Ричард Фореман: Авангардист и театральный новатор

American dramatist (born 1937)

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

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." According to Stein's model, "entity writing" is "the 'thing in itself' detached from time and association, while identity is the 'thing in relation,' time bound, clinging in association." Davy notes that like Stein, Foreman tends to avoid "'emotional traps' or the intentional manipulation of an audiences emotional responses by eliminating the 'lifelike' qualities of drama (clearly developing situation involving imaginary people in imaginary places), thereby creating a world into which the spectator has great difficulty projecting himself." Davy points out that "by eliminating internal punctuation in long complicated sentences," Stein's writing produces a similar effect for her readers who have to actively take part in discerning Stein's words. Among his observations, Kirby notes that although "Sophia" is a play without a plot, it produces its own kind of structure of "thematic webs of visual and verbal ideas and references." and plays by Václav Havel, Botho Strauss, and Suzan Lori Parks for The New York Shakespeare Festival, Die Fledermaus at the Paris Opera, Don Giovanni at the Opera de Lille, Philip Glass's Fall of the House of Usher at the American Repertory Theater and The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Woyzeck at Hartford Stage Company, Molière's Don Juan at the Guthrie Theater and The New York Shakespeare Festival, Kathy Acker's Birth of the Poet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the RO theater in Rotterdam, Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights at the Autumn Festivals in Berlin and Paris. Seven collections of his plays have been published, and books studying his work have been published in English, French, and German.

In 2004, Foreman established The Bridge Project with Sophie Haviland to promote international art exchange between countries around the world through workshops, symposiums, theater productions, visual art, performance and multimedia events.