New Tricks from an Old Dog

The opening night of a Richard Foreman performance is a highly anticipated event in certain circles. The cramped seating area of the Ontological-Hysteric theatre in St. Mark’s Church is dominated by downtown theatre luminaries and those who hope to someday join their ranks. Before the show begins, directors, producers, and actors seek each other out in order to compliment one another on shows they saw at last year’s Fringe Festival, whether in Edinburgh or New York. There’s genuine recognition and politely disingenuous recognition as phone numbers are exchanged and cheeks are kissed. All of this occurs under the watchful eye of Foreman himself, the 70-year-old patriarch of New York’s avant-garde theatre scene, who stands near the entrance to the theatre surveying his audience and watching the clock, clearly anxious to start on time.

Foreman’s most recent creation, a hybrid theatre-video piece called Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, was no exception. As the lights dimmed, just a couple of minutes past the advertised 8pm starting time, the audience hushed in anticipation. For the first several minutes of the performance came the signature Foreman audience response: knowing smiles and uncomfortable giggles coupled with furrowed brows; few attendees at Foreman’s shows pretend to “understand” the work, with its densely layered philosophical references and its aversion to both narrative and character. Still, there is generally something fun about the experience. Tonight, though, the laughter died down fairly quickly, the furrowed brows accompanied more by shuffling feet than knowing smiles. Foreman was up to something different this time, and not everyone was sure they liked it.

The Poster for Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland.

In a recent interview posted on his theatre company’s blog, Richard Foreman said:

[I]t’s true that I’ve always disliked the theatre, at least for the last 30 years, and I work in the theatre in order to work out other certain problems that are for me of a more philosophical, spiritual nature. That’s what concerns me, not making a good play. Now obviously you have your ego, so you want to make a good play to the extent that people like it, that you get good reviews, but that is less important to me now finally. I mean I suffered from being vain and being anxious about wanting to be a success and wanting to be accepted, but then you reach a certain point, you know, everybody feels they’re not accepted sufficiently, or appreciated.

I think I have overcome that more than I ever have in the past, maybe not completely and I just want to be in an arena that I build for myself where I can work on certain problems and I resent, and I have for a number of years now, having to open these plays and subject myself to audiences, critics, what have you…

This paragraph, and others similar to it, shed a great deal of light on Foreman’s current work. Having said repeatedly in recent years that he is no longer interested in writing “plays,” Foreman has subtitled his new work “A Richard Foreman Machine,” rejecting not just narrative and character (as he has in the past) but the medium of theatre altogether. Not only has he attempted to remove the word and concept “play” (as in dramatic text meant for performance) from descriptions of his texts but, with Deep Trance he has removed almost all sense of “play” (as in jest, fun, sport) from the performance itself.

His resentment of “audiences, critics,” and the like is also on full display in Deep Trance, which repeatedly draws attention to the likelihood that the audience very likely has no idea how to engage with what they are seeing. My guest on opening night complained that he felt Foreman hates his audience and was treating them with scorn, making them uncomfortable not in order to challenge them to engage the material in unconventional ways but simply to punish them for being there at all. While I didn’t agree with this assessment, I did sympathize with the frustration behind it and it brought to mind another passage from the aforementioned interview.

Asked to clarify concerns he has raised in the past about his plays “not being as boring as [he] morally feels they should be,” he responded by again revealing his antipathy towards most of his audience: “[Y]ou have people sitting out there and you don’t want them to fidget, even though you know that most of them should if you were doing something really good because they wouldn’t be interested in really high art.”

Whether Deep Trance in Potatoland is “high art” is an open question, of course, but it does seem that Foreman has largely conquered his need to keep his audience from fidgeting; by the end of the 62 minute performance, I had been (accidentally, I hope) kicked in the back a number of times and there were few in the sold-out house who didn’t seem to want to stretch their legs.

The set incorporates some of the usual Foreman touches: a funhouse use of distorted perspective, strings stretched above the stage and dividing the space into an enigmatic sort of longitudinal system, etc. As with more recent pieces, the back wall is dominated by two large video screens which, like the rest of the set, are slightly askew.

Projected onto the screen are moving tableaux filmed in Japan and England of inscrutable performers who sometimes intone fragments of philosophy and tell jokes without punch lines. At other times, the soundtrack of the show is a densely layered collage of Foreman’s famously sepulchral voice-overs, fragments of music ranging from Romantic to Industrial, and bits of text in English, German, French, and Hebrew (but none in Japanese.) The voice-over describes those on screen as “Japanese people of all ages who understand” and “young English people who understand,” as if to remind those in the audience that we, by contrast, don’t get it at all.

Five live performers, four women and a man, perform precise and strange, if mostly prosaic, choreography with little apparent psychological motivation. They may or may not be vampires. They place pills carefully on their tongues. They explore the set and occasionally confront the video, sometimes recoiling in horror from something an on-screen performer says, sometimes trying to enter that other world, and sometimes going about their business as if they were unaware of the images upstage. The lights shift intensity and focus, sometimes drawing attention to the video screen, sometimes to the stage, and sometimes shining directly into the faces of the audience, drawing attention to the three distinct layers of Foreman’s deep trance.

References abound to classical philosophy, to numerology, to Jewish mysticism, to Deleuze and Guattari, and to Foreman’s earlier work. “Potatoland” has been part of Foreman’s geography since at least 1975’s Rhoda in Potatoland, which also included the line “Only being a tourist can one experience a place,” which is repeated several times in the new piece. All of this intertextuality lends the work a density and an opacity that can be extremely frustrating; in earlier pieces, the frustration was often mitigated by the leavening humor of absurdity, but those moments are few and far between in Deep Trance.

Two major questions arise from all of this, and not necessarily the questions Foreman is hoping to raise. If Foreman resents having to present his work for an audience, and if he is more interested in his ideas than in theatre, why does he continue to produce theatre at all? And if the audience is going to feel antagonized and frustrated through much of the evening, why do they continue, as so many of us do, to make their enthusiastic pilgrimage to St. Mark’s Church year after year?

The answer to the first question seems to be that Foreman needs the audience, whether he resents them or not. He needs them not only to fund his work (both directly and by continuing to attract grants) but in order to complete the image he is building. The lights need to foreground the audience from time to time. Messages to the audience need to occasionally appear on the screen. Perception is part of the process Foreman is exploring, and the audience represents that aspect of his ontology.

Foreman’s shows can indeed be frustrating, and there are an awful lot of ways to spend your $25 or so. And yet, even in Deep Trance in Potatoland, surely one of his more difficult works, there is a reward to be had in giving yourself over to the experience at hand. When Foreman’s voice declares that “no relationship exists between what happens on stage and what is happening on the illuminated screen” he is encouraging you to stop trying to figure it out and just let the images wash over you. He continues, “Except – click – and now a profound relationship does exist. It’s that simple.”

In a program note, Foreman explains (or tries to) that he is trying to create “theater dissolving itself in the ‘acid-bath’ of film, hopefully revealing beneath, the skeleton-support of consciousness itself.” Foreman is not trying to depict consciousness, but to reveal it. Perhaps the “deep trance” he seeks is not something he is trying to represent but something he is trying to evoke, in both himself and in his audience. Enlightenment, I suspect, is a quixotic quest, but it is a quest to which Foreman has devoted the past 40 years of his career. As long as he keeps staging explorations in his “Ontological-Hysteric laboratory of the mind,” I’ll keep checking in on him, once every year or so, to see what he’s come up with and to wonder what I might be missing.

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland. Written, directed, and designed by Richard Foreman. With Joel Israel, Caitlin McDonough-Thayer, Fulya Peker, Caitlin Rucker and Sarah Dahlen. Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; Through April 13. Running time: 62 minutes. General admission: $25; Student tickets $20. Available at www.ontological.com or by calling 212-420-1916.

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