Richard Foreman (SHS '55) un-retires—again.
The master of theatrical avant-gardism returns to the Public for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)
The master of theatrical avant-gardism returns to the Public for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance)
Extract from TimeOut.com - Article written by Helen Shaw
Here’s a tip: Do not take Richard Foreman seriously. First, the experimental-theater titan’s perception-warping spectaculars require audiences to be ready to laugh at understanding, to spit in the eye of illusionist escapism, to tap-dance on the grave of linear thought. And second, he knows people overanalyze him. Should he start telling you about his elliptical, indescribable work, believe about 50 percent.
Certainly we’ve all recovered nicely from Foreman’s oft-threatened retirement, which has barely slowed his show-a-year pace. In 2009, he announced he was abandoning theater for film (the productive septuagenarian does have several movies in the works), gave up his venue, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and mounted the valedictory Idiot Savant at the Public. At Savant’s end, a giant deus ex machina duck puppet delivered a message as it exited: “Arrogant bastard people! Goodbye forever.” Since we now eagerly await Foreman’s latest, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance), at the Public Theater, the duck may have overstepped.
On a lunch break from rehearsal, the lightly rumpled Foreman chatted and continued to wax mischievous. As any fan knows, his texts stem from journal pages, lines grouped together for their intangible affinitive properties. Prostitutes is a collage of things he has written over the last ten years, yet he still claims that this is one of the first of his shows (“the first play that I know of”) to be autobiographical. (He has said this before.) Foremanland often features volatile men who find themselves both baffled and quasi-worshipped by a mysterious woman. In the new work, Rocco Sisto plays Samuel—a borderline-dangerous Southerner who navigates a surreal French café-cum-golf-course, pursues a coquette called Suzie (the elegant Alenka Kraigher) and changes his identity by adopting another, more “European” name. And in Samuel, Foreman sees himself.
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