The Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street in 1965.

UPDATE (14 January): Off-off-Broadway veteran Robert Patrick has generously and kindly provided several links to material about the Caffe Cino and Ellen Stewart here.

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Alison Croggon’s comment on a post earlier this week has led me to some thoughts on evolution and comparison — particularly that of the alternative theatre, and especially that of its word-based drama. Melbourne is far away,  but New York is not: let’s start in New York.

The evolution of post-war American performance art has been well-traced by Peggy Phelan, RoseLee Goldberg and Sally Banes, among others, but post-war alternative American drama has only recently been the focus of attention by theatre historians, and this focus has been limited to the years between 1958 (with the opening of Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino at 31 Cornelia Street in New York) to the early 1970s, when the initial burst of energy subsided and in American drama gave way to David Mamet and the first wave of Yale School of Drama playwrights like Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. Stephen J. Bottoms’ 2006 Playing Underground and David Crespy’s 2003 Off-Off-Broadway Explosion both concentrate on New York theatrical activity in the 1960s, and two books about Caffe Cino itself — Wendell Stone’s excellent Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway and Steve Susoyev and George Birimisa’s Return to the Caffe Cino, which also includes plays presented at the theatre — have recently appeared as well.

But these, as I say, have their limitations, and they are two-fold. First, as I mentioned above, they are chronologically limited to the two decades of off-off-Broadway theatre (really, 15 years)  between 1958 and 1972; second, they are secondary and not primary sources. In terms of written drama rather than performance, several anthologies of this work were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the best of which has been long out-of-print: The Off-Off-Broadway Book: The Plays, The People, The Theatre edited by Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman, published in 1972 by Bobbs-Merrill, was a huge collection of dozens of plays from Gertrude Stein to Ronald Tavel, Adrienne Kennedy and Sam Shepard, accompanied by an excellent introduction that listed and described both theatres that might be called traditional off-off-Broadway venues like the Caffe Cino, La MaMa and Theatre Genesis, as well as those that bridged the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway worlds like the Public Theater and the American Place Theatre. It was one of the books that accompanied me through my adolescence in the 1970s and made it seem as if a life in the American theatre, away from Broadway, was possible.

By the time I got to college in 1979 this first wave was over — the spirit of the off-off-Broadway theatre (if one can use the word “spirit”), along with its economics, ambition and iconoclasm, continued to evolve over the next few decades; now it is reflected in the Fringe festivals and more generally in what is being called the “indie theatre” or “fringe theatre” movements. But along with this original spirit of the 1960s was an effort to de-commercialize and de-institutionalize the drama and the theatre, and in tracing this evolution through the 1980s and 1990s one needs to avoid any idea of a “golden era” and carefully look at the continuing dynamics of the project. This theatre did not enter a period of hibernation between 1973 and the first New York Fringe Festival of 1997. But it did continue, and the bridge between these periods was composed of RATs.

Whether RAT signifies “Regional Alternative Theatre” or “Radical Alternative Theatre” may depend on whom you ask; the Web site for the project itself is still online here and specifies “Regional Alternative Theatre” and perhaps we’d best leave it at that for now. The brainchild of playwright Erik Ehn and several other alternative theatre artists (including the Thieves Theatre’s Nick Fracaro and Gabriele Schafer, with whom I had the pleasure of working recently), it was a plan to disseminate information about alternative theatres in both New York and other regions across the country as well as foster a spirit of collaboration. Ehn proposed the collaborative effort in a 1993 article for Yale University’s Theater magazine, “A Proposal and an Alarum Towards Big Cheap Theater,” in which he clearly repudiated both the marketplace and the institution as healthy arenas for the production of alternative art.

But in the four years between Ehn’s article, the first RAT conferences and the establishment of the New York Fringe Festival, a great deal happened both to undermine the RAT project, contradicting its original intent, and ironically center alternative theatre once again in New York, as well as commercialize and institutionalize its practice. The controversy surrounding the relationship of RAT and the Fringe Festival was, in fact, one of the springboards for the career of David Cote, now theatre editor of Time Out New York; his 1997 essay for his self-published OFF periodical is available here.

Any study of the evolution of independent, alternative theatre in New York must take these, too, as primary documents. As Karl Marx was one of the first to point out, there is an intimate relationship between the means of production, what is produced and those who produce it, and this is just as true in theatre as in any other cultural activity. What has happened in the years since the end of the RAT project and the beginning of the Fringe festivals has been a process of re-commercialization and re-institutionalization — of the branding of an art form, whether it’s “indie theatre,” “alternative theatre,” “fringe theatre” or indeed “off-off-Broadway theatre” — and, according to Marx (as well as Adorno), this has had to have had an effect on the kinds of plays being written and productions being staged under those rubrics. And one must ask whether it’s to the art of theatre itself, or to an institution or even an individual professional career, to which any of these participants are contributing.

This is the subject of a book, not a blog post, or even a series of blog posts. For in this evolution there must also be considered the relationship between off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway (never a cozy or comfortable one, though an essential facet of the discussion: it took only six years for Sam Shepard to make it from Theater Genesis with 1964′s Cowboys to Lincoln Center with 1970′s Operation: Sidewinder; he even made it to Broadway a year later, if you count the scene from The Rock Garden that appeared in Oh! Calcutta!); the role of “outsiders” who are somehow simultaneously “inside” (in this respect, it would be worth considering Edward Albee’s influential role not only as a playwright but also a producer); the role that service organizations such as the Theatre Communications Group, founded in 1961, have played in institutional support of new work; the rise of professional dramatic writing and criticism degree programs in higher education; even the hairy question of 501(c)(3) non-profit status for production companies. And, finally, the question implied in my first paragraph: the aesthetic relationship between “performance art” and traditional text-based drama, a relationship that may be personified in Richard Foreman, certainly one of the most influential theatre artists of the past half-century, if not the most influential, who continues to identify himself as a playwright and permit, as traditional playwrights always have, other directorial interpretations of his original texts.

In surveying the current landscape of alternative American drama and remembering the plays I read in the 1973 Off-Off-Broadway Book, I am, as I so frequently am, reminded that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. A mashup of popular culture and classical theatre? Hello, Tom Eyen. A realistic depiction of the struggles of homosexuals in a primarily heterosexual culture? Robert Patrick, nice to meet you. Absurdism and taboo-resistant, frenetic activity? Ronald Tavel’s extraordinarily over-sexed Gorilla Queen, there you are. (And adaptations of comic books? Yes, at the Caffe Cino, almost 50 years ago. Take that, Julie Taymor and Brick Theater.) Not to mention Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom are represented in the anthology. I’m encouraged to look at the evolution of this history not only to see how far we’ve come, but also how little we’ve progressed in the absence of a historical consciousness of the evolution of alternative drama and theatre in New York — and what its evolutionary branding and recommercialization may mean for its future.