rhythms and corresponding to the alternation of the character’s feelings. Chaikin considered this somatic approach to be circular. Since interiority was expressed in movement and bodily attitudes, it was accessed through the forms and rhythms of the movement itself. A research that led back to both the Method of Physical Actions of the late Stanislavsky and to Grotowski’s work31 on physical actions but also to certain principles on which Michael Chekhov based the actor’s creative work.32 In the Open Theatre workshops, actor’s training coincided with the creative process and with the definition of the new experience of relating with the audience, experimented by means of observers during workshop sessions and theater audiences during performances. As we have seen, for Chaikin, effective results were guaranteed by the communal relationship that the group’s actors established in the long work sessions. The exercises aimed, in addition to providing each actor with particular skills, to creating a true ensemble, as well as achieving a unitary rhythm of the theatrical event, made possible only by a collective on-stage presence. The experimentation, which was never systematized in a method, was therefore aimed at defining a common language and recognizing reciprocal rhythms. The fundamental fulcrum of the exercises was improvisation, mostly collective, in which the actors had to adapt and react to sudden changes in the given situations, in ways that recalled jamming in jazz sessions. The training comprised physical and vocal exercises, as well as techniques for improving the respective performances, and therefore was aimed at achieving an organic form through mutual trust between the actors, by means of the receptivity of the rhythms and movements of others and the harmonizing of energies during the stage action. Finally, by relying on kinetic impulses to identify their inner states, the actors experienced new, never felt before emotions, useful for expressing even what often remains hidden in life. Many of the exercises consisted of short improvisations suggested by the writers of the group who, at the end of the experimentation, gave shape to

98  Developing a new kind of theater the definitive work. Playwrights oversaw the research by suggesting themes or variations, gathering the impulses that emerged during the workshop and breathing life into the work to be staged. An example of this was Open’s first public performance, presented in the winter of 1963–1964 at the Sheridan Square Theatre, entitled From an Odets Kitchen, the product of an experimentation of Jean-Claude van Itallie centered on improvising a realistic scene through non-verbal expressions of feelings. In the workshop, the actors were asked to identify and communicate the shape of the characters’ state of mind without resorting to words but rather by embodying their rhythm and translating it into metaphorical images.33 In some instances, as happened in other groups, part of the training flowed into the performance. It was a workshop overseen by Megan Terry that led to the staging of Viet Rock, while The Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces contained a scene taken from one of the sound-andmovement exercises of the Open Theatre34 in which the actors were divided into two rows, facing each other, and took turns executing a movement toward the opposite row with a second performer repeating the same movement, but with variations, before relaying it to a third performer in the opposite row. Another scene from the same play was made up of two yoga exercises familiar to some members of the group. The Performance Group also employed an assemblage of exercises adapted from Grotowski’s training to put together an Opening Ceremony, later part of Dionysus in 69.35 Tom O’Horgan set out from the opposite direction to Chaikin’s. After his European tours, O’Horgan, as director of La MaMa, began to formulate a training program for his actors, who, like many members of the Open Theatre, had been grounded in the training variants of the Actors’ Studio Method, but they still lacked a preparation capable of raising them to a more professional performative level. His goal was also to distance oneself from the psychological and realistic approach in working on character and to find new ways and styles of acting that were suitable for presenting the short one-act plays created for the alternative Off-Off Broadway circuit. However, even if they wanted to distance themselves from Lee Strasberg’s teaching and its several American variants, both O’Horgan and Chaikin still considered the Method to be a useful form of basic training because it helped actors to exploit themselves and their bodies as a creative tool, pushing them to explore and transcend their limits, as Chaikin himself testifies. All of the actors have had extensive training with Method teachers (and I use the term advisedly) and some of us are still going to class. I can’t imagine working with actors who don’t have a Method background – such training, even when it’s bad, helps an actor know how to use himself. But neither can I imagine working with actors who are content to stop with the Method.36

Developing a new kind of theater   99 In his training exercises, as in his rehearsals, O’Horgan encouraged the actors to freely experiment with their potential and the different ways of relating to their partners. The creative process developed specifically from the experience of the company’s European productions, identifying its founding element in investigation and collective creation. O’Horgan was inspired by the teachings of Viola Spolin and other masters under whom he had studied and had developed a large number of theater games and exercises that helped actors to free themselves from the psychological approach, to bolster their self-confidence and heighten the imagination of the group. Each training session began with group exercises aimed at developing a common physical language focused on movement and body expressiveness, while others adopted methods from the musical field, such as those he called Rows, inspired by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique (which combines sounds with specific distances and patterns), which had actors develop an action and simultaneously overcome different types of obstacles or simultaneously carry through thought and sensory sequences logically disconnected from the interference to which she or he had to react. When the actor carried out the action in the awareness of the actions being developed by others, without letting herself or himself be distracted by them while being involved in them on a perceptual level, she/he achieved in the performance a kind of spontaneity that also made it more engaging for the audience.37 In other instances, actors were asked to cross a space in slow motion, following a specific idea or course of action, or to perform simple actions which, when performed in this way, looked very different from their normal execution speed, implying a different kind of attention from those involved in them.38 The same exercises could also be performed in fast motion or by stopping movement, thus creating new experiences even with the simplest actions. The idea of such exercises certainly came from Grotowski’s seminars, which invited actors to perform their movements by imagining they were pushing back on some opposing force, while their whole bodies adapted to even the smallest movement. The slow motion experienced in a 1966 workshop is described in Towards a Poor Theater, the definitive text on Grotowski’s training, which Eugenio Barba published in 1968. – Start from a standing position – From a headstand, change to shoulderstand39 – With the legs still in the air, transfer the weight of the body from the shoulder to the back of the neck, the arms and hands on the ground for support – Rolling – still in slow motion – with legs outstreched [sic] – Return to original standing position

100  Developing a new kind of theater This exercise must be done with a certain imaginary force. You must imagine you are in constant contact with someone in order to give the exercise a definite direction. The great expressive force of this exercise lies in the control of the leg muscles. The toes are constantly stretched in a fixed direction. When one of the legs reaches the point at the end of the movement on the ground, the arm takes over. Here co-ordination is essential. Just before the leg movement finishes, the arm starts moving in the same direction and in the same way.40 In the workshops created for La MaMa Repertory Troupe, dance, acrobatics and voice exercises were practiced, again in groups, to improve expressiveness. Some of these were the fruit of Eugenio Barba’s teaching: in the first years of Odin Teatret, he relied heavily on Grotowski’s actor training, on Asian theater, but also on Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, above all for developing presence and achieving on-stage credibility.41 In fact, Tom O’Horgan adopted and integrated into his training some acrobatic exercises learned from the actors who were able to attend the Odin Teatret workshop in Holstebro. As for other groups, La MaMa’s stage action was also integrated with workshop exercises. One exemplary instance was the production of Futz, where O’Horgan incorporated, through skillful montage, short choreographies performed in slow motion and vocal experiments investigated during the workshop. Hence, a particularity of many workshops, including the New York ones, was the functionality of training in experimentation. These were spaces exclusive to the actors, in which spectators could just sit in as guests and whose experiments, which often involved improvisation, were based on assumptions that needed to be tested.42 In Barba’s workshops, individual improvisation was favored to avoid the risk that collective improvisation might distract the actor’s attention from the theme of the work. Conversely, in Chaikin and Feldman’s workshops, the actors created through collective exploration the elements that later formed the basis of the script and the staging.43 During the period in which the Open Theatre was a guest at La MaMa, it produced some works that grew out of group experimentation. Although Chaikin only took part in the first show production devoted to improvisation, the rest of the group focused its research on new stagings, involving only the actors that took part in the performances. This arrangement gave birth to van Itallie’s Dream, Megan Terry’s The Magic Realists, Sharon Thie’s Soon Jack November, and Michael Smith’s The Next Thing.44 O’Horgan and his actors also devoted ample space to improvisation, used here as an exercise in approaching the text. The group was invited

Developing a new kind of theater   101 to simplify and paraphrase the scenes by O’Horgan, using what had spontaneously evolved in the workshop’s free experimentation phase, a sort of reverse path to that of the ancient Commedia dell’Arte, whose actors improvised scenes by defining and expanding them from the canovaccio, that is a scant plot outline they were given. However, the improvisations that the La MaMa actors developed took on a function like that of the zibaldoni that Italian actors once used, a sort of archive of already experimented and masterfully integrated actions that actors could draw on during the staging. Tom O’Horgan saw the conventional distinction of role and character as a limit to imagination and developed the ploy of fragmentation to highlight them. This approach might also include a gender shift, where an actor would alternately or simultaneously play characters of the opposite sex. As dramatists started noticing some time ago, notably Pirandello, the conventional idea of role and character is a rigid corset for the imagination, apart from being completely unrealistic. To build a role as part of a secondary reality, then ask first the actor and then the audience to identify with it, is a sad narrowing of dramatic and psychological possibilities. So I, for one, fragment the roles to remove their presentation from the physical aspects of characters that are conventionally connected with the roles. This I do, partly by dissolving individual roles into several aspects to be presented by several actors and, partly, by merging several roles into the performance of one actor.45 Hence, in many workshops, whose setting ran parallel to theater, improvisation became a fundamental part of the creative process, as Erik Christoffersen explains in speaking of the work of the Odin Teatret. Traditionally, the actor’s work is limited to what the spectator sees: performance. This is, however, only the result of the actor’s work. The process which leads to this result is equally important. The process is the actor’s improvisation work – a lifelong process which is an exploration of personal resources, personal material. It is a journey into the unknown.46 As far back as Stanislavsky’s Studios, but above all from the approach Grotowski pursued, attention shifted from the performance to the process leading to it, which finds its final outcome in the staging. It is interesting to note how, in the same years in which this trend took hold in Europe, attention shifted to the workshop dimension in America as well, with the Open Theatre in the vanguard to find a new way of reconsidering the creative and writing process of a work. The Living Theatre itself devoted

102  Developing a new kind of theater a long preparation to Antigone, through a creative process that involved the whole group in shared activities, as Judith Malina recounts in a fine interview she gave to Cristina Valenti. Readings, songs, theatrical exercises. It is the continuity of this communal practice that builds the artistic ensemble. Antigone could not have been created by a group of people who didn’t know each other. It isn’t about something superficial, but about the deep, warm, familiar way in which people who have spent a long time together, sharing all sorts of experiences, ecstasy, tragedy and adventure, get to know each other. So, we know each other to the point that, if I move this way, the actor who works with me already knows the reaction of my shoulders that will follow, and I already know that he can lift me and how he will do it, because we have created movements together many times. The fact is that we know in advance the type of response we will have, we recognize our voices and we know who can run and who can slide, who can be lifted and who can do certain actions better than the other; because we all know how to do something very well, and I myself, who could never climb high or climb a ladder, can nevertheless be lifted and carried around because I trust whoever supports me; […]. The starting point is mutual knowledge, physical and spiritual. After that we can start creating plastic formations and compositions of movements, for which acrobatic preparation isn’t necessary, but rather the awareness of the ensemble as a collective body.47 4.4

Viet Rock: transformation takes the stage in a “folk war movie”

Viet Rock, the first work created entirely during the Open Theatre’s workshop experimentation, was presented at La MaMa on May 18, 1966, and staged again in the autumn of the same year at the Martinique Theatre, where it remained on the bill for six weeks. The play, on the war in Vietnam, was the result of Megan Terry’s Saturday workshops, in which the group’s reactions to the war were explored through exercises designed by Joseph Chaikin. Sixteen actors took part in the workshop, some of whom came from O’Horgan’s group. Terry guided the research, centered on images, newspaper articles and interviews, leading the transformation exercises, with the participants rapidly passing from one scene or character to another, making use of the compositions of movements to create certain scenic situations. The group discussed the jingoistic propaganda behind war and delved into the motivations behind the violence and aggression. What emerged was a work

Developing a new kind of theater   103

Figures 4.2 Viet Rock. Poster advertising the show staged at Cafè La MaMa from May 25 to 29, 1966. Director Megan Terry, Joseph Chaikin and Peter Feldman. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

that achieved a cinematic effect from the montage of tableaux that arose from the improvisations Terry and the actors developed during the workshop, connected to each other by the topic of war and its life and death narration. Joseph Chaikin and Peter Feldman were called in to oversee rehearsals before La MaMa’s staging, but Terry decided to reject their idea of stressing anti-war protest and anger and to maintain the ironic, tender tone that permeated the play. The divergence of choices in the direction led the group to a revision in the staging, to an inevitable split and to compromising the play’s success.48 While the technical level of the actors seemed impeccable, and at La MaMa the performance had a good audience response, the critics were lukewarm, albeit recognizing the daring nature of the subject matter and the creative approach. It is the first realized theatrical statement about the Vietnam war that I have seen and a rare instance of theater confronting issues broader than individual psychology. And it is the first time the special ensemble techniques of the Open Theatre, developed during several years of workshop sessions, have been fully applied and used for a purpose.49

104  Developing a new kind of theater Peter Feldman, in some director’s notes that introduced the text of the drama published in «The Tulane Drama Review» a few months after its debut, reflected on a peculiar aspect of the production at La MaMa or rather on the actor-audience relationship that could only take place in the coffeehouse setting and which had already been seen as essential for the success of many works spawned from the Off-Off Broadway theater. A type of relationship that was impossible to duplicate because of space distribution in commercial theaters, where Viet Rock was also staged. It was no accident that works of this kind found a more favorable response in Europe where, in the context of festivals, they were often presented in the non-theatrical spaces, such as deconsecrated churches, archaeological sites or abandoned warehouses, compared to what they received in traditional theaters, which preserved a scene-hall division. Peter Feldman, like Robert Pasolli, highlights how it was only in the first performance at La MaMa that the work got a favorable public reaction.50 The intimacy of the Café La Mama, where we opened, was an important factor in the planning of the event. The play was performed in the middle of the room. Actors crossed into the audience to deliver the shorter monologues; the longer speeches, the push-up, parachuting, and crawling scenes were direct addresses to the audience, who were seated on bleacher-like risers.51 Viet Rock was constructed on transformation exercises that involved sudden variations in character traits which the actors played. Their relationships, age and gender could change or the contexts in which they moved could vary, such as the setting, the historical moment or time of day. The actors were thus encouraged to display instinctive associations, fantasies and passions that could not emerge from a naturalistic type of acting, and at the same time, they learned to adapt quickly to the changes hinted by the other performers during the performance. As already mentioned, here the research was centered on reactions to war. Questions were asked, to which the actors had to respond metaphorically, on the anxiety and sense of confusion increasingly felt from the duration of the conflict, in order to force the audience to reflect on the issue and on the various realities of the war. Megan Terry agreed with Brecht in believing that theater should be close to society and reflect on the events it experiences, since too many plays are written after studying other plays. Not enough plays are written out of an observation of character, society, and current world problems. The theater world is very small, and it keeps looking

Developing a new kind of theater   105 inward. It better lift its head and take a look around it if it wishes to join this century.52 The performance also arose from the mix of war narrative and pop culture, which was stressed in the folk-rock songs composed by Marianne de Pury, the musician who had been working with the group since its first meetings. In the play, the transformation materialized in the passage from one acting role to another, with the actors playing several characters in the same scene, in “such a way as to discourage audience identification with any single character”.53 The intermediary role of a character between actor and audience was therefore lost. The spectators were encouraged to look up on the on-stage figures “as actors, then as actors-as-characters, then as actors again”. Megan Terry spoke thus of their workshop research: To deal with our confusion and sense of shame created by the war, we acted out personal stories trying to get to the roots of our drives toward anger and aggression. I felt we had to penetrate our negative feelings and our fantasies. We explored loss, grief, regret – we tried to reach the essence of violence. I worked to expose these qualities, and then formalized them. I believe it is as important to face the substance of our personal nightmares and terrors of war as it is to deal with the facts and impressions of war we receive from newspapers and television.54 The play, constructed on a montage of sequences, also adopted another technique based on improvisation and born from Chaikin’s research with the group, called Expecting. The aim of this exercise was to involve the public or at least to capture its interest: it consisted of fictitious secret information about the spectators, shared among the actors, in order to characterize them and to stimulate their response. In Viet Rock, the exercise was literally staged at the end of the play, when the actors physically touched the spectators, reacting to the secret information that the audience was made up of never-before-seen creatures.55 One by one they [the actors] enter the audience. Each chooses an audience member and touches his hand, head, face, hair. Look and touch. Look and touch. A celebration of presence. They go among the audience until every actor has left the stage. Then as the song begins they leave the auditorium. In no way should the actors communicate superiority. They must communicate the wonder and gift of being actually alive together with the audience at that moment.56

106  Developing a new kind of theater The play was reworked during the group’s stay at Yale University, where the Open Theatre held a workshop at the invitation of Robert Brustein, director of the Drama School. In the program for the Yale University theater performance, in October 1966, Megan Terry explains that she finally succeeded in working with the actors on an ongoing basis and improving the production by solving some problems that had previously emerged in the performances at La MaMa.57 The following month, Brustein himself announced its premiere at the Martinique Theatre, scheduled for November 10th. The action, developed through disjointed episodes, cabaret numbers and actors’ transformations, follows the careers of seven American soldiers from birth to death, wandering from induction centers to training camps to senatorial investigating rooms and finally to the battlefield itself where the soldiers are introduced to enemy propaganda, Saigon whores and Vietcong guerrillas. Satirical of both sides of the conflict, Viet Rock anatomizes the absurdity and obscenity of war itself […].58 The reviews, though still lukewarm about certain aspects (the recent workshop had improved the play’s professionalism but caused the loss of some of the features that had personalized it at La MaMa), agreed on its stylistic originality compared to contemporary theater and spoke of the collective creation of the work as a sort of new art in American theater, also shared with The Living Theatre. The troupers at the Martinique work up ensemble acting effects that have to be seen to be believed (the troupe’s provocative bow-off at play’s end is a sample). No matter what the quality of the plays they perform, these Open Theatre types are contributing something new to the concept and technique of stagecraft.59 Hence, critics recognized the merits of this workshop approach to creation and how it led in most cases to greater theatrical effectiveness through the different, more intimate relationship that it established between the members of the group. A communion that, in the case of the Open Theatre, had already been extended to the public with an openness to audiences becoming an integral part of the whole theatrical relationship.60 4.5

The workshop dimension: a second form of life

The December 1968 issue of the Italian magazine «Sipario» published Una seconda forma di vita. Una tavola rotonda sul workshop (A second kind of life. A roundtable discussion on workshops), which was the transcript of a

Developing a new kind of theater   107 panel discussion on workshop activity, organized by critic Aldo Rostagno on behalf of the magazine. It was an important article, since it contained the thoughts of some of the prominent figures of American experimental theater, involved in a dialogue that gave light to common ideas and opinions on the workshop experience. The roundtable, moderated by John Lahr, critic of the «Evergreen Review», had among its participants Richard Schechner, Peter Feldman, Megan Terry and Julie Portman, founder and director of Boston’s OM Theatre. In the Sixties, many workshops flourished within experimental theater groups, in both America and Europe. The companies found in a private, communal setting an alternative to the work that went on in rehearsals, a setting that enabled them to devote themselves to research in a free and ongoing way, without time restrictions and to explore a variety of topics and situations not limited to one specific production. Schechner, who in 1968 scheduled two workshops per week with The Performance Group, considered these meetings essential, because, unlike rehearsals, they focused on pure research unrelated to the play in question. He also considered them important for the intimacy they offered, in which the interpersonal relationships among the actors could be probed, and their space and nature explored, thanks to the communal climate that was created. The speakers reflected on the democratic and shared aspects of creative work, and on the dictatorial side which might emerge from their roles as research leaders. While they considered improvisation and the freedom to experiment fundamental for the actors participating in the workshops, they thought it essential to establish, as essential prerequisites for teamwork, guidelines for experimenting and imposing a discipline. More than a “democracy of improvisation”, as Lahr defined the experimentation dimension, Schechner considered it “a carefully structured situation in which everyone infers his task from that of another”,61 a situation where everyone feels connected in doing a certain thing and that comes very close to being a rite led by a shaman. The experimental workshop setting was considered central to the actor’s creative work but also for the playwright’s. Megan Terry testified to how much her participation in the workshops influenced her style as a writer. She illustrated how it was always useful for her to observe the actors at work because she could assess the range of their expressive possibilities and discover different ways of revealing their human personality. It’s a bit like a germ, you see, they are sparks, flares. Lots of ideas come to me while watching actors. I love to observe acting, it’s a great pleasure for me, and this is one of the reasons why I hold one workshop per

108  Developing a new kind of theater week, every week I get to see great acting. Near me, there, right under my eyes. But in addition to this pleasure, I get an extraordinarily acute insight into relationships between individuals, people, feelings, dreams, trance states.62 Peter Feldman too spoke of the involvement of the authors in the Open Theatre’s experimentation: You must realize that several writers will each engage differently in a workshop, or an author’s function may change during the work. It seems to me, if I remember correctly, that there was a time when Megan Terry almost always sat on the sidelines, attending a number of workshops from which she got, I think, ideas she then developed in her works. And then, in a later period, she began to participate much more actively in workshop experiences, where she made her own contribution, lavishing advice on the actors, and so on. Which shows that there are other ways to work with these people.63 Again, in speaking about creative work, Schechner’s opinion was that even physical training can lead to the discovery of new creative possibilities. When I start a workshop on a Tuesday afternoon or a Friday morning, I never know where it will take us. I just know where it starts. It starts for us with the psycho-physical exercises that we use in our plays, which we adapted from Grotowski and from work I did some time ago in New Orleans, and with some yoga exercises […]. But now these exercises are turning into other types of exercises. And this is how we begin our work because it is a way of clearing the ground, of feeling what is going on with our bodies and with sounds, and so I can structure what comes next, and for me it’s a very important phase of improvisation because I give instructions, but I don’t know what instructions I will give until I see the exercises.64 During the event, the four speakers discovered that they were involved in a common search for exercises or techniques to release the unconscious. For a time, Portman and her group brought in a psychiatrist who had them experience hypnotically induced improvisation. However, Feldman and Schechner agreed in considering some of Grotowski’s exercises effective in this sense, since the rigor of their execution allowed the mind and body, fused into a single unit, to reach otherwise inaccessible areas of the unconscious precisely because suffering opens up new roads for research. During the panel, there was also talk of certain exercises being potentially dangerous for actors and of their potential risk for one’s body or

Developing a new kind of theater   109 voice. According to Schechner, this idea derived from a conservative cultural preconception, prevalent in America, that oriented even artistic training and the most widespread techniques. The director, who believed there was no right way to speak or move, advanced a different point of reference from which to regard training. But there is another point of reference that comes from illiterate (primitive) societies, from the Eastern world, which involves giving, striving, in rites of passage, when you’ve gone through a certain rite you can’t return to your old state. In a tribe, when you become an adult, you can’t decide to go back to being a child. The rite of passage is irrevocable, and an artistic training based on these foundations wears out an actor. He becomes a shaman and as such consumes his voice never to get it back, consumes his body never to get it back, because he knows that his artistic life and his real life go hand in hand, while our western education, in which an old man can play the part of a young man, is deceptive. But we constantly wear ourselves out both physically and spiritually, that’s what life is, it’s a kind of entropy, which we must abandon ourselves to. Orientals know this, and you have an artistic training that closely adheres to this concept, so that an old man is really old, his voice is really weak and wears out, I believe that a new type of training could be created on such premises, which is much more honest in every respect, but also much more relentless. Otherwise, artistic training would always tend, according to Conrad’s expression, to find escape from the inexorable flight of time. What interests me is to go straight toward this inexorable flight of time.65 Here, then, is how Richard Schechner explained the need for an honest education that also takes into account the fact that artistic life and real life cannot and must not be separated. A vision filtered through anthropological research, which will also pervade the work of other masters, such as Peter Brook. Notes 1 A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre, cit., p. 80. 2 On The Group Theatre see Oscar G. Brockett, History of Theatre, Allyn and Bacon, Boston 1991; A. Sica, Uptown-Downtown, cit.; Jan Watson, Sintesi di un’indagine storica sul training dell’attore negli USA, «Teatro e Storia», Annali 2, vol. X, 1995, pp. 175–199. 3 B. Simmer and R. Creese, The Theatrical Style of Tom O’Horgan, cit., p. 62. 4 M. R. Russel, Tom O’Horgan, Staging the Outrageous, cit. 5 Robert LaGuardia, Tom O’Horgan’s New Theater of Wine and Frenzy, «After Dark», vol. 10, n. 3, July 1968, pp. 16–19.

110  Developing a new kind of theater 6 The latter group, made up of about twenty members, including actors, musicians, writers, directors and playwrights was formed in 1976 for what Chaikin called the Winter Project, a workshop to analyze the elements that underlie the theater and explore the contemporary expression of feelings. The goal was to find a way to express through one’s voice and body the countless emotions that people are capable of. 7 Eileen Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin. Exploring the Boundaries of Theater, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, London, Rochelle, Sidney, and Melbourne 1984. 8 Ivi. 9 Jean-Claude van Itallie, Playwright at Work: Off-Off Broadway, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 154–158, p. 154. 10 Joseph Chaikin, in E. Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin, cit., p. 40. 11 Ludwik Flaszen, Carla Pollastrelli, and Renata Molinari (ed.), Il Teatr Laboratorium di Jerzy Grotowski 1959–1969, La Casa Usher, Firenze 2007. 12 In 1968, Richard Schechner published 6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre, an essay in which he explored the relationships between performers, members of the public and between performers and the public in the shared space of the Environmental Theater, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 12, n. 3, Architecture/Environment, Spring 1968, pp. 41–64. 13 Joseph Chaikin and Richard Schechner, The Open Theatre, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 9, n. 2, Winter 1964, pp. 191–197. 14 E. Gress, The Lost Years, cit. 15 B. Simmer and R. Creese, The Theatrical Style of Tom O’Horgan, cit. 16 The work was staged again, with a different cast, the year following its 1976 debut. 17 Ivi, p. 78. 18 Franco Perrelli, I maestri della ricerca teatrale. Il Living, Grotowski, Barba e Brook, Editori Laterza, Bari-Roma 2020. 19 Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor, Theatre Communication Group, New York 2006, p. 85. 20 See Joseph Chaikin’s notes, Joseph Chaikin Papers, Box 25, Folder 13, Kent State University, Department of Special Collections and Archives. 21 Joseph Chaikin in E. Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin: An Open Theory of Acting, cit., p. 126. The text is part of an interview granted to Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano in Venice on May 12, 1968, and kept in the Joseph Chaikin Papers collection, Box 25, Folder 14, Kent State University, Department of Special Collections and Archives. 22 On Michael Chekhov’s technique and his relationship with Rudolf Steiner’s teachings, see Yana Meerzon and Marie Christine Autant-Mathieu, The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, Routledge, London and New York 2015, in particular my essay Meditation and Imagination. An Anthroposophical Contribution to the Michael Chekhov’s Acting, pp. 69–81. See also Monica Cristini, Psychological Gestures, Concentration and Meditation. At Work on the Character with Rudolf Steiner and Michael Chekhov, in «Medicina nei secoli. Arte e scienza», vol. 31, n. 2, 2019, pp. 335–354. 23 Actor and director Nola Chilton (1922–2021) worked as acting teacher at the Actors’ Studio and in her own studio, developing a post-Method to perform non-naturalistic plays. 24 International Symposium new Methods of Educational Drama, Pre-paper of Peter Feldman – workshop C – sound and movement, Peter Feldman Papers,

Developing a new kind of theater   111 Box1, Folder 28 and The Cave, From Workshops III, IV, V, Amsterdam: Stichting Mickery Workshop, 1972, Peter Feldman Papers, Box1, Folder 29, Kent State University Libraries, Department of Special Collections and Archives. 25 R. Pasolli, A Book of the Open Theatre, cit., and E. Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin, cit. 26 Viola Spolin (1906–1994) was an educator and theater coach. She developed an acting technique based on improvisation. 27 Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater. A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1999. Both Chaikin and O’Horgan had been members of Second City in Chicago, an improvisation group founded by Paul Sills, Spolin’s son, and for which Spolin led its workshops. 28 R. Pasolli, A Book of the Open Theatre, cit. See also Viola Spolin, Theater Games for the Lone Actor. A Handbook, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2001. 29 J. Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor, cit. 30 E. Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin: An Open Theory of Acting, cit. 31 Thomas Richards analyses Grotowski’s approach in his book At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, Routledge, Oxon and New York 1995. 32 See Michael Chekhov, To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting, ed. Mala Powers, Routledge, Oxon and New York 2002. 33 Joseph Chaikin, Notes, Joseph Chaikin Papers, Box 25, Folders 13 and 14, 1968, Department of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University. 34 Lee Worley, Open Theatre’s actor, taught the exercise to the members of The Living Theatre during her stay in Paris. See Saul Gottlieb, The Living Theatre in Exile: Mysteries, Frankenstein, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 137–152. 35 See M. Kirby, On Acting and Not-Acting, cit. 36 J. Chaikin and R. Schechner, The Open Theatre, cit., p. 193. 37 R. LaGuardia, Tom O’Horgan’s New Theater of Wine and Frenzy, cit. 38 M. R. Russel, Tom O’Horgan, Staging the Outrageous, cit. 39 “Kneel ready to take the position for the headstand. Make a triangle of the forearms, with the palms of the hands on the back of the head. In the final position, it is the shoulders that are the supporting point”. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. Eugenio Barba, Methuen Drama, London 1991, p. 156. 40 Jerzy Grotowski in Ivi, pp. 156–157. 41 E. E. Christoffersen, The Actor’s Way, cit. 42 M. Schino, Alchemists of the Stage, cit. 43 I. Watson, Towards a Third Theatre, cit. 44 R. Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre, cit. 45 Tom O’Horgan in Elsa Gress and Tom O’Horgan, An Interview with Tom O’Horgan on Aspects of the Contemporary Theater, «Leonardo», vol. 3, n. 3, July 1970, pp. 341–349, p. 348. 46 E. E. Christoffersen, The Actor’s Way, cit., p. 3. 47 “Letture, canzoni, esercizi teatrali. È la continuità di questa pratica comunitaria che costruisce l’ensemble artistico. Antigone non avrebbe potuto essere creata da un gruppo di persone che non si conoscessero. Non si tratta di qualcosa di superficiale, ma del modo profondo, caldo, famigliare in cui si conoscono le persone che hanno passato un lungo tempo insieme, condividendo ogni sorta di esperienze, l’estasi, la tragedia e l’avventura. Così noi ci conosciamo al punto che, se io mi muovo in questo modo, l’attore che lavora con me

112  Developing a new kind of theater sa già la reazione delle spalle che ne seguirà, e io da parte mia so già che lui può sollevarmi e in che modo lo farà, perché abbiamo creato movimenti insieme tantissime volte. Il fatto è che conosciamo in anticipo il tipo di risposta che avremo, riconosciamo le nostre voci e sappiamo chi può correre e chi scivolare, chi essere sollevato e chi fare certe azioni meglio di un altro; perché tutti sappiamo fare qualcosa molto bene, e io stessa, che non potrei mai arrampicarmi in alto o salire su una scala, posso però essere sollevata e trasportata in giro perché ho fiducia in chi mi sorregge; […]. Il punto di partenza è la conoscenza reciproca, fisica e spirituale. Dopo di che possiamo iniziare a creare formazioni plastiche e composizioni di movimenti, per le quali non è necessaria una preparazione acrobatica, ma piuttosto la consapevolezza dell’ensemble come di un corpo collettivo”. Judith Malina in C. Valenti, Storia del Living Theatre, cit., p. 149. Author’s translation. 48 Robert Pasolli talks about the problems in his already-cited A Book on the Open Theatre. 49 Michael Smith, Theatre Journal, «The Village Voice», June 9, 1966. 50 Robert Pasolli, who followed the work of Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, relates this circumstance in his A Book on the Open Theatre, cit. 51 Peter L. Feldman in Megan Terry and Peter L. Feldman, Viet Rock, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 11, n. 1, Autumn 1966, pp. 196–228, pp. 197–198. 52 Megan Terry, in R. Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre, cit., p. 74. 53 Richard Schechner, ‘Cabaret’ Et Al. Haworth, ‘Drama Mailbag’, «The New York Times», December 11, 1966. 54 Megan Terry, Viet Rock, theater informative program, The Yale School of Drama, p. 10. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. 55 R. Pasolli, A Book on the Open Theatre, cit. 56 Megan Terry in Megan Terry and Peter L. Feldman, Viet Rock, cit., p. 227. 57 Robert Brustein invited the group to hold a workshop for students at the Yale School of Drama, where Megan Terry was able to work daily with the actors. 58 Robert Brustein, A Third Theater That Is Superb, Gay and Wild, «The New York Times», September 25, 1966. 59 Viet Rock, ‘Off-Broadway Reviews’, «Variety», November 30, 1966. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. 60 Martin Gottfried, ‘Viet Rock’, «Women’s Wear Daily», November 14, 1966; Jerry Tallmer, Agitprop Minus Aim, «New York Post», November 14, 1966. Courtesy La MaMa Archives. 61 “una situazione accuratamente strutturata in cui ognuno deriva la propria mansione da quella di un altro”. Richard Schechner in Una seconda forma di vita. Una tavola rotonda sul workshop, «Sipario», n. 272, cit. pp. 125–131, p. 127. Author’s translation. 62 “È un po’ come un germe, vedi, sono scintille, zampilli. Mi nascono quantità di idee guardando gli attori: adoro veder recitare, è per me un grandissimo piacere, e questa è una delle ragioni per cui ho un workshop alla settimana, ogni settimana vedo della grande recitazione. Vicino a me, là, proprio sotto i miei occhi. Ma oltre a questo piacere, ottengo una visione straordinariamente acuta dei rapporti fra le persone, della gente, dei sentimenti, sogni, stati di trance”. Megan Terry in Ivi, p. 126. Author’s translation. 63 “Vi dovete render conto che vari scrittori si impegneranno ognuno in modo diverso in un workshop: oppure la funzione dell’autore può cambiare durante il lavoro. Mi sembra, se ricordo bene, che vi è stata un’epoca in cui Megan Terry se ne stava quasi sempre seduta in disparte, assisteva a una quantità di

Developing a new kind of theater   113 workshops da cui traeva, credo, certe idee, che sviluppava poi nei suoi lavori. E poi, in un periodo successivo, ha incominciato a partecipare molto più attivamente alle esperienze del workshop, a dare il suo contributo, a prodigare consigli agli attori e così via. Il che dimostra che vi sono altre possibilità di lavorare con queste persone”. Peter Feldman in Ibidem. Author’s translation. 64 “Quando un martedì pomeriggio o un venerdì mattina incomincio un workshop, non so mai dove ci condurrà. So solo da dove si comincia. Incomincia per noi con gli esercizi psico-fisici che usiamo nello spettacolo, che abbiamo adattato da Grotowski e da un lavoro che avevo fatto tempo fa a New Orleans, e con alcuni esercizi yoga […]. Ma ora questi esercizi si stanno trasformando in altri tipi di esercizi. Ed è così che cominciamo il nostro lavoro perché è un modo di sgomberare il terreno, è un modo di sentire con il corpo e con i suoni quello che sta accadendo, e io posso così strutturare quello che viene dopo, ed è per me una fase molto importante dell’improvvisazione poiché do istruzioni ma non so che istruzioni darò prima di aver visto gli esercizi”. Richard Schechner in Ibidem. Author’s translation. 65 “Ma esiste un altro punto di riferimento che viene dalle società illetterate (primitive), dal mondo orientale, che consiste nel dare, nel prodigarsi, in riti di passaggio, quando si è passati attraverso un certo rito non è possibile ritornare al vecchio stato. In una tribù quando si è diventati adulti, non si può decidere di ritornare bambini. Il rito del passaggio è irrevocabile e una formazione artistica che poggi su queste basi logora un attore. Egli diventa un shaman e come tale consuma la sua voce per non rivendicarla mai, consuma il suo corpo per non rivendicarlo mai, poiché sa che la sua vita artistica e la sua vita reale avanzano di pari passo, mentre la nostra formazione occidentale, in cui un vecchio può sostenere la parte di un giovane, è ingannevole. Ma noi ci consumiamo continuamente sia fisicamente che spiritualmente, ecco che cos’è la vita, è una sorta di entropia, cui ci si deve abbandonare. Gli orientali lo sanno, e si ha una formazione artistica che aderisca intimamente a questa concezione, in modo che un vecchio sia veramente vecchio, la voce sia veramente debole e si logori, credo che un nuovo tipo di formazione potrebbe essere creato su tali premesse, cosa che è molto più onesta da ogni punto di vista, ma anche molto più terribile. Altrimenti la formazione artistica tenderebbe sempre, secondo l’espressione di Conrad a trovar scampo dall’inesorabile fuga del tempo. Quello che mi interessa è proprio andare nel senso di questa inesorabile fuga del tempo”. Richard Schechner, Ivi, pp. 129–130. Author’s translation.

5 Two new companies at La MaMa

The Avant-garde theater, or “New Theater”, began with a phase of important changes in the late Sixties after experiencing a period of maximum development between 1965 and 1968. However, it was a crisis concomitant with a rebirth of experimental theater, which Marco De Marinis has called “New-New Theater”.1 The research that had begun in previous years was fine-tuned toward the end of the decade. Some groups consolidated and others disbanded. There was an increasingly marked shift of attention from product to creative process. The audience was definitively considered an integral part of the theatrical relationship and no longer a passive spectator. Directing was criticized as a monopolizing practice while the actor gained new functions, with an increasingly decisive push toward collective creation. At the end of the Sixties, the artists who were to become the major protagonists of the stage in the following decade made their debut, among them Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman. In addition, new groups were formed. We have already spoken of the founding of The Performance Group (in 1967, following Grotowski’s NYU seminar), but new companies were also formed at La MaMa: The Great Jones Repertory Company and La MaMa Plexus Workshop. Theatrical experiments took new directions, and there was a real “process of abandoning theater”.2 The experimental theater of the Seventies was “made by those who had the courage to deny theatre, to leave theater in order to truly find it, during their journey, in the living form they desired”.3 Peter Brook founded CIRT, the International Centre for Theatre Research, in 1970 in Paris. After an initial period of research on sound and voice, Brook began to investigate the origins of theater, turning to primitive forms of performance, in search of a primary theater able to communicate with every culture regardless of the language spoken. He formed a group of artists from different countries and went on long journeys to investigate the communicative potential of theater and its relationship with audiences. In 1970, he was in Iran, where he culminated his first research cycle with DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-6

Two new companies at La MaMa   115 the production of Orghast, presented at the Persepolis Festival in Shiraz in 1971. In 1972, the group went to Africa and in 1973 to North America. In 1970, The Living Theatre split into four groups that traveled to different countries. Julian Beck and Judith Malina were in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they came into contact with the inhabitants of the favelas and investigated theater as a political action. After the success of Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, Jerzy Grotowski retired from the stage to devote himself entirely to research on human relationships and group dynamics. Even Eugenio Barba, with his Odin Teatret, set out on a research trajectory that drew him away from Holstebro, setting in motion a series of projects that opened the season of his Paratheater, in which the group was involved in artistic barters with the inhabitants of villages in southern Italy, Sardinia and Salento, an investigation that later took the group to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Lastly, Richard Schechner also investigated ritual in Dionysus in 69, in which Euripides’ Bacchae was reinterpreted as an initiation rite, a performance incorporating a ritual of the Asmat people of New Guinea.4 This was also the period in which the main theatrical theories elaborated by the Avant-garde masters circulated through important publications. The year 1968 saw the publication of Towards a Poor Theatre, the book of Grotowski edited by Eugenio Barba, and Peter Brook’s The Empty Space; 1973 was the year Environmental Theater was published, in which Richard Schechner presented the results of his research on space and its relationship with the spectator.5 We have also seen how, from the mid-Sixties, new attention was paid to actor’s training. Both European masters and American directors undertook, with their respective companies, research that gave rise to new training techniques and to different creative modes and practices. The instance of two artists at La MaMa whose work Ellen Stewart had promoted from the end of the Sixties is particularly noteworthy: Andrei Serban, whom she invited to New York to stage her productions, and Stanley Rosenberg, who on his return from a long period at Odin Teatret decided to involve himself in actor training. 5.1

New members coming from Europe: Stanley Rosenberg and Andrei Serban

In 1966, Stanley Rosenberg, a member of O’Horgan’s group on tour in Europe, stayed on at the Odin Teatret for over a year. In Holstebro, he took part in Barba’s daily training sessions, where he met Grotowski and learned part of his method, in addition to the other techniques that had become part of Odin’s actor-training routine, such as yoga, mime and the acting methods of the Commedia dell’Arte taught during the spring and summer seminars.

116  Two new companies at La MaMa In the fall of 1967, on his return to New York, Rosenberg contacted Andy Robinson, an actor with extensive experience in the Off-Broadway commercial scene, from which he had distanced himself because he was tired of repertory theater. To explain to Robinson what his starting point would be for doing new research on theatrical purity, and for founding a company, Rosenberg showed him The Cat and suggested he join him and the group he intended to form. The next day, the two actors shared the idea with Ellen Stewart, who decided to support the project and founded the La MaMa Plexus Workshop with them, with the aim of concentrating the group’s work mainly on training and opening up the workshop’s activities to the other artists at La MaMa. Joel Zwick and his wife Diane Callum, both actors, joined the project. Thus, Stanley Rosenberg established a permanent workshop that drew on the techniques he had learned in Europe, his previous actor training with Viola Spolin’s theater games, and the Open Theatre approach. These were supplemented by the skills of the other members of the group. Joel Zwick had a master’s degree in Commedia dell’Arte from Brooklyn College, while Andy Robinson and Diane Callum had professional actor training. Hence, as with Joseph Chaikin and Tom O’Horgan, here too the new workshop of La MaMa’s first training company came about from a diversity of methods.6 Once the group was formed, Rosenberg, Zwick, Callum and Robinson worked with the other actors, following the different methods with the aim of gaining a technical level capable of defining a distinctive company style and (in accord with Stewart’s suggestions), and demonstrating a new approach to physical preparation. Subsequently, by also opening up the workshops to actors outside the group, the company turned out to be the first to offer a type of training that could lead to the professionalism that Off-Off Broadway theater aspired to. We have seen how in the experimental circuit some changes of perspective, and above all the shift of attention from text to direction, strongly emphasized the need for greater actor preparation. During that same fall in which she founded the new company, Ellen Stewart also promoted Grotowski’s first visit to New York and was involved in organizing La MaMa Repertory Troupe’s third European tour, on its return from the recent scandals over the staging of Futz at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In April 1968, La MaMa moved to the second floor of 9 Saint Mark’s Place, while waiting for the new building purchased at 74A East 4th Street to be renovated. The inauguration of the theater, with adjoining administrative offices, was scheduled for September of the same year. Sam Zolotov reported it in «The New York Times», announcing that the building purchased thanks to funding received from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations would include a repertory theater with 144 seats on the first floor and an ensemble theater for 60 spectators on the

Two new companies at La MaMa   117 second floor. Among other news, he reported on a workshop company, called Plexus, to be overseen by Stanley Rosenberg.7 In August, Stewart organized the International Theatre Festival at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, which O’Horgan and his company took part in with Megan Terry’s Massachusetts Trust.8 During the company’s participation in the Zagreb International Student Theatre Festival, Stewart was able to attend the staging of the pre-Shakespearean drama Arden of Faversham. The play was directed by Andrei Serban, a young Romanian student of the Theatre and Film Institute of Bucharest, whose directorial work had already been awarded prizes at the Zagreb Theatre Festival in 1965 and at the Wroclaw Theatre Festival in 1966. Stewart decided to invite him to New York and secured him a Ford Foundation grant that enabled the young man to visit the United States in 1969. In his new version of Arden of Faversham staged at La MaMa, Serban, influenced by Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, reduced the use of words in favor of sound and an intensive use of images. His direction of Ubu Roi9 instead reflected the influence of Edward Gordon Craig in the stylized puppet-like movements of the actors. The two plays marked his American debut in 1970, rousing the interest of Peter Brook, who invited him to join the first group he was forming for the new International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT) in Paris. Andrei Serban joined it in the fall of the same year, contributing to the production of Orghast after a research period in France and Iran, whose local artistic traditions were explored by the group of young persons of mixed nationalities. The play was presented in 1971 at the Shiraz Festival and staged in the ruins of Persepolis, an experience that deeply affected Serban’s artistic path and later led him to continue the experiments started by Peter Brook.10 At CIRT, the research work was centered on the possibilities of sound to communicate beyond the codes of language, geographical or cultural origin. The investigation of a possible universal language aimed at the different qualities of sound – pitch, tone, volume and rhythm, independent of speech meanings – by working on tribal and ancient languages. It also explored the body’s expressive potential, from everyday gestures to the study of traditional dances of different cultures, in an attempt to “develop the ability to listen through the body to the codes and impulses that are always hidden at the root of different cultural forms”.11 Physical and vocal training also owed much to the influence of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, whose spiritual investigation Peter Brook had studied since the Forties, adapting it to a quest for harmony of movements and feelings in the context of developing an actor’s stage presence. Besides Andrei Serban, the first group included Malick Bowens, who collaborated with Grotowski, Andrea Katsulas (sent by Ellen Stewart) and

118  Two new companies at La MaMa other Portuguese, French and English artists, including some of the actors who had already worked in Brook’s productions. The writer Ted Hughes, the young Persian director Arby Ovenassian and Yoshi (short for Katsuhiro Oida), the Japanese actor met through Jean-Louis Barrault, also joined the company.12 The investigation started from the physical work: the participants discussed their knowledge of the different expressive forms of theater and dance, though also dwelling on common daily gestures. They practiced different languages, expressing moods from laughter to tears, trying to turn speech into pure sound and song. They invited deaf-mute children and adults to improvise with them, in consideration of the special purpose of their communication, which was not artistic but linked to immediate needs. Lastly, they investigated the ability to feel hidden impulses with the body in order to learn to recognize the roots of different cultural expressions. Indeed, each culture has its own set of clichés, and from the start we tried to explore how to go beyond stereotypes and imitations, how to find the key to actions so transparent that they appeared completely natural, whatever their form. The first step was to free ourselves from the influence of the normally selective brain that had already divided us up into Europeans, Africans, Asians. Whenever we allowed this analysing mind to relax, we could enter directly into one another’s backgrounds and listen to sounds and movements closer to their source, without having to explain to ourselves what they meant.13 Orghast, on which Serban also collaborated as assistant director, emerged from the first year of research, to a significant extent through sound experimentation. The writer and poet Ted Hughes participated in the investigation, creating the basis for a new language and inserting into the text some dramatic passages in ancient Greek, taken from Aeschylus’ The Persians, and in Avestan, the ancient Persian ceremonial language, whose meaning was strictly sound related. The work that the group undertook ultimately led to questions that Peter Brook brought up again in the show’s program: What is the relation between verbal and non-verbal theatre? What happens when gesture and sound turn into word? What is the exact place of the word in theatrical expression? As vibration? Concept? Music? Is any evidence buried in the sound structure of certain ancient languages?14 The work presented at the Persepolis Festival, with performances scheduled at midnight and at four in the morning, was a great success with critics and public. Despite the incomprehensibility of the language, the exploration of the archetypal human experiences through sound and gesture brought the performance closer to the ritual and mystery form of ancient

Two new companies at La MaMa   119 theater, thus familiarizing the spectators with it. The critics spoke of the sensation of a language that had been known in the past and that had long survived unexpressed in the most hidden recesses of the mind and of a reception that inevitably revealed itself as subjective and personal. You leave this performance wondering what you saw, knowing only what you felt. It is difficult to pin down meanings, you are aware only of sensations, much as in a religious experience. This is to say that the performance is most successful on the level of spectacle and in the vibrations of language as spoken sound. For each of us, the response will be different. Any review of this play will tell more about the reviewer than the play.15 The play aroused an uproar and, as Margaret Croyden wrote in her impressions in «The New York Times», called into question every convention on which contemporary theater was based. The work in Iran has linked Brook’s theatrical genius to Middle Eastern and Oriental art and philosophy, resulting in a synthesis that seriously challenges conventional Western theatrical patterns. Brook threatens to find the magic in the word which might very well restore to the theater its original transcendent power. Orghast may be a beginning.16 After a year of research with Peter Brook’s group, Andrei Serban decided not to return to Romania, whose regime took a dim view of theatrical experimentation, and instead to continue his research in New York. 5.2

Welcome back to La MaMa

On his return to La MaMa, Serban asked Ellen Stewart to support him in doing research for the production of a new play, for which he intended to go into more depth in the study of sound he had begun with the Paris group. Stewart, who fully shared a vision of theater as a possible universal language, founded a new company with him, which also included some members of the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, no longer headed by Tom O’Horgan. This new company took its name from Great Jones Street, where the building that housed the rehearsal room stood: The Great Jones Repertory Company was thus founded in 1971, under Serban’s direction. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Stewart supported the costs of maintaining the company for six months, during which the fifteen members ran a workshop to put together the production of Medea.17 The group was also joined by the young musician Elizabeth Swados,18 who was involved in researching incidental music that went beyond serving

120  Two new companies at La MaMa as a simple accompaniment but was an intimate part of the action through a creation process focused on a collaboration between the musician and the members of the company; a concept of musical creation very similar to the dramaturgical writing that characterized the creative process of the Open Theatre. Serban also recruited Yoshi Oida, the Japanese actor expert in Noh theater with whom he had shared the CIRT experience in Paris and Iran, to collaborate in the new research by versing the actors in the expressive principles of movement in Noh theater. Serban saw in the traditional forms of oriental theaters a fundamental exercise for learning to use one’s body in a new, extra-daily way, as Eugenio Barba would say. Oida’s training technique aimed at developing a new awareness of voice and body and at recovering a sensitivity to sound and movement that had been lost in Western society. The company carried on a rigorous training program and, in the wake of the experimentation begun by Peter Brook, focused on sound and inventing a new vocabulary by, among other things, drawing on archaic languages. The actors then experimented with the different ways of producing sounds, working on the most common ones of daily life, on those of ancient Greek and Latin and on using voice as a musical instrument to explore its expressive possibilities. They explored the profound meaning of myth, through a process that did not focus so much on feelings as on the source that generates them, to discover how it could still communicate on an emotional level. Andrei Serban worked on editing extracts from the plays of Euripides and Seneca in ancient Greek and Latin, while the group investigated with Elizabeth Swados the communicative possibilities of languages unknown to the actors. The goal was to find and explore what lies behind the sounds that make them up, by using text as a sound score. The group experimented with the theories of Artaud in an attempt to find a language that did not depend on the semantics of speech in its daily use and effectively transmitted the raw message that tragedy conveyed.19 The sounds of ancient Greek contain the potential for a special energy to be rediscovered after two thousand years, to be unlocked and acted out. Now we can look at the tragedy in a new way – as if the whole life of the character were contained in one sound, in the way that sound is produced, where it comes from in the body. In Greek theater, we do not deal with super-obsessed, neurotic, twentieth-century characters. We deal with forces, with strong colors, with sharp energies. The sound emerges as an expression of force, with the same strength and focus as an animal impulse.20 The actors worked on the themes of myth by improvising on key concepts of this tragedy, such as crime, journey, exile, night and jealousy. They

Two new companies at La MaMa   121 explored the nature of sound and the expression of sensations and moods through vocal sounds, probing their different registers, from whisper to shout, from lament to laughter. An important part of the research was also listening to and identifying sounds and their qualities in nature and everyday life and then trying to reproduce them vocally. Lastly, in staging the performance, Swados integrated musical instruments and voices into a single sound texture. The training enabled the actors to achieve extraordinary expressive and technical levels. Priscilla Smith,21 who played Medea, achieved such a vocal mastery as to express anger in sound by uttering speech while inhaling and thus obtaining an extraordinary expressive effectiveness and an equally remarkable impact on the audience. This is a special training that we did for this particular production – I gathered this group of actors and on the first day we agreed to the fact that nobody in the world is able to say which is the best way to make a sound and produce the voice. If we start from nothing, practical experience can give an answer, so trying to confront the languages of Greek and Latin, which have very strong and solid vowels, consonant and patterns of sound and are very difficult to pronounce, necessitated a special training in the actor. Each of the actors tried to find different resonators for himself; so the sound came from different areas: the stomach, the head, the back, the chest – not only the ones that are taught in the acting schools. This research was something that each one had to find in himself […]. It needs very special type of breathing exercises over a long period of time; you take in a great volume of air and you let it out very slowly – it is all a question of breathing.22 The new experiments even affected staging in their aim to achieve a different relationship with the public, in accordance with the vision of a no longer passive and invisible spectator promoted by the experimentation of the Avant-garde that, as Marvin Carlson emphasizes, was influenced by the research of Jerzy Grotowski, who “although […] did not directly involve spectators as did many of his international followers later in the century, he often incorporated their real bodies into his early theatrical works”.23 In the January 21, 1972, premiere in New York, an actor guided thirty spectators in the dark by candlelight toward the basement of La MaMa at 74 E 4th St. A short procession that led them to Medea and Jason, already present on stage, face to face with each other and separated by a small fire burning in a ceramic brazier. Throughout the performance, the physical action was reduced to a minimum and developed almost without sets, while emotions were communicated through sounds (Medea’s anger, her nurse’s anxiety and terror), and through the force of the metaphorical images that Serban had suggested: Creon strips Medea of

122  Two new companies at La MaMa her identity by removing her mask, while Aegeus frees her from the chains with the simple gesture of touching them with a lit candle; a use of image whose power burst forth in the final scene, in which Medea’s triumph was heightened by her towering (upside down) over Jason, who holds their dead son in his lap.24

Figure 5.1 Medea at La MaMa, January 21, 1972, directed by Andrei Serban. Photo credits Amon Ben Nomis. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/ Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

Two new companies at La MaMa   123 In New York and in Europe, where the company was on tour that same year, the critics were enthusiastic in appreciating the technical preparation of the performers and the expressive results they achieved, with special praise for Priscilla Smith’s acting. It was a success for Andrei Serban’s directing, capable of bringing theater back to its ritualistic roots, staging the tragedy in a way that most closely approached what its representation would have been in antiquity. As Clive Barnes declared at the beginning of his review in «The New York Times», theater as mystery and ritual – the theater as a nonverbal experience of tragedy – this is what Andrei Serban’s Medea at the La Mama is all about. It is a powerful theatrical event, and it offers deep insights into the nature of the dramatic experience.25 Unlike other directors, who in staging Greek tragedy sought to involve the audience through physical interaction with the actors on stage – as was in The Living Theatre’s Antigone or The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 – Serban reached the spectators through a composition of sound gestures that elicited a direct emotional response. 5.3

Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski: the legacy of two masters

Andrei Serban’s experience at the Peter Brook’s Center released new reflections on the extent to which the research of the European masters could inspire American artists in their investigations. An influence that was certainly just as strong even within the Avant-garde itself on the young artists and companies forming in Italy, as in France, England and other European countries, where the legacy of the great directors brought about notable changes in the manner of creating and appreciating theater. At the same time, their research thrived on exchanges with young European and American artists. For this reason, it is essential to accompany the study of the groups that collaborated with La MaMa with brief references to the work being carried on by the European masters. The history of the New American theater and of the European theatrical Avant-garde were continually intertwined due to the dialogues initiated by those same artists. It is therefore essential to take another look at the work that the European masters were then involved in, at the time when the two new companies led by Andrei Serban and Stanley Rosenberg were formed, which marked the transition from the Sixties to the Seventies. After the staging of Orghast, in 1972, Peter Brook continued his research at CIRT with a second group that journeyed to Africa and that included Elizabeth Swados on her return from collaborating with Serban on the production of Medea. The experience with Brook significantly influenced

124  Two new companies at La MaMa her poetics as a musician and had an important impact on her future collaborations with Serban. Brook’s group started out from Algiers and passed through Niger, Nigeria and Dahomey, stopping in the villages where they performed in market squares and nomad camps, improvising songs and short actions on a Persian carpet previously used in experiments in Iran. The aim of their research was to find the most direct, sincere and fertile way of presenting a theatrical performance by resorting to improvisation through both physical action and sound. The actors learned to respond to the reactions of the African public, which was freer and more uninhibited in its use of the theater than the European one and welcomed the company’s sound experiments. Through their research, carried out mainly in public representations, the group initiated an exchange with African populations, seeking sounds or actions that could be shared and become a trigger for reciprocal responses. Thus, an exchange developed in which the spectators also gave the actors songs or music typical of their cultures of origin or simply reacted to the performances with laughter or applause. However, their quest for a universal language manifested itself more in the simplicity of sound than in structured speech or song. Brook demonstrated this in Niger, where the actors related to the Fulani people, nomadic shepherds whose music was incredibly beautiful.26 The group gained a wealth of new sound experiences and new relationships with the spectators, learning to respond to their nature and to establish a contact with them whose key lay in the emotional impact of sound and speech. In African villages whose languages had no word for theater, Peter Brook rediscovered the communicative possibilities of the theatrical experience thanks to the openness of the African populations. In those villages, the actors learned to share the same world as the audiences, developing their performances according to a common rhythm. A sharing made possible by the empty area (limited only by the carpet) in which the performance took place, a sort of testing area for the actors, since the moment they entered the limited space, they left everyday life behind them and exposed themselves to public attention.27 Through his interaction with these populations, Brook found further confirmation of the greater vitality and naturalness of theatrical communication in a space shared with the spectators, in comparison with what could be achieved in traditional European theaters. At the same time, being able to see the audience confortably seating in the dark offered new perspectives and meanings to the work of the actors. We learned a lot, and the major experience for the actors was playing to an audience they could see, as opposed to the invisible audience to

Two new companies at La MaMa   125 which they were accustomed. Many of them had worked in large, conventional theatres, and it was a profound shock to find themselves in Africa in direct contact with the audience, the only floodlight being the sun, which united spectator and performer in the same impartial glare. […] Another aspect of the empty space is that the emptiness is shared: it’s the same space for everyone who is present.28 In the same years, Andrei Serban too carried out investigations in a different relationship with the public and on sound. We have seen this in the experimentation that led to the staging of Medea, on which Peter Brook himself advised the young director to choose a Greek tragedy in the ancient language to continue the research that had begun with Orghast.29 Serban also took his cue from Brook in his quest for a theater that could be objective art, with a work that took shape in the essentiality of Medea’s staging, which used few props. Elizabeth Swados, on her part, shared Brook’s sound experimentation, focused on revealing a deeper meaning in speech by investigating ancient or tribal languages.30 Her work was based on the idea that the secret linking vocal expression and speech meaning lay in the sound structure of certain ancient languages. She shared her research with the group in training sessions that involved listening to and pronouncing sounds, with variations in accent, rhythm and intensity, and she familiarized herself with the traditional songs of village populations. She collected musical instruments that she brought back with her to the United States, where African sounds and motifs would significantly influence her work. Thus, we can appreciate how important it was for both Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados to share the experience with Peter Brook in the early Seventies. However, to talk about Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski we must backtrack a bit to 1968, the year of the publication of Towards a Poor Theatre, which circulated in the United States thanks to the now consolidated contacts between the director of Odin Teatret and many American artists and celebrities. The frequent participation of Americans in the seminars held in Holstebro from 1966 led to a grapevine of people who worked to promote the book in New York.31 Harry G. Carlson, a professor of theater at Queens College of the City University of New York, provided Barba with information on city libraries that might be interested in the book and the journal that Odin published, «Teatrets Teori Og Teknikk». Carlson also made the book of Grotowski available to his students and periodically sent the sales proceeds to his friend in Denmark.32 The members of the new La MaMa Plexus company helped distribute the volume among the artists and in the colleges where the group held workshops. In a letter dated December 1968, in which Stanley Rosenberg briefed Eugenio Barba on the training method he was

126  Two new companies at La MaMa promoting, the actor testified that Grotowski’s book was extremely popular in America and predicted that, when the Polish director would come to New York the following autumn, much would change in America’s approach to theater.33 Jerzy Grotowski and the Teatr Laboratorium were actually back in New York for an American tour in 1969. The Polish master was a guest along with his company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), which from October 16th to November 26th was planning thirty-four performances of The Constant Prince, Acropolis and Apocalypsis cum Figuris. For the occasion, Grotowski was received by a welcoming committee made up, among others, of Robert Brustein, Joseph Chaikin, Harvey Lichtenstein (Director of the BAM), Tom O’Horgan, Richard Schechner and Jean-Claude van Itallie. Its chairperson was the theatrical agent Ninon Tallon-Karlweis, and co-chairperson was Ellen Stewart who promoted Grotowski’s visit with the Brooklyn Academy.34 On Grotowski’s request, the plays were staged at the Washington Square Methodist Church, while the two lectures, which he held on November 7th and 22nd – on the technique and creative process of the Teatr Laboratorium’s actors and on the relationship between his own work and Stanislavsky’s – took place at the Brooklyn Academy.35 Marvin Carlson gives an account of Grotowski’s visit in his book 10,000 nights: He [Grotowski] planned to bring three productions to the United States in 1968, but was denied entry by the State Department after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. In Paris in September I was mailed a copy of a petition protesting this decision published in the New York Times and signed by sixty leading American theatre artists, among them Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Ellen Stewart. By the time permission was granted for the company to come, I was myself back in the United States and eager to see this muchpraised work. Grotowski was hosted by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which had just (in 1957) come under the leadership of Harvey Lichtenstein, whose vision was to make this outpost of the New York theatre into a major center of modern dance and contemporary national and international performance, which he brilliantly accomplished during his three decades there. Grotowski was his first major international guest, but he proved a difficult one. Grotowski did not find the space available at the Brooklyn Academy suitable for the work, and Lichtenstein was unable to find a nearby space that was better. Finally Grotowski accepted an engagement at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Greenwich Village, in the historic heart of the American expterimental theatre scene literally just around the corner from O’Neil’s Provincetown

Two new companies at La MaMa   127 Playhouse and only eight blocks from where Richard Schechener was editing TDR. Not only was the neighborhood most appropriate to this venture, but so was the church itself. It was deeply involved in contemporary political and social movements, often referred to as the ‘peace church’.36 On the same occasion, Grotowski held workshops and met with some groups, including the Open Theatre and La MaMa Plexus. Some members of Stanley Rosenberg’s group had met him at the summer seminar held in July of the same year in Holstebro, and in New York they were able to show him the evolution of their work, a circumstance that allowed Grotowski to indicate what he felt were the weaknesses that hindered their ensemble approach.37 The Open Theatre members, on their part, were able to attend an actual workshop of his, of which there is an account in Joseph Chaikin’s papers kept in the Kent State University archives. During the nine days of the workshop, Grotowski illustrated ways to tackle even the most difficult exercises and helped them create actions from their innermost impulses. Each exercise began with a physical phase, followed by a personal investigation with a partner, addressed without dialogue but only through gestures and movements and then repeated starting with a classical or mythological character, such as Faust, Romeo or Don Quixote. What emerges from the description of the sessions is a very rigorous training method, due to their difficulty and duration, an effort that not all of the Open Theatre actors were able to fully endure.38 In addition, the artists did not always see eye to eye with Grotowski’s approach, something Chaikin reaffirms in his comments on the workshop that had taken place the previous summer in Holstebro. As Andy Robinson also states, the American groups exhibited a personal freedom that led them to be recalcitrant to the dominating force of the European masters and, while nonetheless acknowledging their legacy, to use their teaching to develop new training methods and original approaches to artistic creation. However, the innovations that grew out of Jerzy Grotowski’s and Peter Brook’s research also spread thanks to performances staged in New York theaters. While Brook’s fame from his direction of Marat/Sade and US was already widespread, Grotowski officially presented his works in the United States only in 1969, shortly before interrupting his stage production. The impact of the performances was very powerful above all due to the theatrical experience the audiences underwent thanks to the essential scenic arrangements that redefined the theatrical space so as to offer a new type of relationship between spectators and performers and among members of the public itself. Clive Barnes commented in «The New York Times» on

128  Two new companies at La MaMa the fact that Grotowski with his performances sparked a reflection on the essence of theater. In Acropolis the audience is grouped all around the central playing area and the actors move around and by them. To an extent, your fellow members of the audience became lay actors – not exactly invisible, but rather like the black-garbed puppeteers in the Japanese Bunraku theater. You see them, but you don’t see them. Yet their presence, their common civilian status with yourself, actually adds to the immediacy of the actors.39 5.4

The common research of Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados on the Greek tragedies

The research that had begun for Medea in the fall of 1971 continued at La MaMa in the following years and materialized in the productions of Electra, The Trojan Women, and Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, the latter made up of parts of the other three performances. The work was a collective creation that took shape in the experimentation that Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados conducted on a daily basis with the actors of The Great Jones Repertory Company. As Andrei Serban explains, the choice of producing tragedies was determined by the ability of ancient Greek poets to communicate the essence of human relationships and to convey the most powerful emotions. […] Greek tragedy, Greek poetry, is potentially the best material ever written for the theatre. Although Shakespeare’s poetry is the richest and most complex in the English language, I think that Greek tragedy universally has an archetypal quality that even a Shakespearian play doesn’t have. The strength is that those Greek poets of the theatre were dealing with deeply felt essential relationships and human problems. They were, more than anybody after them, closer to, and more concerned about, the origin of our existence and the basic questions of man’s identity. […] In the very sound of the original Greek language of Sophocles and Euripides and the Latin of Seneca, there is a special karma, a special power that works like an Indian mantra. It has a secret alchemy.40 The initial idea, suggested by Serban’s and Swados’ experience at the CIRT workshop, lay in the communicative power of ancient languages, whose every sound has a meaning and every syllable carries a secret that can still be revealed. To rediscover this purity of sound, the group turned their

Two new companies at La MaMa   129 attention to the original plays in ancient Greek, again adopting a very rigorous approach. However, Elizabeth Swados’ investigation also focused on the Navajo, Swahili and Nahuati languages, whose every sound was significant. Her research on universal sound was related to the investigation carried on by Serban with his actors upon movement as an equally universal language that could be understood by everyone everywhere.41 The work of research and artistic creation was shared with the actors right from the start, using a training method that applied some of the vocal and physical exercises learned from Peter Brook. The company was committed to experiencing the sound of the ancient texts in their bodies – to have a visceral and physical, rather than an intellectual understanding of the words. This objective turned out to be a literal truth in the sense that Serban would pick and choose sections from the ancient Greek and Latin texts as they were read aloud in the original language by various translators.42 The aim was also to lead the actors to inhabit their bodies with sound, explore its different resonators, experiment with its various production possibilities and discover the potential of speech. Many times, sounds were passed in a circle, with the actors again either reproducing each other’s sound as closely as possible, or gradually expanding into conversations of abstract sound. On another occasion, the company passed sounds in a circle while at the beach, gradually widening the circle to determine the maximum distance for listening, concentration, and correct reproduction. Sometimes they would just face the wall and hurl their sounds against it – figuratively attempting to batter down the cement wall with a torrent of sounds.43 The exercise was partly guided by Yoshi Oida, again with reference to the techniques of Noh theater, while Serban exposed the actors to the physical disciplines of other arts, such as Kathakali and Kabuki, in order to make them use their bodies in an alternative way from the Western tradition. The exercise with sticks, which Serban had learned at CIRT, had a similar function. There were many variations in this exercise, but the basic idea was for the actor to use a long stick or pole in an acrobatic, rigorous, yet beautiful way, almost as an extension of an arm, rotating it, balancing it, performing movements in unison with other actors in a light and airy fashion that did not represent anything specific in terms of meaning beyond its aesthetic effect.44

130  Two new companies at La MaMa Swados and Serban thus created a new language made up of music, sounds, rhythms and gestures. The actors participated in the investigation by experimenting with new sounds that evoked the passions contained in ancient dramas and that contributed to the mysterious, ritualistic atmosphere of a staging that united performers and spectators. In The Trojan Women, the emphasis was on spatial research and a new relationship with the public that had begun with Medea. The audiences were invited to move with the actors, participating in the action in the performance space, implicitly playing the role of an Achaean soldier or a Trojan prisoner of war. In contrast to what had taken place for plays put on previously by other groups, which had involved sharing space with the public (such as The Performance Group with Dionysus in 69 or The Living Theatre with Antigone), Serban’s production did not experience any instances of misunderstanding by audiences.45 Serban’s productions created a vibrant emotional connection and intimacy through the staging, but it never violated the implicit boundary between performer and spectator. It was an attempt, in modern times, to recreate the sense of connection with a powerful aesthetic, religious, and civic event that the Greeks might have experienced. The audience implicitly understood its role and responded accordingly.46 Bill Ruyle, a musician who joined the group in 1974, took part in the production, playing percussion accompaniments to the vocal music that Swados taught the actors, learned only phonetically, without the artists knowing the original meaning of the words but heeding only the sound and experimenting with its rhythm. Swados’ research extended over a period of several years, with a ­variety of outcomes. In Medea and Electra, it led to a sort of vocalization close to speech and dialogue, while in The Trojan Women, she introduced chants and songs that emerged from a fusion of the sounds and rhythms of the indigenous peoples of Africa and South and North America. She also experimented with different musical instruments, winds and tribal percussions chosen to match their sounds with the vocal ones. Both the instrumental and vocal music were not notated but taught by the musician to the members of the company through repetition (only later did Bill Ruyle transcribe them).47 Thus, artistic creation developed concurrently. Elizabeth Swados worked on the images that Serban suggested, looking for ways to make sound visible and thus recreate his visions through music and song. Serban actually saw sounds synaesthetically as images. He considered them visual elements as well as auditory ones, a sort of energy in motion, explaining

Two new companies at La MaMa   131 that “the tone of the speaking or the singing voice is an expression of an inner posture. The tone of voice betrays something about a person deeply related to essential emotions”.48 I see the sound as an image. I see what is enclosed in it – a column of air trying to break open. In the effort to produce the cry I attempt to replace heaviness with spontaneous vitality. The cry becomes either an expression of freedom and awakening or a sign of imprisonment; it all depends on how the sound is controlled and directed from inside. […] The word is written to be experienced at the moment it is spoken, in an immediate relationship with the sound, with an infinite possibility to create moods and situations as music does. It exists on its own. It comes from somewhere – and it goes away. We sense its vibration. We hold onto it. We can try to make it vibrate inside us.49 The Trojan Women made its debut on September 12, 1974, at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where the space allowed for the itinerant installation that Serban had conceptualized. But in October of the same year, it was also installed at La MaMa, for the inauguration of the building called The Annex, on East 4th Street, with the interior spaces and sets designed by the Japanese Jun Maeda.50 There the performance took place throughout the hall, equipped for the occasion with numerous platforms, and on the side galleries. The public was guided through a procession that began in the atrium, where the Achaean soldiers led the Trojan women into captivity. The episodes presenting the story of the three protagonists, Cassandra, Helen and Andromache, were staged in different parts of the room at the sides or in the midst of the audience – as in the case of Helen, led to center stage on a chariot – who followed the action, moving at the bidding of the soldiers and witnessing the facts represented, totally immersed in the work’s spatial-temporal dimension. Their role as witness also extended to the second and final part of the performance, where the spectators were invited to sit on the sides of the hall, in the center of which a new procession initiated the funeral of Andromache’s son Astyanax, heir to the throne of Troy and killed by the victorious Achaean soldiers. The production of all three tragedies emerged from meetings with other artists, in perfect harmony with La MaMa’s well-established practice. While the research that produced Medea was rooted in Peter Brook’s experiments with the first CIRT group in Paris, and later in Iran, Electra’s resulted from a request from the French actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault to co-produce a work with his Renaud-Barrault Company. The play

132  Two new companies at La MaMa debuted at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1973 with a mixed cast of French and American actors in an evocative setting at the Sainte Chapelle. Lastly, The Trojan Women resulted from research that had begun in São Paulo, in collaboration with the iconic actor of Brazilian theater Ruth Escobar and other Brazilian actors, and that was concluded later in New York with the members of The Great Jones. The experimenting with Brazilian artists greatly influenced the work. As Andrei Serban recalls, “what we did was very close to the traditional South American sensitivity, to their understanding of ceremony very close to their own origins”.51 The vibrant energy and dynamics of the stage actions were instead inspired by the political demonstrations that Serban and Swados had observed in São Paulo. Hence, these plays emerged from a dialogue established with other artists from different parts of the world, in an intercultural exchange that was especially impactful in this last work, which, although it was not intended to transmit political messages, has stirred audiences in the many countries where it has been presented since 1975. The Trojan Women was a work that restored the ancient sense of theater, especially in bringing together those who participated in it, actors and spectators, in a common ceremony. It was acclaimed at each performance, partially answering the questions that Peter Brook posed in his research, which sought to unite people from different parts of the world through the power of sound and universal emotions.52 The Trojan Women deals with the loss of a civilization. A whole culture is disappearing. We asked ourselves, “what is the meaning of the loss of a nation?”. We used cries and laments from Brazil and from American Indians; we used songs and tunes that Liz had gathered when she was studying in Africa; we took things from the Balkans, from Rumania, where I come from, things which are very close to me. All of these deal with the same mood, the underlying feeling stretching through alla civilizations. All the songs carry the same vibration.53 Fragments of a Trilogy enclosed in a single work the passionate cries of Medea, the hieratic composure and rituality of Electra, together with the sensuality, iconic effectiveness and active involvement of the public in the action of The Trojan Women. As such, it can be considered the first embodiment of Artaud’s theater of cruelty. Andrei Serban’s biographer Ed Menta sees the actors of The Great Jones company as realizations of Artaud’s actor-shamans: “Their almost ascetic sense of discipline and rigorous physical and vocal technique seemed to recall Artaud’s demand for the actor to return to his original function as shaman in a spiritual ceremony”.54 Serban also believed there was a special force in the work that

Two new companies at La MaMa   133 acted on both actors and audiences, arising from the shared moment.55 Priscilla Smith herself speaks of the extraordinary relationship with the audience that was established during the performances. At a certain point during the last tour, we started doing curtain calls for the first time. I began to wonder whether a curtain call was not so much the audience acknowledging the performers as the performers acknowledging the assistance of the audience. If I really looked at a person and smiled, they would stop clapping. It was almost as if they became aware of the fact that a circle had existed, that they had assisted, that a movement of energy had been there between them and me.56 An impression also confirmed by the critics at the work’s New York debut on June 21, 1974, and in the following months. The long experimentation led to a new successful production, demonstrating once again the value of Ellen Stewart’s commitment to discovering and supporting talented young artists and the importance of the cultural exchanges she promoted in the theatrical field. Serban creates a total experience for us, as modern theatergoers, which must be as near an equivalent as is contemporarily possible to the feel and thrust of the original plays – a sense of pervading mystic/religious ritual atmosphere, full of tension and, ultimately, of release. I felt that I really understood for the first time what the analysts of Greek tragedy mean by the term catharsis. Peculiarly enough, I found myself reminded throughout of voodoo ceremonies that I attended four years ago in Haiti. There was the same feeling of primitive intensity, of hidden mysteries, of revelation.57 Serban speaks to us of primal, universal emotions and situations – regardless of what language he relates them in or how much (or how little) we have in our memory bank of facts and meanings and connections to draw upon for understanding. […] It’s almost as if Serban were forcing us to see the plays bare, to experience them as primitive religious rituals, in much the same way that the Greeks themselves had to do.58 Mr. Serban makes you feel such basic emotions as love, suffering anguish, disgust and fear, at a level not so far removed from reality. Of course, they are in essence totally removed – no theatrical experience can duplicate, for example, the raw thrust of real pain – but that particular removal has the tincture of poetic honesty, to it. Mr. Serban’s theater helps you to know what you think.59

134  Two new companies at La MaMa 5.5

A training company: La MaMa Plexus Workshop

Andrew Robinson’s account of joining La MaMa Plexus begins with the visit from Stanley Rosenberg and his demonstration of The Cat in his living room. Robinson recalls that “it was like watching a great storyteller, except there were no words or mimetic signals, just one physical movement finding its full expression and then morphing into the next”.60 The story of the first La MaMa training company therefore starts with an exercise. The group organized itself in daily four-hour sessions, five days a week, held first in La MaMa’s basement and later in the loft of the Open Theatre, practicing Rosenberg’s training method together with other types of exercises familiar to the company members. The company explored different techniques to discover each actor’s potential and find new approaches to acting.61 The main purpose was to achieve body-mind unity through individual and collective actions, with an awareness of the impulses coming from every part of the body that generated them. During the workshop, the La MaMa Plexus actors also worked on creating character by developing physical actions that served as a subtext in the performance, thus also drawing from the teachings of Stanislavsky. It was a sort of micro-dramas that the group also used during the workshop demonstrations that were open to the public. An example of this was Inside Out, later called Horse and Rider, devised from an improvisation in which Andy Robinson and Joel Zwick, respectively, played the roles of a sheriff and a motorcyclist arrested for speeding. The action, which started with a prompt by Robinson, made up for the lack of a crucial instant that captured audience interest. The two sat face to face and started a discussion, in a sequence that took its cue from the slow-motion physical training technique, that Ellen Stewart later adopted as a performance demonstrating the group’s work. At one point during a late rehearsal (maybe even an early performance), acting on an impulse, I rose out of my chair in slow motion, crawled over the desk and physically attacked Joel. This launched us into a violent struggle for dominance (amplified by the slow motion) that was resolved when the prisoner, in an attempt to harness the rage and animal energy of his attacker, rides the sheriff like a horse until he is able to pacify him. We then returned to normal time, the text and our original positions across the desk as if this power struggle had never taken place. But of course it had.62 The training also included Grotowski’s Plastic exercises, in which the actors isolated the movements performed with specific parts of their bodies

Two new companies at La MaMa   135 in order to release muscle tension but also to build a nonverbal vocabulary of expressive movements, starting from the principle that the body is a vehicle of emotions and feelings. The group explored the complex relationship between language and physical actions, to arrive at experiencing language itself profoundly through movement. The investigation started with the assumption that imagination is nourished by the senses and that speech itself, if investigated as a sensory experience, can activate memory and desire.63 In the company’s first period of work, and a few months after Stanley Rosenberg’s return to the United States, he kept up an intense correspondence with Eugenio Barba, informing him of the group’s progress and how he was passing on to his fellow actors what he had learned in his long period at Odin Teatret. In a letter dated February 29, 1968, he included the notice of Plexus’ first production, in which the company declared, among its various influences, those of the La MaMa Repertory Troupe, Eugenio Barba, Odin Teatret and Jerzy Grotowski. On March 6th, the group staged Jan Quackenbush’s Complexions and Inside Out, along with Victor Copi’s The Cylinder, which Rosenberg directed. The cast were made up of Diane Callum, Tony De Carlo, Jean Graham, Sally Lansing, Annabel Leventon, Jillian Lieder, Julian Olf, Andy Robinson and Joel Zwick.64 Professor Harry Carlson, who also saw the play, raved about it in a letter to Barba, writing that he himself could testify that it owed a great deal to Grotowski and Odin.65 In his correspondence with Eugenio Barba, Stanley Rosenberg spoke of the training that the company practiced with The Cat, karate, dance and some of the theatrical improvisation games common in the United States, but he also commented on the student struggles and the protests that were spreading throughout the country, narrating incidents of violence at Queens College which he himself had witnessed. In September 1968, he and some other members of the group were actually invited by Harry Carlson to teach in the College’s advanced acting course. Rosenberg also held, together with one of the female actors, a workshop in a psychiatric hospital where he lectured on the relationship between mind, body and emotions. In the fall, he joined the faculty at the School of Drama at Yale University, where he was invited after the group had demonstrated the new physical and voice work the group was developing.66 That same year, La MaMa Plexus was asked by the United States Information Agency to take part in an event called Problem Areas of Contemporary America, dealing with issues of higher education, poverty, urban crisis and the development of the arts. The company was invited, as representatives of the Avant-garde theater, to conduct part of a seminar for senior officers of the agency returning to the United States after a work

136  Two new companies at La MaMa period abroad, whose aim was to familiarize them with the most stringent challenges America was facing and with the current state of the arts.67 This was how, following the directives of Ellen Stewart, Rosenberg and the actors of the company transmitted the training techniques developed through La MaMa’s work sessions and brought its new acting technique to universities, thus spreading the name of the La MaMa Experimental Theatre, together with the methods developed in Europe. New disciplines were gradually integrated into the training method. For example, when the actor Leslie Redford joined the group, on arriving at Plexus after reading the review of Kaspariana in «The Drama Review»,68 he taught the actors Tai Chi Chuan, which Rosenberg described as a slow-motion technique involving the whole body, hands and feet as well, useful for achieving discipline, control and concentration. In the letters to his friend in Denmark, he explained that the company members practiced this martial art as an exercise, and that it was becoming a resource for new ideas on movement. On his return from participating in the Odin summer seminar, Rosenberg gradually added an individual training to the collective exercises and improvisation that La MaMa Plexus had worked on at the start. Hence, a year after its foundation, the company was already recognized for its workshops in both Off-Off Broadway and Broadway theaters. In December 1968, Rosenberg wrote to Eugenio Barba that Tom O’Horgan had called on the group to train the actors who were working in the production of Hair, for whom La MaMa Plexus held two workshops a week of up to four hours each.69 In addition to the company sessions, Rosenberg and his team also held workshops for a dozen professional actors who trained weekly. At the same time, three members of his group were holding a seminar in La MaMa Bogota with Ellen Stewart. Stanley Rosenberg was enthusiastic about the results. He wrote that La MaMa Plexus had contributed to raising interest in America in Barba’s and Grotowski’s work through direct experience, at the same time paving the way there for a new approach to theater and acting.70 In effect, the company generated interest in the experiments of the European masters. In his letters to Odin Teatret, Rosenberg and the other members of the group often mentioned actors from other companies or institutions such as the Actors’ Studio, who after having participated in the La MaMa Plexus workshops asked to take part in Odin’s summer seminars. This correspondence contains a letter from Joel Zwick (signed together with his wife Diane Callum), addressed to Eugenio Barba, in which the two artists ask to be admitted to Grotowski’s seminar scheduled in Holstebro in the summer of 1969. The document is of interest for Zwick’s albeit brief observations about the value that the training developed by Grotowski and Barba had for American theater.

Two new companies at La MaMa   137 Dear Mr. Barba,

New York, December 16, 1968

I am writing to you on the recommendation of Stanley Rosenberg, in order to request an invitation to this year’s Grotowski seminar for myself and my wife. The two of us have been performing members of Stan’s group La MaMa Plexus Workshop since its inception, here in New York, one year ago. In the past year the work has become the main driving and sustaining force in our lives, and we look on our possible participation in the seminar as the single most important contribution we can make to our future development. For one year we’ve been eating and sleeping Barba and Grotowski, I feel it is now crucial, if only on a limited basis, that we meet and work with the both of you. In the past year your work has begun to excite the imaginations of many of our leading Universities. For the past 5 months my wife and I have been running workshops at Queens College and Yale School of Drama. A center of your work is rapidly beginning to form here in New York, with such people as Prof. Harry Carlson, Stan and Suzie Rosenberg, Richard Schechner, and myself, Joel Zwick and my wife Diane spreading a return to the actor. I feel it is crucial for the future development of theatre here in New York that we move ahead with your and not bastardize it. Americans (including myself) too easily accept the façade and not the method or process. I do not want to see what happened to Stanislavski in this country, happen to yourself and Mr. Grotowski. The best way my wife and I can continue to personalize this work and deal with it on our own terms is by direct confrontation with yourself and Mr. Grotowski. I sincerely hope you will look favorably on this request and I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Joel Zwick and Diane Callum71 The work that La MaMa Plexus offered was greatly influenced by the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski. In a 1972 interview, Joel Zwick spoke of “negative training”, whose purpose was to remove blocks that limit the actor’s creativity, a type of exercise meant to identify his/her personal skills, owing much to Grotowski’s concept of the “negative way”. The method Zwick developed, on replacing Rosenberg as director in 1969,72 also owed much to the teachings of Viola Spolin and Martha Graham, from whom he took exercises for acquiring individual motility, i.e. the ability to express

138  Two new companies at La MaMa emotions through body movement. Spolin’s technique was used to explore sensitivity and acquire relational skills with stage mates. Joel Zwick also developed his own vocal training method inspired by Grotowski’s work on resonators and by the method elaborated by the actor Kristin Linklater, which she developed starting from the teachings of Iris Warren at LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, where Andy Robinson had also studied. It was a technique for vocal enhancement and elasticity through combined work on imagination and on the release of channels that lead to impulse, whether feelings, imagination, the text to pronounce or musical notes.73 Plexus training was divided into two sessions, the first on removing blocks and stopping automatisms, the second preparatory to acquiring certain skills. A good part of the work was aimed at developing the individual, what Zwick called “the actor’s essential humanism”. The training that we do does give the actor skills; it teaches the actor to do; it teaches him pride in craft – and that’s fifty percent of the battle. The other fifty percent demands development of the actor’s essential and unique humanism. This is where negative training becomes crucial in helping to create that human being on a super level.74 The work relied heavily on improvisation but also on discipline. Zwick considered it essential to find a balance between creativity and technique, to obtain which it was necessary to set boundaries within which the actor feels free to explore: “it is within this framework that a person has total freedom to explore the discipline and herself”.75 In 1969, in addition to taking part in Odin’s summer seminars, the group toured Europe, where they presented Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck as adapted by Joel Zwick, Andy Robinson’s Last Chance Saloon, and John Buttoms’ Man Versus Computer, but above all gave training demonstrations and workshops. Woyzeck evolved from a production designed for Queens College students, where Robinson, Zwick and Buttoms taught, while The Last Chance Saloon was written by Andy Robinson, presented in a reading with Yale students and later staged during a workshop for Dartmouth College (New Hampshire) students from May 20 to 24, 1969. The play, which combined dance, experimental theater and other media according to a register that ranged from grotesque to comic, was presented at the London’s Arts Theatre and at the Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam, by then a reference point for La MaMa, where the reviews were enthusiastic. Inside Out improvisation was then presented in a theater near Paris. During the European tours, but also in Brazil and Colombia, Ellen Stewart had the company hold workshops in universities and theaters. In January 1969, she was at Kent State University, where she gave a seminar at

Two new companies at La MaMa   139

Figure 5.2 The Last Chance Saloon at La MaMa, November 30, 1973, directed by Joel Zwick. Photo credits Amon Ben Nomis. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

the Creative Arts Festival and La MaMa Plexus made a training film with Shirley Clarke, in which Joel Zwick and Diane Callum performed physical improvisations on the relationship between the actor and space.76 Later productions involving the company were Spring-Voices (1969), a work written by Andy Robinson and based on the Tibetan Book of the

140  Two new companies at La MaMa

Figure 5.3 The Myths of America Smith at La MaMa, May 4, 1973, directed by Joel Zwick. Photo credits Amon Ben Nomis. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

Dead (on the life and teachings of Padmasambhava, the founder of Buddhism), and Greg Antonacci’s “Dance Wi Me” Or (The Fatal Twitch), a musical choreographed by Joel Zwick on musical pieces from the Fifties (1971).

Two new companies at La MaMa   141 Joel Zwick’s productions focused on actors and their relationship with space. This is why he preferred essential scenes and saw an empty room as the ideal space for theater because it could be reconceptualized for each work. My approach towards staging or mounting a production is influenced by Grotowski’s notion of Poor Theatre. The only advantage that theatre has over the movies or television is the ability to put in front of the live audience a number of actors who are given a chance to express their humanity. This is what makes the theatre live; what gives it its unique character. Obviously, movies and television can produce spectacle better than the theatre; for this reason I like to reduce every play I do down to a level which is essentially human. I remove grandeur. My productions tend to be very stark. I deal with few props, very simple lighting, and my sets are not sets but environments Once everything is reduced to the human level, that is to the actor, it necessarily becomes the actor’s job to create everything organically.77 Hence, La MaMa Plexus seems to have played a truly fundamental role in disseminating the training methods and poetics developed by Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, but more than through productions, this took place through the workshops offered in universities and theaters. Among Odin Teatret’s papers, there are numerous letters sent by artists, critics, students and theater teachers asking to participate in the summer seminars after having been trained with the New York company or having attended its demonstrations. Many were actors who gravitated around La MaMa or belonged to the Off-Off Broadway theater environment, and who after coming into contact with La MaMa Plexus wished to learn more about the methods of the European masters.78 Notes 1 M. De Marinis, Il Nuovo Teatro, cit. Marco De Marinis was the first scholar in Italy who adopted the name New Theater (Nuovo Teatro) to refer to the Avant-garde theater of the second half of the twentieth century. 2 Ivi. 3 “Fatto da quanti ebbero il coraggio di negare il teatro, di uscire dal teatro per ritrovarlo poi veramente, durante il loro viaggio, nella forma viva che desideravano”. Ivi, p. 180. Author’s translation. 4 Fabrizio Deriu speaks about the creation of the play in Un crocevia di influenze. Appunti per un’esegesi delle collaborazioni e delle influenze nel Dionysus in 69 del Performance Group, a paper given at the international study conference The rise of New Theatre and the theatrical avant-garde: meetings and influences across boundaries (1948–1981) at the University of Verona, May 2022. See also Fabrizio Deriu, ‘Dionysus in 69’ da Euripide per Richard Schechner e il Performance group, Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2023.

142  Two new companies at La MaMa 5 E. Barba, Towards a Poor Theatre, cit.; Peter Brook, The Empty Space, McGibbon & Kee, London 1968; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theatre, Hawthorn Books, New York 1973. 6 Andrew Robinson, Stepping into The Light. Sources of an Actor’s Craft, Figueroa Press, Los Angeles 2015. Kindle, Amazon. 7 Sam Zolotov, La Mama to Get Larger Quarter, «The New York Times», July 24, 1968. 8 C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents, cit. 9 The two works were staged at the theater at 74A East 4th Street on February 6, 1970. 10 Ed Menta, The Magic World Behind the Curtain. Andrei Serban in the American Theatre, Peter Lang, New York 1997. 11 “La capacità di ascoltare attraverso il corpo i codici e gli impulsi che sono sempre nascosti alla radice delle diverse forme culturali”, F. Perrelli, I maestri della ricerca teatrale, cit., p. 133. 12 Peter Brook, Threads of Time. A Memoir, Methuen, London 1999. 13 Ivi, p. 167. 14 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point, Harper and Row, New York 1987, p. 110. 15 Gregory Lima, Ritual for a Mountain Top, «Kayhan International», August 31, 1971. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 16 Margaret Croyden, Peter Brook Learns to Speak Orghast, «The New York Times», October 3, 1971. 17 Giulia Palladini, Ellen Stewart e La Mama: un’idea di teatro, Bachelor degree thesis presented at DAMS, University of Bologna, 2004–2005. Courtesy La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 18 The young woman was a native of Buffalo, and when Ellen Stewart introduced her to Andrei Serban, she was still studying at Bennington College. 19 A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History, cit. 20 Andrei Serban and Eileen Blumenthal, ed., Andrei Serban, «Theater», vol. 8, no. 2–3, 1977, pp. 66–77, p. 68. 21 Priscilla Smith had previously collaborated with La MaMa in productions directed by Nancy Fales and Wilford Leach, and with The Performance Group in Dionysus in 69 e in Makbeth. 22 Naomi Gray Wallis, A Shattering Experience, «Monday Morning», Beirut, July 7th, 1972. Courtesy La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 23 Marvin Carlson, Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror. Theatre and Reality, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2021, p. 111. 24 Anna Maria Narti, Le Travail D’Andréï Serban. Medea. Elektra, in Le Travail D’Andréï Serban. Medea. Elektra, Festival D’Automne à Paris, 4, in Gallimard (ed.), Paris 1973, pp. 10–54. 25 Clive Barnes, Stage: Superb ‘Medea’, «The New York Times», January 25, 1972. 26 John Heilpern, I.C.T.R. in Africa. A Cronicle. December 1 1972 – March 10 1973, CIRT documentation, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. Of the same outhor, Conference of the Birds. The History of Peter Brook in Africa, Routledge, New York 1999. See also Michael Gibson and Peter Brook, Brook’s Africa, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 17, no. 3, Theatre and Social Sciences, September 1973, pp. 37–51. 27 Peter Brook, The Open Door. Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, Anchor Book, New York 2005. 28 Ivi, p. 6. 29 A. M. Narti, Le Travail D’Andréï Serban, cit.

Two new companies at La MaMa   143 30 Bill Ruyle, a musician who took part in Andrei Serban’s productions, recounted the story in an interview granted to the author in New York on February 1, 2021. 31 S. Dragone, Le origini del seminario, cit. Even the press took note of the book, see Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, If It Can’t be Rich, Let It Be Poor, Books of The Times, «The New York Times», January 23, 1970, e Richard Gilman, What Not to Do in the Theater – A Handbook for Would-Be Disciples, «The New York Times», February 8, 1970. 32 The information is contained in an epistolary exchange between Eugenio Barba and Harry Carlson in 1968. Found Odin Teatret, Odin Activities B30, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 33 Stanley Rosenberg, letter to Eugenio Barba dated December 16, 1968. Odin Teatret Archives, Activities. Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 34 Opening Night, Archive materials, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 35 Press release, September 8, 1969, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 36 Marvin Carlson, 10,000 Nights. Highlights From 50 Years of Theatre-going, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2021, pp. 51–52. 37 A. Robinson, Stepping into the Light, cit. 38 Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin Papers, Box 18, Folder 15, Courtesy Kent State University Libraries. Department of Special Collections and Archives. 39 Clive Barnes, Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Acropolis’, «The New York Times», November 5, 1969. See also, by the same author, ‘Apocalypsis cum Figuris’, «The New York Times», November 20, 1969. 40 Andrei Serban, in Arthur Bartow, The Director’s Voice. Twenty-One Interviews, Theatre Communication Group, New York 2002, p. 290. 41 The description of the group’s work is taken from an interview of January 4, 2021, that Onni Johnson, an actor belonging to the company who took part in the productions of the Seventies, granted to the author. 42 E. Menta, The Magic World Behind the Curtain, cit., p. 16. 43 Ibidem. 44 Ivi, p. 17. In his book, Ed Menta describes in detail the training method of The Great Jones Repertory Company and the poetics that guided Serban and Swados in realizing the tragedies. 45 In some stagings by The Living Theatre and The Performance Group, there had been unfortunate events where members of the audience had been turned away because of their actions during the performance. 46 A. Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre, cit., pp. 105–106. 47 The information on the method that characterized the musical and sound research is taken from a conversation the author had with Bill Ruyle on February 1, 2021. 48 Andrei Serban, in Arthur Bartow, The Director’s Voice, cit., p. 295. 49 Andrei Serban, The Life in a Sound, «The Drama Review», vol. 20, n. 4, December 1976, pp. 25–26, pp. 25, 26. 50 The Japanese artist was previously part of La MaMa’s Tokyo Kid Brothers company and designed the scenographies of Andrei Serban’s subsequent productions at La MaMa, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Zetzuan (1975) and As You Like It (1977). 51 Robb Baker, Andrei Serban – The Intelligence of Emotions, «The Soho Weekly News», October 17, 1974.

144  Two new companies at La MaMa 52 The information is taken from the interview Andrei Serban granted the author on January 13, 2021. 53 Andrei Serban, in A. Serban and E. Blumenthal, eds., Andrei Serban, cit., p. 71. 54 E. Menta, The Magic World Behind the Curtain, cit., p. 31. 55 A. Serban and E. Blumenthal, ed., Andrei Serban, cit. 56 Priscilla Smith, in Diane Cartwright, Priscilla Smith of The Great Jones Repertory Project, «The Drama Review», vol. 20, n. 3, September 1976, pp. 75–82, p. 82. 57 Robb Baker, Catoptromancia, «The Soho Weekly News», July 3, 1974. Courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 58 Robb Baker, Off Off and Away, «After Dark», August 1974. Courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 59 Clive Barnes, Serban’s Trilogy Is an Event, «The New York Times», October 20, 1974. 60 A. Robinson, Stepping into the Light, cit., Location n. 2693, Part Two, Chapter 5, ‘La Mama’. 61 Ted Flagg, Blood, Sweat, and Tears on Absolutely Nothing a Week, «After Dark», June 1968, pp. 38–40. 62 A. Robinson, Stepping into the Light, cit., Location n. 3007, Part Two, Chapter 5, ‘Plexus’. 63 A. Robinson, Stepping into the Light, cit. 64 Stanley Rosenberg, letter to Eugenio Barba dated February 29, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret, Activities, Rosenberg-Barba correspondence, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 65 Harry G. Carlson, Letter to Eugenio Barba dated April 12, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret, Activities B6, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 66 Stanley Rosenberg, letter to Eugenio Barba of October 25, 1968, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities, Rosenberg-Barba correspondence, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 67 Stanley Rosenberg, letter to Eugenio Barba dated September 12, 1968, Odin Teatret Archives, Activities, Rosenberg-Barba correspondence, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives; see also William K. Payeff’s letter (United States Information Agency) to Stanley Rosenberg, dated August 30, 1968. Courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 68 Marc Fumarolli, Eugenio Barba’s Kaspariana, «The Drama Review», vol. 13, n. 1, Fall 1968, pp. 46–56. 69 Stanley Rosenberg, letters to Eugenio Barba dated December 16, 1968, and December 30, 1968. Odin Teatret Archives, Activities, Rosenberg-Barba correspondence, Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives. 70 Ibidem. 71 Letter from Joel Zwick and Diane Callum to Eugenio Barba, dated December 16, 1968. The document, kept at the Odin Teatret Archives, Activities, is published here thanks to the permission granted by the parties involved: Joel Zwick, Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret Archives/Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium – Department of Research and Dissemination. 72 The company suffered a falling out when Ellen Stewart and Andy Robinson decided to hand over the direction of The Last Chance Saloon to Joel Zwick. Barbara Bottner, John Buttoms, Michael Brody, Mel Skipper and Diane Callum took part in the production. Andy Robinson describes the matter in Stepping into the Light, cit.

Two new companies at La MaMa   145 73 Actor, director and playwright Kristin Linklater (1936–2020) was a student and assistant of Iris Warren at LAMDA and later in the United States, where she also taught Joseph Chaikin. On her method, see Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice, Drama Publishers, Hollywood 2006. 74 Joel Zwick, in Sarah Venable, Actor Training. An Interview with Joel Zwick, Associate Professor of Drama, «Wheaton College Alumnae Magazine», Winter 1972, pp. 16–20, p. 18. 75 Ibidem. 76 Information on the documentary is taken from an interview Joel Zwick granted to the author on August 10, 2021; the video is kept at the La MaMa Archive. The appointments with Ellen Stewart and La MaMa Plexus appear on the festival program and in the University publication, «Kent Starter», vol. LIV, n. 42, January 7, 1969. Courtesy Kent State University Libraries. Department of Special Collections and Archives. 77 Joel Zwick in S. Venable, Actor Training, cit. p. 20. 78 Others had news about the seminars from Ellen Stewart, such as theater professor and critic Margaret Croyden, who asked to attend as an auditor in the summer of 1969 because she wanted to tell about Odin Teatret in a book she was writing. This was probably Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: The Contemporary Experimental Theatre, Dell Publishing Company, New York 1975. A report of the seminar was published in «The Drama Review: TDR» in the form of interview: see Erika Munk, Bill Coco and Margaret Croyden, Notes From The Temple: A Grotowski Seminar. An Interview With Margaret Croyden, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 14, no 1, Autumn 1969, pp. 178–183. The letter to Eugenio Barba is dated March 24, 1969. Odin Teatret Archives – ­Activities – B7B. Courtesy Odin Teatret Archives.

6 A multicultural venue in New York

Since Café La MaMa’s early years, Ellen Stewart supported young playwrights by producing their works, often with the participation of novice actors, while the authors often took on the role of directors. In the evolution of the Off-Off Broadway experimental circuit, thanks also to the first European tours she financed and organized, the scene of the author became the scene of the director, as in many instances, the directors worked on productions with a stable company and no longer with a cast chosen on an as-need basis. The methods of experimentation changed, no longer focused mainly on performance and aimed solely at production. The research shifted to the workshops, in an effort spread over time and shared by a well-defined group of people whose aim was to find a common artistic language, improve the actors’ expressive skills, create an authentic ensemble and optimize technical skills through training. As we have seen in the previous chapters, it was an evolution resulting from the new and different needs that arose with the experiences that the artists were facing in New York and abroad, but also from exposure to realities other than that of New York’s experimental scene and from encounters with other artists. We also saw Ellen Stewart’s interest in actor training and stage experimentation, but La MaMa was also attentive to socially or politically engaged companies in recognizing their respective ethnic backgrounds and their efforts to preserve their traditions and promote awareness of their cultures. La MaMa Experimental Theatre hosted the Chinese Theatre Group and La MaMa Chinatown, which Ellen Stewart founded in the early seventies along with a group of Asian-American artists. These two companies merged in 1977 into a larger company under the name of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, directed by Tisa Chang, devoted to producing cross-cultural Asian-American plays, classic Asian plays translated into English, and staging innovative versions of classic plays from Western culture. With these groups, Stewart’s theater became a center of research as well as transmission of the varied Asian cultures present in New York DOI: 10.4324/9781003336235-7

A multicultural venue in New York   147 (and in the United States), and which were part of America’s great multicultural society. 1970 was the year La MaMa founded its first group made up mainly of African American actors, who staged works written by authors belonging to the Black Theatre Movement, in turn connected to the Black Power Movement. La MaMa GPA Nucleus Company, later called Jarboro Players,1 contributed to spreading African American culture and awareness of the rights of Black people with performances in America and Europe via tours that Ellen Stewart organized. Lastly, among La MaMa’s numerous guest groups, mention should be made of the American Indian Theatre Ensemble, founded in 1972, the first US theater company made up exclusively of Native Americans, and later called Native American Theatre Ensemble. This too was a group formed to spread the culture and traditions of a people, i.e. Native Americans, through original works written in English and in the Navajo tongue. Ellen Stewart was aware of the growth opportunities offered by cultural and artistic exchanges and pursued her cross-pollination project by facilitating the collaborative experiences of her companies with foreign artists in the United States and in Europe. Opportunities that she also grasped for the Jarboro Players, whom she accompanied on a 1972 European tour, and

Figure 6.1 Ellen Stewart, New York City premiere of Golden Bat, Tokyo Kid Brothers, June 17, 1970, directed by Higashi Yutaka. Photo credit La MaMa Archive. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

148  A multicultural venue in New York for the Native American Theatre Ensemble, for which she organized meetings with Peter Brook’s group. In 1973, more than ten years after the opening of Café La MaMa, Stewart grasped a new opportunity to collaborate with an important New York center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and bringing together some of the artists who gravitated around her theater with one of the most important European directors.2 Her close friendship with Brook was thus reinforced into an artistic partnership during one of the research journey that Brook made with the members of CIRT, the last of a three-year project whose final destination was the Brooklyn Academy. 6.1

Native American Theatre Ensemble meets Peter Brook

In 1973, Peter Brook and the CIRT group, on their return from their African journey, continued their research in North America. As on previous journey, the group was made up of artists from Japan, England, France, Mali and America and included Elizabeth Swados.3 Their work, which involved artistic exchanges with other American companies, began in California in June of 1973. Brook and his artists spent eight weeks in San Juan Bautista, living and sharing their research with El Teatro Campesino, and subsequently met with La MaMa’s Native American Theatre Ensemble at the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. In Connecticut, it shared a work session with the National Theatre of the Deaf,4 and in early September CIRT initiated, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a comprehensive project with Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan communities. Concentrated work periods were also organized at the Academy with other groups, including The Living Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish group (coming from Philadelphia, where it held workshops) and La MaMa’s Chinese Theatre Group. One-day work sessions were also organized in Brooklyn with the National Theatre of the Deaf and the Native American Theatre Ensemble.5 The main objective of Peter Brook’s investigation was once again his quest for a universal language, in his belief that theater had the potential to be a means of transcultural communication. Again, as in the research he carried out in Iran and in Africa, the group’s attention was directed to the different expressive possibilities of body and voice beyond speech, and to spontaneous forms of theatricality in different cultures: “The aim of the research was to create test situations out of which rhythms, movements, attitudes, characters and incidents could evolve, with different degrees of active participation from the audience”.6 This was the goal of his American journey, pursued by sharing research with others groups and entering into relationships with the communities to which they belonged. His experience in African villages was put to good use here in the relationships that

A multicultural venue in New York   149 occurred in urban contexts. The intent of Brook’s research was explained in an information document of one of the closing performances, The Ik, which he directed at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in January 1975. When the inner group links itself to an outer group it is exercising a primary function of theatre. The exploration of the means by which one group of people, regardless of social and ethnic backgrounds, can make contact with another group through a shared area of human concern is at the root of all theatre activity. There are rare things – piece of music, certain gestures – that can communicate to anyone anywhere.7 The work was based mainly on improvisation, starting with The Conference of the Birds, a twelfth-century Persian allegorical poem on which the Center had already carried out part of its research in Africa, and which narrates through metaphorical stories the journey of a flock of birds that follows a spiritual guide in search of their king. The Conference was probed through a series of experiments in which the other groups could enter directly the performance as a way of participating in the research of CIRT’s actors. The story, replete with allusions and metaphors, was especially suitable for the investigation that the group carried out, because, since the poem was little known in the West, it offered innumerable possibilities for investigating and applying the artistic languages mastered by the various companies. Lastly, to set off a dialogue with the groups he came into contact with and start up a real artistic exchange with them, Brook also planned a series of demonstrative exercises of the work done at CIRT.8 At the onset of his journey, Brook’s group met El Teatro Campesino, a company founded and directed by Luis Valdez in 1965,9 a political theater group born amidst the strikes of the Mexican farm workers, or campesinos in California, who were protesting harsh working conditions and low wages.10 Hence, Valdez founded a strike theatre, devoted to informing and propagandizing through the staging of satirical one-act plays, called actos, improvised on the spot and inspired by the situations in which they were performed. These were very short plays with few characters that the workers could easily recognize, and performed from one farm to another, reached by truck to get in touch with the striking campesinos. To involve the farm-worker audience, the group used very simple artistic forms, such as songs and parades, with equally simple props, such as flags and placards. The scripts were in the Chicano idiom, which mixed Mexican Spanish with English, and written by Valdez himself after a first phase of creation by the group.11 Another important interest of Brook’s was the research that El Teatro Campesino undertook on the Aztec origins of Chicano workers, to retrieve a collective identity they had lost over the decades of migrantions and as

150  A multicultural venue in New York the result of the contaminations first with Spanish and later with American culture. The performances made use of pre-Columbian references, but also of potent religious symbols, especially those of Catholic origin assimilated during the period of colonizations.12 It was a path that led to the creation of the new dramaturgical forms of mitos, followed later by corridos, performances based on traditional ballads that revealed the strong influence of Mayan and Aztec cultures. In these performances mime, dance and song were blended together, often to guitar accompaniments.13 Valdez’s works investigated the problems faced by the Mexican American community, above all the difficulty of establishing its own identity in the context of the American dream narrative, from which American citizens of Mexican origin were totally excluded. The actor and scholar Alma Martinez spoke of this in an interview with Michael Chemers: We were talking about national identity, trying to establish a national identity in the midst of a country that was extremely racist and divisive, redlining left and right, subsuming our chances to get ahead, economically, in the judicial system, in education. We were always being kept down.14 El Teatro Campesino’s research on traditional languages and its ability to dialogue through theater with a specific audience such as the Chicanos offered Peter Brook’s group new ideas in pursuing its investigation of universal language. However, what especially struck Brook was the complete fusion of theater and life that characterized the Californian company’s approach. Valdez’s group, by acting in close contact with the strikers through the organization of street performances and community theater experiences, forged a special relationship with its audience.15 Here, there was no division at all between the group’s daily life and its performances. Yet its preoccupation went beyond fair play and social justice. Even as they boycotted the supermarkets, the campesinos were concerned with the Mexican-Indian heritage pulsing in their veins, reminding them of the living nature of the earth, of the rhythms of the seasons, of the cosmos.16 In California, the CIRT group gained an intimate awareness of the Chicanos’ living conditions and performed with El Teatro Campesino in its natural environment, in the context of the farm-worker protests in Hollister, San Juan, Delano and La Paz. In this way Peter Brook’s actors gained insights into the special nature of Valdez’s theater and at the same time applied the techniques developed on previous trips to the topics suggested

A multicultural venue in New York   151 by the campesinos. Their work was based on improvisation, an approach that involved both groups in experiments with some of the actos and some works of Mexican popular theater, performing them for the farm workers who attended Cesar Chavez’s union meetings. The CIRT group thus were able to relate with an audience of protesters and with audiences ideologically involved in the performances, by sharing myths and themes with them. This was the beginning of a theatrical experiment without precedent, aimed at pushing to the limit the principle of cross-fertilisation on which the Centre had been based. The two directors Luis Valdez and Peter Brook made a program for the two groups in which an intense exchange operated through exercise, performance and discussion.17 The Conference of the Birds was staged in English and Spanish with a mixed cast of actors belonging to the two groups, and got an enthusiastic response from the public at the Firehouse Theatre in San Francisco, in Santa Cruz and in other California cities. In particular, the CIRT actors noted the sincere interest of the farm-worker audience in the journey of the birds. Those involved in the protest identified their ideals with the Conference myths, and the journey narrated therein became for them synonymous with their struggle. After the period spent in California, the CIRT project continued in Leach Lake, on the Chippewa Indian Reservation, for a week’s work with the Native American Theatre Ensemble. The company, made up of sixteen Native American artists representing eighteen different tribes, was founded within La MaMa in 1972 to spread awareness of a new national Indian identity through performances in theaters but also in colleges and numerous Indian communities.18 At the same time, the group, directed by Hanay Geiogamah, aimed to recoup the origins and to the spreading of the Native American traditions, rituals and tribal practices that still survived on the reservations.19 The company aimed to include productions devoted to Native Americans, capable of reaching in equal measure the inhabitants of both reservations and urban communities. The priority was to create a totally Native American theater and to support the movement’s struggle for freedom, equality and self-determination of Native Americans, while also combating the false negative image of them endemic in popular American culture.20 To this end, in 1973 the group made a 54-day tour, performing at twenty-one reservations and fourteen urban enclaves with a program of works “of, by and for American Indian People”,21 to initiate an exchange with a large number of people.

152  A multicultural venue in New York Peter Brook and CIRT members met the La MaMa troupe along with Ellen Stewart and other Indians on the reservation, in a peace-pipe ceremony conducted by Phil George, who presided over other ceremonies throughout the week and showed the actors some tribal dances, while Hanay Geiogamah taught them songs. The Indian actors also showed them dances called The Eagle, The Hummingbird, The Wardance, and taught the visiting group a simplified version of 49, an Indian social dance. In the days that followed their work focused on improvisation and the exchange of artistic and expressive techniques. Peter Brook chose to demonstrate the exercise with sticks and to compare the sign language learned from the National Theatre of the Deaf (the American group previously met in Paris) with Indian sign language, in which the La MaMa artists were well-versed. They also worked on Indian myths filtered into Geiogamah’s works, Foghorn, Coon Cons Coyote and Body Indian. From this meeting Peter Brook and his actors increased their knowledge, not only of Native American theater, but also of their lifestyle and the movement for Indian rights that was becoming widespread in America. A water ceremony on the lawn beside the house under an overcast sky. Phil recites his sign-language poems Oh A New Cradle-board, Monument in Bone, etc. Later tells me he was invited to join the group because they wanted to know more about ritual: “I’m sort of the ritualist for them. The movement towards tradition is gaining real strength and is the single most significant aspect of the Indian movement now. The activists want to know and practice the Indian religion, but too often they want the beginning and the end without going through the middle – they want the ritual without practicing the discipline which makes it possible. Without this discipline it becomes mere theatre, which is why many of the elders and medicine men are refusing to speak or teach. They mistrust the sincerity of the Indian youth: they don’t want the ritual cheapened”.22 This experience also stimulated both groups to conduct further artistic research on the Conference of the Birds that was felt, in this context, as a sort of ceremony. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there was a meeting between the Native American Theatre Ensemble and the National Theatre of the Deaf in which the two companies investigated their respective sign languages together in a work phase shared also with other participating artists.23 In this session organized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as by Ellen Stewart and the UNESCO International Theatre Institute,24 Peter Brook promoted a very important dialogue between many artists and various theater companies, including, in addition to the two just mentioned,

A multicultural venue in New York   153 Jerzy Grotowski’s group, the Chinese Theatre Group, and artists from La MaMa and The Living Theatre. The work was also shared with theater teachers, critics, some Brooklyn communities and children’s groups. The meetings took place in the large hall made available by the Brooklyn Academy, but also in the squares and cultural centers of some Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, meeting places for African American and Italian American communities. These meetings resulted in an experience of artistic and human knowledge in which theater came into contact with a segment of New York’s complex multicultural society and also became a means of communication and dialogue between communities, which, despite existing in the same city and often in adjacent neighborhoods, were culturally very diverse. The unusual event aroused the curiosity of the press, and critics registered their experience as spectators. The actors then began playing musical instruments – drums, recorder, guitar, conch shell, pennywhistles – and, attracted by the music, neighborhood children began to gather. One of them played a harmonica, others tapped drums. The cast lined up on the carpet and the audience was asked to choose one of the actors to play God, another the Devil, and the third an ordinary mortal. A contest began – “two gigantic monsters fighting for the soul of Mr. Man”. Slowly the audience became more involved, cheering each side, making jokes, and, encouraged by the actors, occasionally joining in the action. “What’s going on?” asked one passer-by, and a man answered, “It’s a semiplay – not really a play”.25 Hence, the CIRT group was able to reach out to the numerous American artists participating in the project, meeting their communities of origin and at the same time forming new bonds with very different types of audiences. At the end of the three-year project, in which some La MaMa artists also participated – such as Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Serban and Andrea Katsulas, as well as Katsuhiro Oida, who, as we have seen, collaborated in the research of The Great Jones Repertory Company – some interesting conclusions were drawn and later set down in the CIRT report. Success or failure in the conventional sense was never a criterion and yet almost every experience was positive in its own right, as it clearly proved that a warm and satisfying encounter can be created between people of different races with no common language by using the possibilities offered by a renewed use of theatrical form. […]

154  A multicultural venue in New York – Theatre artists can learn from interchange across cultures; – Theatre groups can learn from interchange by working together on a common project; – Theatre idioms can be enriched by a cross-cultural flow; – Theatre language can be vastly enrichened by exploration of means and sources of expression that flower more in one country or one period of history; – Theatre understanding can broaden by experiences outside the circuit set up by normal theatre practices and this in turn leads to an enrichening of the theatre artists awareness of his audience’s humanity; – Such experiences become model learning experiences; – Such experiences are immediately picked up and used by new groups wherever the Centre has been active.26 6.2

The Jarboro Players: La MaMa introduces Black Theatre to Italy

In the early Seventies, the first La MaMa’s resident African American company was the GPA Nucleus directed by Hugh Gittens, later called Jarboro Players in honor of the African American opera singer Katarina Jarboro (1903–1986). The company staged works by young African American writers and pursued the principles of the Black Arts Movement, linked to the Black Power Movement for the defense of Black rights in America. As on other occasions, Ellen Stewart supported the artists and their cause, while preserving the multiculturalism of her theater and continuing to host companies from different backgrounds and with very different artistic projects. The group, made up of predominantly African American actors, collaborated with writers associated with the best-known of New York’s Black Theatre venues, the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, with which they also shared European tours in 1972. The company’s aims are described in some documents that apparently were produced during the first meetings, whose members indicated a series of objectives for the troupe, together with the criteria for selecting the works to be produced. In one of these notesheets, the writer Melvin W. Dixon listed among the goals the creation of a revolutionary Black Theatre and the production of plays exclusively by Black playwrights. Dixon suggested that the training should include the investigation of Black lifestyles and the policies adopted by Black communities, in order to better adapt for the stage the characters and the situations in which they were involved. The company should also directly address Black audiences and use theater to raise consciousness and determination in the struggle for liberation. To this end, Dixon proposed that the works should arise from a

A multicultural venue in New York   155 multiplicity of both artistic and political visions, and make use of expressive forms typical of African American culture, such as Black American dance, jazz and gospel songs. The language too should feature the folk idioms of Black culture, and the diction should reflect the various geographical origins of America’s Black communities.27 To better understand the context in which the company was formed, we must briefly examine the Black Theatre phenomenon that developed within the broader Black Power Movement promoted by the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party and further defined by the Black Arts Movement as a form of radical theater and propaganda tool in agitating for Black civil rights in America.28 It was a movement aimed not at the consciences of white Americans but focused exclusively on the African American community, specifically neighborhood communities.29 Their works presented scenes of daily life, referencing the values and traditions of Africa, in order to raise awareness of the identity of African Americans. Even the characters of the works they produced were drawn from everyday life, and the dialogue reflected the simultaneously harsh and poetic rhythms of street talk. By linking the plays to real life, Black Theatre writers led audiences, who often had no experience of theater, into a shared cultural experience.30 The dramas were markedly naturalistic, focused more on the themes and messages they wanted to communicate than on form, and consequently they were a far cry from the experimentation of the theatrical Avant-garde. A peculiarity that Richard Schechner not only did not deem a problem, but, as he wrote in the first issue of «The Drama Review» on Black Theatre, assumed its naturalism could be a compromise and an effective tool for the objectives of this type of theater.31 As with other versions of political theater, Black Theatre also offered street theater, making use of improvisation and quick actions. LeRoi Jones spoke of this in the programmatic document of The Black Communication Project put forth by the Black Students Union of San Francisco State College in 1967. A project that listed in its format African and Black American history, the recovery of traditions through theater, poetry, dance, art and music, in the form of short actions hosted in schools, churches and community centers, staged by student groups and professional actors together with ordinary citizens interested in participating.32 The intentions of Black Theatre were further clarified by the playwright Ed Bullins in A Short Statement on Street Theatre, in which he illustrated the primary objective of communicating with Black people by referring to their collective imagination and including all classes, from the workers to the homeless and street people, who normally had no experience of theater. This short paper includes an interesting description of the method

156  A multicultural venue in New York he suggests for drawing crowds, which recalls in many respects that used by theater groups politically involved in workers’ protests, such as El Teatro Campesino. First, draw a crowd. This can be done by use of drums, musicians, recording equipment, girls dancing, or by use of a barker or ralling cry which is familiar and revolutionary and nationalistic in connection (Burn Baby Burn). Or the crowd can be gotten spontaneously where masses of people are already assembled – the play done within the mob (Mob Action – Mob Act): immediacy – or done with a minimum of fanfare, in the street, upon a platform or a flatbed truck. The truck can carry the equipment and be used as an object of interest if decorated attractively. Also, girls can ride atop the truck and aid in crowd-gathering (fishin’). Monitors can circulate throughout the crowd, distributing printed information, doing person-to-person verbal communicating and acting as guards for the performers and crew.33 (The Black Guard) It was a theater that addressed exclusively to Blacks, and that echoed the agit-prop experiences of the past to attract its audiences and reach an everwider community, drawing spectators into the streets and inviting them to enter the theaters. In the various program documents there is no mention of artistic research or aesthetic issues, which were in fact often subordinated to impactful communication. Although Black Theatre was addressed basically to Black communities, Ellen Stewart saw in the Jarboro Company a representative of La MaMa and Off-Off Broadway, an offspring, like all the other companies she hosted, of her mission to support young artists and encourage crosspollination. She decided to organize European tours for the group, where the company performed to mostly white audiences aware of the civil rights protests of African Americans and of the Black Power Movement through the filter of mainstream media and not from direct experience. In her dialogue that had been going on for some years with the various European theatrical entities, Stewart chose to introduce a type of theater with no experimental approach, based on staging similar to the more traditional theatre and which made frequent use of music and song. It was in any case a theater that introduced a new culture for European audiences, presenting the style and living conditions of Black Americans. The Jarboro Players thus contributed to making known abroad the works of Ed Bullins – one of the major representatives of the Black Arts Movement, which had LeRoi Jones among its founders – and of other Black writers.34 In 1972 the company took part in two important Italian theater festivals, Milano Aperta and the Venice Biennale, which for the

A multicultural venue in New York   157

Figure 6.2 Short Bullins, at La MaMa, March 3, 1972, directed by Allie Woods. Photo credit Amnon Ben Nomis. Courtesy of the La MaMa Archives/ Ellen Stewart Private Collection.

158  A multicultural venue in New York first time staged works written in the context of the protest for the rights of Blacks, an event to be taken into consideration for the value of the intercultural exchange it represented.35 The dramas produced were Richard Wesley’s Black Terror, directed by Jay Fletcher, and five one-act plays by Ed Bullins: How Do You Do?, A Minor Scene, Dialect Determinism (The Rally), It Has No Choice, Clara’s Old Man, directed by Allie Woods. Given the novelty of the theatrical form and of the themes presented, the program was enriched with a presentation of the Black Theatre and an introduction of the works with a very brief description of the theme covered. The same document also contains a text by Ed Bullins from 1971, entitled Notes on Black Theatre, in which the playwright gives its origins and aims, describing its elements, including the rhythms of African music, dance in the models and styles of Black life, different forms of religion, Black symbolism and mysticism. He also dwells on what made Black Theatre incomprehensible to critics, hinting that the reactions to the plays may not always have been positive. The reason critics – Black, white, American – fail to decipher many of the symbols of Black Theatre is that the artists purposely seek out nonWestern references. Even white theater, as done in America, has models of form and aesthetics found in pre-industrial and pre-technological societies, with beginnings traced as far back as Greece. The creators of Black Theatre, those who have done some study, realize that Greece and the West were civilized by Africans, a superior mix of cultures of the earth that was mother to humanity, Africa to the south of the Sahara. They also understand that contemporary Negro aesthetics demand that those ancestral sources be utilized, made known, and translated to the populace through Black stylistic, symbolic, and literary imagery/interpretations. In this way, an innovative style of Black art is continually revitalized. Thus, critics, like the Western-worshipping Black intellectual and street-corner revolutionary, arrive at Black Theatre unaware of what profound legacy some artists are drawing upon.36 There were many reviews of the Italian staging of the Jarboro Players, though at times not entirely favorable and skeptical about its artistic quality. They expressed doubts about the company’s aesthetic choices and speak of “naturalistic” theater and of a performance that does not seem to be up to par with the other productions present at the festivals. Theater of Black protest: an explosion was expected and what we got was a quiet, bland, level-headed repetition of the themes and styles of

A multicultural venue in New York   159 a theater dating back thirty or forty years. Hope and curiosity were kindled by reading decidedly counter-current comments in the program of the New Lafayette Theater in New York, […] “We must set ourselves high, significant goals, if Black theatre and Black people are to remain planted on this earth, and not take flight towards some fantasy of the American avant-garde”. But by rejecting avant-garde frivolities, the result here was a long leap backwards: at least in a theatrical sense. The five one-act plays by Ed Bullins, poet, playwright, producer and director of «Black Theatre Magazine» […] bring us back, with archaeological precision, to the climate of American realism of the 1930s and the soft psychological realism of Tennessee Williams.37 The public […] rushes to the theater with the secret hope of seeing a play by those who tread the path of the avant-garde, and instead find themselves before a troupe that dishes out old formats by now common on any small-town stage. In short, from the level of crackling invention we have moved on to classroom lecture, which may perhaps be relevant for raising the consciousness of the Black community in New York, but which leaves perfectly indifferent anyone who, though acknowledging the importance of the struggle that Black people are conducting within American society, at the theater are not stimulated by works that take them back decades. […] the impression is of having seen something old and predictable. Significant perhaps on a social level, within the Black community, engaged as it is with its most sensitive elements to speed up a revolutionary process that, according to their interpretation of reality, is indispensable for putting an end to a vexatious and oppressive system of life, but old hat for those who belong to another cultural dimension and want respect for a certain distrust of cries of protest and exhortations to violence.38 But some critics went beyond such first impressions to wonder how important originality was in a work aiming to communicate a political message. Renzo Tian of «Il Messaggero», wondered if in theater what matters more is what one says than how one says it, and why Black actors in their desire to give life to a new Black theater still rely on old models of white actors: What is more important here? By adopting an integrated theater, avoiding that Black people should give in to the temptation to integrate into the white system, or avoiding that the new Black theatre should be written and acted in such a way that it ends up resembling the old white theater like two peas in a pod?39 The Black playwrights, who spoke English and lived in America, seemed tied to the more popular theatrical tradition and to white aesthetics despite

160  A multicultural venue in New York trying to distance themselves from it and presenting in their plays the dynamics of families dealing with the problematic social issues that affected African Americans, often related to the historical issues that caused them.40 However, the performances presented in Italy made sense if seen as intercultural exchanges and effective social and political manifestations providing information on African American culture and the situation of communities and struggles for Black rights in America in the early Seventies. There actually were some who, in the press, reasoned on the value of these works, toward which the Italian public should relate to with respectful curiosity. We have tried to see it [the performance] more as a social and political manifestation than as an art; and as useful cultural information about seventies America. […] The themes refer to Black ghetto life, a topographical and social ghetto, which they however claim, in opposition to the white establishment and to affirm a Black nationalism, that looks back at the culture of its origins, the African and tribal one from before the American slave era. In short, it is the call of a negritude different from the one sung, with the linguistic tools of Western culture, by poets such as Aimé Césaire. These Black writers and authors write and act in ghetto American slang, but try to introduce a typically African timbre and stylistic features in the interaction of words and histrionic vitality.41 Hence, the visit of the company affiliated to La MaMa in the end gave a chance for the Italian audience to approach African American culture. Theater thus became, once again, the ideal medium for dialogue between two different cultures that spoke different languages, proving right those who, like Ellen Stewart and Peter Brook, believed that it could be a universal language. 6.3

Conclusion. La MaMa as international meeting point for artists

Ellen Stewart established her first relations with Italy in 1967, during La MaMa Repertory Troupe’s third European tour and the company’s participation in the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, where the company staged Tom Paine. On that occasion, the American experimental scene was a strong presence at the festival, with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Tom Eyen staging Sarah B. Divine! In the following years La MaMa and its companies were constantly active in Italy at both the Spoleto Festival and the Venice Biennale, as well as with the staging of plays in Milan, Turin and Rome. Andrei Serban and The Great Jones Repertory Company

A multicultural venue in New York   161 were in Spoleto with Arden of Faversham in 1970, together with Wilford Leach’s ETC Company, a former resident at the Stewart theater. 1972 was again Serban’s turn, with his staging of Medea, followed in the next years by Trilogy and The Trojan Women at the Venice Biennale. In supporting Off-Off Broadway theater, Ellen Stewart encouraged its spread beyond America’s borders. We have seen how from 1965 on she had been promoting her companies in various European theaters (and in South America), often choosing venues that welcomed experimentation, such as university festivals and experimental theater circuits. Even when dealing with tours, as in New York, the goal was not profit but collaboration and dialogue with non-American venues, in the belief that new influences could help the growth of theater. “Ellen’s masterpiece […] was the resilience, concreteness and pragmatism of a theater that didn’t fear contamination and was open to different experiences, never tiring, without inventing rigid schematisms […]”.42 But Ellen Stewart went further, and in Europe she found the way to enable her young artists – the members of La MaMa Repertory Troupe in the early Sixties, and the actors of La MaMa Plexus and The Great Jones Repertory Company in later years – to meet and work with Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook, the greatest artists of the moment who were influencing the development of the theatrical Avant-garde. A dialogue brought forward through training, encounters and demonstrations, and through her hospitality of European companies at her New York theater. Stewart also understood the importance of the role played by theater festivals – very popular in Europe in the Sixties and Seventies – in bringing different cultures into contact. They were places where companies remained for whole the duration of the festival, meeting and sharing art and life experiences, and comparing their respective research.43 While not claiming to be exhaustive, this study has presented examples of how some companies residing at La MaMa were able to encounter fellow European artists during the Sixties and Seventies; consequently, the choice fell on those who emerged as the most significant representatives of the artistic exchange process that Ellen Stewart promoted. The focus has been therefore on the different forms of dialogue that took place among artists of the two continents – research, physical training, as well as performance presentation and co-production – in moments that proved crucial for developing the theatrical Avant-garde in America and in Europe. Encounters and collaborations that were important in stimulating theatrical research and opening up new ways of experimentation, and that demonstrate how farsighted Ellen Stewart was in planning those first tours in 1965 and promoting an ongoing international dialogue. A dialogue that also expanded to the theaters and festival communities where La MaMa was a guest, as well as to the artists and spectators who gravitated around

162  A multicultural venue in New York La MaMa in New York. The importance of the exchanges Stewart promoted was also reflected in the intercultural encounters with the populations of the countries where the companies performed and where the artists were able to relate to a different public, as in the reception of the works that the La MaMa Repertory Troupe and The Great Jones Repertory Company brought to Europe. Again, cross-cultural exchanges proved fundamental for artistic development, and theater confirmed itself as an indispensable means of dialogue between different cultures. In 1985, twenty years after her first trip to Europe, Ellen Stewart was able to create a new meeting point, which, unlike the various facilities she acquired, was located not in New York but in Italy near Spoleto, where she offered the various companies and artists from all over the world a place where they could share their experiences and respective theatrical research. That year Stewart received a 300,000 dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation, linked to the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award she had won,44 which she used to purchase a thirteenth-century monastery in the hills of Santa Maria Reggiana. Her idea was to make it a meeting place for geographically very distant realities, facilitated by the centrality of the Italian peninsula compared to other European and non-European countries, a residence for artists from different parts of the world.45 The large structure was renovated and inaugurated in 1990 as a complementary venue to La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York and hosted workshops in the summer months. It contains numerous guest rooms, a rehearsal room, a workroom designed for the production of scenographic elements and masks, and an open-air theater, created on a lawn adjacent to the building, for staging plays. The architectural complex also contains a café, which Stewart had designed in the style of the first Café La MaMa. Since its inauguration, La MaMa Umbria International, as the new Italian center is called, has hosted workshops for directors (the International Symposium for Directors) and offered residency to artists and companies needing a space to focus on research. But La MaMa Umbria has also participated in the folkloric activities planned in the Spoleto area, with the aim of promoting La MaMa’s activities and collaborating with companies residing in Umbria, thus fostering a cultural exchange between New York artists and the inhabitants of the area’s small rural towns. Although it is a project that goes beyond the time span investigated until now and that came into being only after the decline of the theatrical Avantgarde, it deserves mention at the end of this study because La MaMa Umbria International can be considered the full and definitive realization of the cross-pollination project that Ellen Stewart promoted. The opening of the Italian center represented the full realization of her vision of a theater without borders and a meeting place between different cultures.

A multicultural venue in New York   163 Notes 1 Also called the Jarboro Troupe or Jarboro Company. 2 Andrei Serban had already collaborated with Brook, as we saw in the previous chapter. 3 Michael Kustow, Peter Brook. A Biography, Bloomsbury, London 2006. 4 The group was founded in 1967 as a national and international performing arts organization and it was pioneer of a dual language theater hybriding American Sign Language with spoken English. 5 International Centre of Theatre Research, Sessions in U.S.A., July 1st–October 12th 1973. 15 weeks, CIRT documentation, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. The topic covered in this chapter was the subject of a speech presented at the international conference The Rise of the New Theatre and the Theatrical Avant-garde. Meetings and Influences Across Boundaries (1948–1981), held at the University of Verona in May 2022, and will be the subject of an essay to be published along with the conference proceedings (Edizioni di Pagina, Lecce 2023). 6 International Centre of Theatre Research, Report on Activities, December 31st 1973, CIRT documentation, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music, p. 1. 7 The International Centre of Theatre Research, informational materials, Courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music Archives, Peter Brook Press Clippings 1973– 1974, BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 8 The experimentation was later formulated in a text that the playwright JeanClaude Carrière wrote and presented at the Avignon Festival in 1979. Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre (1892–1992), Routledge, London and New York 1996. 9 Luis Valdez, the son of farmers who migrated from Mexico to California, joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1964, where he learned the techniques of the Commedia dell’Arte. He decided to found El Teatro Campesino following his participation in the meetings chaired by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, leaders of California’s farm worker movement. 10 Thanks to the Chicano activist Cesar Chavez, the workers formed a union, the National Farm Workers Association, from 1970 onward the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, and from 1965 they began to organize protest marches and strikes, within which they also included theatrical performances. M. De Marinis, Il Nuovo Teatro, cit. 11 The company, which was an integral part of the American Avant-garde, in its tours at numerous locations and universities in the United States, can be associated to the Agitprop theater (short for Agitation and Propaganda), a proletarian political theater linked to the German communist party. It was made by workers for workers, developed in the early Twentieth century and inspired by the Russian Proletkult theater groups. See Richard Bodek, Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht, Camden House, Columbia 1997; Eugenia Casini Ropa, La danza e l’Agitprop. I teatri-non-teatrali nella cultura tedesca del primo Novecento, Il Mulino, Bologna 1988. 12 Ivi. El Teatro Campesino. Interviews with Luis Valdez. 13 Luis Valdez, Theatre of The Sphere. The Vibrant Being, ed. by Michael M. Chemers, Routledge, New York 2022, and Beth Babgy and Luis Valdez, El Teatro Campesino: An Interviews with Luis Valdez, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 11, n. 4, Summer 1967, pp. 70–80.

164  A multicultural venue in New York 14 Michael M. Chemers and Alma Martinez, Interview with Alma Martinez, in Michael M. Chemers (ed.), The Theatre of Luis Valdez, Routledge, New York 2002, pp. 26–46, p. 35. 15 M. M. Chemers, ed., The Theatre of Luis Valdez, cit. 16 Peter Brook, Threads of Time, cit. p. 190. 17 International Centre of Theatre Research, Report on Activities, cit., p. 2, Box 3a, “CIRT” Reports and Proposals 1972–1973, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 18 C. Rosenthal, Ellen Stewart Presents, cit. 19 With the support of Ellen Stewart, but also of John Vaccaro (director of The Playhouse of the Ridiculous group) and Lee Breuer, director of Mabou Mines, the Native American Theatre Ensemble became part of the American AvantGarde. M. Dini, Teatro d’Avanguardia Americano, cit. 20 On Native American Theatre see also Linda Walsh Jenkins and Ed Wapp, Jr., Native American Performance, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 20, n. 2, American Theatre Issue, June 1976, pp. 5–12. 21 Native American Theatre Ensemble, Organizational Records, 1973. Courtesy La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. 22 International Centre of Theatre Research, A Cronicle by Peter Wilson. July 1st–October 12th 1973, p. 20. CIRT Reports and Proposals, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 23 Ivi. See also Roberta Gandolfi, Quando il teatro si mise in cammino. Il viaggio di Peter Brook e del Centre International de Reserches Theatrales negli anni Settanta, in compagnia del poema persiano Il verbo degli uccelli, «Ricerche di S/Confine», vol. IV, n. 1, 2013, pp. 43–69. 24 As Director of the International Theatre Institute of the United States, Martha Coigney enlisted support from the New York State Council on the Arts to assist with outdoor activities and with Brooklyn communities taking part in the project. See Martha Coigney, letter to Harvey Lichtenstein (director of BAM), dated 29 June 1973, CIRT – Correspondence, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 25 Mel Gussow, To Peter Brook, Audience Is a ‘Partner’, «The New York Times», September 28, 1973. CIRT, Peter Brook Press Clippings 1973–1974, Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. See also Walter Kerr, A Long Day’s Journey into Panic with Peter Brook, «The New York Times», September 30, 1973. 26 CIRT, Report on Activities, cit., p. 1, 6. Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives – Brooklyn Academy of Music. 27 Brainstorming Notes: The Jarboro Company. Courtesy La MaMa Archives/ Ellen Stewart private collection. 28 The first Black Theatre groups were organized in the years preceding the First World War, but the theatrical form that flanked civil protest emerged again in the Sixties, above all encouraged by the Black Panthers Party, within an organization of writers called the Black House. It was an association that pursued different purposes. While writers and artists worked at a cultural awakening of the African American masses, the more revolutionary members saw culture as a useful weapon to stimulate social transformation. For further information see Jervis Anderson, Ed Bullins, «The Newyorker», June 16, 1973. On Black Theatre see also Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London 1989; Richard Schechner, Theatre &

A multicultural venue in New York   165 Revolution, «Salmagundi», vol. 2, n. 2 (6), Fall 1967–Winter 1968, pp. 11–27; Floyd Gaffney, Black Theatre: Commitment & Communication, «The Black Scholar», vol. 1, n. 8, Black Culture, June 1970, pp. 10–15. 29 Adam David Miller, It’s a Long Way to St. Louis. Notes on the Audience for Black Drama, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, Summer 1968, pp. 146–150. 30 See John O’Neal, Motion in the Ocean. Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theatre, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, 1968, pp. 70–77 and, on the same issue, Larry Neal, The Black Arts Movement, pp. 28–39. See also Amiri Baraka, Black Theater Movement & The Black Consciousness Movement, «Kola», vol. 24, n. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 104–119. 31 Richard Schechner, White on Black, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, 1968, pp. 25–27. 32 LeRoi Jones, Communication Project, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, 1968, pp. 53–57. 33 Ed Bullins, A Short Statement on Street Theatre, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, 1968, p. 93. 34 The Black Arts Movement, founded in 1965, pursued the development of an art aimed at the needs and dreams of Black America and an expression of the community in which the artist worked. Poetic experimentation was therefore supported by research on African and African American art, and on the cultural roots of the African American people. M. Sell, Avant-garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, cit. See also James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 2005 and Michael W. Kaufman, The Delicate World of Reprobation: A Note on the Black Revolutionary Theatre, «Educational Theatre Journal», vol. 23, n. 4, December 1971, pp. 446–459. 35 We have news of only one preceding production of Adrienne Kennedy’s A Rat’s Mass, staged in Turin in 1966 (reported in «Sipario», no. 247, Novembre 1966). 36 “La ragione per la quale i critici – neri, bianchi, americani – non riescono a decifrare molti dei simboli del Black Theatre sta nel fatto che gli artisti di proposito vanno alla ricerca di riferimenti non occidentali. Persino il teatro bianco, come viene fatto in America, ha modelli di forma e di estetica trovati nelle società preindustriali e pretecnologiche, con esordi che sono stati tracciati fin dalla Grecia. I creatori del Black Theatre, quelli che hanno fatto qualche studio, si rendono conto che la Grecia e l’Occidente sono stati civilizzati da Africani, una superiore mescolanza di culture della terra che è stata madre per l’umanità, l’Africa a sud del Sahara. Capiscono anche che l’estetica negra contemporanea esige che quelle fonti ancestrali siano utilizzate, rese note e tradotte al popolo attraverso immagini/interpretazioni stilistiche, simboliche e letterarie nere. In questa maniera, si rivitalizza continuamente uno stile innovatore di arte nera. Così, i critici, come l’intellettuale nero adoratore del mondo occidentale ed il rivoluzionario dell’angolo della strada, arrivano al Black Theatre senza sapere a quale profonda eredità alcuni artisti stiano attingendo”. Ed Bullins, Appunti sul Black Theatre, Milano Aperta, playbill, Courtesy La MaMa Archives/Ellen Stewart Private Collection. Since the original text in English could not been obtained, this translation is by the author. 37 “Teatro della protesta nera: ci si aspettava una esplosione e ci siamo trovati davanti a una quieta, blanda, assennata ripetizione dei temi e degli stili di un

166  A multicultural venue in New York teatro con una data di trenta o quarant’anni fa. Speranza e curiosità si erano accese leggendo frasi decisamente controcorrente nel programma del New Lafayette Theatre di New York, […] «Noi dobbiamo proporci scopi alti, significativi, se il teatro nero e la gente nera devono rimaner piantati su questa terra, e non prendere il volo verso qualche fantasia dell’avanguardia americana». Ma rifiutare le frivolezze avanguardistiche, in questo caso, si è tradotto in un lungo salto all’indietro: almeno in senso teatrale. I cinque atti unici di Ed Bullins, poeta, commediografo, produttore e direttore del «Black Theatre Magazine» […] ci riportano, con archeologica precisione, al clima del realismo americano degli anni Trenta e del morbido verismo psicologico alla Tennessee Williams”. Renzo Tian, Noiosa la protesta nera, «Il Messaggero», 7 ottobre 1972. Author’s translation. 38 “Il pubblico […] si precipita a teatro con la segreta speranza di assistere a uno spettacolo di quelli che battono il sentiero dell’avanguardia, e invece si trova davanti a una troupe che ripete vecchi schemi ormai assimilati a livello provinciale. Insomma, dal piano dell’invenzione crepitante si è passati a quello della divulgazione, che potrà magari aver importanza agli effetti d’una presa di coscienza della comunità negra newyorkese, ma che lascia perfettamente indifferenti quanti, pur riconoscendo l’importanza della lotta che la gente nera sta conducendo in seno alla società americana, in sede spettacolare non amano i lavori che li riportano indietro di decenni. […] l’impressione è di aver assistito a qualcosa di vecchio e scontato. Significativo magari sul piano sociale, all’interno della comunità nera, impegnata con gli elementi più sensibili ad accelerare i tempi di un processo rivoluzionario indispensabile secondo la loro interpretazione della realtà per far cessare un sistema vessatorio e oppressivo di vita, ma scontato per chi appartenendo a un’altra dimensione culturale, desidera il rispetto di certe cadenze diffidenti sia con il grido di protesta, sia con l’invito alla violenza”. Gian Antonio Cibotto, Frammenti dell’arte nera. Gli atti unici di Ed Bullins, presentati da La Mama e dal New Lafayette Theatre di New York, appaiono vecchi e scontati, «Il Gazzettino», 7 ottobre 1972. Author’s translation. 39 “Cosa è più importante in questo caso? Evitare, servendosi di un teatro integrato, che la gente nera ceda alla tentazione di integrarsi nel sistema bianco, oppure evitare che il nuovo teatro nero sia scritto e recitato in maniera tale che finisca per assomigliare al vecchio teatro bianco come si assomigliano due gocce d’acqua?”. Renzo Tian, Noiosa la protesta nera, «Il Messaggero», 7 ottobre 1972. Author’s translation. 40 Regarding the works presented in Italy, How Do You Do? deals with a Black couple who want to integrate into white society; Dialect Determinism, is a satire about a group of Blacks who talk about revolution while remaining tied to the ideological framework of whites. 41 “Noi abbiamo tentato di vederlo [lo spettacolo] più come manifestazione sociale e politica che d’arte; e come utile informazione culturale sull’America degli anni Settanta. […] I temi si riferiscono alla vita del ghetto in cui i negri stanno: ghetto topografico e sociale, che essi però rivendicano in opposizione all’establishment bianco e per l’affermazione di un nazionalismo nero che si rifaccia alla cultura delle origini, quella africana e tribale di prima dell’era schiavistica americana. È il richiamo insomma di una negritudine diversa da quella cantata, con gli strumenti linguistici della cultura occidentale, da poeti come Aimé Cesaire. Questi scrittori e autori neri scrivono e recitano in uno slang americano appunto da ghetto, ma cercano di introdurvi un timbro

A multicultural venue in New York   167 e stilemi – l’interazione delle parole, la vitalità istrionesca – tipicamente africani”. Roberto De Monticelli, Non si salva niente della civiltà bianca, «Il Giorno», ottobre 7, 1972. Author’s translation. 42 “Il capolavoro di Ellen […] era la duttilità, la concretezza, il pragmatismo di un teatro che non temeva contaminazioni e si apriva a diverse esperienze, senza stancarsi mai, senza inventare rigidi schematismi […]”. Moreno Cerquetelli, Ellen Stewart e La MaMa: casa, teatro, vita e storia. Intervista con Italo Moscati, in M. Cerquetelli (ed.), La MaMa Dell’Avanguardia, cit., pp. 105–117, p. 108. Author’s translation. 43 The importance of theater festivals as meeting places and cultural exchanges is the subject of a new three-year study project entitled The Underground History of the Avant-garde. Cultural Exchanges in Theatre Festivals – Estella, financed as part of the NextGenerationEU program (2022–2025, Principal Investigator Dr. Monica Cristini, www.researchingtheatre.eu). 44 An award granted to American citizens of ongoing merit in artistic endeavors and intended as support for the realization of their projects. 45 G. Palladini, Lo spazio del La MaMa, cit.

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Bibliography  171 Brecht, Stefan, Dionysus in 69, from Euripides’ The Bacchae, Theatre Reviews, «The Drama Review: TDR», Spring 1969, vol. 13, n. 3, pp. 156–168. ———, Nuovo Teatro Americano 1968–1973, Bulzoni Editore, Roma 1974. Brockett, Oscar G., History of Theatre, Allyn and Bacon, Boston 1991. Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, McGibbon & Kee, London 1968. ———, The Open Door. Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, Anchor Book, New York 2005. ———, The Shifting Point, Harper and Row, New York 1987. ———, Threads of Time. A Memoir, Methuen, London 1999. ———, Tip of the Tongue. Reflections on Language and Meaning, Nick Hern Books Limited, London 2017. Brustein, Robert, A Theatre Slouches to Be Born, «The New Republic», July 13, 1968. ———, A Third Theater That Is Superb, Gay and Wild, «The New York Times», September 25, 1966. ———, New Theater, New Politics?, «The New York Times», August 25, 1968. Bullins, Ed, A Short Statement on Street Theater, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre Summer 1968, p. 93. Calhoun, Ada, St. Marks Is dead. The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., London 2016. Carlson, Marvin, Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror. Theatre and Reality, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2021. ———, 10,000 Nights. Highlights From 50 Years of Theatre-going, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2017. Cartwright, Diane, Priscilla Smith of The Great Jones Repertory Project, «The Drama Review», vol. 20, n. 3, September 1976, pp. 75–82. Casini Ropa, Eugenia, La danza e l’Agitprop. I teatri-non-teatrali nella cultura tedesca del primo Novecento, Il Mulino, Bologna 1988. Cerquetelli, Moreno (ed.), La MaMa dell’Avanguardia. Il teatro di Ellen Stewart, i rapporti con l’Italia, Edizioni Internazionali, Roma 2006. ———, Ellen Stewart e La MaMa: casa, teatro, vita e storia. Intervista con Italo Moscati, in M. Cerquetelli (ed.), La MaMa Dell’Avanguardia. Il teatro di Ellen Stewart, i rapporti con l’Italia, Edizioni Internazionali, Roma 2006, pp. 105–117. Chaikin, Joseph, The Presence of the Actor, Theatre Communication Group, New York 2006. Chaikin, Joseph, Pasquier, Marie-Claire and Fabre, Geneviève, The Actor Still Present, «Revue française d’études américaines», Octobre 1980, n. 10, Les Theatres de L’Amerique, pp. 217–221. Chaikin, Joseph and Schechner, Richard, The Open Theatre, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 9, n. 2, Winter 1964, pp. 191–197. Chekhov, Michael, To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting (ed. Mala Powers), Routledge, Oxon and New York 2002. Chemers, Michael M. (ed.), The Theatre of Luis Valdez, Routledge, New York 2002. Chemers, Michael M. and Martinez, Alma, Interview with Alma Martinez, in Michael M. Chemers (ed.), The Theatre of Luis Valdez, Routledge, New York 2002, pp. 26–46.

172 Bibliography Christoffersen, Erik Exe, The Actor’s Way, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. Cibotto, G. A., Frammenti dell’arte nera. Gli atti unici di Ed Bullins, presentati da La Mama e dal New Lafayette Theatre di New York, appaiono vecchi e scontati, «Il Gazzettino», October 7, 1972. ———, Il Rito di Medea al festival di Spoleto, «Il Giornale d’Italia», June 27, 1972. Coco, William et al., The Open Theatre (1963–1973): Looking Back, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 7, n. 3, 1983, pp. 25–48. Colomba, Sergio, Le creazioni fantastiche della voce, «Il Resto del Carlino», September 25, 1975. Cornell, Jonas, A Theatre Which Is Present, «Expressen», July 11, 1967. Cox, Rebecca and Bass, Eric, La Mama on La Mama, «Prompt», n. 9, 1967, pp. 18–23. Craig, Sandy, Dreams and Deconstructions. Alternative Theatre in Britain, Albert Lane Press, Ambergate 1980. Crespy, David A., Off-Off Broadway Explosion, How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theatre, Back Stage Books, New York 2003. ———, Paradigm for New Play Development. The Albee-Barr-Wider Playwrights Unit, in James M. Hardin and Cindy Rosenthal (ed.), The Sixties, Center Stage. Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2020, pp. 117–137. Cristini, Monica, Beyond the Borders. The Trojan Women Project, «Antropologia e Teatro», n. 13, 2021, pp. 65–86. ———, L’unicità della drammaturgia Off-Off Broadway nell’Avanguardia Americana, «Il Castello di Elsinore», vol. XXXV, n. 86, 2022, pp. 117–134. ———, Meditation and Imagination. An Anthroposophical Contribution to the Michael Chekhov’s Acting, in Yana Meerzon and Marie Christine AutantMathieu (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, Routledge, London and New York 2015, pp. 69–81. ———, Psychological Gestures, Concentration and Meditation. At Work on the Character with Rudolf Steiner and Michael Chekhov, «Medicina nei secoli. Arte e scienza», vol. 31, n. 2, 2019, pp. 335–354. Croyden, Margaret, Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: The Contemporary Experimental Theatre, Dell Publishing Company, New York 1975. ———, Notes from the Temple: A Grotowski Seminar, «The Drama Review », vol. 14, n. 1, Autumn 1969, pp. 178–183. ———, Peter Brook Learns to Speak Orghast, «The New York Times», October 3, 1971. ———, The Most Avant-Garde of Them All?, «The New York Times», October 5, 1969. ———, To Joe Chaikin, Burning Bridges Is Natural, «The New York Times», March 29, 1970. Daniels, Barry V. and Chaikin, Joseph, Letters to Joseph Chaikin, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 31, n. 1, Spring 1987, pp. 89–100. Dasgupta, Gautam, Earley, Michael and Marranca, Bonnie, The American Playwright. A Life in the Theatre?, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 4, n. 1/2, May 1979, pp. 33–51.

Bibliography  173 Dawson, Helen, Behind the Scenes, «The Observer Review», September 17, 1967. De Marinis, Marco, Il Nuovo Teatro (1947–1970), Bompiani, Milano 1995. De Monticelli, Roberto, Non si salva niente della civiltà bianca, «Il Giorno», October 7, 1972. Dini, Massimo, Teatro d’Avanguardia Americano, Vallecchi, Firenze 1978. Dragone, Simone, Le origini del seminario. Il Teatro Laboratorio come nuovo sistema di produzione, «Il Castello di Elsinore», vol. XXXV, n. 85, 2022, pp. 89–113. Ev. M., Baalbeck a offert à Medee un cadre sur mesure, «La Revue du Liban», July 22, 1972. Eyen, Tom, The Discreet Alarm of the Off Off Broadway Playwright, «The New York Times», September 23, 1973. Flagg, Ted, Blood, Sweat, and Tears on Absolutely Nothing a Week, «After Dark», June 1968, pp. 38–40. Flaszen, Ludwik, Pollastrelli, Carla and Molinari, Renata (eds.), Il Teatr Laboratorium di Jerzy Grotowski 1959–1969, La Casa Usher, Firenze 2007. Foster, Paul, A Nurse in A Madhouse, «Chelsea Clinton News», March 10, 1979, p. 29. Fumarolli, Marc, Eugenio Barba’s Kaspariana, «The Drama Review», vol. 13, n. 1, Fall 1968, pp. 46–56. Gaffney, Floyd, Black Theatre: Commitment & Communication, «The Black Scholar», vol. 1, n. 8, Black Culture, June 1970, pp. 10–15. Gandolfi, Roberta, Quando il teatro si mise in cammino. Il viaggio di Peter Brook e del Centre International de Reserches Theatrales negli anni Settanta, in compagnia del poema persiano Il verbo degli uccelli, «Ricerche di S/Confine», vol. IV, n. 1, 2013, pp. 43–69. Gardner, Paul, Coffee House Theater Festival Presents 2 Plays, «The New York Times», June 2, 1964. Gardner, R. H., Café La Mama, Baltimore Style, «The Sun», Baltimore, May 14, 1967. Gassner, John (ed.), Best American Plays. Seventh Series 1967–1973, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York 1975. Gibson, Michael and Brook, Peter, Brook’s Africa, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 17, n. 3, Theatre and Social Sciences, September 1973, pp. 37–51. Gilman, Richard, What Not to Do in the Theater – A Handbook for Would-Be Disciples, «The New York Times», February 8, 1970. Godard, Colette, “Elektra”, a la Sainte-Chapelle, «Le Monde», November 24, 1973. Gottfried, Martin, ‘Viet Rock’, «Women’s Wear Daily», November 14, 1966. Gottlieb, Saul, The Living Theatre in Exile: Mysteries, Frankenstein, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 137–152. Gray Wallis, Naomi, A Non-Verbal Experience of Tragedy, «Monday Morning», Beirut, July 7, 1972. Greenfeld, Josh, Their Hearts Belong to La Mama, «The New York Times Magazine», July 9, 1967. Greiner, Judy, The Arts ‘Reach Out’, «Kent Starter», vol. LIV, n. 42, January 7, 1969, p. 1.

174 Bibliography Gress, Elsa, Boxiganga. Teater Som Livsform, Spectator, Copenhagen 1968. ———, The Lost Years, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 3, Spring 1969, pp. 115–119. Gress, Elsa and O’Horgan, Tom, An Interview with Tom O’Horgan on Aspects of the Contemporary Theater, «Leonardo», vol. 3, n. 3, July 1970, pp. 341–349. Grode, Eric, Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation, Running Press, Philadelphia 2010. Grotowski, Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre (ed. Eugenio Barba), Methuen Drama, London 1991. Grotowski, Jerzy, Schechner, Richard and Chwat, Jacques, An Interview with Grotowski, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 1, Autumn 1968, pp. 29–45, p. 33. Gruen, John, The Pop Scene. Markopoulos’ ‘Himself as Herself’: Oh Fey Can You See!, «World Journal Tribune», May 4, 1967. Grut, Mario, Theatre as Life Itself – but a Little Bit More, «Aftonbladet», July 19, 1967. Gudmansen, Per, Gloomy Merriment in the Comediehuset, «Actuelt», October 19, 1965. Gussow, Mel, La Mama to Start 2nd Repertory Season March 23, «The New York Times», February 14, 1972. ———, To Peter Brook, Audience Is a ‘Partner’, «The New York Times», September 28, 1973. Hall, Simon, Protest Movements in the 1970s: the Long Sixties, «Journal of Contemporary History», vol. 43, n. 4, October 2008, pp. 655–672. Harding, James M. and Rosenthal, Cindy (eds.), Restaging the Sixties. Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2009. ———, The Sixties, Center Stage. Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2020. Harris, Judith Gayle, So Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee and The Recluse, «Back Stage», June 12, 1964. Hayes, Richard, Plays and Publishers, «Prompt», n. 9, 1967, pp. 7–9. Heide, Robert, Cockroaches in The Baubles, «Other Stages», April 19, 1979, pp. 8–9. Heilpern, John, Conference of the Birds. The History of Peter Brook in Africa, Routledge, New York 1999. Helde, Robert, Magic Time at the Caffe Cino, «New York Native», May 6–19, 1985. Hengberg, Harald, American Experimental Theatre Troupe at “Comediehuset”, «Politiken», October 19, 1965. Hewes, Henry, La Mama Abroad, «Saturday Review», January 11, 1975. ———, La Mama, Bienvenue!, «Saturday Review», February 23, 1974. ———, La Mama’s Own Thing, «Saturday Review», June 28, 1968. ———, Subterranean Sounds Surfacing, «Saturday Review», March 11, 1972. Hume, George, BESTIALITY! Woman Bailie Backs Express Protest, «Scottish Daily Express», August 24, 1967. Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre (1892–1992), Routledge, London and New York 1996.

Bibliography  175 Ionesco, Eugène et al., Le Travail D’Andreï Serban. Medea-Elektra, Festival D’Automne et Éditions Gallimard 1973. Israel, Steven Ben, “Fuck the Curtain”: An Oral History of Off-Broadway, «The Village Voice Archive», May 20, 2019. Isserman, Maurice and Kazin, Michael, America Divided. The Civil War of the 1960s, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2000. Itzin, Catherine, Stages in the Revolution. Political Theatre in Britain since 1968, Eyre Methuen London, London 1980. Jones, LeRoi, Communication Project, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, 1968, Black Theatre, pp. 53–57. ———, (Baraka, Amiri), Black Theater Movement & The Black Consciousness Movement, «Kola», vol. 24, n. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 104–119. K., J., Bailie Seeks Magistrates’ Meeting to Consider Action Against Play, «The Glasgow Herald», August 25, 1967. ———, ‘Tom Paine’ Outstanding Theatre, «Glasgow Herald», September 5, 1967. Kalmic, Zarko, The Many Mad Women in Tom Eyen’s Life, «After Dark», December 1974, pp. 30–38. Kauffmann, Stanley, Last 3 Plays of ‘6 From La Mama’ Offered at the Martinique, «The New York Times», April 13, 1966. ———, Stanley Kauffmann on Films. Futz, «The New Republic», November 15, 1969. ———, Theater: ‘La Mama’ Bill: First 3 of 6 Plays Open at The Martinique, «The New York Times», April 12, 1966. ———, Trilogy, «The New Republic», (date missed), 1974. Kaufman, Michael W., The Delicate World of Reprobation: A Note on the Black Revolutionary Theatre, «Educational Theatre Journal», vol. 23, n. 4, December 1971, pp. 446–459. Keating, John, Making It Off Off Broadway, «The New York Times», April 25, 1965. Kellman, Alice J., Joseph Chaikin the Actor, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 20, n. 3, Actors and Acting, 1976, pp. 17–26. Kerr, Walter, A Long Day’s Journey into Panic with Peter Brook, «The New York Times», September 30, 1973. ———, A Whisper in the Wind, «The New York Times», November 7, 1966. ———, ‘Futz’ – Is It a Fiasco…, «The New York Times», June 30, 1968. ———, One Succeeds, the Other Fails, Why?, «The New York Times», November 27, 1966. Kirby, Michael, On Acting and Not-Acting, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 16, n. 1, March 1972, pp. 3–15. ———, The New Theatre, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 2, Winter 1965, pp. 23–43. Koutoukas, H. M., And so the Cino, in Caffe Cino Benefit, flyer, March 15, 1965. T-CLP, Caffe Cino (New York), NYPL/BRTD. Kumiega, Jennifer, The Theatre of Grotowski, Methuen, London 1985. Kustow, Michael, Peter Brook. A Biography, Bloomsbury, London 2006. LaGuardia, Robert, Tom O’Horgan’s New Theater of Wine and Frenzy, «After Dark», vol. 10, n. 3, July 1968, pp. 16–19.

176 Bibliography Lazar, Irving, What’s Happening Off Off-Broadway – Where Nothing Is Taboo, «The Montreal Star», September 3, 1966. Lee Horn, Barbara, Ellen Stewart and La MaMa, Greenwood Press, Westport and London1993. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, If It Can’t be Rich, Let It Be Poor, Books of The Times, «The New York Times», January 23, 1970. Lester, Eleanor, Caffe Cino, «The Village Voice», August 26, 1965. ———, He Doesn’t Aim to Please, «The New York Times», December 25, 1966. ———, In the Parish Hall, the Hippies Go Ape, «The New York Times», March 26, 1967. ———, Mama Makes ‘Wanton Soup’, «The New York Times», April 5, 1970. ———,‘Of Course, There Were Some Limits’, «The New York Times», May 19, 1968. ———, Off Off Broadway Takes Center Stage, «The New York Times», August 31, 1975. ———, The Pass-the-Hat Theatre Circuit, «The New York Times», December 5, 1965. Lima, Gregory, Ritual for a Mountain Top, «Kayhan International», August 31, 1971. Linklater, Kristin, Freeing the Natural Voice, Drama Publishers, Hollywood 2006. Mackay, Barbara, Theater Without Words, «The Saturday Review», February 8, 1975. Mango, Lorenzo, Il Principe Costante di Calderón de la Barca – Slowacki per Jerzy Grotowski, Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2008. ———, Studiare la recitazione nell’epoca delle avanguardie. Alcune questioni metodologiche, «Acting Archives Review», vol. V, n. 9, 2011, Maggio 2015, pp. 19–58. ———, The Actor and Stage Writing, «Acting Archives Review», vol. I, n. 1, 2011, supplement n. 6. Margiotta, Salvatore, Il Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1968–1975, Titivillus, Corazzano 2013. Marowitz, Charles, La Mama ‘Alienates’ London, «The New York Times», November 12, 1967. ———, Marowitz on La Mama, «Prompt», n. 9, 1967, pp. 24–26. ———, Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 11, n. 2, Winter 1966, pp. 152–172. Marranca, Bonnie, Introduction, in C. Van Vechten (ed.), Gertrude Stein. Last Operas and Plays, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1977. Marranca, Bonnie and Dasgupta, Gautam, American Playwrights, A Critical Survey, vol. 1, Drama Book Specialists (publishers), New York 1981. Marranca, Bonnie et al., Ages of the Avant-Garde, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 16, n. 1, January 1994, pp. 9–57. Martin, Carol, After Paradise: The Open Theatre’s The Serpent, Terminal, and The Mutation Show, in James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (eds.), Restaging the Sixties. Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2009, pp. 79–105.

Bibliography  177 McLeod, Kembrew, The Downtown Pop Underground. New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, Diy Fillmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock’n’Roll Glitter Queen Who Revolutionized Culture, Abrams Press, New York 2019. Meek, Brian, Futz Furore, «Scottish Daily Express», August 25, 1967. Meerzon, Yana and Autant-Mathieu, Marie Christine (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, Routledge, London and New York 2015. Menta, Ed, The Magic World Behind the Curtain. Andrei Serban in the American Theatre, Peter Lang, New York 1997. Miller, Adam David, It’s a Long Way to St. Louis. Notes on the Audience for Black Drama, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Summer 1968, Black Theatre, pp. 146–150. Miller, Hillary, Drop Dead. Performance in Crisis 1970s New York, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2016. ———, Ellen Stewart’s La Mama ETC as Lower East Side Landing Site, «Performance Research», vol. 20, n. 4, 2015, pp. 53–61. Mitter, Shomit, Inner and Outer: “Open Theatre” in Peter Brook and Joseph Chaikin, «Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism», vol. 3, n. 1, Fall 1988, pp. 47–69. Moss, Jeremiah, Vanishing New York. How a Great City Lost Its Soul, Dey Street Books, New York 2017. Munk, Erika, Coco, Bill and Margaret Croyden, Notes From The Temple: A Grotowski Seminar. An Interview With Margaret Croyden, «The Drama Review», vol. 14, n. 1, pp. 178-183. Narti, Anna Maria, Le Travail D’Andréï Serban. Medea. Elektra, in Le Travail D’Andréï Serban. Medea. Elektra, Festival D’Automne à Paris, 4, Gallimard, Paris 1973, pp. 10–54. Neal, Larry, The Black Arts Movement, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, 1968, Black Theatre, pp. 28–39. O’Neal, John, Motion in the Ocean. Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theatre, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, Black Theatre, 1968, pp. 70–77. Ostroska, Bev, Interview with Ellen Stewart of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, December 9, 1989, «Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism», vol. VI, n. 1, Fall 1991, pp. 99–105. Owens, Rochelle, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 2, Gale, Detroit 1985, pp. 255–269. ———, Futz and What Came After. Five Plays of Rochelle Owens, The Colonial Press Inc, Clinton 1968. Palladini, Giulia, Com-memorare Ellen Stewart, la Mama: narrazione e custodia di una parentela, «Culture Teatrali», n. 21, 2011, pp. 233–253. Ellen Stewart e La Mama: un’idea di teatro, Bachelor Thesis DAMS, University of Bologna, 2004–2005. ———, Lo spazio del La MaMa, in Moreno Cerquetelli (ed.), La MaMa dell’Avanguardia. Il teatro di Ellen Stewart, i rapporti con l’Italia, Edizioni Internazionali, Roma 2006, pp. 11–69. ———, The Scene of Foreplay. Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 2017.

178 Bibliography Pasolli, Robert, A Book on the Open Theatre, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Kansas City, New York 1970. ———, The New Playwrights? Scene of the Sixties: Jerome Max is Alive and Well and Living in Rome…, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 13, n. 1, Autumn 1968, pp. 150–162. Patrick, Robert, American Experimental Theatre. Then and Now, «Performing Art Journal», vol. II, n. 2, Autumn 1977, pp. 13–24. ———, The Other Brick Road, «Other Stages», February 8, 1979. Pegnato, Lisa J., Breathing in a Different Zone: Joseph Chaikin, «The Drama Review: TDR», Autumn 1981, vol. 25, n. 3, Actor/Director, pp. 7–18. Perrelli, Franco, I maestri della ricerca teatrale. Il Living, Grotowski, Barba e Brook, Editori Laterza, Bari-Roma 2020. Plunka, Gene A., Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty on Route 666: Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “Motel”, «South Atlantic Review», vol. 61, n. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 89–108. ———, Brecht, Artaud, Campbell: The Making of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “A Fable”, «The Comparatist», vol. 26, May 2002, pp. 83–98. ———, Jean-Claude van Itallie and The Off-Broadway Theater, University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press, Newark and London 1999. ———, The Jean-Claude van Itallie Papers in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Kent State University, «Resources for American Literary Study», vol. 27, n. 1, 2001, pp. 113–128. Poggi, Jack, Theater in America. The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and New York 1968. Poland, Albert and Mailman, Bruce, The Off Off Broadway Book. The Plays, People, Theatre, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis and New York 1972. Quadri, Franco, L’avanguardia teatrale in Italia, I, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino 1977. Reinelt, Janelle, Approaching the Sixties: Between Nostalgia and Critique, «Theatre Survey – The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research», vol. 43, n. 1, May 2002, pp. 37–56. Richards, Thomas, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, Routledge, Oxon, and New York 1995. Robinson, Andrew, Stepping into The Light. Sources of an Actor’s Craft, Figueroa Press, Los Angeles 2015. Kindle, Amazon. Rosenthal, Cindy, Ellen Stewart La Mama of Us All, «The Drama Review», vol. 50, n. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 12–51. ———, Ellen Stewart Presents. Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2017. Rostagno, Aldo, ed., Una seconda forma di vita. Una tavola rotonda sul workshop, «Sipario», n. 272, Dicembre 1968, pp. 125–131. Rostagno, Aldo, et al., America urrà: il teatro della rivolta, «Sipario», n. 272, Dicembre 1968. Ruffini, Rosaria, Le Afriche di Peter Brook, Linea Edizioni, Padova 2020. Russel, Martin R., Tom O’Horgan, Staging the Outrageous: A Chronological Study of His Theatre, Dissemination to the Graduate Faculty in Theatre, CUNY 1997.

Bibliography  179 Sacharow, Lawrence, ‘Drama Mailbag’: The Case of Cafe La Mama, «The New York Times», November 6, 1966. Saddik, Annette J., Contemporary American Drama, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2007. Sainer, Arthur, The New Radical Theatre Notebook, Applause, New York and London 1997. Sanders, Leslie Catherine, The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London 1989. Savielli, Aggeo, I tragici greci nella visione del La Mama, «L’Unità», September 25, 1975. Schechner, Richard, Axioms for Environmental Theatre, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 12, n. 3, Architecture/Environment, Spring 1968, pp. 41–64. ———, Environmental Theatre, Hawthorn Books, New York, 1973. ———, Theatre & Revolution, «Salmagundi», vol. 2, n. 2 (6), Fall 1967–Winter 1968, pp. 11–27. ———, The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do about It, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 5, n. 2, American Theatre: Fission/Fusion, 1981, pp. 48–63. ———, The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do about It, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 5, n. 3, 1981, pp. 9–19. ———, untitled, «The New York Times», December 11, 1966. ———, White on Black, «The Drama Review», vol. 12, n. 4, 1968, Black Theatre, pp. 25–27. Schechner, Richard, Chaikin, Joseph and Morris, Kelly, An Interview with Joseph Chaikin, «The Drama Review», vol. 13, n. 3, Spring 1969, pp. 141–147. Schechner, Richard and Schuman, Mady, Ritual, Play and Performance. Readings in The Social Sciences/Theatre, The Seabury Press, New York 1976. Schino, Mirella, Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories in Europe, Routledge, London and New York 2013. Schumach, Murray, Off Off Broadway Theater in Squeeze, «The New York Times», March 20, 1968. Sell, Michael, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2008. Serban, Andrei, The Life in a Sound, «The Drama Review», vol. 20, n. 4, December 1976, pp. 25–26. Serban, Andrei and Blumenthal, Eileen (eds.), Andrei Serban, «Theater», vol. 8, n. 2–3, 1977, pp. 66–77. Shepard, Richard F., Coffeehouse Theaters Join to Present New Play, «The New York Times», August 8, 1964. Shepard, Sam et al., American Experimental Theatre. Then and Now, «Performing Arts Journal», vol. 2, n. 2, Autumn 1977, pp. 13–24. Shorter, Eric, La Mama Troupe’s Exciting Style, «The Daily Telegraph», October 23, 1967.

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Bibliography  181 ———, Agitprop Minus Aim, «New York Post», November 14, 1966. Taviani, Ferdinando, Il libro dell’Odin. Il Teatro-laboratorio di Eugenio Barba, Feltrinelli, Milano 1975. Terry, Megan, ‘Who Says Only Words Make Great Drama?’, «The New York Times», November 10, 1968. Terry, Megan and Feldman, Peter L., Viet Rock, «The Tulane Drama Review», Autumn, 1966, vol. 11, n. 1, pp. 196–228. Tian, Renzo, Noiosa la protesta nera, «Il Messaggero», October 7, 1972. Tretck, Joyce, Futz. “Astonishingly Real”, «Show Business», March 11, 1967. Valdez, Luis, Theatre of The Sphere. The Vibrant Being (ed. by Michael M. Chemers, Routledge), New York 2022. Valenti, Cristina, Storia del Living Theatre. Conversazioni con Judith Malina, Titivillus, Corazzano, Pisa 2017. Van Itallie, Jean-Claude, America Hurrah and Other Plays, Growe Press New York, New York 2001. ———, Playwright at Work: Off-Off Broadway, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 154–158, p. 154. ———, Should the Artist Be Political in His Art?, «The New York Times», September 17, 1967. Van Itallie, Jean-Claude and Simmer, Bill, A Reinvention of Form, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 21, n. 4, Playwrights and Playwriting, December 1977, pp. 65–74. Vanden Heuvel, Michael, Performing Drama / Dramatizing Performance. Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1994. Venable, Sarah, Actor Training. An Interview with Joel Zwick, Associate Professor of Drama, «Wheaton College Alumnae Magazine», Winter 1972, pp. 16–20. Visone, Daniela, La Nascita del Nuovo Teatro in Italia 1959–1967, Titivillus, Corazzano 2017. Walker, John, America Hurrah, Lonsdale Boo, «Town», September 1967. Walsh Jenkins, Linda and Wapp, Jr., Ed, Native American Performance, «The Drama Review: TDR», vol. 20, n. 2, American Theatre Issue, June 1976, pp. 5–12. Wardle, Irving, The Tyranny of the Actor, «The Times Saturday Review», October 21, 1967. Watson, Ian, Sintesi di un’indagine storica sul training dell’attore negli USA, «Teatro e Storia», Annali 2, vol. X, 1995, pp. 175–199. ———, Towards a Third Theatre. Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, Routledge, London and New York 2007. Watson, Ian, and Colleagues, Negotiating Cultures. Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York 2009. Wetzsteon, Ross, Chaikin and O’Horgan Survive the ‘60s, «Voice Arts», November 3, 1975. ———, Tom Paine (Part I), «The Village Voice», May 11, 1967. Young, B. A., America Hurrah, «The Financial Times», August 4, 1967. ———, Tom Paine, «The Financial Times», October 18, 1967.

182 Bibliography Zolotov, Sam, Cafe La Mama to Reopen in Temporary Quarters, «The New York Times», January 3, 1969. ———, La Mama Opens at New Home April 2, «The New York Times», March 19, 1969. ———, La Mama to Get Larger Quarter, «The New York Times», July 24, 1968. ———, Playwrights’ Unit Receives Subsidy for Staging, «The New York Times», June 1, 1966. Unpublished archival documents Andrei Serban’s productions Espace Pierre Cardin, La MaMa de New York, Medea, Medea Program, Medea Tour File, 1972. LMA/ES. Festival D’Automne a Paris, printed leaflet, Great Jones Repertory Tour (Paris 1973), Print Materials. LMA/ES. Fragments of a Trilogy: ‘The Trojan Women’ and ‘Electra’ (1975–1976), Program. LMA/ES. Medea, Festival dei Due Mondi Spoleto, printed leaflet, Medea Tour File, 1972, LMA/ES. Medea, Festival dei Due Mondi Spoleto, Press Release, Medea Tour File, 1972, LMA/ES. Medea, Program, Medea Tour File, 1972. LMA/ES. Grotowski in New York Ahrne, Marianne, Jerzy Grotowski, 6.11.69. New York, conference transcription, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. Brooklyn Academy of Music 1969/1970, Grotowski, printed leaflet. BAM/HA. Brooklyn Academy of Music 1969/1970, The Polish Laboratory Theatre, 1969, printed leaflet. BAM/HA. La MaMa Correspondence. Jerzy Grotowski, 1967–1968. LMA/ES. Jarboro players Brainstorming Notes: The Jarboro Company. LMA/ES. Bullins, Ed, Appunti sul Black Theatre, Milano Aperta, printed leaflet, LMA/ES. “Five One-Acts by Ed Bullins” and “Black Terror”. Letters, Agreements, and Notes. (Italy, 1972) (folder). LMA/ES. “Five One-Acts by Ed Bullins” and “Black Terror”. Program Insert (Milan 1972). LMA/ES. “Five One-Acts by Ed Bullins” and “Black Terror”. Press (Italy, 1972). LMA/ES. “Five One-Acts by Ed Bullins” and “Black Terror”. Program (Milan 1972). LMA/ES. Jarboro Troupe. Project #1. Headshots/Resumes. LMA/ES. Letters and Programs: Jarboro Troupe Members (1971–1973). LMA/ES.

Bibliography  183 La MaMa European tours Correspondence (Ellen Stewart-La MaMa’s companies in Europe), 1965–1966. La MaMa Repertory Troupe First European Tour (1965–1966). LMA/ES. Danish press release, Cafè La Mama Scores Again at Festival, «New York Post», Saturday, September 17, 1966. ———, La Mama Makes Living Theatre, «Jyllands-Posten», February 3, 1966. ———, La Mama Repertory Troupe (folder), LMA/ES. ———, La Mama Surprises, «Berlingske Tidende», November 2, 1965. ———, The American Surplus, «Roskilde Tidende», January 26, 1966. La MaMa E.T.C. Europe Tour Number Three, 1967. Schedule. LMA/ES. La Mama Experimental Theater Club presents: Off-Off Broadway Theater, poster of the first European tour. LMA/ES. La MaMa presents: Off-Off Broadway Theater, poster, La Mama Repertory Troupe/1st European Tour (folder), LMA/ES. La Mama Repertory Troupe/3th European Tour (folder), LMA/ES. ———, La Mama und ihre Spiele, «Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung», June 7, 1967. La Mama Repertory Troupe/3th European Tour/Sweden, Denmark + Holland July-August 1967 (folder), LMA/ES. Off-Broadway Theatre Evening (Paris 1965), printed flyers. Theatre of the Eye. Miscellaneous. LMA/ES. Off-Broadway Theatre Evening, printed leaflet. LMA/ES. Reviews for European Tour 1965–1955. LMA/ES. La MaMa Plexus La MaMa Plexus Workshop. The Company. LMA/ES. La Mama Troupe Plexus II, The Arts Theatre of London. Printed leaflet. Miscellaneous Materials: La MaMa Plexus in London. LMA/ES. Letters: La MaMa Plexus to Ellen Stewart. LMA/ES. ———, Correspondence: La MaMa Plexus (1968–1974). Payeff, William K., Letter (United States Information Agency) to Stanley Rosenberg, August 30, 1968. LMA/ES. Rosenberg, Stanley, letter to Eugenio Barba, December 16, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. OTA. ———, letter to Eugenio Barba, February 29, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. Rosenberg-Barba correspondence. OTA. ———, letter to Eugenio Barba, OTA. ———, letter to Eugenio Barba, September 12, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. Rosenberg-Barba correspondence. OTA. ———, letters to Eugenio Barba, December 16, 1968 and December 30, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. Rosenberg-Barba correspondence. OTA. Stewart, Ellen, Correspondence with La MaMa’s companies, La Mama Repertory Troupe. First European Tour (1965–1966), LMA/ES. ———, telegram to Stanley Rosenberg, June 5, 1967. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. OTA.

184 Bibliography Theater Mikery presenteert la Mama Plexus Theatre, New York. Printed leaflet. Miscellaneous Materials: La MaMa Plexus in Amsterdam (1969). LMA/ES. Zwick, Joel and Callum, Diane, letter to Eugenio Barba, December 16, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. OTA. 1969 Creative Arts Festival. January 20–24. Printed leaflet. DSC/KSU. Native American Theatre Ensemble Native American Theatre Ensemble, Organizational Records, 1973. LMA/ES. Odin Teatret and Jerzy Grotowski Seminars Ahrne, Marianne, Jerzy Grotowski seminar Holstebro 1967, notes and transcription, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. ———, Jerzy Grotowski seminar Holstebro 1968, notes and transcription, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. ———, Jerzy Grotowski seminar Holstebro 1969, notes and transcription, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. Barba, Eugenio, correspondence with Harry Carlson, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret, Odin Activities. OTA. ———, Correspondence with Joseph Chaikin, 1969. Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA ———, Correspondence with Richard Schechner, 1969. Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. Carlson, Harry G., Letter to Eugenio Barba, April 12, 1968. Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. Chaikin, Joseph, correspondence with Jean-Claude van Itallie, July 1969. Barry Daniels papers, Correspondence of Joseph Chaikin files, 1969, DSC/KSU. ———, Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin Papers. DSC/KSU. ———, Interview granted to Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano in Venice on May 12, 1968. Joseph Chaikin Papers. DSC/KSU. ———, Notes, Joseph Chaikin Papers. DSC/KSU. Croyden, Margaret, Letter to Eugenio Barba, March 24, 1969. Odin Teatret Archives – Activities. OTA. Foster, Paul, letter to Eugenio Barba, October 21, 1966. Fund Odin Teatret, OdinLetters. OTA. Scandinavian Theatre Laboratory for the Art of Acting, Activities, 1966–1972. Fund Odin Teatret – Activities. OTA. ———, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, company documentation, Fund Odin Teatret, Activities. OTA. ———, Odin Teatret presentation, notes. ———, Sources of Theatre, Seminar 1970. ———, Theatre Laboratory, Holstebro, Denmark, Activities 1971. ———, Work programme, Summer Seminar 1969.

Bibliography  185 Off-Off Broadway Theatre A Benefit for Caffe Cino, April 15, 1965, flyer, Café Cino (NY). NYPL/BRTD. A Benefit for Caffe Cino, April 26, 1965, flyer, Café Cino (NY). NYPL/BRTD. BbAaNnGg!, «Playbill», printed leaflet. LMA/ES. Coffee House Theatre Festival. Printed flyer. 1964–1966. Program. LMA/ES. Koutoukas, H. M., And so the Cino, in Caffe Cino Benefit, flyer, March 15, 1965. T-CLP, Caffe Cino (New York), NYPL/BRTD. The Caffe Cino Symposia, flyer, Café Cino (NY). NYPL/BRTD. Tom Eyen Festival, printed leaflet, Café Cino (NY). NYPL/BRTD. Open Theatre America Hurrah. Royal Court. Printed Leaflet. London 1967. LMA/ES. Feldman, Peter, International Symposium new Methods of Educational Drama, Pre-paper of Peter Feldman – workshop C – sound and movement, Peter Feldman Papers. DSC/KSU. ———, The Cave, From Workshops III, IV, V, Amsterdam: Stichting Mickery Workshop, 1972, Peter Feldman Papers. Megan Terry (“Viet Rock”). Playwright File. LMA/ES. Press release Germany-Italy 1968. Joseph Chaikin Papers. DSC/KSU. Press release New York 1966. Joseph Chaikin Papers. DSC/KSU. Viet Rock, printed leaflet, The Yale School of Drama, LMA/ES. Viet Rock at Martinique Theatre (1966), Program. LMA/ES. ———, Promotional Flyer. Viet Rock, ‘Off-Broadway Reviews’, «Variety», November 30, 1966. LMA/ES. Peter Brook Coigney, Martha, Letter to Harvey Lichtenstein, June 29, 1973. CIRT – ­Correspondence, BAM/HA. Heilpern, John, I.C.T.R. in Africa. A Cronicle. December 1, 1972 – March 10, 1973, CIRT documentation, BAM/HA. International Centre of Theatre Research, A Cronicle by Peter Wilson. July 1st – October 12th 1973. CIRT Reports and Proposals, BAM/HA. ———, CIRT documents, Peter Brook Press Clippings 1973–1974, BAM/HA. ———, Report on Activities, Box 3a, “CIRT” Reports and Proposals 1972–1973, BAM/HA. ———, Report on Activities, December 31st 1973, CIRT documentation, BAM/ HA. ———, Sessions in U.S.A., July 1st – October 12th 1973. 15 weeks, CIRT documentation, BAM/HA. ———, 1970–1973 Correspondence. CIRT + Peter Brook. BAM/HA. Interview With Ted Hughes Author of Orghast, 5th Festival of Arts Shiraz Persepolis, September 1, 1971, Festival magazine, CIRT’s documents. BAM/HA. ———, Orghast, Part II.

186 Bibliography Lima, Gregory, Ritual for a Mountain Top, «Kayhan International», August 31, 1971. BAM/HA. Opening Night. CIRT’s documents, BAM/HA. Orghast, 5th Festival of Arts Shiraz Persepolis, August 28, 1971, Festival magazine, CIRT’s documents. BAM/HA. ———, Orghast, Part I. Press release, September 8, 1969. CIRT’s documents. BAM/HA. 5th Festival of Arts Shiraz Persepolis, September 5, 1971, Festival magazine, CIRT’s documents. BAM/HA. Tom O’Horgan and La MaMa Repertory Troupe Futz, Promotional Book (The Film) (1969). LMA/ES. Weiss, Ann, Will Brandeis survive “Massachusetts Trust”?, notes, Brandeis Interact 1968. LMA/ES.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aasø Skole 50 Acropolis, Stanislaw Wyspianski 126, 128 Actors Equity Association 39–40 Actors’ Studio 33, 57, 61, 87, 98, 110n23, 136 Adler, Stella 87 Agitprop Theater 163n11 Albarwild Theater Arts, Inc.’s (ABW) 36, 44 Albee, Edward 15, 23n15, 36, 126 Alexander, Ross 27, 46, 50–51 Allen, Michael 12–13 Allen, Seth 50–51, 75, 84n67 America Hurrah: A Masque for Three Dolls, (Motel), Jean-Claude van Itallie 32, 35, 50–51, 57–58, 69, 72, 91 American Center for Students and Artists 9, 44, 46, 50–51, 54 American Indian Theatre Ensemble (Native American Theatre Ensemble) 147–148, 151 American Theatre for Poets 8, 17 Antigone, Sophocles, Living Theatre 92, 102, 111n47, 123, 130 Antonacci, Greg 140 Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, Jerzy Grotowski 115, 126 The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, Fernando Arrabal 93 Arden of Faversham, Unknown, preShakespearean play 117, 161 Arrabal, Fernando 31, 93

Artaud, Antonin 20, 26n57, 54, 87, 90–92, 117, 120, 132 Aschengreen, Erik 75 Augias, Corrado 75 Avignon Festival 163n8 Avital, Samuel 31 Back Stage 38 The Balcony, Jean Genet 20 Balls, Paul Foster 32, 35–36, 44 Balm in Gilead, Lanford Wilson 31 Banes, Sally 12 Barba, Eugenio xi, 54–55, 57–58, 60– 65, 74–75, 80, 81n14, 93–94, 99, 100, 115, 120, 125, 135– 137, 141, 143n32, 144n33, 145n78, 161 Barnes, Clive 123, 127 Barr, Richard 23n15, 36 Barrault, Jean-Louis 31, 118, 131 Barrie Hall 76 Bathsheba, Andre Gide 31 Beat Generation 6–7, 17, 22n5 Beck, Julian xi, 9, 22n3, 26n63, 54, 72, 78, 90, 115 Beckett, Samuel 20, 26n57, 31 Benedictus, David 77 Bennington College 142n18 Berlingske Tidende 53, 75 Bernhardt, Sarah 83n50 Birdbath, Leonard Melfi 35 Bissinger, Tom 78 Bitter End 34 Bjorksten, Ingmar 67

188 Index Black Arts Movement 154–156, 165n34 Black House 164n28 Black Mountain College 6, 45 Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party 164n28, 155 Black Power Movement 25n47, 147, 154–156 Black Students Union 155 Black Terror, Richard Wesley xii, 158 Black Theatre 72, 154–156, 158–159, 164n28, 165n36 Black Theatre movement 147 Blau, Herbert 20 Body Indian, Hanay Geiogamah 152 Bottner, Barbara 144n72 Bottoms, Stephen James 36 Bovasso, Julie 14, 20, 26n59 Bowens, Malick 117 Boxiganga, Elsa Gress 52, 66 Branch, Pat 12 Brandeis Interact International Theatre Festival 38, 117 Brandeis University 38, 117 Braswell, John 43 Bread And Puppet Theatre 8, 19, 72, 86 Brecht, Bertolt 9, 20, 22n9, 23n20, 54, 78, 91, 104, 143n50 Breuer, Lee 43, 164n19 The Bridge 8 Brody, Michael 144n72 The Bronx Is the Next, Sonia Sanchez, 72 Brook, Peter i, xi-xii, 39, 49n39, 62, 79, 84n77, 94, 109, 114–115, 117–120, 123, 124–125, 127, 129, 131–132, 148–152, 160– 161, 163n2 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 39, 85, 126, 148, 152–153, 163n5–7 Brooklyn College (CUNY) 116 Brustein, Robert 106, 112n57, 126 Bryden, Ronald 77 Brzozowski, Stanislaw 61 Buchanan, R. J. 76 Büchner, Georg 138 Bullins, Ed xii, 14, 72, 155–159, 164n28, 166n37 Burroughs, William 17 Buttoms, John 138, 144n72

Cafe Bizarre 34 Café La MaMa (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club) i, iv, ix, 1, 9, 13–15, 23n12, 26n59, 27, 29–32, 35, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48n20, 64, 72, 78, 88, 103, 104, 136, 146, 148, 162 Café Wha? 34 Caffe Cino xi, 9–12, 15–16, 20–21, 24n28, 28–29, 33, 35, 48n20, 56, 88 Cage, John 5–6, 9, 12, 17, 22n9, 24n31 Cali Festival 44 Callum, Diane 116, 135–137, 139, 144n71 Calm Down Mother, Megan Terry 96 Camus, Albert 19 Cannes Festival 24n21 Caravan Theatre 38 Carleton College 25n57 Carlson, Harry G. 125, 135, 137, 143n32 Carlson, Marvin 121, 126 Carmines, Alvin 11 Carrière, Jean-Calude 163n8 Cedar Tavern 7, 17 Center Du Silence 31 Cerquetelli, Moreno 1 Césaire, Aimé 160, 166n41 Chaikin, Joseph xi, 9, 21n2, 35, 42, 54, 57, 62, 72, 78–80, 84n77, 85, 88–91, 93–98, 100–103, 105, 110n6, 111n27, 111n33, 112n50, 116, 126–127, 145n73 Chang, Tisa 146 Charba, Mari-Claire 44, 46, 50, 82n50 Chavez, Cesar 151, 163n9 Chekhov, Michael 95, 97, 110n22 Chemers, Michael 150 Cherry Lane Theatre 22n4, 26n63, 36, 44 Chicago, Sam Shepard 35, 56, 66 Chilton, Nola 95, 110n23 Chinese Theatre Group 146, 148, 153 Christoffersen, Erik Exe 101 Clara’s Old Man, Ed Bullins xii, 158 Cieslak, Ryszard 61, 65, 79 Cino, Joe 10, 15–16, 24n24, 27, 29, 33, 35, 48n20, 56 City University of New York 2, 125

Index  189

Civello, Alex 51 Clarke, Shirley 9, 23n12, 139 Club De Teatro Experimental La MaMa 38 Clurman, Harold 87 Coe, John A. 78 Coffee House Theater Festival 37 Coigney, Martha 39, 164n24 Colombaioni Brothers 80 Colombaioni, Carlo 84n80 Colombaioni, Mario 84n80 Colombaioni, Nani 84n80 Colombaioni, Romano 84n80 Colombaioni, Willy 84n80 Colton, Jacque Lynn 44–46, 50, 57, 65, 82n50 Comediehuset Hall 52 Complexions, Jan Quackenbush 135 A Concert of Dance #1, Robert Dunn 11 The Conference of the Birds, Farid alDin ‘Attar, CIRT, Peter Brook 149, 151–152 The Connection, Jack Gelber 4, 9 The Constant Prince, Calderón, Juliusz Slowacki 64, 68, 126 Cook, Ralph 12–13 Coon Cons Coyote, Hanay Geiogamah 152 Copeau, Jacques 81n28 Copi, Victor 135 Cornell, Jonas 67 Cowboys, Sam Shepard 12 Crawford, Cheryl 87 Creative Arts Festival 139 Crespy, David A. 17, 26n64 Croyden, Margaret 119, 145n78 Cunningham, Merce 6, 9, 11–12, 22n9 The Cylinder, Victor Copi 135 Dagny, Robert 37 “Dance Wi Me” Or (The Fatal Twitch), Greg Antonacci 140 Danish National Television 54 Darling, Candy 83n50 Dartmouth College 138 Davis, David 44, 51–52 De Carlo, Tony 135 De Kooning, Elaine 22n9 De Luise, Jerry 50

De Marinis, Marco xi, 114, 141n1 De Pury, Marianne 105 Decentre Artistic Centre 45 Decroux, Étienne 31, 62–63, 81n28 Delsarte, François 63 Department of Cultures and Civilizations ix, 2 Deriu, Fabrizio 141n4 Di Prima, Diane 9, 11, 17 Diamond, Abraham 27, 47n1 Dialect Determinism (The Rally), Ed Bullins 158, 166n40 Dickens, Charles 53 Dini, Massimo 20 Dionysus in 69, (adaptation of The Bacchae, Euripides), Richard Schechner, The Performance Group xiii, 72, 92, 98, 115, 123, 130, 142n21 Dixon, Melvin W. 154 Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Gertrude Stein 26n63 Dog, Sam Shepard 32 The Drama Review 25n57, 38, 62, 64, 72, 136, 145n78, 155 Dream, Jean-Claude van Itallie 32, 78, 100 Drexler, Rosalyn 11, 14, 20 Duchamp, Marcel 17 Dunn, Robert 12, 24n31 D. W. Griffith Theatre 24n21 Dylan, Bob 9 The East Village Others 23n14 Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, Allan Kaprow 24n29 El Teatro Campesino xii, 86, 148–150, 156, 163n9 Electra, (Euripides and Sophocles), Andrei Serban, Elizabeth Swados 128, 130, 132 Engberg, Harald 53 Escobar, Ruth 132 ETC Company 43, 161 Euripides 115, 120, 128 Evergreen Review 107 Experimenta Festival 66–67 Eyen, Tom 11, 14, 32, 41, 43–45, 47n9, 50, 68, 82n50, 86–87, 160

190 Index The Factory 22n12 Fales, Nancy 142n21 The Family Joke, David Starkweather 44 Fancher, Edwin 23n14 Feldman, Peter 32, 35, 78, 96, 100, 103–104, 107–108 Fellini, Federico 84n80 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 12 Festival d’Automne 132 Festival dei Due Mondi 66, 68, 160 Finnerty, Warren 9 Firehouse Theatre 151 Flaszen, Ludwik 55 Fletcher, Jay 158 Fluxus 17 Fo, Dario 62 Foghorn, Hanay Geiogamah 152 Ford Foundation 42, 117 Ford, John 53 Foreman, Richard 114 Fornes, Maria Irene 11, 14 Foster, Paul 10–11, 14, 27, 31–32, 35–38, 44–45, 50–51, 53, 55, 67–68 Franziska, Frank Wedekind 1 Free Jazz Movement 25n47 Freedman, Gilliam 77 Freud, Sigmund 32 Fringe Festival 75, 77, 116 Fringe Theatre 54, 81n15 From an Odets Kitchen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Open Theatre 84n73, 98 “Frustrata” or, the Dirty Little Girl with The Paper Rose Stuck in Her Head is Demented, (Frustrata) Tom Eyen 32, 44–45, 50 Fuck You/A Magazine for the Arts 34 Fuller, Buckminster 22n9 Futz, Rochelle Owens 20, 66–67, 72, 73, 73, 75–77, 84n71, 92, 100, 116 Garbo, Greta 25n50 García Lorca, Federico 22n9, 23n20 Gardner, Paul 37 Gaslight Café 7, 17, 34 Gay Liberation Front 7 Geiogamah, Hanay xii, 151–152

Genet, Jean 20, 53, 88 Gide, André 31 Gilman, Richard 78 Ginsberg, Allen 7, 17, 160 Gittens, Hugh 154 Give My Regards to Off-Off Broadway, Tom Eyen 41 Glass, Philip 6 The Good Woman of Setzuan, Bertolt Brecht 143n50 Goodman, Paul 23n20 Gordon Craig, Edward 117 Graduate Center (CUNY) 2 Graham, Jean 135 Graham, Martha 137 The Great Jones Repertory Company 3, 43, 114, 119, 128, 143n44, 153, 160–162 Greenwich Village Cafe Theater Association 34 Greenwich Village Coffee House Association 34 Gress, Elsa 45–46, 51–53, 55, 66, 81n8 Grotowski, Jerzy xi-xii, 26n57, 38, 54–55, 57–58, 60–68, 74, 79–80, 81n28, 82n31, 84n75, 84n77, 87, 90–91, 93–94, 97–101, 108, 111n31, 113n64, 114–117, 121–123, 125–128, 134–138, 141, 148, 153, 161 The Group Theatre 87, 109n2 Gudmansen, Per 53 Guidote-Alvarez, Cecile 38–39 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich 117 Guttenplan, Howard 47n1 Hair, Gerome Ragni and James Rado 72, 88, 136 The Hardware Poet’s Playhouse 8 Hanft, Helen 83n50 Harris, Judith Gayle 38 Harris, Ted 47n9 Harris, Walter 41 Hawk’s Well Press 72 Head Hunting, Pagoon Kang Wouk 31 Heide, Robert 11, 39 Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III) 23n12 Hoffman, Theodore 64–65 Holiday, Dylan Thomas 31

Index  191 Home Free!, Lanford Wilson 36, 44, 50 Home Movies, Rosalyn Drexler 20 Home on the Range, LeRoi Jones, 72 How Do You Do?, Ed Bullins 158, 166n40 Huerta, Dolores 163n9 Hughes, Ted 118 Hurrah for The Bridge, Paul Foster 31–32, 44, 50 The Ik, Colin Turnbull, adaptation by Colin Higgins and Dennis Cannan 149 Il Messaggero 159 Inside Out, Jan Quackenbush 134– 135, 138 Intermission, Daniel Mauroc 44 International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT) 39, 114, 117 International Theatre Festival Erlangen 44 Interview, Jean-Claude van Itallie 32, 57, 90 Ionesco, Eugene 20, 26n57, 31 Irons, Leslie 83n55 It Has No Choice, Ed Bullins 158 Jarboro, Katarina 154 Jarboro Players (Jarboro Company, Jarboro Troupe, GPA Nucleus) xii, 3, 43, 147, 154, 156, 158, 163n1 Jarry, Alfred 6 Jazz Club Montmartre 46 Jazz Gallery 7 Johns, Jasper 18 Johnson, Onni 143n41 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) 17, 72, 155–156 Judson Dance Theatre 11 Judson Gallery 11 Judson Memorial Church 9, 11–12, 24n21, 33 Judson Poets’ Theatre 11 Kang Wouk, Pagoon 31 Kaprow, Allan 11, 17, 24n29 Kaspariana, Odin Teatret 75, 136 Katsulas, Andrea 117, 153 Kauffmann, Stanley 56

Kazan, Elia 87 Keep Tightly Closed in a Cold Dry Place, Megan Terry 68, 96 Kemeny, Alex 11 Kennedy, Adrienne 14, 50, 165n35 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 19 Kent State University 127, 138 Kerouac, Jack 7, 17 Kessler, Bruce 14, 48n28, 51 King, Martin Luther Jr. 13 Kirby, Michael xi, 1, 12 Koch, Ed 34 Kornfeld, Lawrence 9, 11 Kostelanetz, Richard 4, 69 Koutoukas, H. M. 11–12, 15–16, 20–21, 23n12, 50 Krauss, Ruth 11 La Fayette Theatre 154, 159, 166n37 La Fede 1 La MaMa Annex 42, 131 La MaMa Chinatown 43, 146 La MaMa ETC 42 La MaMa Gallery 42 La MaMa Paris 44 La MaMa Plexus Workshop xii, 2–3, 42, 114, 116–117, 125, 127, 134–139, 141, 145n76, 161 La MaMa Rehearsal Spaces 42 La MaMa Repertory Troupe xii, 2–3, 43, 55, 57, 66, 68, 73, 85–86, 94, 100, 116, 119, 135, 160–162 La MaMa Tel Aviv 47 La MaMa Tokyo 47 La MaMa Umbria International 42, 162 La Silvay, Lucy 41 LaBar, Tom 66 Ladies’ Voices, Gertrude Stein 23n20, 26n63 Lahr, John 72, 107 Landshoff-Yorck, Ruth 45, 47n9, 49n39, 50 Lansing, Sally 135 The Last Chance Saloon, Andrew Robinson 138, 139, 144n72 Le Grand Theatre Panique 38 Leach, Wilford 43, 142n21, 161 Lebreton, Yves 62, 80 Lecoq, Jacques 62

192 Index Lee, Bryarly 38 Lester, Elenore 20–21, 23n19 Leventon, Annabel 135 Levy, Jacques 78 Lewis, Robert 87 Lichtenstein, Harvey 126 Lieder, Jillian 135 Lights, Fred 27 Lindh, Ingemar 62, 80 Link, Ronald 15 Linklater, Kristin 138, 145n73 LiPari, Marjorie 50 LiPari, Victor 50, 55, 57, 65 The Living Theatre xi, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 19, 22n3, 22n8–9, 23n20, 26n57, 48n12, 53–54, 67, 69, 72, 74, 77, 86, 88, 90, 92, 98, 101, 106, 111n34, 115, 123, 130, 143n45, 148, 153 Locus Solus, Raymond Russel 1 Lollobrigida, Gina 25n50 London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) 138 London’s Arts Theatre 138 Lonnert, Sten 68 Mabou Mines 43, 164n19 MacArthur Foundation 162 MacArthur Genius Award 42, 162 The Madness of Lady Bright, Lanford Wilson 20, 50 Maeda, Jun 131 The Magic Realists, Megan Terry 100 The Maids, Jean Genet 20, 88 Mailer, Norman 23n14 Malina, Judith xi, 9, 22n3, 26n63, 54, 72, 78, 90, 102, 115 Man Is Man, Bertolt Brecht 9 Man Versus Computer, John Bottoms 138 Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss 49n39, 127 Marowitz, Charles 62 The Marrying Maiden, Living Theatre 22n8 Massachusetts Trust, Megan Terry 38, 117 Martin Beck Theatre 49n39 The Martin E. Segal Theater Center 2 Martinez, Alma 150 Martinique Theatre 35, 56, 84n73, 102, 106

Mason, Marshall W. 31 Mauroc, Daniel 44–45 McDougall, Gordon 76 McGuire, Maggie 41 McLeod, Kembrew 11 McNeil Lowry Grant 42 Medea, (Euripides, Seneca), Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados 119, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131–132, 142n24, 161 Meek, Brian 76–77 Meisner, Sanford 87 Mekas, Jonas 9 Melfi, Leonard 12, 14, 35, 47n9, 50 Melodrama Play, Sam Shepard 18 Menta, Ed 132, 143n42 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilyevich 100 Mickery Theatre 138 Midler, Bette 83n50 Milano Aperta xii, 156 Miller, Arthur 126 Milligan, Andy 11, 27, 29, 31 A Minor Scene, Ed Bullins 158 Mitchell, Mary 50 Monk, Meredith 114 Monroe, Marilyn 83n50 My Next Husband Will Be a Beauty Tom Eyen, 32 Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, The Living Theatre 9, 54, 98 The Myths of America Smith or Pappy Crumb’s Treefrog Beer, Greg Antonacci 140 Nagel Rasmussen, Iben 59 Nanni, Giancarlo 1 National Educational Television 57 National Endowment for the Arts 41–42 National Farm Workers Association 163n10 National Theatre of the Deaf 148, 152 Native American Theatre Ensemble (NATE; American Indian Theatre Ensemble, AITE) xii, 3, 43, 147–148, 151–152, 164n19 Negret, Edgard 44 The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre 87 New American Cinema Group 9 New Playwrights Series 36, 44

Index  193 New School for Social Research 24n31 New York, Daniel Mauroc 45 New York Post 66 New York State Council on the Arts 164n24 The New York Times 21, 37, 40–41, 48n15, 56, 116, 119, 123, 126–127 New York University 26n57, 38, 64, 79, 87 The Next Thing, Michael Smith 100 Niblock, Phill 47n9 Nomis, Amon Ben 122, 139, 140, 157 Obie Award 37, 48n20, 72 O’Connor, Kevin 47n9, 50, 56 Odin Teatret 54–55, 57–59, 60, 61–65, 75, 80, 84n80, 94, 100–101, 115, 125, 135–136, 138, 141, 145n78 Off-Off Broadway Theater Conference 38 O’Hara, Frank 9 O’Horgan, Tom xii, 2, 14, 18, 38, 42–43, 46, 50–57, 64, 66–69, 72–75, 77, 83n67, 85–88, 90–93, 96, 98–102, 111n27, 115–117, 119, 126, 136 Oida, Katsuhiro (Yoshi) 118, 120, 129, 153 Okking, Jens 44, 50 OM Theatre 107 One Arm, Tennessee Williams 29, 30 O’Neil, Eugene 126 Open Theatre xii, 2–3, 17, 19, 21n3, 26n57, 32, 42–43, 47n9, 54, 57, 62, 67–68, 72, 77–80, 85–86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94–98, 100–101, 103, 106, 116, 120, 127, 134 Oppenheimer, Joel 11 Ordway, Sally 12 Orghast, Ted Hughes, International Centre for Theatre Research 115, 117–119, 123, 125 Ovenassian, Arby 118 Owens, Rochelle 9, 14, 20, 66–67, 72, 73 Padmasambhava (Padma Raja) 140 Palladini, Giulia 29

Pan Asian Repertory Theatre 146 Pasolli, Robert 69, 79, 104, 112n48 Patel, Raman 52 Patrick, Robert xi, 4, 11, 14, 20–21, 33 Pavane: A Fugue For Eight Actors, (Interview), Jean-Claude van Itallie 32, 57, 66 Pay, Roald 59–60, 62–63 Penn, Arthur 22n9 The Performance Group xi, xiii, 19, 22n3, 72, 87, 92, 98, 107, 114, 123, 130, 143n45 Persepolis (Shiraz) Festival 115, 117–118 The Persians, Aeschylus 118 Perlini, Amelio (Memè) 1 Perr, Harvey 50 Phase 2 34 Philippe, Jean-Loup 50 Pinter, Harold 20, 31 Pirandello, Luigi 101 Pistolteatern 66 Pivano, Fernanda 110n21 The Playhouse of the Ridiculous 43, 72, 164n19 Playwrights Unit 23n15, 36–37 Pocket Theatre 35 Poggi, Jack 48n31 Portman, Julie 107–108 Portnow, Richard 41 Pottberg, Clifford 83n55 Powell, Michael Warren 50 Proletkult Theater 163n11 Provincetown Playhouse (Theatre) 22n4, 126 Quackenbush, Jan 135 Queens College (CUNY) 125, 135, 137–138 A Rat’s Mass, Adrienne Kennedy 50, 165n35 Rauschenberg, Robert 9, 18 Reavey, Jean 50 The Recluse, Paul Foster 32, 37–38, 44, 51, 53, 56–57 Redford, Leslie 136 Reed, Lou 22n12 Renaud-Barrault Company 131 Reuben Gallery 24n29

194 Index Roberts, Marilyn 39, 57, 65 Robertson Murray, M. 75–76 Robinson, Andrew (Andy) 116, 127, 134–135, 138–139, 144n72 The Rock Garden, Sam Shepard 12 Rockefeller Foundation 36, 42, 116, 119 Rocking Chair, Sam Shepard 32 Rodio, Jolanda 62, 80 Rogoff, Gordon 78, 91 The Room, Harold Pinter 31 Rosenberg, Stanley 42, 57, 75, 115– 117, 123, 125, 127, 134–137 Rosenberg, Suzie 137 Rosenthal, Cindy xi, 1, 35, 38 Rostagno, Aldo 69, 72, 107 Royal Shakespeare Company 62, 79 The Ruse of Medusa, Erik Satie 6 Ruyle, Bill 130, 143n30 Sacharow, Lawrence 40 Sadan, Mark 46 Sainer, Arthur 37 Sainte Chapelle 132 San Francisco Mime Troupe 163n9 San Francisco State College 155 San Remo 7, 17 Sanchez, Sonia 72 Sanders, Ed 34, 48n12, 164n28 Sankey, Tom 12 Sarah B. Divine!, Tom Eyen 68, 160 Sarah Lawrence College 131 Sartre, Jean-Paul 19 Satie, Erik 6 Schechner, Richard xi, 22n3, 26n57, 64, 87, 92, 94, 107–109, 110n12, 115, 126, 137, 155 Schoenberg, Arnold 99 Schoenwalf, Gerald 51 Schumann, Peter 8 Scottish Daily Express 75–76 Second City 111n27 Sedy, Robert 50 Seneca 120, 128 Serban, Andrei xi, xiii, 2, 42, 43, 47n8, 115, 117–125, 128–133, 142n18, 143n30, 143n50, 144n52, 153, 160–161, 163n2 The Serpent, Jean-Claude van Itallie, 72 Shakespeare, William 128

Shakespeare & Co 44 Shepard, Sam 11–12, 14, 32, 35, 47n9, 50, 56–57, 72 Sheridan Square Theatre (Playhouse) 49n35, 84n73, 98 Show Business 74 Sills, Paul 111n27 Sipario 54, 69, 70–71, 72, 75, 106, 165n35 Skipper, Mel 144n72 Sklar, Roberta 78 Smith, Michael 7, 22n10, 24n24, 34, 47n8, 55, 74, 78, 100 Smith, Patti 23n12 Smith, Priscilla xiii, 121, 123, 133, 142n21 SoHo Weekly News 23n14 Soler, Shirley 83n50 Sontag, Susan 25n49 Soon Jack November, Sharon Thie 78, 100 Sophocles 128 Sottsass, Ettore 110n21 Spolin, Viola 96, 99, 111n26, 116, 137–138 Spring-Voices, Andrew Robinson 139 St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery 9, 12–13 St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project 13 Stafford-Clark, David 77 Stage 73 35 Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeevič 60, 87, 95, 97, 100–101, 126, 134 Starkweather, David 37, 44 Statens Film Central 66 Staw, Sala 37–38 Stein, Gertrude 11, 20, 22n9, 23n20, 26n63 Steiner, Rudolf 95, 110n22 Stewart, Ellen xiii, 1–2, 9, 13–15, 23n12, 25n40, 27–33, 35–46, 47n1, 48n20, 49n39, 50–52, 54–57, 59, 64–65, 67–69, 72, 75, 77–78, 80n2, 80n4, 83n65, 85–88, 94, 115–117, 119, 126, 133–134, 136, 138, 142n18, 144n72, 145n76, 145n78, 146– 148, 152, 154, 156, 160–162, 164n19 Stockholm Municipal Theatre Studios 68

Index  195 Stolyar, Shirley 50 Stonewall Inn 7 Strasberg, Lee 61, 87, 92, 98 Strausbaugh, John 24n28 Sullivan, Dan 40, 41, 56 Sullivan, Patrick 39 Sullivan Street Playhouse 15 Svalegangen Theater 44, 46 Swados, Elizabeth xi, xiii, 119–121, 123, 125, 128–130, 132, 143n44, 148, 153 Swanson, Gloria 41 Sztybel, Stefan 50

Tresko, Elsa 41 Tretck, Joyce 74 The Trojan Women, (Euripides, Seneca), Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados 128, 130– 132, 161 The Tulane Drama Review 20, 25n57, 54, 62, 104 Tulane University 25n57 La Turista, Sam Shepard, 72 TV, Jean-Claude van Itallie 32 The Two Executioners, Fernando Arrabal 31

Take 3 6, 34 Tallmer, Jerry 22n10, 23n14 Tallon-Karlweis, Ninon 126 Teatr Laboratorium 38, 55, 58, 61, 63–64, 126 Teatrets Teori Og Teknikk 125 Teatro delle Cantine Romane 54 Teatro La Maschera 1 Tempo Playhouse 20 Terry, Megan 14, 20, 35, 38, 68, 78, 96, 98, 100, 102–108, 112n51, 117 Theatre and Film Institute of Bucharest 117 Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord 149 Théâtre des Nations 64 Theatre Genesis 12–13, 32, 35, 72 Theatre Piece, John Cage 6 The Theatre of the Eye Repertory Company 43, 67–68, 83n50, 86 Theatre of the Thirteen Rows (Teatr 13 Rzędów) 81n24 Thie, Sharon 78, 100 Third World Committee 39 Third World Institute of Theatre Arts Studies (TWITAS) 38 Thirdside 34 Thirkel, Rob 57, 65 Thomas, Dylan 31 Tian, Renzo 159 Times Square, Leonard Melfi 14 Tom Paine, Paul Foster 35, 67, 68, 92, 160 Tomasewski, Henryk 61 Tokyo Kid Brothers 46–47, 143n50, 147 Traverse Theatre Club 38, 76

Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry 6, 117 UNESCO International Theatre Institute 39, 152 United Farm Workers Organizing Committee 163n10 University of the Andes Touring Theatrical Company 44 University of Verona 2, 141n4, 163n5 US, Peter Brook, The Royal Shakespeare Company 79, 94 Vaccaro, John 43, 164n19 Valdez, Luis xii, 86, 149–151, 163n9 Valenti, Cristina 102 Van Itallie, Jean-Claude 14, 17, 20, 32, 36, 50–51, 56, 66, 72, 78–80, 82n36, 84n75, 85, 90, 98, 100, 126 Venice Biennale xii, 156, 160–161 Viet Rock, Megan Terry 20, 35, 41, 78, 92, 98, 102–106 Village South Theatre 36–37, 44 Village Vanguard 7 The Village Voice 7, 22n10, 23n14, 24n24, 28, 34, 37, 43–44, 55, 67 The Villager 23n14 Vitali, Roberto 80 War, Jean-Claude van Itallie 20, 36, 50, 56, 66, 85, 91 Ward, Conrad 14, 18, 73 Warhol, Andy 6, 9, 18, 22–23n12 Warren, Iris 138, 145n73 Washington Square Methodist Church 126 Weiss, Peter 49n39

196 Index Wesley, Richard xii, 158 Wethal, Torgeir 59, 62 The White Whore and The Bit Player, Tom Eyen 32, 44 Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee, David Starkweather 37 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee 36 Why Tuesday Never Has a Blue Monday, Robert Heide 39 Wilder, Clinton 23n15, 36 Williams, Tennessee 29, 159, 166n37 Wilson, Doric 11, 20 Wilson, Lanford 11, 20, 47n9 Wilson, Robert 114 Wolaski, Barry 41 Wolf, Dan 23n14

Woods, Allie 157, 158 Woyzeck (Georg Büchner), Joel Zwick 138 Wright, Clifford 45, 52 The Writer’s Stage Theatre 15 Wroclaw Theatre Festival 117 X, Malcolm 19, 25n47 Yale School of Drama 112n57, 137 Yale University 106, 135 Yutaka, Higashi 147 Zagreb International Student Theatre Festival 65, 117 Zolotov, Sam 116, 142n7 Zwick, Joel xii, 42, 48n32, 116, 134– 141, 144n71, 145n76