Richard Foreman, Dean of the Off-Off-Broadway Avant-Garde, Dies at 87

Richard Foreman, the iconoclastic dean of the New York City avant-garde theater scene, has died at the age of 87 from complications of pneumonia.

Working right up to his passing, Foreman’s latest play, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, premiered in December 2024 at La MaMa, in a production by the Brooklyn-based theater company Object Collection. They, like many other theater artists, got their start in Foreman’s legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

In looking at Foreman’s career through the lens of Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, our chief critic said last month, “More than any living writer-director, Foreman has been able to create an onstage world that feels completely alien to the one we inhabit, offering audiences a window into a different plane of existence.”

Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968 and presented more than 50 of his plays. Elephant Steps marked his first Obie Award win in 1970; he’d go on to win for The Cure and Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good in 1987 and Pearls for Pigs and Benita Canova in 1998. His other plays include Symphony of Rats, Dream Tantras for Western Massachusetts, Bad Boy Nietzsche!, King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!, Idiot Savant, which starred Willem Dafoe, and Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, among many others. Foreman’s booming, disembodied voice was often heard guiding the actors through the often plotless, nonlinear works.

He was also a highly regarded director of works that didn’t originate with him. Among Foreman’s notable productions are Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, starring Raul Julia and Ellen Green, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, Molière’s Don Juan at the Guthrie, and operas including Die Fledermaus and Don Giovanni.

Foreman’s only immediate survivor is the artist Kate Manheim, whom he married in 1988.