Richard Foreman (1937–2025)

Richard Foreman (June 10, 1937–January 4, 2025) was an American playwright, director, filmmaker, theorist, and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, one of the central figures in American experimental theater. Born Edward L. Friedman in New York City and adopted as Richard Foreman, he received his B.A. from Brown University in 1959 and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1962. Brown awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1993.

In 1968 Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, through which he developed the radically distinctive theatrical practice that occupied him for more than four decades. His productions combined language, elaborate visual environments, recorded speech, music and noise, projections, interruption, and deliberately non-naturalistic performance. Gertrude Stein and Berthold Brecht offer important precedents for Foreman’s conception of writing and consciousness, while his early engagement with the downtown New York avant-garde brought him into close contact with Jonas Mekas, George Maciunas, Jack Smith, Robert Wilson, and Richard Schechner.  

Foreman wrote, directed, and designed more than fifty of his own plays. Major works include Angelface, Sophia=(Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs, Pain(t), Penguin Touquet, The Cure, Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, Symphony of Rats, Eddie Goes to Poetry City, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, Permanent Brain Damage, Paradise Hotel, Bad Boy Nietzsche, Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty, The Gods Are Pounding My Head!, Zomboid!, Idiot Savant, and Old-Fashioned Prostitutes. His final play, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, appeared in New York in 2024. In 2006, Foreman collaborated with composer Michael Gordon on the post-rock opera What to wear, for which Foreman provided the direction, libretto, and production; twenty years later, the work received its New York debut at BAM in January 2026, in a reconstruction of Foreman’s original staging by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar.
Foreman also worked extensively beyond his own theater. His plays were co-produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, La MaMa, the Wooster Group, Festival d’Automne in Paris, and the Vienna Festival. He collaborated with composer Stanley Silverman on eight music-theater works and directed productions of Brecht, Molière, Gertrude Stein, Václav Havel, Kathy Acker, Suzan-Lori Parks, Philip Glass, and others. His filmmaking extended from Strong Medicine (1978) to Once Every Day (2012), Now You See It Now You Don’t (2017), and Mad Love (2018).

Foreman received seven Obie Awards, including three for Best Play and one for Lifetime Achievement, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in Theater, the PEN/Laura Pels Master American Playwright Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2004 he was named an Officer of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. His papers and working materials are held by the Fales Library at New York University.

Foreman’s books include Plays and Manifestos, Reverberation Machines, Love and Science, Unbalancing Acts, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, No-Body, Paradise Hotel and Other Plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche! and Other Plays, Manifestos and Essays, Plays with Films, and Plays for the Public. A growing digital archive of his writings, plays, interviews, photographs, and related materials is available at the Richard Foreman Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) page, including a free digital edition of Plays and Manifestos.The Richard Foreman PennSound archive presents an extensive audiovisual record of his work, including readings, conversations, films, interviews, and recordings and excerpts from Ontological-Hysteric Theater productions spanning several decades.