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.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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