Falling Into a Deep Trance With Foreman's Latest

Playwright and director Richard Foreman is celebrating two birthdays this year—his own 70th, and the 40th of his brainchild, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

The Ontological-Hysteric Theater is housed in St. Mark’s Church in the West Village, and has been home to at least one of Foreman’s eccentric and experimental productions each year since 1968. This year’s piece, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, captures Foreman’s perpetual need to push boundaries while maintaining the fractured imagery, dialogue, and otherworldly sets that characterize much of his work.

“Up until now, I thought theater was a real challenge because if you’re going to write a poem, you could use words and sort of go wherever you want, if you’re going to do a painting, same thing,” Foreman explained. “But if you have to combine them all in 3-D concrete space, it’s harder to be abstract or whatever I want to be. I think in theater more than other mediums, and that was a challenge, and I’ve always been energized by the challenge.”

Yet it now seems that the challenge of the stage alone is not enough. In Deep Trance Behavior and in his other plays over the past few years, Foreman has begun to stretch the limits of his medium by incorporating film into his theatrical productions.
Appropriately, then, the central feature of the set of Deep Trance Behavior is a large double screen on which identical films play throughout the 70-minute stage production. Film clips taken from various locations in New York, Japan, and England help to construct the atmosphere of isolation, estrangement, and fragmentation that typifies the show.
Foreman’s stage design is a major means by which he establishes a theatrical atmosphere that is appropriate for the experimental nature of his work. The stage is divided into two asymmetrical halves, each of which contains a grand piano, a dish cupboard, and a well, among other miscellaneous items. They are arranged at irregular angles and positioned illogically, giving the impression that the world of the stage is exempt from the laws of gravity and scale that govern reality.

The overall effect is something like a nightmarish hallucination. Sporadic flashes of light, jarring noises, and the occasional scream interrupt the automatic motions of the zombie-like, pill-popping actors. But this seems to be the effect Foreman is going for, not only in this play, but also in his entire oeuvre. He works through a unique process of writing pages of unrelated material, and then piecing together ideas into a more cohesive work later on.

“It’s getting a little more radical now in that I collage my plays less around recognizable themes than before,” Foreman said. “But it’s making a collage out of all the different elements—light, music, movement.”

Despite how easy it is to be drawn in by the striking aesthetic effects of the production, it’s difficult to overlook the social critiques and thematic continuities present throughout. First off, “potatoland” itself is an intriguing yet problematic concept, particularly in that there is no mention made of it throughout the play.
Foreman explains that in some ways the term “potatoland” is a marketing strategy. It spices up the title, which started out simply as Deep Trance Behavior, and it references his 1975 success, Rhoda in Potatoland.
“When I make plays, I try to be as pure as possible following my aesthetic instinct,” he said. “But when it comes time to try to get people into a theater I’ll do anything, I’ll be crass and stupid... It was a purely commercial sort of choice.”
That’s not to say that “potatoland” is an entirely frivolous addition to the title. It also serves as a social critique. “We’re all potatoes. I mean there’s a relationship between our flesh and the flesh of plants, and of potatoes. Potatoes above all,” he added, citing the cliché of the couch potato.

Among other criticisms is Foreman’s choice of film footage. The clips give unflattering portrayals of New York, but echo Foreman’s personal sentiment towards the city.
“I’ve always had great ambivalence about New York, and about America frankly,” he explained. But rather than move to Paris in the 1980s—the place where he had done most of his work for over a decade—Foreman chose to remain. “I realized that, well, I’m an American. And though there are lots of things about America I don’t like, America is where I’ll have to fight my battles.”

It was this realization that allowed the Ontological-Hysteric Theater to remain in New York, where it was born in 1968, and where it found a new home at St. Mark’s in 1992. While Foreman now branches exclusively into film productions, he plans to maintain his connection to the theater through a new opera he is working on with composer John Zorn.

In writing about his current work, Foreman describes his yearning to push his medium further in terms that echo the otherworldliness of his theatrical productions. “[It’s] the laboratory-like work that obsesses me, luring me deeper and deeper into the particular truths I feel driven to explore.”