Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (review)

Few American avant-garde theatre companies last beyond four decades. Ideals shift. The experimental gets subsumed into the mainstream. Personalities clash. Mabou Mines is one of few exceptions, still producing and touring new work more than forty years after its founding in 1970. In Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s, Iris Smith Fischer describes the company’s origins as an artistically, personally, and financially interdependent multi-arts collective and its relatively early evolution into a more loosely affiliated group of performers and directors, who come and go for specific projects while pursuing independent careers outside the organization. For Fischer, who calls the emergent configuration a “company of directors” (26), this transition and the variety of innovations and aesthetics it is able to accommodate are key to the company’s longevity.

Fischer’s exposition traces Mabou Mines’s roots to the late 1950s and the 1960s, when Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, Joanne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass entered the avant-garde theatre scene, first in California and later in “bohemian” Europe, where they worked on Samuel Beckett’s Play and took a workshop with Grotowski’s Theater Lab. In 1969, the four moved back to the United States and settled in New York City. By 1970, the founders of Mabou Mines had been exposed to a considerable range of performance art and were prepared to explore their own artistic vision. They knew they wanted to work across boundaries, to collaborate on equal terms with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. They were ready to form a troupe.

A core group, including fifth co-founder David Warrilow, retreated to begin work in the small Canadian fishing village whose name they would adopt as their own. Their first production, presented at La Mama and gallery spaces in and around Greenwich Village, was Breuer’s Red Horse Animation, a cinema- and pop-culture-inflected movement-theatre exploration of the artist/individual’s freedom to invent his own destiny and identity. Two more Animations would follow, B. Beaver in 1971 and Shaggy Dog in 1978, each a “playful,” “autographical” piece taking on another aspect of Breuer’s inner life, although he depersonalized the work and “undercut emotion by layering cultural references on the material” (55).

Lee Breuer was the company’s auteur until Joanne Akalaitis emerged as the second major director, with her staging of Beckett’s Cascando in 1975. In 1977, she made “Dressed Like an Egg,” a collage about the romantic based largely on the writings of Colette. Akalaitis was emphatically interested in addressing issues of gender, both in her productions and in the power dynamics within the collective. She objected to what she saw as an unfair, gender-based distribution of labour and artistic control and, along with Maleczech, helped create, in 1975, a daycare centre for artists’ children.

While Breuer and Akalaitis directed the company’s early productions, they facilitated long rehearsal processes in which performers, designers, musicians, choreographers, and visual artists were truly co-creators. Other members of the collective also took turns directing, an arrangement that enabled the company to stay together past the time when the “artistic democracy” began to fray. The desire to maintain and replenish the company’s vitality led, in 1979, to the establishment of ReCherChez, Mabou Mines’s own lab to nurture emerging talent.

As its repertoire and reputation grew, the company played larger and more established venues in New York, in American regional theatre, and on national and international tours. They won numerous OBIE awards. Funding from the likes of the Ford Foundation and the NEA became both easier to get and more cumbersome to manage. Offers to direct and perform outside Mabou Mines lured members to branch out on their own, but the company adjusted and endured.

Fischer’s writing reflects a profound – and well-placed – admiration for Mabou Mines’s artists, methods, and productions. She has done exhaustive archival and primary research over at...