This third issue of NuMuse introduces our expanded policy of publishing plays by Brown faculty and alumni as well as those produced in Brown's annual New Plays Festival.
Therefore, in this special issue which celebrates "The Spirit of Innovation". NuMuse pays tribute to a Brown alumnus, a world-class playwright and director whose unique work has earned him the sobriquet "peerless," Richard Foreman, Renaissance man of the avant-garde American Theater.
Foreman, a recipient of an AB from Brown University in 1959, was awarded a Brown University Honorary Degree in 1992 for his unique contributions to American Theater. His bold and uncompromising theater subverts the spectator's usual way of seeing. Once he discards his usual straitjacketed eyes he is rewarded with a psychic freedom where narrative coherence is replaced by moment to moment objects seemingly called forth by his deepest impulses. Foreman's deft theater craft releases these objects from the "meanings" society has imposed upon them. With skillful use of the bright lights, makeup and illusion, transformation and spectacle that are his trademarks, Foreman stages unfamiliar occurrences which are simultaneously strange yet organically familiar and thus succeeds in his goal of spotlighting the most elusive aspects of human experiences.
Foreman is preoccupied with illuminating the inner landscape of humans and this results in productions in which lights and props stay in the foregraound and the darting, fragmentary text echoes and re-echoes in circular currents of meaning, akin to "speaking in tongues" for it is speech from a region other than the superficial one of mundane "reality." Like the traditional sage-playwright in all cultures, where they assume a quasi-religious role, Foreman believes that the aim of playwriting and indeed all arts is to speak to man's spiritual condition and his relationship to the universe. Knowing that his iconoclastic ways of reaching his goals would never see the light of production if left to others, Foreman wisely founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and as a theatrical auteur lives in a world "written, designed, directed, produced" by Richard Foreman.
Written especially for NuMuse readers, Foreman's essay, Rules, gives us an insider's peek into some of his theatrical strategy. Also in this issue is The Cure, a play that marks Foreman's 40th year. It is, in his own words, an attempt to see if his "work could become more mythic, to resonate to structures which reflected the archetypal pulsation within man."
The Cure is a chamber piece, with milked actors in a tiny space with the actor no more than twenty feet from the spectators. This technique makes the play detached and meditative, simultaneously close and yet far enough away so that the spoken words over the loudspeakers seem to be happening inside each audience member's head. In The Cure, Foreman once again creates a unique and multi-faceted theater form.
Renowned poet, translator, collage artist, fiction writer, playwright, founding member of the Wastepaper Theater, co-editor of Burning Deck Press, Keith Waldrop has left an indelible, distinct mark upon American Arts and Letters.
In order to investigate new possibilities of poetry in the theater, Waldrop, along with his colleagues Rosmarie Waldrop, James Schevill and Edwin Honig, founded Wastepaper Theater over twenty years ago. Continuing his theatrical experiments, Waldrop has merged (especially for NuMuse readers) his Minimalist prose and art and humor in Play (A Play) (In Three Acts). In addition, he appropriately graces the covers of our "Spirit of Innovation" issue with his ingenious "visual haikus," collages which are a terse, mirthful comment on terms "old" and "new."
Like a sliver of Thelonius Monk's music, it only takes a few notes of her verbal harmonics to quickly identify a Carole Maso piece. Unique, varied and third stream, Maso's fiction marks her as a writer of unrelenting originality. Her fiction, essays and reviews are visual, poetic and lyrical, are sensual and cerebral and written with an impressionistic gait that eschews linear narrative for tumescent sensations that make an ordinary alphabet throb with creative fecundity.
Rupture, Verge and Precipice, Precipice, Verge and Hurt Not is a call to arms for all writers, literary and dramatic, in which Maso's voice is a clarion call leading us unafraid into the millennium as we bring forth the best of our past.
Azande is the prototype of the 21st century playwright. Film and video are visual and aural elements foregrounded in her dramas as she attempts to break free of the text, expand the perimeters and deepen the dimensions of The Word.
BaXai is inspired by two versions of The Bacchae, the original by Euripides and an adaptation by Wole Soyinka. A tale of a quest for spiritual intoxication in a sober world, the drama leads the audience through ecstatic devotion, possession, dispossession, remembrance and release as an African diety, forgotten by his scattered people, is finally restored.
In BaXai, Azande daringly and deftly creates a theatrical language of the Afrospora; a stage language which is comprised of various dialects or linguistic combinations spoken by African descendants globally, it is universally understood through tone and gesture as well as syntax.
Is Polynesian Frostbite set in 1860 or 1960 or could it be 2060? Are the characters in Alaska, Russia, California or is space the place? Michael Barnwell's ahistorical, historical play with its linguistic hijinks, transmutable physical environments and impermanent time is infused with an allegorical tone while its oxymoronic title hints at a serious, comedic jaunt about isolation and desperation, and the human struggle of carving out an identity in a formidable environment.
NuMuse welcomes Thalia Field's second appearance with Copy And Distribute This. Continuing her experiments with language, Field has written a supra visual play whose objects have an inherent and strong emotional language. Within this filmic structure constructed for the stage, Thalia expertly weaves fevered dialogue that illumines the angst of contemporary modern man caught between logical irrationality and sane madness.
Flags Unfurled marks Ruth Margraff's return to these pages. Since her first appearance, in true Foremanesque style, Margraff has become a part of the growing school of independent play making. Ruth has been involved with the production, direction, acting as well as writing of her plays. Flags Unfurled is the genesis of her body of biblical westerns that Margraff envisions performed in the "Best Western motels across America." In a rich, thematic layering of the virgin birth and the American bicentennial, Margraff paints a disturbing picture of contemporary society.
The Undiapered Filefish is also Gale Nelson's encore. A frolic with words, underneath this linguistic caper lies a plot. But in true Stendahlian fashion, the words don't reveal, but obfuscate, serving only as a disguise in this language driven gambol. In the spirit of play, the audience must divine a play through the phonetic fog. Is it about filefish and rotten aristocracy, plotting thieves or poets blinded by their own muse? Or does the loquacious tone spotlight "the mouth caving in from lives and dexterity?" Only the words know; only the words live on.
And the words of these writers will live on. They will survive, grow and flourish. They are a living tribute to the invincible artistic and innovative spirits that, despite the gloom of a late 20th century American Babbit-minded culture, are persistent as the sun.