Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (review)

Early Off-Off Broadway is a slippery beast. Its innumerable productions went largely undocumented and its vast array of playwrights went mostly unpublished. The movement included the avatars of both the avant-garde and political agit-prop; musicals and dramas; high camp and earnest social exploration. It veered from the sublime to the self-proclaimed ridiculous, sometimes within a single performance. Popular parlance has turned it into a slightly derisive term for any offbeat or low-budget theatrical endeavor, and it sometimes turns up as a synonym for "experimental" or "avant-garde." In fact, the term was coined by the Village Voice in 1960 to apply to an increasing number of performances that were developing outside the legal, geographic, literary, and aesthetic parameters of Off Broadway. Focusing primarily on the 1960. s, when social, political, economic, and cultural forces coalesced to produce an energetic explosion in the arts, Stephen J. Bottoms has written the most comprehensive history of the Off-Off Broadway movement to date. Like the subject matter itself, the book is alternately mesmerizing and infuriating, revelatory and contradictory.

Bottoms wants to rescue this prolific period from the obscurity and misconceptions that have become its fate. The few histories or anthologies that acknowledge Off-Off Broadway at all tend to focus on the four significant venues: Caffe Cino, Judson Poets Theatre, La MaMa (Bottoms, contrary to the theatre's own usage, spells it La Mama), and Theatre Genesis. These theatres were, at least initially, focused on the playwright, and out of this cauldron, emerged Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Lanford Wilson, Megan Terry, Rosalyn Drexler, and a few others. In addition, according to the standard mythology, there were the Grotowski-inspired ensemble companies, notably the Open Theatre and, towards the latter part of the decade, The Performance Group – both of which might be seen as spawn of the Living Theatre. The heroes of the traditional narrative, in addition to the writers mentioned above, tend to be Joe Cino, Ellen Stewart, Joe Chaikin, and Richard Schechner. Bottoms' argument, which he supports with scrupulous research, is that many significant playwrights, and the dramatic innovations they wrought, have been greatly overlooked and that the history of this period is far more complex than most people realize. As he notes, with some justification, a large part of the reception of these works and the consequent history of the period was shaped by The Tulane Drama Review, then edited by Schechner, and the journal tended to foreground the European-inspired avant-garde while largely ignoring the quirky dramas and productions of the myriad store-front and coffee-house theatres in and around Greenwich Village.

While Bottoms gives the writers, directors, and producers mentioned above their rightful place in the pantheon (and Cino is a person of mythological proportions in almost every account of the period), he resurrects figures that are in danger of disappearing from view or whose contributions to the movement were overshadowed by later work: Al Carmines, Lawrence Kornfeld, Murray Mednick, Tony Barsha, Paul Foster, Tom O'Horgan, Doric Wilson, H.M. Koutoukas, Jeff Weiss (Bottoms' account of Weiss' A Funny Walk Home at Cino comes as close to recreating the emotional impact as one could hope), Julie Bovasso, and Michael Smith. Long-forgotten theatres, such as The Tempo and the Old Reliable, are reinserted into the story. And significant plays and productions that have not made it into the canon, such as Leon Katz's Dracula: Sabbat and Barsha's The Hawk, are meticulously described. One of Bottoms' great contributions is to situate both John Vaccaro's Play- House of the Ridiculous and Charles Ludlam's breakaway Theatre of the Ridiculous as central to the story. Vaccaro has always been overshadowed by Ludlam, but Bottoms celebrates his audacity, together with that of Ridiculous playwrights Ron Tavel and Ken Bernard. And by stretching the 1960s to 1973. , Bottoms can include Ludlam's masterpiece Camille and...