Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman (born June 10, 1937 in New York City) is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, both in New York City and abroad.

He has received three Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year, and received four other Obies for directing and for sustained achievement.

At Scarsdale High School (SHS), from which he graduated in 1955, Foreman was heavily involved in the theater department.

Richard Foreman went on to study at Brown University (B.A. 1959), and received an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama in 1962.

As a freshman, he starred as Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, receiving much acclaim, despite his later stated antipathy for Miller’s work.

Later at Brown, Foreman founded the Production Workshop, Brown University's student theatre group, while taking part in other student theater productions.

During the 1960s, Foreman also got to know theater director Robert Wilson, filmmaker and actor Jack Smith, and theater director and scholar Richard Schechner, all of whom encouraged Foreman to start producing his own work.

Foreman finally inserted himself into the avant-garde scene when police interrupted a screening and seized a copy of the 1963 film, Flaming Creatures, and charged Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and Florence Karpf for violating New York's obscenity laws.

Foreman called Mekas, offering his help, and over the following years, Foreman and Mekas became close friends and collaborators.

Through his connection to Jonas Mekas, Foreman became acquainted with architect and artist, George Maciunas.

Foreman began working for Mekas and Maciunas, overseeing their movie theater, Film-Maker's Cinematheque at 80 Wooster Street.

Foreman also became heavily involved in the development of Maciunas' Fluxhouse Cooperatives, which consisted of converted SoHo lofts designed to be living and working spaces for artists.

With Schechner, Foreman formed a theater collective in 1968 called "A Bunch of Experimental Theaters of New York Inc," which included seven theater companies: Mabou Mines, The Manhattan Project, Meredith Monk/The House, The Performance Group, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Section Ten, and Foreman's company, Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

From this point on, Foreman began producing works under the moniker "Ontological-Hysteric."

A number of scholars have called attention to the parallels between the theories of Gertrude Stein and Richard Foreman's theatrical aesthetics.

Foreman himself has spoken about the significance of her writings to his work.

In 1969, Foreman declared, "Gertrude Stein obviously was doing all kinds of things we haven't event caught up to yet."

Kate Davy analyzes Stein's influence on Foreman in her article, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre: The Influence of Gertrude Stein.

The primary connection between the works of Stein and Foreman, she proposes, is the writers' conception of consciousness in writing.

Stein preferred "entity writing" over "identity writing."

In 1993, Brown presented him with an honorary doctorate.

At Yale, Foreman studied under John Gassner, the drama critic and former literary manager at The Theatre Guild.

Richard Foreman moved to New York City directly after graduating from Yale School of Drama and worked as a manager of apartment complexes.

Before finding his footing as a theater practitioner, Foreman became an avid patron of New York's downtown experimental theater and film scene.

Foreman described feeling "overwhelmed" upon seeing The Living Theatre's productions of The Connection and The Brig.

Foreman also attended screenings of avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas at The Living Theatre.

Mekas' early cinematic work had a profound impact on Foreman.

In The Lower East Side Biography Project documentary, Foreman states, "those [films] really got to me. I thought this is the most poetic, beautiful, creative art that I've seen Americans producing."

Foreman claims that, for a long time, he was too shy to introduce himself to Judith Malina and Julian Beck (the founders of The Living Theatre) or to Jonas Mekas, but fascinated by Mekas' work, Foreman and his wife, Kate Manheim, began following Mekas as he filmed various projects in New York.

Foreman has received the annual Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center Master American Dramatist Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2004 was elected an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.

Foreman's archives and work materials have been acquired by the Fales Library at New York University (NYU).

Richard Foreman was born in New York City, but spent many of his formative years in Scarsdale, New York.

A 2018 documentary produced by the Lower East Side Biography Project outlined Foreman's early motivations for pursuing work in the theater.

The documentary maintains that Foreman suffered from extreme shyness as a child.

The documentary also reveals that Foreman was adopted — a fact he did not discover until he was in his 30s.

The name given to him by his birth mother was Edward L. Friedman.

Foreman’s birth mother was an orthodox Jew, and his birth father was Catholic “with artistic talent,” according to information he received from the Jewish adoption agency, Louise Wise Services.

Both his adopted parents were Jewish.

Foreman says, "...my parents were very supportive, but nevertheless, I didn't feel that close to them in certain ways."