LAVAby

Richard Foreman

Lava was produced on December 5th 1989 at the Performing Garage by the Wooster Group and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater

Writer / Director / DesignerLights

Sound DesignProperties

Technical DirectorAssistant Director

………………………….Richard

Foreman………………………….Heather Carson………………………….Tim Schellenbaum………………………….Heidi Tradewell………………………….Mike Taylor………………………….David Herskovits

Production Team

Performers

Neil Bradley, Matthew Courtney, Peter Davis, Kyle deCamp, Heidi Tradewelland Richard Foreman as the Voice

• Off-off-Broadway theater in SoHo, NYC• Founded in 1968 & the permanent home of the Wooster Group• Hosts an annual Emerging Artist Series since 1978• Launched the careers of actors such as Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray

The Performing Garage

Richard Foreman

Received an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama

Born in New York on June 10th 1937

Foreman is known as a pioneer of postmodern theaterprior to the coining of the term

Richard Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968

The OHT seeks to produce works that balance a primitive and minimal style with extremelycomplex and theatrical themes. ... Foreman’s trademark "total theater” unites elements of theperformative, auditory and visual arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature for a uniqueresult. ... He seeks to make work that unsettles and disorients received ideas and opens the doors for alternative models of perception, organization, and understanding.

Meaning of NameOntology: The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.

Ontological-Hysteric: The Nature of Being Hysteric

Excerpt from OHT’s mission statement:

Kenneth Bernard:Lava … is Foreman’s hot outpouring of what has obsessed him for many years, each playa different squirming. He is hysterical. He seeks to infect us with his hysteria by means ofsurreal stage, his asymmetry, his sudden loud music and buzzers and bells, his subversionof our false contrivances of reality (plot, character, cause and effect, “grammar”).

Foreman uses conventions of traditional narrative theater in non-traditional ways.

In Foreman’s own words from his book, Unbalancing Acts:

LAVA

Lava is like a series of staged essays, several contradictory approaches to the same problem:why can language never adequately express the true and complex quality of an internal impulse?

Postmodern drama follows Beckett in dramatizing the Derridean notion of the infinite play of signifiers through a refusal of narrative closure, an idea which often finds expression in its tendency to embrace contradictions instead of resolving them.

Foreman argues that language should not be used primarily for its referential purposes because referentiality itself stands deeply problematized.

-Mufti Mudasir, The Criterion

Richard Foreman on voice and language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7sC80l5Rco&t=4m35s

Lava is threaded with contradictory logic, essentially inhibiting the audience from deriving meaning from the play in a rational manner.

Language in Lavahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=4m20s

LAVA

Categories and Connections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=20m11s

…The signature Foreman touches---the herky-jerky movements, the monotone speeches, the omniscient narrator, and the pounding use of acoustics…

-Hoyt Hilsman

Strange objects (and bizarre looking characters) are firmly fixed in place, but theconnection among them is in the eye of the beholder.

-Mel Gussow

Kenneth Bernard on Lava:

Foreman, a postmodernist before that term’s currency…feels far too deeply the awful mess of being human to be really hopeful.Those who did not see Richard Foreman’s … Lava at the Performing Garage missed an unusual opportunity to see his work through a glass clearly, a philosophic pronunciamento. As his theater’s title (Ontological-Hysteric) has always implied, Foreman has always more or less dramatized the anxiety of being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=42m20s

Category 3

There are writers who despair that a gap exists between the self and the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity---it’s an ecstatic field rather than a field of despair… It’s the unfathomable from which everything pours forth.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=6m5s

…Everything in this life is either a black hole or a mirror. Neither tells us anything true.-Kenneth Bernard

Richard Foreman, from The New Yorker:

Works Cited

• Als, Hilton. "Talk Talk." The New Yorker. N.p., 16 Nov. 2009. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

• <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/talk-talk-2>.

• Davy, Kate. Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. Ann Arbor: UMI

• Research Press, 1979. N. pag. Print.

• Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. 308-64. Print.

• Gussow, Mel. "Review/Theater; On A Feather-Strewn Stage, Multiple Flights of Fancy."

• The New York Times. N.p., Dec. 1989. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

• <http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/13/theater/review-theater-on-a-feather-strewn

• stage-multiple-flights-of-fancy.html>.

• Hilsman, Hoyt. "Lava/Breath." Backstage.com. N.p., 29 Aug. 2001. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

• <http://www.backstage.com/review/lavabreath_2/>.

• Lava. YouTube, 1989. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE>.

• Rabkin, Gerald, ed. Richard Foreman. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999.

• 98-99. Print.

• Richard Foreman Interview. YouTube. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7sC80l5Rco>.