Inintiating the Q&A with Richard Foreman after the Tuesday, March 4th performance of Foreman’s Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land, New York Times critic, George Hunka said, “I have a problem with Richard Foreman’s plays.” Hunka qualified this statement by saying that while he always created a narrative for himself when experiencing Foreman’s works, he never felt that such a narrative was given, or determined by the director himself.

Hunka’s comment (albeit paraphrased) is strange, and clearly the comment of a devil’s advocate, insofar as Foreman’s Ontological Hysterical Theater has always complicated action-driven narrative theater in order to deal with theatrical forms, effects and texts. As the Ontological Hysterical Theater’s name suggests, Foreman’s theater is a theater of ideas, of “onto-” and not “psycho-” drama. That Foreman would eschew psychology for ontology gives me hope for contemporary theater, and also makes me bitter that ontological theater is not better supported by our current cultural economy, which tends to privilege narrative over experience, psychology over ontology, character over type or gesture, and cause over effect. Such is the burden of the twin legacies of method-acting and Aristotlean catharsis, a climate that hasn’t ceased to persist, despite the ongoing influences of Beckett, Brecht, Artaud and, more recently, Foreman in contemporary performance.

I have only seen two Foreman productions since moving to NYC two years ago, but both attest to the exigency of ontological hysterical theater. At last year’s Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, I was struck by how Foreman was doing everything he could to overcome typical theatrical devices and trappings. Sight lines (those perspective lines that provide the illusion of vanishing points in and on a stage) were hung deliberately across the audience’s line of sight, literally cutting through the audience’s perception of the stage, as well as directing the eyes to arbitrary perspectives (many of the lines led to vantages across the walls of the theater and upon the stage). Likewise, a clear, plexiglass wall stood before the audience, mediating a fourth wall so that the audience was reflected in it—a moment of “theory” (what can be seen through speculation, and thus reflection). As a friend more versed in the theater put it, these sight lines allegorize the lines of the Fates being cut, severing an audience’s ties with an ancient theater of fatal actions and visual identification. Following Brecht’s aesthetics, Foreman’s theater not only interrupts the audience’s identification with characters, but also with naturalistic environments.