Subtitled Sophia=(Wisdom): Part 2. Presented by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at the Cinematheque (80 Wooster Street), New York City, December 1970–January 1971. With Mike Jacobson (Ben), Bob Fleischner (Leo), Judy Fyve (Hannah), Margaret Ladd (Sophia) and Alexandra Stone (Little Girl). In Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos, edited and with an introduction by Kate Davy. New York: New York University Press, 1976, pp. 33-66.

Neither the light-bringing goddess Sophia nor his wife Hannah seems to be particularly well-disposed to Ben at the beginning of Total Recall, Foreman’s third Ontological-Hysteric play. Ben himself is experiencing something of a phenomenological crisis: “Nothing seems different this morning. I sit down to breakfast. I have coffee and rolls. Then I put on my coat and go out into the street. Nothing seems different,” he says (34). But oh, it is, and even he knows it. He has some kind of revelation, and the rest of the play is an exploration of just what may have been revealed. He hopes to find it in a kind of “total recall,” a memory of what happened, but it eludes his grasp; instead, his vision doubles, redoubles, then returns to “normal” again.

This is Foreman’s first explicit experimentation with the frame as a device for perception and directing attention; apart from the proscenium opening, the frames are multiple. There is not only a window frame (through which characters fall, both into and out of the room, through the play), but also a “landscape box” and two “puppet theatres,” as well as a box which displays the goddess and her lamp, that the characters contemplate from time to time; even the perspectives within these smaller frames change. Sometimes the perspective is a landscape; at other times, Ben thrusts his hands through the curtains of the puppet theatres, hands gargantuan compared to the landscapes and whatever puppets may theoretically appear inside.

But more to the point, the body and the mind are themselves frames, and their experience is asychronous: what Ben’s body feels and what his mind perceives or thinks seem detached from each other. Wisdom inheres in being able to think with the body and feel with the mind, a wisdom that comes to Ben late in the play and even provides a means for him to erotically communicate with his rather wiser wife Hannah. The mind and the body provide frames for experience — perspectives — as well, sometimes one upon the other, and as Ben negotiates these perspectives he begins to find a new sensual life. At best, the body can emanate the same light, the same wisdom, as Sophia’s lamp. It’s maintaining that light, that wisdom, that’s the hard part.

The explicit use of landscapes in the puppet theatres is an explicit reference to Stein, but I detect a Chekhovian note here, too: an emphasis on the quotidian, as Ben describes in his opening monologue. We may as well be in a Chekhov play: it’s a family scene, with husband Ben, wife Hannah, uncle Leo, and even a little girl and a dog wandering around with seeming aimlessness. It’s an aimlessness that, in the 1970 production, transpired over three hours. As Arthur Sainer wrote in his review of the play for the Village Voice, “Foreman’s focus is on what begins as the commonplace. A plain kitchen table, a couple of plain wooden chairs, a plain bed, a plain tree, a plain husband.” Sainer also quotes Foreman’s own comment on the play: “If every moment can be clear and only itself, the stasis becomes a tremendous release from fantasy and storytelling. And delight is in everybody’s head instead of in objects and various postulated adventures.”¹ The loud noise that punctuates the play, described as “the workings of an electric saw brought up to the highest decibel,” serve to shatter any sense of adventure or narrative and return the attention to the precise moment under consideration on the stage, encouraging a clear and “only itself” perspective.

The third production of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (the text for the second, 1969′s Ida-Eyed, is not in print), Total Recall may also have been the last were it not for that Arthur Sainer review. In a 1990 interview with Ken Jordan, Foreman remembers the effect the review had on his effort:

I will be eternally grateful because for Total Recall he wrote a long review saying: Well, this is pretty hard to take, and I am against most critics who give consumer guides, and though I usually don’t do this I’ve got to say you must go see this play because it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, and it’s terribly important. People still kept walking out, of course. But he reviewed my plays for the next couple years, and was very favorably inclined. If he hadn’t done that, I often wonder if I would have had the courage or the determination to continue, because I was a very sensitive young thing and, really, everybody walked out. Including … I had a few friends like Annette Michaelson who would direct artists to see my plays, and I remember the nights that Richard Serra and Robert Morris walked out. And that crushed me. Later, when I got to be friendly with them, they told me, “Oh, well, yeah, in those days your work was so abstract, and I’m not really interested in abstract art!” [Laughs] But at the same time, though, we thought that we had the word, and obviously these … of course these people couldn’t appreciate it, just like they couldn’t appreciate Van Gogh, or whoever you want to name. So we felt quite heroic. And fortunately there were a few people who I really believed in who thought the work was magnificent. That was enough for me.

1. “Arthur Sainer on Total Recall,” in Richard Foreman, edited by Gerald Rabkin. Baltimore and London: A PAJ Book from the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 67-68. [↩]