www .press .umich .edu michigan Playing Underground THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE Series Editors: David Krasner and Rebecca Schneider Founding Editor: Enoch Brater Recent Titles: A Beckett Canon by Ruby Cohn David Mamet in Conversation edited by Leslie Kane The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine by Marvin Carlson Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind by William W. Demastes Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty by Anthony Kubiak Land/Scape/Theater edited by Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement by Stephen J. Bottoms Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change edited by Enoch Brater Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography by Arnold Aronson Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement by Mike Sell Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective by Robert Gordon Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy edited by David Krasner and David Z. Saltz Critical Theory and Performance, Revised and Enlarged Edition edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach Playing Underground A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement Stephen J. Bottoms The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor to Michael Smith, for “keen inspiration” and to Paula, for everything First paperback edition 2006 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America cPrinted on acid-free paper 2009 2008 2007 2006 5 4 3 2 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bottoms, Stephen J. (Stephen James), 1968– Playing underground : a critical history of the 1960s off-off- broadway movement / Stephen J. Bottoms. p. cm. — (Theater: theory/text/performance) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11400-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Off Off-Broadway theater—History—20th century. 2. American drama—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN2277.N5B47 2004 792'.09747'1—dc22 2004001248 ISBN 0-472-03194-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-03194-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) Cover photo: Ridiculous Theatrical Company, circa 1969. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. ISBN 978-0-472-02221-2 (electronic) He came to the altar with ›owers He came to the altar with ›owers But the preacher did not hear No the preacher did not hear For the preacher was singing a folksong Not knowing the folks had all but gone. Each man chooses the stations That he waits at while choosing his cross Each man chooses the stations As each man chooses his death. Everyone took his life for granted Refused to grant logic to his joy— Now that joy’s gone Now that joy’s gone Now that joy’s gone Now that joy’s gone No one need be bothered by his joy. —H. M. Koutoukas, Elegy for Joe Cino Preface I’m not interested in the sixties. I’m not interested in any of these nostalgic eras they’re reviving. . . . That’s just people trying, so desperately, to ‹nd some— (Laughs lightly.) “meaning for their own time.” —“Carla,” in Robert Patrick’s Kennedy’s Children For as long as I can recall having an opinion on the subject, the theaters that have seemed most alive to me—the most exciting to be at or a part of—have been those generally regarded as “illegitimate” by the established apparatus of press, funding bodies, and professional theatrical institutions. Basement the- aters. Café theaters. Hole-in-the-wall theaters. Theaters thriving on rough edges, raw passion, and a ‹erce sense of the immediacy and “liveness” of both the stage event itself and of the audience. A church gymnasium; a disused warehouse; the underground arches beneath a railway station: these are the performance spaces where I have been thrilled and moved far more often than I have been in the relatively comfortable, controlled spaces of the professional theater. My own ‹rst experiences as a director—in a tiny black-box space con- verted from a reading room in the University of Bristol’s students’ union, where the crammed-in audience seemed almost to sit on top of the stage, and the ceiling was so low that the barn-doors on the lights could scrape the tops of actors’ heads—made most of the “real” theaters I have worked in since seem lacking in atmosphere by comparison. For some years, I harbored these thoughts rather guiltily, believing that I must, at heart, be some kind of rank amateur to feel this way. During my doc- toral research on the work of Sam Shepard, however (cf. Bottoms 1998a), I became fascinated by his background in the off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s—a movement that seemed to have been largely airbrushed out of the history books, but which had thrived in precisely the kinds of spaces that interested me, and which, far from being merely some amateur or student affair, had produced an explosion of genuinely innovative theater. My research for this book has thus been an attempt to explore and document a movement that offered real alternatives to institutionalized professionalism. In viii Preface today’s theater scene, often intent on recycling familiar formulas—whether big-money commercialism, subsidized classicism, or purportedly avant-garde gimmickry—a new injection of anarchic, underground energy is devoutly to be wished for. Excavating the movement’s history proved no simple task, since so little of critical or historical substance has previously been published on the subject. Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman’s The Off-Off-Broadway Book (1972) remains the most useful source, but is mostly comprised of play-texts, and its “factual” details are often inaccurate. My work has involved dredging used bookstores for long-out-of-print play collections, wading through avalanches of archived newspaper clippings, and tracking down playwrights, directors, and actors to request interviews and, where possible, beg for copies of unpub- lished scripts. The surviving documentation, moreover, covers only a fraction of what occurred on off-off-Broadway’s ad hoc stages, some of which mounted new plays every week or two, for years. Much of what was instantly forgotten probably deserved no better fate, but much that was of value has also, undoubtedly, been lost forever: the creators of off-off-Broadway were always more concerned with what was happening now,in the present moment (one of the central imperatives of the 1960s counterculture), than with document- ing events for posterity. Playwright H. M. Koutoukas claims he went as far as shredding all copies of some of his plays after opening night, partly to prevent script piracy, but also partly to ensure the ephemerality of performances that had been designed to “hit the air” and then vanish forever. The venues them- selves were only slightly more concerned with recording their achievements: the archives of the period held by La Mama and Judson Church consist of clipped-out Village Voice reviews, typed or hand-printed programs and posters, scratchy photographs, and letters recording the day-to-day business of trying to keep the venues a›oat. The most vivid accounts of the performances themselves are to be found in the memories of those who were there, but, as many of them are quick to point out, time can play tricks on the memory. In short, all that is really left of Off-Off-Broadway is fragments—fragments that require a good deal of creative interpretation if one is to assemble them into a coherent narrative. The notion of writing anything “objective,” let alone “de‹nitive” on the subject seems nonsensical: there was and is no one set of truths about off-off-Broadway to uncover, since the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than of a singular, concrete reality. For this reason, my ironic working title for this book was What Happened,and although my publishers—for sound marketing reasons—suggested that I go Preface ix with something snappier, the impishness of my original choice still appeals. Gertrude Stein’s short play What Happened (1913), which became the basis for a landmark production by the Judson Poets’ Theater (1963), uses rhythmi- cally repetitive, self-referential language to capture a subjective impression of endlessly circling chatter, rather than attempting in any way to record the rep- resentational “truth” of the dinner party Stein was apparently inspired by. Conversely, though, What Happenedalso appealed as a title because it can be taken as a direct statement, perhaps even a challenge: for the off-off-Broadway movement didhappen, and canbe narrativized, and it is long past time that its signi‹cance was acknowledged. Unfortunately, even in a book of this scale, it is possible only to sketch out an initial mapping of “what happened.” For example, in seeking to set out an intertwined history of the venues and companies involved in the movement, I have often had to rein in my own impulse to re›ect at length on individual works. Few of the plays and performances discussed in this book are covered in anything like the detail they deserve, and—while I have attempted to cover most of the major “landmarks” of the movement’s development—the materi- als I focus on often say as much about my own critical preoccupations as they do about their renown at the time. Much more research could, and I hope will, be done, by other scholars with different concerns. But what follows is, at least, a start. Off-off-Broadway was a theater movement founded on collaborative creation, and this book too is very much a group effort. I owe an enormous debt to the many people who have shared their time and expertise with me. I am grateful to my interviewees, in particular, for providing insights that none of the exist- ing documentation could have offered: a full list of their names, and of when and where we met, is provided in appendix B. (Please note that quotations in the text from these artists that are otherwise unattributed to bibliographic sources come from these interviews.). Further thanks are due to the following “OOBniks” for consenting to read and comment on chapters in progress: Tony Barsha, Hal Borske, Jerry Cunliffe, Paul Foster, Walter Hadler, Robert Heide, Lawrence Kornfeld, H. M. Koutoukas, Murray Mednick, Tom O’Horgan, Robert Patrick, John Vaccaro, and Doric Wilson. Further invaluable advice has also been provided by friends and colleagues including Greg Giesekam, Francis Hagan, Katherine Morley, and, especially, Sarah Kornfeld. My most important collaboration of all has been with Michael Smith, the chief theater critic for the Village Voice throughout the period discussed in