Downtown Performance: Richard Foreman

After studying theater at Brown and Yale, Richard Foreman (1937 – 2025) settled in Soho during its early art years.  Scoffing at Broadway theater, he found a handful of productions that inspired him—notably at The Living Theater—but felt greater kinship with Jonas Mekas’s Filmmakers Cooperative. Foreman created the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968, and its productions of Foreman’s gnomic plays resembled no other—non-narrative, rooted in the process of the mind, deliberately alienating in its presentation of harsh noise, complex sets, and non-lifelike acting. Richard Foreman has won three Obie Awards and written more than fifty plays.