“Announcement from Richard Foreman”, the email said on May 8th from the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Foreman, the avant-garde playwright and American theater trailblazer, founded the theater in 1968 attempting to “Strip…the theater bare of everything but the singular and essential impulse to stage the static tension of interpersonal relations in space”. Simply put, some of the oddest performances I have ever seen where produced by the OHT, from minimalistic dance pieces in glass coffins, to loud, explosive political stories about presidents and kings sucking from the world’s nipples.

Richard Foreman himself has been the leader of these explosive experimental staging’s, at least most of them. Foreman’s work is in contrast to Aristotle’s notions of catharsis with a concept called “total theater” where the playwright unites concepts of audio, visual, the literary, and the philosophical to viscerally reflect and challenge the audience, often with mixed results. Foreman’s goal is and was to have the audience think about the show well after they had left his theater. Although Foreman has a legion of devoted followers, it had not been rare for audience members to vacate the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, some times creating a scene.  During 2004’s Panic! (How To Be Happy), a woman left the theater in the middle of the performance claiming; “This is not theater”! That year Foreman was elected an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France for his work. A decade before he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Although the OHT is noted as Foreman’s home, it has fostered the works of several artists with a notoriously involved internship program (unpaid and usually 40 hours a week), summer residency programs such as “The Blue Print Series“, which has been a starting point for many international artists, and supporting significant artists such as Collapsible Giraffe, Robert Cucuzza, Elevator Repair Service, Juliana Francis, David Herskovits, DJ Mendel, Richard Maxwell, The National Theater Of The United States of America, Radiohole, and Young Jean Lee. One of the more famous artists to work at the OHT is actor James Urbaniak, most commonly known as the voice of Dr. Thaddeus Venture on Cartoon Network’s The Venture Bros. In this recent interview on “Kevin Pollack’s Chat Show“, Urbaniak discusses what it was like to work at the OHT and with Foreman. (NOTE: the whole interview is fun, but Urbaniak talks of his time at the OHT at the 0:53:30 mark).

In an email last months, in an announcement, Foreman wrote that the Ontological-Hysteric Theater is moving on. They will be giving up the space they have since 1992, the theater at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. The announcement claimed Foreman would focus more on video and film, and less on his “total theater”. In fairness, people weren’t coming to the Ontological the way they used to. The last show I saw there wasn’t sold out. In that piece I remember a big, booming voice over from Foreman reading “They do it in a hole in the wall. They do it in a donkey”. The line startled me, and took me by surprise. What an odd thing to do, an odd thing to say. It came with bursts of white lights and actors rolling on the stage. After that it took me a moment to return to the world of the play. It was the kind of experience you can’t get from film or video. And to this day I still think about it.

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About Timothy Braun

Timothy Braun is a writer living in Austin, TX. He has been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, HERE Arts Center, Edward Albee Foundation, and a Warhol Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. He is a frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, culturebot.org, and is the founder of Federal Prisoner 30664. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is a Cultural Studies professor at St. Edward’s University. Learn more at timothybraun.com.

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