LAVA

by

Richard Foreman

Lava was produced on December 5th 1989 at the Performing

Garage by the Wooster Group and the Ontological-Hysteric
Theater
Production Team
Writer / Director / Designer
Lights
Sound Design
Properties
Technical Director
Assistant Director
.Richard Foreman
.Heather Carson
.Tim Schellenbaum
Performers
.Heidi Tradewell
Neil
Bradley, Matthew Courtney,
.Mike
Taylor Peter Davis, Kyle deCamp, Heidi Tradewell
and Richard
Foreman as the Voice
.David
Herskovits

The Performing Garage

Off-off-Broadway theater in SoHo, NYC
Founded in 1968 & the permanent home of the Wooster
Group
Hosts an annual Emerging Artist Series since 1978
Launched the careers of actors such as Willem Dafoe and
Spalding Gray

Richard Foreman
Born in New York on June 10th 1937

Received an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of

Drama

Foreman is known as a pioneer of postmodern theater

prior to the coining of the term

Richard Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968

Meaning of Name
Ontology: The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of
being.
Ontological-Hysteric: The Nature of Being Hysteric
Kenneth Bernard:
a is Foremans hot outpouring of what has obsessed him for many years, each
fferent squirming. He is hysterical. He seeks to infect us with his hysteria by mea
eal stage, his asymmetry, his sudden loud music and buzzers and bells, his subv
ur false contrivances of reality (plot, character, cause and effect, grammar).
Foreman uses conventions of traditional narrative theater in
non-traditional
ways. statement:
Excerpt
from OHTs mission
The OHT seeks to produce works that balance a primitive and minimal style
with extremely
complex and theatrical themes. ... Foremans trademark "total theater
unites elements of the
performative, auditory and visual arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and
literature for a unique
result. ... He seeks to make work that unsettles and disorients received

LAVA

In Foremans own words from his book,

Unbalancing Acts:
Lava is like a series of staged essays, several contradictory approaches to the
same problem:
why can language never adequately express the true and complex quality of
an internal impulse?
Lava is threaded with contradictory logic,
essentially inhibiting the audience from deriving
meaning from the play in a rational manner.
Postmodern drama follows Beckett in dramatizing the Derridean notion of
the infinite play of signifiers through a refusal of narrative closure, an idea
which often finds expression in its tendency to embrace contradictions
instead of resolving them.
Foreman argues that language should not be used primarily for its
referential purposes because referentiality itself stands deeply
problematized.
-Mufti Mudasir, The Criterion
Richard Foreman on voice and language:
tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7sC80l5Rco&t=4m35s
Language in Lava
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=4m2

LAVA

e signature Foreman touches---the herky-jerky movements, the monotone speec

mniscient narrator, and the pounding use of acoustics
-Hoyt Hils

ange objects (and bizarre looking characters) are firmly fixed in place, but the
nnection among them is in the eye of the beholder.
-Mel Gussow

Categories and Connections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=20m11s

Kenneth Bernard on Lava:

Foreman, a postmodernist before that terms currencyfeels far too
deeply the awful mess of being human to be really hopeful.
Those who did not see Richard Foremans Lava at the Performing
Garage missed an unusual opportunity to see his work through a glass
clearly, a philosophic pronunciamento. As his theaters title (OntologicalHysteric) has always implied, Foreman has always more or less
dramatized the anxiety of being.

Category 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=42m20s
Richard Foreman, from The New Yorker:

There are writers who despair that a gap exists between the self and
the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity--its an ecstatic field rather than
a field of despair Its the unfathomable from which everything pours
forth.
erything in this life is either a black hole or a mirror. Neither tells us anything tru
-Kenneth Berna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE&t=6m5s

Works Cited

Als, Hilton. "Talk Talk." The New Yorker. N.p., 16 Nov. 2009. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/talk-talk-2>.

Davy, Kate. Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. Ann Arbor: UMI

Research Press, 1979. N. pag. Print.

Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. 308-64. Print.

Gussow, Mel. "Review/Theater; On A Feather-Strewn Stage, Multiple Flights of Fancy."

The New York Times. N.p., Dec. 1989. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/13/theater/review-theater-on-a-feather-strewn

stage-multiple-flights-of-fancy.html>.

Hilsman, Hoyt. "Lava/Breath." Backstage.com. N.p., 29 Aug. 2001. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.backstage.com/review/lavabreath_2/>.

Lava. YouTube, 1989. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrwqIA9dgE>.

Rabkin, Gerald, ed. Richard Foreman. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999.

98-99. Print.

Richard Foreman Interview. YouTube. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7sC80l5Rco>.