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Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000) 133-137



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Performance Review

Permanent Brain Damage

The Universe

Eddie Goes To Poetry City, Part One

Samuel's Major Problems

Miss Universal Happiness

Errata


Permanent Brain Damage. By Richard Foreman. Lake Ivan Performance Group, The Piano Shop, New York. 13 August 1999.

The Universe. By Richard Foreman. St. Kneehouse, Nada, New York. 13 August 1999.

Eddie Goes to Poetry City, Part One. By Richard Foreman. True Comedy Theatre Company, The Piano Shop, New York. 14 August 1999.

Samuel's Major Problems. By Richard Foreman. Crush Company, Nada, New York. 14 August 1999.

Miss Universal Happiness. By Richard Foreman. Gemini Collisionworks, Nada, New York. 14 August 1999.

IMAGE LINK= For many theatregoers, the thought of Richard Foreman's plays immediately summons up not words, plots, or characters, but visual images from Foreman's productions. The plays have come to seem inseparable from the brightly lit, densely decorated spaces Foreman designed for them--those intensely resonating boxes of visual energy that frustrate the spectator's attempts to find a point of repose. There are also images of Foreman's actors within those boxes, alternating tense and physically awkward stances with bursts of manic energy sending them into silly spins and dances, mad chases, and collisions with the walls. Although Foreman's scripts have been published for decades, giving them a literary status independent of their productions, it is easy to regard the written works as, at best, intriguing remnants of a past occasion, which are incapable, for all their stage [End Page 133] directions, of summoning up the dense, jarring, and delightfully surprising world of a Foreman production.

In the notes to his volumes of plays, Foreman encouraged potential directors to ignore the published stage directions and react imaginatively to the dialogue, creating new structures of meaning. This idea has been taken up by the vibrant off-off-Broadway producing company, Todo con Nada, which based its three summer seasons of Foreman festivals on the assumption that directors can and should respond to the challenges of Foreman's richly imaginative texts. This season included fourteen productions, ranging from the 1966 Broadway-option Harry in Love to the 1997 popular success, Benita Canova--an ambitious retrospective that makes the much-lauded backward glances of the Signature Theatre pale in comparison. The 1999 festival not only provided a valuable opportunity to revisit favorite Foreman plays and consider them side by side, but also to encounter Foreman in the theatre without his directorial presence. The results were varied and intriguing.

Some productions made me long to see Foreman back in control. Both David Vining's The Universe and Christopher J. Rushton's Samuel's Major Problems, marked by murky lighting, ominous music, and moments of modern dance, sank the plays in undifferentiated washes of angst. In The Universe, a young man and woman were made objects of research by a mute cyclopean figure whom they could never see and a disembodied voice coming over a loudspeaker. The play's dialogue, used for little but the uninterrupted expression of an anxious subtext, quickly became tedious, especially in Karen Grenke's hyperventilated performance. In Samuel's Major Problems, the delivery was cooler, but no less paranoid, as the protagonist was teased and taunted by two party guests who mysteriously changed into a sinister doctor and femme fatale nurse. From its preshow sound loop of ominous phrases from Stravinsky's Firebird to the final image of Samuel sitting on the floor, his head slumped forward, the production was a gloomy, Maeterlinckian meditation on the coming of death. In both productions, Foreman appeared less an innovator than an epigone of early twentieth-century European art theatre. Vining and Rushton turned their backs on Foreman's theoretical writing and production techniques, only to sink into the portentous gloom of Symbolist drama.

Both productions foregrounded a part of Foreman's artistic background--the paranoiac, countercultural art of the late 1960s, composed of equal parts Strindberg, Kafka, and Ken Kesey. However, making the dominant...

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