The books of a dramatist: Richard Foreman’s loft.

During a conversation last week, one of my friends jokingly suggested that it was time to consider a renaissance of “closet drama,” the form of written drama intended first and foremost to be read, not staged. The tradition of closet drama has a long history and not a few monuments itself: the tragedies of Seneca, John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Goethe’s Faust, Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, and, most peculiarly, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name a few. While in the years since their composition these closet dramas have after all come to be staged with varying degrees of success, in an odd sort of way these were bastardizations of the original explicit authorial intent.

Flip the coin and we have the much more common condition: that we read plays originally written to be staged. The technique of reading drama is in many ways quite different from that of reading poetry or fiction: it calls upon a reading imagination informed by what we know of theatrical practice, a stage and the four walls of the theatre, the staging technology, an assumed audience present for the experience of the work. Challenging enough within the confines of the realistic and naturalistic genres that have held the stage in the last century or so: but then, what of avant-garde dramatic texts? How must we re-orient our reading disciplines to experience these texts, to confront or open ourselves to their possibilities as both performance and literature?

The question is particularly acute in the case of Richard Foreman, a dramatist first, a designer and director second. Over the nearly 50 years of his career, his practice of mise-en-scene has tended to overshadow his accomplishments as a writer of drama, especially since critic Bonnie Marranca grouped him along with Robert Wilson and Lee Breuer as practitioners of what she called a “Theatre of Images” — intentionally foregrounding the visual and theatrical rather than the reading experience of their drama. Fair enough to Foreman the designer and director, but arguably handing shorter shrift to Foreman’s texts.

And, in a variety of collections beginning with the 1976 Plays and Manifestos, edited by Kate Davy for NYU Press, the plays are there to be read, as conveniently as one can read plays by Neil Simon; yet most of the critical work devoted to Foreman’s career has neglected the plays as texts to be read and subjected to an individual reader’s scrutiny. Whatever his concerns about his theatrical practice, Foreman has labored to produce these collections for the hands of the reader in a study, preparing them carefully for publication, annotating his original texts with stage directions that indicate his own approaches to staging these texts. Indeed, by far the majority of the polemics and writings in Foreman’s The Manifestos and Essays relate directly to his practices of writerly composition.

“Following the lead of contemporary French theorists, I find it most productive and illuminating to regard the written text of the playwright as the ‘deposit,’ the ‘tracings’ of what obsessed him as an individual,” Foreman wrote in the program notes for his 1981 production of Moliere’s Don Juan at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.¹ Though Foreman was describing his approach to a dramatic text as a director, the same approach is valid for a reader’s approach to a dramatic text as well — every reader, in a sense, his or her own director, “visualizing” a text within the context of a “theatrical” frame of mind, in a way, quite different from a novel or a poem, as I mentioned above. So one can, as a reader as well as a director, trace Foreman’s own obsessions through his primary dramatic texts, considering the relationship of form to content, of genre and perspective.

And in a sense one has to, if one is to gain a perspective on Foreman’s dramatic accomplishment as a whole. For Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric play, Angelface (1968), indeed we have nothing except the text: no photographs from this first production exist, and very little ephemera with the exception of what may be lying about, out of the reach of the general public, in the NYU Fales Library collection. As Foreman’s career progressed photographs of his original productions become more common, but of his early work only Ernie Gehr’s 1972 film of Sophia:The Cliffs (which appears on this DVD from Tzadik) provides anything more than a hint of how Foreman as director approached Foreman as dramatist.

The two dramatists who had the greatest impact on Foreman in his early career were Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht, two of the great Modernist dramatists, perhaps the greatest — one from the United States, another from Germany. They shared little else except a profound distrust of the theatre and the drama as they found it. Between Stein’s conception of the landscape play and Brecht’s conception of what has variously been called a “distancing” or “alienation” effect, Foreman found a third way for drama, informed also by the work of the avant-garde American filmmakers who managed to find their way into the casts of most of these early productions. But time has not yet caught up to Foreman as it has to Stein and Brecht, both of whom have had extensive critical eyes cast upon their dramatic texts as literature.

Reading a Modernist dramatic text can be as daunting as negotiating a Modernist theatrical performance (or Modernist prose or poetry, for that matter), but is worth the trouble for all that; it still has the ability to produce insights about our condition, much as King Lear can produce these insights in a reader who has never set foot inside a theatre. I can testify that Foreman’s Angelface is a meaningful reading experience, for example, quite apart from its status as a work intended for theatrical performance. Could it be, then, that in neglecting the work of these dramatists as published, as written texts to be read, we are also neglecting one of the most promising arenas for the exploration of drama itself, a closet drama or otherwise?

I’ve often considered writing a much longer essay, or even a book, covering Foreman’s oeuvre as dramatist. Certainly there’s primary material enough: more than 50 plays alone for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, many of them published, inviting such an approach to Foreman as, first and foremost, a writer. Stephen Parker’s recent biography of Bertolt Brecht is tellingly subtitled “A Literary Life.” This characterization could never cover Foreman’s career as a man of the theatre in toto any more than it covers Brecht’s — despite what I’ve said above, Foreman’s contribution to the arts of scenic and sound design and direction in the theatre also invite sustained criticism and study, of course. But without considering Foreman’s creative life as a literary one, we have a fatally incomplete picture of his accomplishment as an artist.

1. Richard Foreman, edited by Gerald Rabkin, A PAJ Book from Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 88. [↩]