Richard Foreman has been at the leading edge of the theatrical avant-garde in the United States and throughout the world since 1968. His legendary productions, written and directed by him at his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre have influenced two generations of theater artists. This new anthology collects plays written and performed over six years, including Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty, Maria del Bosco, Panic (How to Be Happy!), Bad Boy Nietzsche!, Bad Behavior and King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe. Richard Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in 1968. The theater is currently in the historic St. Marks Church, where he rehearses and produces one of his new plays each year, each play performing for 16 weeks every winter.
“There’s an irresistible joy to reading these plays…examining them at leisure without the urgent propulsive forward movement of the theater, reveals beauties and resonances uniquely literary.” —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater, from his foreword Plays for The Public includes: The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah) “Richard Foreman is the ultimate theater auteur and mind-roiling warlock of avant-garde drama… Gods is an extravaganza of tightly orchestrated hallucinogenic visual effects, bruising slapstick and intense, cryptic lines… It is majestically mad and funny.” —New York Times Idiot Savant “Vintage Foreman: ravishing, perplexing, scary, a sensual and intellectual message for those weary of causality and psychology.” —Time Out New York Old-Fashioned Prostitutes “What makes Mr. Foreman’s work so entertaining is his ability to turn these classic, head-scratching concerns into phantasmagorical vaudevilles in which all the world’s a stage that keeps changing shape on you… Mr. Foreman is a grandmaster.” —New York Times This volume features the two plays sumptuously produced at The Public Theater in New York City that mark the culmination of Richard Foreman’s unstintingly inventive, astonishing career in theater, just as he was beginning to devote his creative energies entirely to filmmaking.
Nietzsche's love affair with the theater was among the most profound and prolonged intellectual engagements of his life, but his transformational role in the history of the modern stage has yet to be explored. In this pathbreaking account, David Kornhaber vividly shows how Nietzsche reimagined the theatrical event as a site of philosophical invention that is at once ancestor, antagonist, and handmaiden to the discipline of philosophy itself. August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugene O'Neill— seminal figures in the modern drama's evolution and avowed Nietzscheans all—came away from their encounters with Nietzsche's writings with an impassioned belief in the philosophical potential of the live theatrical event, coupled with a reestimation of the dramatist's power to shape that event in collaboration with the actor. In these playwrights' reactions to and adaptations of Nietzsche's radical rethinking of the stage lay the beginnings of a new direction in modern theater and dramatic literature.
Richard Foreman has been writing, directing and designing avant-garde theatre in New York since he first founded his Ontological-Hysteric company there in 1968. In all that time, few directors have taken up the challenge of staging his problematic, rewarding texts, and Foreman's work remains under-explored by other practitioners. Richard Foreman: An American (Partly) in Paris argues that Foreman can productively be viewed as a (partly) European artist, whose thinking and theatre-making have been radically shaped by contact with Europe. Through a detailed account of his European productions, interviews with Foreman himself, a set of practical strategies for staging the plays and the full text of Foreman's previously unpublished play Georges Bataille’s Bathrobe (1983), Neal Swettenham introduces the director’s work to a new generation of readers and theatre-makers.
This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.
"Richard Foreman reinvented dialogue, action, sound, stage design, and philosophical groundwork as no other stage artist in our history."—PEN/Laura Pels Master American Dramatist Award citation These writings, collected from two earlier books now long out-of-print along with two recent interviews, provide a fascinating window into Richard Foreman's singular mind and creative process. Also included is The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah), his last play before transitioning to more multi-media work. Richard Foreman has written, directed, and designed more than fifty of his own plays, both internationally and at his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which he founded in 1968. He has received many OBIE awards, an NEA Lifetime Achievement Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
Flower essences are liquid, energetic remedies derived from living flowers. They bring the natural dynamic energy of the plant directly into the human electro-system, where they work to bring about movement toward health and balance. Because of their energetic and living quality, they work directly and deeply in the emotional system, assisting in the release of early wounds and trauma. These suppressed imprints are considered to be a main causes of many types of diseases or imbalances today. Flower essences are a perfect complement to many of today's health practices. They enhance the effects of energy work, physical therapy, acupuncture, psychotherapy, cranial-sacral work, massage, aroma therapy and many other forms of healing and treatment. Flower essences are safe, natural, and non-toxic. Continuing the work of Edward Bach, Stars of the Meadow looks deeply into the relationship between health and the human personality. David Dalton takes us on a thorough and soulful exploration of how to use more than forty medicinal herbs as flower essences, portraying each flower in a way that is both substantive and inspired. Each description is organized to present a picture of how the flower essence affects the adult personality as it has been formed through life, and describes its direct clinical effects on children and animals. Dalton also connects different types of flowers--based on the number and arrangement of petals as well as associated colors and qualities--to the system of human chakras, or energy centers. This innovative approach allows the reader to discover new ways to employ flower essences to focus on specific areas of one's being, from the most physical to the highest levels, allowing a kind of flexibility rarely found in any single system of healing. Stars of the Meadow is a valuable guide not only for those who are new to flower essences, but also for seasoned herbalists who wish to deepen their knowledge of this effective method of healing body, mind, and soul.
The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel; Sticks and Bones; and Streamers; * Sam Shepard: Curse of the Starving Class; Buried Child; and True West; * Ntozake Shange: For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; Spell #7; and Boogie-Woogie Landscapes * Richard Foreman: Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3; The Cliffs; Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation; and Rhoda in Potatoland (Her Fall-Starts).
Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial and provocative multi-media artist. Beyond his internationally performed and acclaimed theatrical productions, and his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, he is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist cognisant of the unique power of art to provoke moral speculation, and of the distinctive theatricality of the human being in times of crisis. This collection of essays provides international perspectives on the full range of Barker’s achievements, theatrical and otherwise, and argues for their unique importance and urgency at the forefront of several genres of provocative modern art. It includes an interview with the artist and an essay by Barker himself.
In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists – Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp – active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of ‘epileptic’ writing over the course of his own career as writer/director. Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.
