Ellen Stewart La Mama of Us

MTDR190_11311_ch02 4/26/06 3:24 PM Page 12 Ellen Stewart La Mama of Us All Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/50/2 (190)/12/1821778/dram.2006.50.2.12.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 1. Ellen Stewart with playwrights Leonard Melfi, Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, and Kevin O’Connor at Brandeis University, 1967. (Courtesy of Ellen Stewart/The La Mama Archive) Cindy Rosenthal Cindy Rosenthal is Associate Professor at Hofstra University where she teaches theatre, performance, and women’s studies. She is coeditor, with James Harding, of Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and Their Legacies (University of Michigan Press, 2006). She has contributed two articles on NYC community gardeners’ activist performances to TDR; her work is also published in Women and Performance, Theatre Journal, and Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1998). 12 MTDR190_11311_ch02 4/26/06 3:24 PM Page 13 You let yourself become one of them and you use whatever skills you have to enhance what they have, what they do. This is my philosophy. Nobody tells me anything. —Ellen Stewart, 30 June 2003 Where to Begin? 30 September 2004, City University of New York Ellen Stewart, “La Mama,” founder/director of the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, was honored at a symposium celebrating Off and Off-Off Broadway at the Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY. Stewart was accom- panied by La Mama “baby” performer/director/playwright Paul Zimet, who first worked at La Mama when the Open Theater performed there in 1967. Zimet begins by ringing the bell (laughter in the auditorium). If you’ve seen a show or two at La Mama at any time in the past 45 years, you probably recognize the bell. This is Stewart’s trademark and an impor- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/50/2 (190)/12/1821778/dram.2006.50.2.12.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 tant La Mama ritual. Before most performances—and there have been over 2,000 at her theatres since 1961—Stewart rings the bell, welcoming spectators into her performance space, transforming the disparate spectators into an audience: I’m glad you’re here. Pay attention. The magic is about to begin. STEWART: It’s not voodoo. It’s what I get from a person. This ( pointing to Zimet) is one of my kids. I’ve told him from the first he was a great artist. Who or what are La Mama’s “kids?” “They’re everybody here,” says Stewart, who meets with me in her apartment, up the four flights of stairs from the entrance of her theatre complex. “They’re the ones who will follow me, the ones who stay.” ZIMET: “Nurtured” is the most appropriate word to describe how it is, working at La Mama. I think of Ellen as family as well. She scolds me, she pushes me, she worries about me. Ellen sweeps her stage and the sidewalk outside her theatre because she has such respect for her artists, for her audience, for her theatre. She brought work from over 70 countries to La Mama. Particularly in this climate, where people are so fearful, she has created a world culture. We desperately need this now. This year, 2006, marks the 45th anniversary of the opening of Ellen Stewart’s first theatre in New York’s East Village. Stewart began with a tiny basement space on East Ninth Street in October 1961. The rent was $55 a month. Over the next 10 years the burgeoning alternative theatre scene coalesced around Stewart and her performance spaces. Stewart and playwright Paul Foster remem- ber that one of Stewart’s friends, Robert Paulson, came up with “La Mama” as a name for the theatre, instead of just “Mama,” which was what Stewart’s friends called her. And so, from then on, each and every one of Stewart’s theatres became known as “La Mama.”1 Practically anyone who is anyone in downtown theatre and performance cut their teeth at La Mama, including many performers, composers, and writers who no longer work in alternative theatre. Harold Pinter, Philip Glass, Robert de Niro, Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, Andre De Shields, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Wallace Shawn, and Nick Nolte are a few of the artists who performed or had their work performed there during La Mama’s first two decades. Along with Joe Cino of Caffe Cino and Al Carmines of Judson Poets’ Theater, Stewart is credited with founding Off-Off Broadway,2 giving a home to American playwrights, directors, and performers who could not get their work produced elsewhere. These included radical collectives such as the Open Theater (Viet Rock, 1966); director Tom O’Horgan 1. See the La Mama website for information on current performances and the online archive, which includes a list of all performances from 1961 to the present <http://www.lamama.org/>. 2. References to Stewart, Cino, and Carmines as founders and originators of Off-Off Broadway can be found in The Off- Ellen Stewart Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre, edited by Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman (1972:xii), and in David A. Crespy’s Off-Off Broadway Explosion (2003:67). TDR: The Drama Review 50:2 (T190) Summer 2006. © 2006 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 13 MTDR190_11311_ch02 4/26/06 3:24 PM Page 14 (whose production of Hair, 1968, was a big Broadway hit and a signature of “the sixties”); and playwrights Harvey Fier- stein (International Stud, 1978; Safe Sex, 1987), Adrienne Kennedy (Rat’s Mass, 1969), and Rochelle Owens (Futz, 1967). Today Stewart owns buildings on East Fourth Street, East 1st Street, and a couple of blocks away on Great Jones Street. Her theatres have consistently been the mainstay of experimental and alternative theatre in downtown New York City. La Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/50/2 (190)/12/1821778/dram.2006.50.2.12.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Mama is the only surviving theatre of the four main venues of Off-Off Broadway (Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, and Jud- son Poets’ Theatre were the others).3 But Stewart’s impact and her real es- tate holdings extend far beyond the bor- ders of the East Village. She was one of the first to recognize the importance of international cultural exchange. So, while she created theatres that supported American artists in downtown New York City, she also extended her network to include artists from abroad, making it possible for performers, directors, musi- cians, choreographers, and playwrights 2. Publicity poster for the Open Theatre’s Ensemble from Western and Eastern Europe, Latin Improvisation, directed by Joseph Chaikin and Peter America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Feldman, poster designed by Ken Burgess, 1965. and Southeast Asia to present their work (Courtesy of Ellen Stewart/The La Mama Archive) at her NYC theatres. Among this group are Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Ohno Kazuo (one of the first butoh artists to perform in this country, in 1981), and Tadeuz Kantor. At the same time, Stewart began to establish connections for her American artists, helping to get their work presented at La Mama “satellites.” The first of these kicked off in 1964, when La Mama Bogota opened with Paul Foster’s Hurray for the Bridge. Israeli playwright/director Mark Sadan worked at La Mama in 1963; in 1970 Stewart helped found La Mama Tel Aviv. Rina Yerushalmi, who worked at La Mama throughout the 1970s and ’80s, later became La Mama Tel Aviv’s Artistic Director. These “La Mama–affiliated” theatres, as Stewart calls them, sprang up across the globe, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, Singapore, Belgrade, Prague, Serbia, Lebanon, Morocco, the Philip- pines, South Korea, and Uganda. Currently only a few theatres carry the La Mama name above their titles; besides La Mama Bogota and La Mama Tel Aviv, there are La Mama Melbourne, founded in 1967, and La Mama Umbria, an artists’ retreat and cultural center Stewart established in 1990. La Mama Tokyo, a jazz club in Shibuya, was started by a musician who worked with the Tokyo Kid Brothers, an experimental troupe that performed at La Mama in New York between 1970 and 1981. In addition to all this, Stewart has produced groundbreaking (sometimes literally) site-specific works around the world. To list just some of these: in 1972, the Andrei Serban–Liz Swados Medea played at ruins in Baalbek, Lebanon; Stewart directed Romeo and Juliet on the grounds of Leopold- 3. See Stephen J. Bottoms’s Playing Underground (2004) for an excellent overview on the artists and the theatres of this Cindy Rosenthal period. 14 MTDR190_11311_ch02 4/26/06 3:24 PM Page 15 skron Castle in Salzburg, Austria, in 1981; a year later she re-created R&J with a different cast outside two castles and on the streets of Montenegro, Uruguay; and much more recently, in 2004, Stewart staged Trojan Women at the ruins in Gardzienice, Poland. Company members constructed pathways, staircases, platforms, and bridges among trees, on rocky cliffs, and in archeological sites to mount these and other works. Productions produced or directed by Stewart in the 1970s drew on many cultures, combining Native American chants and drumming, Bulgarian har- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/dram/article-pdf/50/2 (190)/12/1821778/dram.2006.50.2.12.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 monies, and elements of kathakali dance long before terms such as “cultural collage” and “multicultural,” “intercultural” and “transcultural” were the subjects of academic conferences and performance studies courses.

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