"We Still Have to Dance and Sing": An Interview with Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman is an incessant author and highly focused director. Since 1992, at St. Mark's Church on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, Foreman has directed 11 of his own plays. The most recent, Maria del Bosco, opened on 27 December 2001. Over the years, with his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, founded in 1968, Foreman has directed more than 50 of his own plays—and there are more plays still unproduced. Foreman also has frequently directed the works of others. Among my favorite Foreman productions are Brecht's Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center in 1976, Moliere's Don Juan at the Guthrie Theatre in 1982, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus at the Public Theatre in New York in 1996. Foreman has often been in the pages of TDR, starting with his "Ontologic-Hysteric Manifesto II" in 1974 (18:3, T63) up to the program notes for Pearls for Pigs in 1998 (42:2, T158). Foreman's plays have been collected in a number of books, from Plays and Manifestos (New York University Press, 1976) to the most recent, Paradise Hotel and Other Plays (Overlook Press, 2001).

SCHECHNER:

I want to focus on post-September 11th. Your play, Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty [2001], was to some degree about entering a new historic era. But now [November 2001] it appears that the U.S. government, either by intention or accident, has found a way to continue the ColdWar under different auspices. Once again we are immersed in an unending, anxiety-raising situation that allows the Defense Department to expand its operations, strangle civil liberties, and so on and so forth. In this light, I'm interested in your reaction to this and how it will, or not, affect your work.

FOREMAN:

I'm prepared to answer your question because already three other places have said, "We're gonna ask you about what happened on September 11th—so think up a response." I agree with you that, though the event itself was horrible and tragic, of course we're culpable. [Laughs] "Why do all these people hate us so much?"

1.

Juliana Francis in the title role of Maria del Bosco by Richard Foreman (2001). (Photo by Paula Court)

SCHECHNER:

Right.

FOREMAN:

It's not just because they're evil people, even though some of them may be fanatics; if you met one of them in a nightclub, you might think, "What's wrong with that guy?" But obviously, we caused the situation to a large extent. Could we avoid causing the situation? Probably not. You know, the history of the world is: as empires grow they get corrupt and exploit other people. It's all in the normal course of things. When September 11th happened, I was very shocked with myself for the first 24 hours because I noticed that I was feeling, "God damn it, let's bomb them off the earth." [Laughs]

SCHECHNER:

[Laughing too] If they didn't already live in Afghanistan.

FOREMAN:

Yeah. And then next, the shock of wondering,"Well, isn't anybody saying anything in opposition to the government?" So using the good old Internet within a few hours I found some alternative voices. I sort of regained my sanity and my balance. What I realized this morning is that it isn't the end of history. So Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty in a sense was wrong. In that play I bought into the idea that history was over—there was late-capitalistic global domination of the world, and that was that. But at this moment, when we have just started bombing, I'm very suspicious about the United States' ability to function efficiently and know what the hell it's doing. The Gulf War was a total charade because, thank God, the situation was such that we could act like Supermen. I doubt that it will be the same this time. I imagine we might get stuck in the same kind of morass as we were in Vietnam...