A Short History of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre [1999]

(Markus Wessendorf)

Richard Foreman was born in New York on June 10, 1937, and he grew up in Scarsdale, a small town in Westchester only a few dozen miles north of the city. When he was in his early teens he started to design sets for plays in his hometown, and he also performed in them. At some point between 1952 and 1954, Foreman read a chapter on Brecht's V-effect in Mordecai Gorelik's influential book New Theatres for Old, which was such an eye-opening experience that for the next few years he would try to read everything he could find about Brecht's theories, plays and theatre productions. During his student years at Brown University in the second half of the 1950's, Foreman became very interested in the cinema, particularly European cinema. He admired the French director Jean Cocteau, and the acting style in Robert Bresson's films would later inform his work with amateur actors in his early Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. At Brown, he also discovered his philosophical leanings, and for a while the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset was one of his favorite writers. The reading of philosophical texts transported Foreman to a state of intense intellectual excitement that he would later describe in terms of an "ecstatic state," and he wondered at the time how a similar "emotion of the mind" might be achieved in the theatre.[1] After receiving his Bachelor of Arts from Brown, Foreman went to Yale University. One of his teachers at Yale was the well-known theatre scholar John Gassner, whose meticulous approach to play analysis impressed him. Foreman also went to directing class, but a stage tableau, which he had created, was compared to a "Bufferin commercial"[2] by the instructor, who discouraged him from further participation in the course. After this incident, Foreman mainly devoted himself to playwriting.

In 1962 Foreman left Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts. He married the young actress Amy Taubin, and both moved to New York City. Here Foreman soon entered the circle of filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas. Mekas was not only the founder of the Film-Makers Cooperative, he was also the editor of the avant-garde magazine Film Culture and one of the figureheads of New American Cinema. New American Cinema was a movement of like-minded filmmakers, who were opposed to the narrative aesthetics and the industrial production methods of Hollywood. Apart from their formal experimentation with the medium, the filmmakers were exploring new ways to produce and distribute independent films. In writings and interviews Foreman has repeatedly stressed how much his own aesthetics were shaped by the work of these filmmakers. To name only three: Ron Rice, who shot The Flower Thief in 1960, Jack Smith, who directed the highly controversial Flaming Creatures in 1962/63, and Michael Snow who made New York Eye and Ear Control in 1964. Foreman and Taubin soon became friends with most of the filmmakers. In 1967 Michael Snow used Foreman's loft as the location for his film Wavelength. The concept for this film was quite minimalistic. From an elevated position in Foreman's space, the camera in Wavelength slowly—over a period of 45 minutes—zooms in on a photograph of ocean waves on the other side of the room. Taubin, who was pursuing an acting career on Broadway at the time, appeared in a small scene toward the end of the film. Snow, in return, would later operate the light board in Foreman's first theatre production. By the mid-1960's, Foreman was working off and on for the Film-Makers' Cooperative, organizing fund-raising projects and booking artists like Philip Glass and Trisha Brown for events at the Cinematheque. The Cinematheque was not only a venue for avant-garde film, but also for Happenings, Minimal Music, and Postmodern Dance. In November-December 1965, for example, the Cinematheque organized the Expanded Cinema Festival, where Foreman saw works by Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Ken Jacobs, and Andy Warhol. At this festival he also saw Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis, a performance by Jack Smith, whom he already admired as a filmmaker. Foreman would later write about the midnight performances that Smith presented at his loft:

To watch Jack Smith perform was to watch human behavior turn into granular stasis, in which every moment of being seemed, somehow, to contain the seed of unthinkable possibility. [...] The extended slowness, combined with the continual (and somewhat calculated) going wrong of every performance, brought the audience into a state of present attention that is precisely what other theater avoided in order to affect (i.e., manipulate) its audience. [3]

Shortly after his arrival in New York, Foreman had joined the New Dramatists and the playwriting program of the Actors Studio. In spite of his early involvement with the experimental film scene of the sixties, his own writings for the theatre at the time were still influenced by the more traditional aesthetics of dramatists such as Arthur Miller. In 1965, a theatre producer held an option on Foreman's play Harry in Love, but it was never produced. Foreman's frustration with mainstream theatre, as well as his enthusiasm about the process-oriented work of New American Cinema, finally made him give up his attempts at writing "well-made plays." Rather than striving to create "dramatic masterpieces" with linear plots and coherent characters, he now wanted to document in his writing the unconscious impulses of the creative act. The process as well as the material traces of writing—no longer what it signified or tried to represent as content—became the main subject of Foreman's artistic endeavor. For the theoretical underpinnings of his new approach Foreman basically drew upon two writers: the theatre avant-gardist Gertrude Stein and the psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig, who had recently developed a theory of creativity in his book The Hidden Order of Art. As regards Stein, Foreman was particularly struck by two of her ideas about writing which he later adopted: The notion of writing in a state of continuous presence and the concept of continually "beginning again" in the writing. Ehrenzweig's theory, on the other hand, was valuable because it confirmed Foreman's new process-oriented approach to writing in psychoanalytic terms. Ehrenzweig claimed that any creative act initially confronts the artist with abject and fragmented parts of his self. He also advised that the artist should withhold reintegrating these parts into his work as long as possible, in order to prevent the foreclosure of the artistic process. One of the implications of this theory for Foreman's later theatre work was that he would no longer rewrite or revise his play scripts but, instead, consider any supposed textual flaw as a challenge to his imagination as a director.

Unsatisfied with the outcome of his first experiment with the new writing technique (the no longer extant play Good Benny), Foreman wrote a second play in the same fashion, which he titled Angelface. In spring 1968 Foreman staged Angelface at the Cinematheque, which had recently moved to Wooster Street in SoHo. The play was performed four nights in a row, and every night between 6 and 20 spectators showed up. The performers on stage were mostly artist friends of Foreman who lacked formal training in acting. During the performance most of the text was played from tape, and the performers tried to repeat the pre-recorded material in a much slower tempo so as to create an interesting overlap of the two layers of sound. The performers stared into the audience and spoke without inflection, their arms hanging limply from their bodies. Foreman later claimed that in his early plays he had mainly been interested in "registering basic physical events within the language"[4]—"The gestures were wooden, determined, controlled. It was an absolute documentation of the text. When an actor said, 'I'm pointing to her,' that's what he would do."[5] In writing Angelface, Foreman had obviously tried to follow Gertrude Stein's notion of continually "beginning again." The published version of Angelface begins with this scene:

(Max sits alone in a chair in the center of the room. Throughout the scene, he doesn't move. His eyes are glazed. He smiles. The door opens. WALTER is seen. Silence. WALTER is frozen.)

MAX: (finally he laughs once.) The door opens. I don't even turn my head.

WALTER: Does it turn?

MAX: What?

WALTER: (Laughs once.) Heads turn.

MAX: Heads turn. My head is a head. Therefore: my head turns.

(Silence. He smiles.) Open the door a second time.[6]

When Foreman wrote Angelface, he tried to finish the play in one continual session, without other activities interfering. He also still had an outline in mind, but his paradoxical strategy was to write against the outline, to "dewrite the outline."[7]

However marginal an event it may have seemed then, Angelface marked the beginning of Foreman's career as one of the most innovative and visionary artists working in theatre today. Curiously, Foreman's early theatre work was more influenced by developments in film, philosophy, and the arts than informed by the experimental theatre of his contemporaries. As he would later write, artists like Peter Brook, Joseph Chaikin, and Jerzy Grotowski adhered to an outdated notion of drama which would still "trap" the spectator "in an emotional commitment of one sort or another,"[8] instead of making him "CONSCIOUSLY live the tension between wish and reality."[9] Foreman "wanted a theatre that did the opposite of 'flow'"[10]—a theatre that rejected "new age" notions of holism and closure for the experience of a discontinuous and often disruptive mental and perceptive process. One upcoming theatre artist, however, whom Foreman held in high esteem, was Robert Wilson, whose production "The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud" he favorably reviewed for The Village Voice in 1970.

Angelface was presented by Foreman as the first production of his recently founded Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, a label under which he has since then written, directed, and designed more than 40 plays. Foreman has offered different explanations for the naming of his theatre. One is that he liked the name of Hermann Nitsch's Orgien-Mysterien Theater, which performed at the Cinematheque in March 1968, and that "ontological-hysteric" is a pun on "Orgien Mysterien" ("orgies mysteries"). But elsewhere Foreman claims that he called his theatre "Ontological-Hysteric" because the stereotypical situations he experimented with in his plays all derived from classic boulevard theatre which he believed were

basically hysterical at their roots, in terms of classical psychiatry, the hysterical syndrome. And I'm trying to redeem them, to open up holes by which more [...] cosmic perceptual concerns bleed through, that are really ontological concerns in the Heideggerian sense.[11]

The name of Foreman's theatre suggests Martin Heidegger's contemplation of being on the one hand, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan's analysis of psycho-neuroses on the other—though the overall style of the early Ontological-Hysteric Theatre was certainly more ontological and phenomenological than hysterical.

Shortly after the run of Angelface, Foreman also began working in music theatre for the first time. The composer Stanley Silverman, who had been commissioned by the Tanglewood Festival to write a new opera, asked Foreman for cooperation. Silverman wrote the score and Foreman the libretto for the "Fearful Radio Show" Elephant Steps, which was directed by Foreman and first performed at Tanglewood in July and August 1968, two years before it also came to New York. Since then, Foreman and Silverman have created seven works, none of which can be easily classified in terms of music theatre. Elephant Steps, for example, included elements of musical theatre and rock songs not unlike those of the musical Hair (which had opened at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York the year before), but it also included elements of 1930's Swing as well as atonal passages reminiscent of Schönberg.

The most popular success of the Foreman-Silverman team to date has probably been Dr. Selavy's Magic Theatre, which was produced in 1972. This was the first production in which Foreman would stretch strings horizontally across the stage. Ever since Dr. Selavy's Magic Theatre this stage device has been a characteristic feature of Foreman's set design: as they cut across the spectator's field of vision, establish architectural relationships between objects and bodies on stage, and point at the spatial quality of the stage itself, strings function as a visual V-effect in his productions by making the spectator aware of his own act of looking. After Dr. Selavy's Magic Theatre Silverman and Foreman worked on a few more projects—their last collaboration was on Love & Science in 1990.

Until 1973 most productions of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre were performed at the Cinematheque: Total Recall (Sophia=Wisdom: Part 2) in 1970, HcOhTiEnLa or Hotel China: Parts 1 & 2 in 1971, and Sophia=(Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs in 1973. In Hotel China Kate Manheim, daughter of the Brecht-translator Ralph Manheim, made her first appearance. Foreman had met her through his work with the Film-Makers Cooperative and had asked her to perform in one of his plays. Her performance as Rhoda, a role which she would play in all subsequent productions of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre until the mid-1980's—and which consisted of frequent undressing scenes, a rigid stare into the audience, and a shrill acting style—soon became a recognizable and distinctive feature of Foreman's theatre. Increasingly, the antagonistic relationship between Manheim, the hysterical actress, and Foreman, the master director, became not only the focus of most ontological-hysteric theatre productions, but also their driving force. During the same period allusions to psychoanalysis and surrealist imagery became more and more prominent in Foreman's plays, and Jacques Lacan succeeded Bertolt Brecht and Gertrude Stein as Foreman's favorite writer. With Manheim gradually taking over the stage as the central performer, the overall style of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre slowly shifted from the early minimalist and phenomenological concerns to an overtly histrionic and baroque theatricality—or, simply, from the ontological to the hysterical. Foreman wrote in his Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto II from 1974:

I thought the task was to "re-tree" the tree. Make the spectator see it fresh, strange—as for the first time, not seeing real tree through the learned concept tree [...]. Now I realize—the task is the opposite. Not re-TREE the tree, but DE-tree the tree. Make it function consciously as the element it is in man's attempt to be a "soul."[12]

After his return from Paris, where he had staged his Classical Therapy or A Week under the Influence in fall 1973, Foreman bought a loft, which became the new residence of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. This loft was located in SoHo (at the corner of Broadway and Broome Street), only a few blocks away from the Cinema-theque. The plays which Foreman would produce at his new theatre included: Pain(t) and Vertical Mobility (both in 1974), Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation in 1975, Rhoda in Potatoland (Her Fall-Starts) in 1976, Book of Splendors: Part 2 (Book of Leaves) Action at a Distance in 1977, and Blvd. de Paris (I've Got the Shakes) also in 1977. In most of Foreman's productions until the late 1970's the performers didn't wear costumes but performed in the clothes they wore to their first rehearsal. Also there were neither flashy lighting effects nor any elaborate lighting designs. Foreman, however, had an identifiable style of using lights. To distance the spectator from the work, the two brightest ceiling lights were usually aimed directly at the audience. Sitting at his desk in front of the stage and clearly visible to the audience, Foreman would run the lights and the sound, produce live sound effects, and interrupt the performance occasionally by yelling "Cue!" He controlled the rhythm of the performance by playing and stopping the tape recorder. As in his early productions, the actors would still repeat a text that was played from tape, but with Pandering to the Masses this procedure became more sophisticated. The voice-over no longer was a recording of Foreman's voice but of the actors', and each single word of the text was now spoken by a different actor. During the performance this recording was amplified through a quadrophonic system of loudspeakers which surrounded the audience on all sides. On stage the actors slowly repeated the text coming from tape, but instead of cutting each other off, they now spoke the full lines assigned to their characters. In this period Foreman also became more interested in exploring the relationship between bodies and objects on stage, and the performers began to pose in unusual and striking ways. In Rhoda in Potatoland he also experimented with short dance sequences for the first time, which allowed him to play with different rhythms of the performance. These dances have been a standard feature of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre ever since.

In the mid-1970's Foreman altered his procedure of writing theatre texts. When he worked on a play, he no longer had an outline in mind but, instead, considered writing a direct manifestation of unconscious impulses, a taking dictation from the Lacanian "Other." He would put himself into a state of responsiveness to these impulses and jot down into his notebooks whatever came up. The notebooks themselves became the basic material for his plays. He would choose a particular sequence of pages and declare them a play, adhering strictly to the self-imposed rule that there would be neither revision nor rearrangement of the material selected in this way.

In the mid-1970's Foreman also began to direct plays by other writers. On the initiative of Stefan Brecht, who had been enthusiastic about Dr. Selavy's Magic Theatre, Foreman staged Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's The Three-Penny Opera at Lincoln Center in 1976. Since then he has directed Stuart Ostrow's Stages (1978), Molière's Don Juan (1981), Botho Strauss' Three Acts of Recognition (1982), H. Leivick's The Golem (1984), Kathy Acker's The Birth of a Poet (1984), Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato (1986), and Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus (1996). And Foreman has also worked in opera: in 1988 he directed Philip Glass' The Fall of the House of Usher, and in 1991 he staged Mozart's Don Giovanni. In addition, Foreman began to experiment with film and video during the second half of the 1970's. In 1975 and 1977 he directed the "video plays" Out of Body Travel and City Archives, and in 1978 he shot the feature film Strong Medicine, in which a cast of well-known downtown artists appeared. Although highly acknowledged by fellow artists, critics, and academics as a cutting edge director and playwright, Foreman felt isolated intellectually in the cultural context of America at the end of the 1970's. He soon decided to sell his theatre in New York and shift his main focus of activity to France, where his productions Classical Therapy or A Week under the Influence in 1973 and The Book of Splendors: Part 1 in 1976 had been well received by the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard and by the author Georges Perec. Foucault commented on The Book of Splendors, that this production seemed to be organized by a very rigorous scheme, even though he "could not figure out what it was."[13] Over the next few years Foreman would produce most of his work in Paris, and he and Kate Manheim even moved there for a short while. In the early 1980's he not only staged Café Amerique and George Bataille's Bathrobe, but also Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, Kathy Acker's My Death, My Life, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Johann Strauss' opera Die Fledermaus at different theatres in Paris. In 1979 he directed his play Place + Target at the Teatro Piramide in Rome, and from time to time he still worked on projects in New York when the occasion arose. In 1980 he realized another music theatre project with Stanley Silverman—Madame Adare—at New York's City Opera, and in 1981 and 1983 Joseph Papp, the founder and artistic director of New York's Public Theater, produced Foreman's ontological-hysteric plays Penguin Touquet and Egyptology (My Head Was a Sledgehammer) for the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Foreman had worked with professional actors once, when he directed The Three-Penny Opera in 1976, but with Penguin Touquet it became the rule. The decision to work with professionals entailed other changes as well. The actors no longer repeated a text that came from tape, but were now speaking their text directly. The former overlap of pre-recorded and live voices was now omitted and replaced with an extended use of background music. Penguin Touquet was the first of Foreman's productions to have a continuous soundtrack. This musical accompaniment consisted of a variety of sound-loops, of which two or three were playing at the same time. Since the different sequences, which were repeated, varied in length, the relationships between the different melodies and rhythms changed constantly. Foreman tried to use the music contrapuntally against the dominant mood of the scene.

In the mid-1980's Foreman shifted his focus of theatrical activity back to New York City, where he has produced most of his works since. Apart from guest productions at the Public Theatre (What Did He See?, 1988) and at Ellen Stewart's La Mama Theatre (Eddie Goes to Poetry City: Part 2, 1992), Foreman directed four of his plays at The Wooster Group's Performing Garage: Miss Universal Happiness in 1985, The Cure in 1986, Symphony of Rats in 1987, and Lava in 1988. Two of these productions, Miss Universal Happiness and The Symphony of Rats, also featured the actors of The Wooster Group. Foreman's plays during this period varied considerably in style. While Miss Universal Happiness was Foreman's successful attempt to top his former achievements in fast, shrill, and hysterical theatricality, The Cure, which would follow it one year later, was just the opposite: the most pensive and introspective play he had done to date. With its small cast (three actors‚ including Kate Manheim), its private and restrained tone, and its evocative allusions to Jewish mysticism and other spiritual traditions, The Cure prefigured two other equally meditative chamber plays which Foreman would later stage at St. Mark's Church, but which would be more openly concerned with death: The Mind King and Samuel's Major Problems.

Ever since The Cure, Foreman has used body microphones in his productions. Body mikes can create a very intimitate atmosphere, because they allow the actors to almost whisper their lines and still be audible to the audience. This intimacy, however, is counterbalanced in Foreman's work by devices that interfere with the audience's field of vision. In addition to the already mentioned strings and blinding lights, Foreman often reinforces the spatial dividing-line between stage and audience by using reflecting sheets of perspex, railings, totem-like decorated poles, and meshes.

But The Cure also indicated a change in Foreman's approach to writing. The Cure and some of the plays following it have a stronger lyrical flavor and rhythm than his earlier texts. Lines are no longer interrupted intermittently or broken off right away, but they now develop into longer passages and monologs that often involve poetic motifs and cryptic fables. As Foreman has stated, he constantly listened to two different sound-loops while he was writing The Cure—with the result that his writing impulse didn't fizzle out after only a few words or lines.

Before The Cure I'd certainly written by taking dictation from my unconscious, but the fragments that came before were much briefer. Listening to the loops gave the writing an impetus to keep going, to expand. The rhythmical energy of the double music encouraged me to keep talking to myself, and not to be embarrassed by what was appearing on the page.[14]

Lava, which Foreman directed in 1988 at the Performing Garage, has been his most openly theatre-theoretical play to date: a staged essay on the libidinal economy underlying his work as an artist; a meditation on his metaphysical desire for presence and its inevitable failure. Like his early work, this production was dominated by his voice-over, passages of which were occasionally repeated or commented upon by the four characters on stage. But different from Foreman's early theatre texts, Lava is a highly self-reflective and mock-philosophical essay, in which a godly author ruminates about a transcendental as well as aesthetic experience that he refers to as "category three."

There is first, logic. Of things coming out of other things, a logical connection, be that cause and effect, or determined by categories or logical types, or motivational source, etc. [...] Then there is category two. Random nonsense, nonsense, chance, random relations, all those kinds of relations or nonrelations, whatever you choose to call them.[15]

So category three [...] is a connective tissue that cannot be traced, and yet is

the one truly lively way of perceiving the world. It lays down the ground of the real being alive, where the other two categories [...] are predictable in their

emotional kick.[16]

If something can [...] flow through me in the right way, from these two other places at once, flowing through me, then I'm in category three.[17]

Lava revolves around the question of how to reach "category three" and whether the off-stage voice or the characters (or, by implication, the spectators) have already arrived at that state. But, of course, Foreman's play offers no unambiguous conclusion. Similar to the impossible peak experiences pursued by other characters in other Foreman plays—"paradise," "poetry city," etc.—"category three" is as elusive as Lacan's jouissance and can best be described by Heidegger's paradoxical notion of the "event," which only takes place in its withdrawal.

During the second half of the 1980's Foreman worked again on smaller film projects: a 14-minute black-and-white film was screened as part of his production of Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, which he staged in 1987 in cooperation with the Experimental Theatre Wing of New York University. In this production Kate Manheim appeared on stage for the last time, but she could be seen once more in Foreman's TV feature Total Rain, which he directed for the public channel PBS in 1989. Since her retreat from the stage, Manheim has pursued a career as a painter. In the late 1980's she and Foreman finally got married.

Since 1991 Foreman has worked in his own theatre again: The Ontological in the attic of St. Mark's Church in Manhattan's East Village. St. Mark's Church has been a venue for experimental dance and theatre since the early 1960's, when groups like the Theatre Genesis, which included Sam Shepard, worked there. Foreman usually directs one production a year at the Ontological, starting rehearsals in October, opening in December or January, and running until March or April. The plays which he has staged so far at the Ontological include: The Mind King (1992), Samuel's Major Problems (1993), My Head Was a Sledgehammer (1994), I've Got the Shakes (1995), The Universe (I.E.: How It Works) (1996), Benita Canova (1998), and Hotel Fuck (1999), which was running as Paradise Hotel in New York for sponsorship reasons. (Also, the New York Times doesn't print the 4-letter word.) The original project was to stage Hotel Fuck with Reza Abdoh's former company Dar A Luz. In the co-operation with a group of actors who were known for their audacity and unreserved commitment, Foreman saw a chance to reconnect to the aggressiveness of his early work—and this expectation also informed the writing of his play. However, the idea to work with a large cast in a large space couldn't be realized for financial reasons, and Hotel Fuck was finally staged at the Ontological with a much smaller cast which only included three actors of Abdoh's former company.

Apart from Hotel Fuck, which was shown in Berlin and, of course, Copenhagen, and which will go to Paris next month, two other productions of Foreman's have recently toured internationally to great public acclaim: Permanent Brain Damage (1996) and Pearls for Pigs (1997). In 1995 Foreman was a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship—one of the most prestigious awards in the United States that is often referred to as the "genius grant." Over the years Foreman's plays have won nine Obies, the highest honor for Off-Broadway theatre productions in New York City. But Foreman is also one of the most articulate, well-read, and intellectual theatre artists of our time. Similar to Gertrude Stein and Bertolt Brecht, Foreman has developed his own theatre theory, and his work as a theatre practitioner and artist has continually been informed by his theoretical concerns. Since the mid-1960's Foreman has regularly contributed manifestos, reviews, and articles to a variety of art and theatre magazines. Three of the four play collections, which he has published to date, also include major theoretical essays in which he reflects on the psychoanalytic, phenomenological and aesthetic underpinnings of his writing method and theatre work. Foreman has put out one book with his music-theatre texts, and in 1997 he published his first novel, No-Body; A Novel in Parts, in which several characters from his later plays reappear. Foreman's next production, Bad Boy Nietzsche, will open at the Ontological in January 2000.

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[1]Kate Davy, Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Ann Arbor 1979, 8.

[3]Richard Foreman, "During the Second Half of the Sixties," in To Free the Cinema. Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. by David James, Princeton 1992, 142f.

[4]Charles Bernstein, "A Conversation with Richard Foreman," in The Drama Review (T 135), fall 1992, 103f.

[5]Richard Foreman, Unbalancing Acts. Foundations for a Theater, ed. by Ken Jordan, New York 1992, 35.

[6]Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos, ed. by Kate Davy, New York 1976, 1.

[13]see Josefina Ayerza and Richard Foreman, "More Hysteria, Please," in lacanian ink, no. 12, 1997, 18.