INTERVIEW

Questions for...
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman’s latest play, “Wake up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!” begins with
the wire-haired director personally addressing the crowd: “Relax! Don’t work overly hard trying to understand.”
Foreman’s mind-bending experimental theater has been challenging conventions since its founding in 1968.
Now, he’s traveling the world, lecturing and filming video to use in his live performances.
Foreman turns 70 this year, and as he tells the Resident he’s just getting started.

You’ve said that your theater tries to be open-ended,
like other media. What do you mean by that?
RF: Originally I used to justify making theater … I thought theater
was the hardest, because there’s an advantage if you write a poem you
just have words and the imagination has to deal with all kinds of other
things that are absent. In painting you’re absent movement and three
dimensions, and your imagination or some faculty fills in. Theater gives
you everything. To try to generate the same kind of participant imagina-
tion in the person confronting the work of art is a big challenge to me.
The new play proposes the loss of unconscious
thought; do you feel that the Internet is a contributing
factor?
RF: Yes. Yes I do. Because I think that the Web, everything is imme-
diately at hand, so we no longer carry a lot of things inside of ourselves.
We no longer have those kind of 19th- or 18th-century figures who built
themselves like great cathedrals, like a Goethe or a Melville, take your
pick. Now, you don’t have to learn a lot of stuff, because I want to find
out about so-and-so, I go to the Web, I find a surface discussion that pro-
vides surface information about so-and-so, and I jump around in that
way. And I do think that that does make us shallower people.
How much of those notebooks make it to the stage?
RF: Maybe one percent.
What do you think about the state of theater today?
RF: Everybody knows that I don’t go to the theater, and basically, I
don’t like theater very much. So it’s kind of perverse and strange that
I’m still making it. I saw so much from the time I was 13 ‘til the time
I was 36, I saw absolutely everything. And I still see things, very infre-
quently, two or three plays a year. But other things interest me much
more: painting, film, music, literature, philosophy. That’s where I get all
my inspiration.
For someone who has such a love-hate relationship
with the medium, how do you think you’re able to
produce so much work?
RF: You tell me, I don’t know! I need the contact with people. I tend
to be a hermit, so I realized I need those months every year that I go
and engage with people and work with people and that’s important to
keep me healthy.
—Heather Corcoran

You keep your notebooks online,

how do they relate to the way you
create a play?
RF: It’s been many years since I tried to
write a play from beginning to end. At a cer-
tain point I realized, “Hey, I make all these
false starts, I have all these things that pop
into my head, I’ll just put them all down.”
And then I try to collage up a play. I look
for a page that interests me; I look for a page
that seems it could go along well with that. I
skimp the surface of things, as it were, skim
the surface of all these jottings that I have
made to find something that musically, again,
seems to hang together. It’s almost like find-
ing a theme or variations in jazz. It’s almost
like riffing.

14 • Resident The Week Of February 12, 2007