New York
Richard Foreman, Iconoclastic Playwright and Impresario, Dies at 87
Richard Foreman, the relentlessly teasing, deliberately mysterious avant-garde playwright and impresario who founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, won a bookshelf full of Obie Awards and received a MacArthur fellowship in his late 50s, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87.
David Herskovits, the artistic director of Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn and a co-executor of Mr. Foreman’s literary estate, said the death, at Mount Sinai West Hospital, was from complications of pneumonia.
Mr. Foreman established his company in 1968 and went on to present more than 50 of his own plays; for many years the group was housed at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, the historic East Village church. The company name refers to the metaphysical study of the nature of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the situations he worked with were, as he told John Rockwell of The New York Times in 1976, “basically hysteric — repressed passions emerging as philosophical interactions.”
The titles of his plays hinted at his worldview. “Dream Tantras for Western Massachusetts” (1971) was one of numerous collaborations with the composer Stanley Silverman. “My Head Was a Sledgehammer” (1979) depicted a professor and two students facing the frustrations of acquiring knowledge. “Bad Boy Nietzsche!” (2000) was about that German philosopher’s nervous breakdown. “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!” (2004) was inspired by the George W. Bush administration.
Other titles, like “Total Recall” (1970), “Vertical Mobility” (1974) and “Permanent Brain Damage” (1996), were more concise but no less resonant.
Mr. Foreman’s plays tended to be “peerless mini-extravaganzas” offering “dizzying theatrical joys,” Ben Brantley wrote in one 2004 Times review. Looking at Mr. Foreman’s body of work, he also mentioned the familiar “cross-cultural medley of musical fragments, the strings and poles that segment the stage, vulnerable baby dolls and menacing thugs in animal outfits.”
The same review called Mr. Foreman’s strength as a writer “his refusal to spell anything out.”
Mr. Foreman was recognized and rewarded early in his career. He received his first Obie Award in 1970, sharing it with Mr. Silverman, for “Elephant Steps,” which has sometimes been described as an opera about a radio show. It had its premiere at the Tanglewood music festival in Massachusetts in 1968.
When “Elephant Steps” came to Hunter College in Manhattan two years later, the chief classical music critic of The Times, Harold C. Schonberg, found it “all very chic,” but he also confessed, “I don’t know what the hell was going on.”
Mr. Foreman went on to win a half-dozen more Obies, first in 1973 for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater itself, then in 1976 for “Rhoda in Potatoland,” a nearly two-hour one-act show about a woman having bizarre dreams.
On two occasions he won Obies for best play in the same year — meaning that he essentially tied with himself for the top award: for “The Cure” (with an emphasis on patient-doctor relations) and “Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good” (the title was the theme) in 1987; then for “Pearls for Pigs” (about a mentally disturbed actor) and “Benita Canova” (about mean schoolgirls) in 1998. Some people count those as two Obies, others as four.
In between, Mr. Foreman received the best director award for Vaclav Havel’s “Largo Desolato” (1986) and a special Obie (1988) for sustained achievement.
In 1995, when he was 58, Mr. Foreman received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, popularly known as the “genius grant.” The foundation praised him for his “original vision and commitment to developing new theatrical vocabularies” that influenced the direction of American avant-garde theater.
No one could credibly accuse Mr. Foreman of abandoning his bohemian roots and going mainstream, but he did direct and design numerous classical works and operas both in the United States and abroad. They included Johann Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus” at the Paris Opera, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at Opéra de Lille, France, Molière’s “Don Juan” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Joseph Papp’s production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” at Lincoln Center in New York.
Mr. Foreman was well-known in SoHo, where he bought a 3,600-square-foot loft for $10,000 in 1970. (“Now it’s all Boutiqueville,” he observed regretfully, referring to the neighborhood, in a 2013 Times interview.) Early in his career he was identifiable by his matching dark hair, eyebrows and walrus-style mustache. Decades later, when the mustache was gone and his hairline had receded, The Forward described him affectionately as “a disheveled, egg-shaped man with long, stringy hair and frayed, formless clothes.”
Suffering from light sensitivity, Mr. Foreman said, he usually rose well before dawn, covered the apartment’s skylights with fabric and went to bed around 7 p.m. He was a frequent napper. “I lie around, I doze off,” he told The Times. “It’s been a life of bits and pieces.”
It was a life of purpose as well. “I’ve never been very happy about the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Lower East Side Biography Project. “So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.”
Richard Foreman was born Edward Friedman on June 10, 1937, in Staten Island. He was adopted by Albert Foreman, a lawyer, and his wife, Claire (Levine) Foreman; the Foremans soon moved to Scarsdale, in Westchester County.
Richard graduated from Scarsdale High School, where he showed an early interest in theater, appearing in class productions. He also produced and directed Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” there, just two years after the play’s 1953 opening on Broadway. He graduated in 1959 from Brown University, where he majored in English and helped form the student theater group there; he also sometimes designed sets. Three years later, he received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale).
His father helped him get his first job, managing apartment buildings in New York, Mr. Foreman said in the Biography Project interview. That gave him a flexible schedule and allowed him to pursue artistic projects. His father then helped him again, showing one of his early plays to someone at the influential Shubert organization, who encouraged him and introduced him to a producer.
Early on, Mr. Foreman became part of a downtown filmmaking group that included Jonas Mekas. With Mr. Mekas as his guru, he made film shorts in the 1970s, adapted his play “Strong Medicine” to film in 1981 and returned to movie production in 2012 with “Once Every Day” and a documentary about its making, “My Name Is Rainer Thompson and I’ve Lost It Completely.”
His last film was “Mad Love” (2018), a 70-minute reverie, mostly in grainy black and white, released by PennSound Cinema. Its central image was of a well-dressed man inserting his index finger into a well-dressed woman’s open mouth.
The last play he produced and directed himself was “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” which opened at the Public Theater in 2013. In a review of the play, which he called a “gleeful mind- and memory-bender” about an aging man watching the present “turn into the past,” Mr. Brantley praised Mr. Foreman as “the most eminent elder statesman of the avant-garde in New York theater.”
Mr. Foreman’s first play in a decade, “Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey,” about, on the surface, a woman and a man at a boulevard cafe, was staged in December at LaMaMa, the East Village experimental theater, and directed by Kara Feely.
Mr. Foreman married his high school friend Amy Taubin, an actress who became a New York film critic, in 1961; they divorced in 1972. In 1988, he married the artist and actress Kate Manheim, who has appeared in a number of his plays. She is his only immediate survivor.
In a 2013 essay in The Forward, Joshua Furst compared the power of Mr. Foreman’s work to the Jewish tradition of davening: “If you let the rhythm of his rocking enter you, he’ll remind you what it feels like to be ecstatic, what it is to be hysterical, what it means to circle the meaningless void that is the wellspring of all meaning.”
Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
Every week since 1976, Metropolitan Diary has published stories by, and for, New Yorkers of all ages and eras (no matter where they live now): anecdotes and memories, quirky encounters and overheard snippets that reveal the city’s spirit and heart.
For the past four years, we’ve asked for your help picking the best Diary entry of the year. Now we’re asking again.
We’ve narrowed the field to the five finalists here. Read them and vote for your favorite. The author of the item that gets the most votes will receive a print of the illustration that accompanied it, signed by the artist, Agnes Lee.
The voting closes at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 21. You can change your vote as many times as you’d like until then, but you may only pick one. Choose wisely.
Click “VOTE” to choose your favorite Metropolitan Diary entry of 2025, and come back on Sunday, Dec. 28, to see which one our readers picked as their favorite.
Click “VOTE” to choose your favorite Metropolitan Diary entry of 2025, and come back on Sunday, Dec. 28, to see which one our readers picked as their favorite.
Two Stops
Dear Diary:
It was a drizzly June night in 2001. I was a young magazine editor and had just enjoyed what I thought was a very blissful second date — dinner, drinks, fabulous conversation — with our technology consultant at a restaurant in Manhattan.
I lived in Williamsburg at the time, and my date lived near Murray Hill, so we grabbed a cab and headed south on Second Avenue.
“Just let me out here,” my date said to the cabby at the corner of 25th Street.
We said our goodbyes, quick and shy, knowing that we would see each other at work the next day. I was giddy and probably grinning with happiness and hope.
“Oh boy,” the cabby said, shaking his head as we drove toward Brooklyn. “Very bad.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in horror.
“He doesn’t want you to know exactly where he lives,” the cabby said. “Not a good sign.”
I spent the rest of the cab ride in shock, revisiting every moment of the date.
Happily, it turned out that my instinct about it being a great date was right, and the cabby was wrong. Twenty-four years later, my date that night is my husband, and I know that if your stop is first, it’s polite to get out so the cab can continue in a straight line to the next stop.
Ferry Farewell
Dear Diary:
On a February afternoon, I met my cousins at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Their spouses and several of our very-grown children were there too. I brought Prosecco, a candle, a small speaker to play music, photos and a poem.
We were there to recreate the wedding cruise of my mother, Monica, and my stepfather, Peter. They had gotten married at City Hall in August 1984. She was 61, and he, 71. It was her first marriage, and his fourth.
I was my mother’s witness that day. It was a late-in-life love story, and they were very happy. Peter died in 1996, at 82. My mother died last year. She was 100.
Peter’s ashes had waited a long time, but finally they were mingled with Monica’s. The two of them would ride the ferry a last time and then swirl together in the harbor forever. Cue the candles, bubbly, bagpipes and poems.
Two ferry workers approached us. We knew we were in trouble: Open containers and open flames were not allowed on the ferry.
My cousin’s husband, whispering, told the workers what we were doing and said we would be finished soon.
They walked off, and then returned. They said they had spoken to the captain, and they ushered us to the stern for some privacy. As the cup of ashes flew into the water, the ferry horn sounded two long blasts.
Unacceptable
Dear Diary:
I went to a new bagel store in Brooklyn Heights with my son.
When it was my turn to order, I asked for a cinnamon raisin bagel with whitefish salad and a slice of red onion.
The man behind the counter looked up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
Teresa
Dear Diary:
It was February 2013. With a foot of snow expected, I left work early and drove from New Jersey warily as my wipers squeaked and snow and ice stuck to my windows.
I drove east on the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was tied up worse than usual. Trucks groaned on either side of my rattling Toyota. My fingers were cold. My toes were colder. Got to get home before it really comes down, I thought to myself.
By the time I got home to my little red bungalow a stone’s throw from the Throgs Neck Bridge, the snow was already up to my ankles.
Inside, I took off my gloves, hat, scarf, coat, sweater, pants and snow boots. The bed, still unmade, was inviting me. But first, I checked my messages.
There was one from Teresa, the 92-year-old widow on the corner.
“Call me,” she said, sounding desperate.
I looked toward the warm bed, but … Teresa. There was a storm outside, and she was alone.
On went the pants, the sweater, the coat, the scarf, the boots and the gloves, and then I went out the door.
The snow was six inches deep on the sidewalks, so I tottered on tire tracks in the middle of the street. The wind stung my face. When I got to the end of the block, I pounded on her door.
“Teresa!” I called. No answer. “Teresa!” I called again. I heard the TV blaring. Was she sprawled on the floor?
I went next door and called for Kathy.
“Teresa can’t answer the door,” I said. “Probably fell.”
Kathy had a key. In the corner of her neat living room, Teresa, in pink sweatpants and sweaters, was sitting curled in her armchair, head bent down and The Daily News in her lap.
I snapped off the TV.
Startled, she looked up.
“Kathy! Neal!” she said. “What’s a five-letter word for cabbage?”
Nice Place
Dear Diary:
When I lived in Park Slope over 20 years ago, I once had to call an ambulance because of a sudden, violent case of food poisoning.
Two paramedics, a man and a woman, entered our third-floor walk-up with a portable chair. Strapping me in, the male medic quickly inserted an IV line into my arm.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his partner circling around and admiring the apartment.
“Nice place you’ve got here.” she said. “Do you own it?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, all but unconscious.
Once I was in the ambulance, she returned to her line of inquiry.
“Do you mind me asking how much you paid for your apartment?”
“$155,000,” I croaked.
“Wow! You must have bought during the recession.”
“Yeah” I said.
They dropped me off at Methodist Hospital, where I was tended to by a nurse as I struggled to stay lucid.
At some point, the same medic poked her head into the room with one last question:
“You wouldn’t be wanting to sell any time soon, would you?”
Illustrations by Agnes Lee.
‘Part of the job’
Edwin Guity was at the controls of a southbound D train last December, rolling through the Bronx, when suddenly someone was on the tracks in front of him.
He jammed on the emergency brake, but it was too late. The man had gone under the wheels.
Stumbling over words, Mr. Guity radioed the dispatcher and then did what the rules require of every train operator involved in such an incident. He got out of the cab and went looking for the person he had struck.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Guity said later. “But this is a part of the job.”
He found the man pinned beneath the third car. Paramedics pulled him out, but the man died at the hospital. After that, Mr. Guity wrestled with what to do next.
A 32-year-old who had once lived in a family shelter with his parents, he viewed the job as paying well and offering a rare chance at upward mobility. It also helped cover the costs of his family’s groceries and rent in the three-bedroom apartment they shared in Brooklyn.
But striking the man with the train had shaken him more than perhaps any other experience in his life, and the idea of returning to work left him feeling paralyzed.
Edwin Guity was prescribed exposure therapy after his train struck a man on the tracks.
Hundreds of train operators have found themselves in Mr. Guity’s position over the years.
And for just as long, there has been a path through the state workers’ compensation program to receiving substantive treatment to help them cope. But New York’s train operators say that their employer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has done too little to make them aware of that option.
After Mr. Guity’s incident, no official told him of that type of assistance, he said. Instead, they gave him the option of going back to work right away.
But Mr. Guity was lucky. He had a friend who had been through the same experience and who coached him on getting help — first through a six-week program and then, with the assistance of a lawyer, through an experienced specialist.
The specialist prescribed a six-month exposure therapy program to gradually reintroduce Mr. Guity to the subway.
His first day back at the controls of a passenger train was on Thanksgiving. Once again, he was driving on the D line — the same route he had been traveling on the day of the fatal accident.
M.T.A. representatives insisted that New York train operators involved in strikes are made aware of all options for getting treatment, but they declined to answer specific questions about how the agency ensures that drivers get the help they need.
In an interview, the president of the M.T.A. division that runs the subway, Demetrius Crichlow, said all train operators are fully briefed on the resources available to them during their job orientation.
“I really have faith in our process,” Mr. Crichlow said.
Still, other transit systems — all of which are smaller than New York’s — appear to do a better job of ensuring that operators like Mr. Guity take advantage of the services available to them, according to records and interviews.
A Times analysis shows that the incidents were on the rise in New York City’s system even as they were falling in all other American transit systems.
An Uptick in Subway Strikes
San Francisco’s system provides 24-hour access to licensed therapists through a third-party provider.
Los Angeles proactively reaches out to its operators on a regular basis to remind them of workers’ compensation options and other resources.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has made it a goal to increase engagement with its employee assistance program.
The M.T.A. says it offers some version of most of these services.
But in interviews with more than two dozen subway operators who have been involved in train strikes, only one said he was aware of all those resources, and state records suggest most drivers of trains that strike people are not taking full advantage of them.
“It’s the M.T.A.’s responsibility to assist the employee both mentally and physically after these horrific events occur,” the president of the union that represents New York City transit workers, John V. Chiarello, said in a statement, “but it is a constant struggle trying to get the M.T.A. to do the right thing.”
new video loaded: Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid
transcript
transcript
Protesters Arrested After Trying to Block a Possible ICE Raid
Nearly 200 protesters tried to block federal agents from leaving a parking garage in Lower Manhattan on Saturday. The confrontation appeared to prevent a possible ICE raid nearby, and led to violent clashes between the police and protesters.
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[chanting] “ICE out of New York.”
By Jorge Mitssunaga
November 30, 2025
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