[HN Gopher] The Renegade Richard Foreman
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Renegade Richard Foreman
        
       Author : prismatic
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2025-06-16 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (yalereview.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (yalereview.org)
        
       | owenversteeg wrote:
       | For those that aren't familiar with Richard Foreman, he was an
       | experimental playwright who died earlier this year. I think a few
       | quotes from the article do a good job at summarizing who he was:
       | 
       | >These were not plays in any traditional sense. Instead, Foreman
       | created living works of art by "using everything" that a given
       | moment in time brought to bear on his process. He began not with
       | a completed script but with a raw running text, the lines of
       | which he would assign during his monthslong rehearsals, arranging
       | and rearranging his words, giving them to one actor then trying
       | them out on another.
       | 
       | >The visual style of his earliest works resembled that of the
       | surrealists: he composed tidy, witty tableaux of odd objects and
       | strange people speaking what often seemed like stray thoughts,
       | all of which briefly shared the air before careening into their
       | next encounter. Later, the look of his productions became more
       | macabre, almost menacing: he would litter the stage with stuff,
       | visual interferences that prompted the audience to lean closer
       | and look harder. Throughout, his plays remained fairly
       | consistent, all running about seventy minutes and keeping his
       | performers in a near-constant state of movement as they spouted
       | lines that sounded as though a mystic had fallen through the
       | looking glass or a philosopher had become stuck in a screwball
       | comedy. These mind-melting, incandescent productions were equal
       | parts theater, philosophy, literature, and visual art.
       | 
       | >He wrote and directed at least one new play a year, designing
       | the sets as well as the sound, which comprised densely layered
       | loops and samples that he himself played live at every
       | performance.
       | 
       | >Foreman was a MacArthur Fellow whose genius status did not
       | prevent handfuls of people from leaving the theater at nearly
       | every single one of his shows.
       | 
       | Something the HN crowd can appreciate: he offered up his plays to
       | the public, on his website ontological.com, free to stage or
       | create new works or do what you wished.
       | 
       | If you have a spare sixty seven minutes, you could watch his play
       | Lava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-06-16 23:00 UTC)