Richard Foreman
founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York City in 1968. The avant-garde playwright has won multiple Obie awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Lifetime achievement award from the National endowment for the Arts. Foreman’s dramatic works are driven by the notion of a constant reawakening of the audience; he is one of the major artists creating substantial works in the avant garde performance movement.
Richard Foreman has been described as, one of the most original minds ever to grace the American Theatre. Instead of focusing on conflict to shape his theatrical structure, Foreman’s work draws on design, text and the live performance of actors equally, to create a different focus and relationship between the stage and audience. He describes his works as “total theater”. In addition to many plays, he has written books and operas. Foreman has gained acclaim as director for such productions as Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center and the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus at the Public Theater. The New York Times calls him “the reigning philosopher vaudevillian of the New York avant-garde…creating fractured dreamscapes in which life is the banana cream pie that keeps hitting you in the face.”
