Category Archives: Theatre of Revolt

From the archives: Revolting

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About a year ago I published the below notes on theatre and revolution; I take this opportunity as well to recommend the new edition of Georg Büchner’s work from W.W. Norton, published in April 2012 and likely to become the standard source. Along with the texts of all of Büchner’s major drama and prose, it also includes an excellent selection of primary and secondary source material with commentary from Bertolt Brecht, John Houseman, Thomas Bernhard, and Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as the texts of four Georg Büchner Prize talks by Paul Celan, Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, and Durs Grünbein. At $15.00, it’s easy to recommend.

Occupy Wall Street protestors march up Wall Street towards the New York Stock Exchange on 26 September. Photo: AP Photo/Louis Lanzano.

UPDATE, 21 October: If you’re coming here by way of the Guardian, you may wish to access the eight posts via this convenient list:

The introduction follows below.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors have now issued a laundry list of grievances and demands (this just before 700 of them were arrested trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge by foot yesterday, according to the Web site maintained by the group). It is clear that the action is not yet over, but it is by no means clear what the future will bring. My own personal reaction to all this aside, the occupation does have obvious parallels with 1960s actions like the Pentagon protest of 1967 — I’m old enough to remember some of the coverage of these protests, but reaching a conclusion about the efficacy of these protests is impossible. So one will wait and see.

My own bailiwick is drama and the theatre, and one of the essential critical documents of the 1960s theatre is Robert Brustein’s The Theatre of Revolt, published in 1964 by Little, Brown & Company, back when major publishing houses thought that such things as idiosyncratic general surveys of modern world drama deserved dissemination among a general readership. At the time of its publication, Brustein was an academic, just a few years away from founding the Yale Repertory Theatre, which in the 1960s and 1970s was among the most provocative university theatres in the United States; his stewardship of this theatre paralleled a dynamic period of public revolt on university campuses and in the urban streets. [1] The Theatre of Revolt itself is a document of criticism and not as much a political meditation as Brustein’s later books such as Revolution as Theatre: Notes on the New Radical Style (1971). And it bears re-reading, even now.

But the discourse underlying contemporary public protest has changed. And because theatre and drama can be forms of contemporary public protest themselves, this discourse is of considerable interest. Some books, such as Dan Rebellato’s Theatre and Globalization, have rigorously examined at least some of the outlines of this discourse. At 112 pages, though, this book must describe wider outlines of the concern rather than individual dramatists.

Unlike Brustein’s 1964 book. “The purposes of this book are threefold,” he wrote in the foreword: “To examine the development of a single consuming idea or attitude in eight modern playwrights; to analyze the work of these writers in depth; and to suggest an approach to modern drama as a whole.” Most of the eight playwrights that Brustein selects — Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Genet (along with Artaud) — flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a theatre culture which by 1964 had largely disappeared. Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov revolted against a stultified Victorian-era drawing room realism; Shaw, Brecht and Pirandello against Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov; O’Neill against the ameliorist American stage; and Genet against just about everything. This is a vast oversimplification, but a useful one in following Brustein’s argument. In the first chapter of the book, Brustein traces the source of this revolt to the Romantic period, spiced significantly by Nietzsche’s philosophy. This neo-Romantic revolution placed the individual rebel at the center of the stage during a period of catastrophe. “If the theatre of communion climaxes with a sense of spiritual disintegration, the theatre of revolt begins with this sense, inheriting from the Western tradition a continuity of decay in an advanced stage,” Brustein writes. “Similarly, if the theatre of communion incorporated fearful visions and agonizing prophecies, these have all been realized in the theatre of revolt. Lear’s eloquent madness has degenerated into the insane babbling of Ibsen’s Oswald; Leontes’s momentary jealousy has become the pathological obsession of Strindberg’s Father … the melancholy of Hamlet quickens into the painful anguish of Pirandello and the black despair of O’Neill; Iago’s half-world becomes the whole world of Jean Genet. No and nothing and never — Lear’s repeated negatives — are now the modern dramatist’s vocabulary of refusal, as he labors to cast off his legacy of dissolution. … The theatre of revolt, then, is the temple of a priest without a God, without an orthodoxy, without even much of a congregation, who conducts his service within the hideous architecture of the absurd. … Instead of myths of communion, he offers myths of dispersal; instead of consoling sermons, painful demands; instead of a liturgy of acceptance, a liturgy of complaint.”  [2]

Brustein’s own neo-Romantic vocabulary still describes an alternative to contemporary theatre, which continues to offer myths of communion, consoling sermons, and liturgies of acceptance, at least on American stages. But The Theatre of Revolt emerged from a different period of history. If one were to describe a theoretical Theatre of Revolt now, it would require a different perspective, a different set of cultural and philosophical assumptions; a great deal of historical water has flowed under the bridge.

One of the things that is immediately clear is that the neo-Romantic individual rebel, standing and saying no to the corrupt world surrounding him, would not stand a chance because the very idea of the individual, and the efficacy of any revolutionary political action, is more problematic than ever before, and became so long before the Postmodernists wiped him from the map. While Romanticism validated the individual identity, Modernism dissected it (literally, in the case of Brecht’s Man Equals Man and more recently Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life). As the poetry of Pound and Eliot and the prose of Joyce exemplified, the individual is protean and fragmented, not integrated, and the deity of Nature in the urban environment is as absent as the deity of the personal God. Instead of the impersonal storm at sea, the individual faces the impersonal monolith of the city, self-aware that he is as much a product of it as an antagonist to it. Earlier, in his 1946 The Playwright as Thinker, Eric Bentley proposed that Ibsen and Wagner exemplified the two streams of modern drama in the late nineteenth-century, reacting to late Victorian culture in their work. But there the integrity of the individual was conceived as a certainty — now, that integrity is no longer an a priori given. (Indeed, the protestors at Zuccotti Park — renamed “Liberty Square” for the occupation — have assiduously attempted to prevent the rise of individual leaders of the movement and speak and act as a collective. It is the collective that operates, not the individuals in it.)

That was before the Modernist conception of man, influenced by the work of Marx and Freud even more than Nietzsche, infused theatre and drama with its ambivalent perspective on politics, social change, and the individual himself. The shaping of the personality by the forces of ownership and labor, as well as the irrationality that lay at the heart of human consciousness, invalidated the integrity of the individual consciousness even as it opened new possibilities for personal and social experience. The Romantic portrait of the individual rebel was shattered — it was left to Modernism to examine the shards, shards which were exhibited in The Waste Land, the Cantos and Ulysses (to say nothing of Finnegans Wake). By the time these works were published, however, several of Brustein’s dramatists were long dead, and a few more were dying. And the Second World War, with its Hiroshimas and Auschwitzes, extending the technological devastation of the First World War on a massive scale, were still to come.

The philosophical foundation for a contemporary Theatre of Revolt would also be different. The possibility of the emergence of a conceptual Nietzschean Übermensch has become ever more distant, and it is of particular interest that his philosophy plays a lesser role in contemporary drama than those of Marx (whom Brecht systematically studied early in his career), Schopenhauer (whom Beckett systematically studied early in his career), and Freud. The Wille zur Macht is an ambivalent chimera, a hopeless hope, in the context of mass media and mass culture which assimilates protest into Culture Industry titillation. Finally, it is this mass media and mass culture, disseminated through electronic media, that differentiates the period of Brustein’s criticism from that of the present day, accompanied by the rise of a post-industrial capitalism that has seen the alternative of socialism and communism fall by the wayside as a valid oppositional ideology.

If one were to rashly presume to reconceive Brustein’s seminal work fifty years later, which eight playwrights might stand as examples of this changed dramatic landscape? “I should declare that my selection was guided partly by principle, partly by prejudice,” Brustein says of his selection. “I believe these eight dramatists to be the finest, most enduring writers in the field; and I was determined not to include any playwright who would not be read fifty years hence.” I will take the same guidelines for my own selection, and keep the field, as Brustein does, to eight, even though in the end arguments could be made to limit the field to two, or widen it to twenty. It is an arbitrary number, but for the sake of consistency and parallelism, let it be eight. I will list them here in the coming days, with brief explanations for my selection; others would no doubt offer different dramatists with just as valid a claim to inclusion.

On the Internet, to borrow a phrase, of the making of lists there is no end. But I will resist the temptation to make this as foolish and ultimately useless a project as, say, Anthony Tommasini’s list of the Ten Greatest Composers of All Time — that’s cocktail-party talk masquerading as criticism. I make no claim that these are somehow the greatest, or the most influential, or the most important, only that they share traits that exhibit the sense of revolt that Brustein describes, but for our own time. I don’t mean to impugn Brustein’s criticism with the charge of archaism — in fact, many of the dramatists I’ve selected share most eloquently in that sense of “existential revolt” that Brustein describes as “the final phase” of his own thesis:

In the last stage of the modern drama, existential revolt, the dramatist examines the metaphysical life of man and protests against it; existence itself becomes the source of his rebellion. The drama of existential revolt is a mode of the utmost restriction, a cry of anguish over the insufferable state of being human. [3]

Indeed, I hope that I extend rather than contradict Brustein’s thesis. If I don’t have the time to write this book myself, it may anyway provide a useful path for others.

Footnotes
  1. Brustein wrote an excellent memoir of this period in 1981, Making Scenes, which along with Peter Hall’s Diaries details the politics and personalities involved in the making of a large institutional theatre like Yale’s or, indeed, London’s National Theatre. Both are worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the comparison of American and British theatre cultures and the means by which they are expressed in non-commercial theatre. [↩]
  2. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1964, p. 6. [↩]
  3. Brustein, p. 26. [↩]

Those left out

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Now that I’ve completed my list of eight dramatists for a new Theatre of Revolt, the only thing left is to acknowledge once again that this is a list compiled, like Robert Brustein’s,  “partly by principle, partly by prejudice.” Readers will agree with some of these entries and disagree with others, even upon the basis of the definitions I outlined in my introduction. There are many writers I could easily have included had I not limited myself to eight. I would have particularly liked to write about David Rudkin, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill, but I have not studied their work as intensively as these eight others. The lack of readily-available translated texts for writers in other European languages — and for writers on other continents than North America and Europe — as well as a lack of time to devote to this study have led, I am sure, to gaping holes which I invite others to fill. And then there are other dramatists quite celebrated both in America and elsewhere whom I have difficulty celebrating, partly from blindness and partly from considered opinion. I confess that I am not as enamored of Tony Kushner’s work as other critics and writers are — and this is a blind spot. Among other Americans, however, Wallace Shawn would much more readily have deserved a place in this list than David Mamet — and this is considered opinion. Also obviously, I have concentrated on dramatists, not directors or other theatre artists. In the main, this is because I based this project on the seemingly archaic presumption that the dramatist, the writer, is at the center of the theatrical enterprise. Others will disagree, and are welcome to, and to come up with their own lists if they’re so inclined.

For the record, and convenient reading, here are links to the introduction and to the entries on all eight dramatists:

Anybody taking this up as a book project will be daunted not only by Brustein’s considerable achievement but also by the realignment of concerns that the work of these eight dramatists describe. Among philosophers, Nietzsche was at the center of Brustein’s thinking. For these eight, Adorno and Bataille would perhaps serve as a more appropriate philosophical context. Clearly, it would be a ground-up effort. But as I stated in my introduction, I can do no more myself for the moment than suggest a starting point. Drawing a map, however, is the best place to begin, if you wish to get the lay of the land.

I should note that I am aware of the dangers that such a project suggests. I am certain that I could most probably be accused of the sin of popularization — in writing for a general audience, and in trying to fit these plays into a context of my own devising, I risk simplifying and distorting (however impossible it may be to avoid it) the work of these most complex writers for my own ends. I must plead nolo contendre, and only beg the mercy of the court, offering as my excuse my wish and fervent hope that these plays and writers do in fact become more popular — that their plays be produced more, that they be studied in the classroom, that they be read at home. It is perhaps a foolish dream, but one I’m willing to dream.

Sarah Kane

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Sarah Kane.

Only time will tell whether the extraordinarily small number of plays by Sarah Kane (1971-1999) will have as great an influence on drama as those of Georg Büchner. Certainly their influence on British drama over the past twenty years has far outstripped what might be expected from a slim volume of only 268 pages. But the unquestionable power of the plays, and their deconstruction of realism and naturalism in the service of a hallucinogenic version of a post-catastrophic world, derives from their emergence from contemporary history and the cri de coeur of the author, which necessarily foregoes a distancing irony for a more devastating coldness of perception.

Kane’s best-known and most controversial play is most probably her first, Blasted (1995), which was directly inspired by the war in Yugoslavia, a multicultural jerry-rigged nation which consumed itself in civil-war violence. It was Kane’s insight that disclosed that many of the same historical influences which led to this violence — and the same human capacity for the aggression and destruction one individual could wage upon another — were just as present in the streets of Leeds as they were in the streets of Srebrenica. The same influences led Kane to destroy the domestic drama of the late 20th century, blowing up a hotel room to reveal the empty city behind it.

The conclusion of Blasted suggests, however, a singular capacity for compassion and love, even in a landscape seemingly devoid of hope. What is even more surprising, in the work of this eighth and final dramatist of the new Theatre of Revolt, is that the depiction of physical acts of compassion and love can be just as extreme as those of aggression and violence. It is the human urge to the administrative state, to drive the rivers of desire and irrational love into rational and socially malleable forms, that ultimately cripples the self that explores meaning in love with another. Kane’s third play, Cleansed (1998), to my mind the best play of her career, relinquishes subtext and metaphor for a series of extraordinary stage images of the protean capacity of love, desire, and social control to transform the human body itself. The play is wryly set on a university campus; Tinker, a psychiatrist, performs a series of experiments on a small group of men and women to establish the outer boundaries of love and cruelty. Assuming that such a play can be staged at all naturalistically, it is the darkest and most violent contemplation of the human body at extremes; and when death is no salvation (a conclusion that Blasted reaches as well), the human urge to compassion and love acquires an extraordinary new significance.

Having followed her darkest perceptions of the outer world to their extremes, Kane necessarily turned inward for her final two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. It is as if Kane turned from the expression itself to the personal source of that expression. In these texts, gone is any reference to a specific place and time; no more hotel rooms or college campuses; these are voices echoing in a tortured, solitary mind, more reminiscent of the novels of Samuel Beckett (especially The Unnamable and How It Is) than any of his plays. What might be most disturbing about both of these plays is that they indicate an end of theatre and drama itself, the form and genre dissolving, the collaborative nature of theatre undermined in the fearless self-consciousness of the individual. The hostility and viciousness with which her work has been greeted demonstrate the validity of Brustein’s picture of the dramatist of the theatre of revolt as described in the first chapter of his book:

[I]magine a perfectly level plain in a desolate land. In the foreground, an uneasy crowd of citizens huddled together on the ruins of an ancient temple. Beyond them, a broken altar, bristling with artifacts. Beyond that, empty space. An emaciated priest in disreputable garments stand before the ruined altar, level with the crowd, glancing into a distorting mirror. He cavorts grotesquely before it, inspecting his own image in several outlandish postures. The crowd mutters ominously and partially disperses. The priest turns the mirror on those who remain to reflect them sitting stupidly on rubble. They gaze at their images for a moment, painfully transfixed; then, horror-struck, they turn away, hurling stones at the altar and angry imprecations at the priest. The priest, shaking with anger, futility, and irony, turns the mirror on the void. He is alone in the void. [1]

It may be asked, after Kane’s inimitable example of this theatre, what might the theatre and drama be left to do in the 21st century. Each dramatist — and each critic, and each theatregoer — must answer the question on his own.

The standard edition is Sarah Kane: Complete Plays from Methuen, with an introduction by David Greig. The extent to which Kane’s first play, Blasted, has been taken as her most important work (an opinion from which I dissent; see above) is indicated by the fact that there is already one monograph by Helen Iball on the play as well as a critical edition of Blasted by Ken Urban. There is as yet no formal life, but two books by Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes and About Kane, collect a great deal of material about both her life and career.

My own previous writings on Kane’s work can be found here.

Footnotes
  1. Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt, pp. 3-4. [↩]

Howard Barker

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Howard Barker. Photo: Victoria Wicks.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that Howard Barker (b. 1946) is the seventh of the eight dramatists that I am writing about as exemplars of a new Theatre of Revolt. The career of the extraordinarily prolific author, which began in 1970, traces a progression from the Royal Court tradition of politically savvy and satiric “state of the nation” plays to a darker meditation on the assumptions upon which both existence and politics rest. Barker has justified and reinvented the tragic form for the 21st century (though it must be said that he does not consider all of his plays “tragedies,” reserving the term only for specific works), and has drawn into this form a new eroticism that had been neglected, if not repudiated, by both Beckett and Brecht. If the “three Bs” of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — have gained honorifics as the outstanding figures of classical music, Brecht, Beckett, and Barker may be the three Bs of 20th century theatre.

The plays of the first decade of Barker’s career were mordant satires of neoliberalism; Barker foresaw to a great extent the rightward turn of Thatcherite England and Reaganite America, the seeds of which were laid in the suicidal compromises of socialist dreamers. Both socialism and capitalism played into the hands of ravenous powerbrokers; how much of this was a game of domination, submission, and ignorance only became clear in the next decade, when with plays like The Castle, The Europeans, and Victory he turned more to histories both imagined and documented to dig among the worms of the human spirit. At the same time Barker implicated both himself and his form in two plays about artists, No End of Blame and Scenes from an Execution, which explored the same kinds of compromise and efforts to maintain individual integrity and dignity. In all of these plays Barker suspected a darker erotics that provided the compulsions to both dominance and self-invention, and finally in 1988 he made a firm break with his earlier career upon the publication of Arguments for a Theatre and the formation of a theatre company devoted to his work, The Wrestling School. Its first production, The Last Supper, daringly parodied sacrifice and worship of a godhead, making a mockery of martyrs and acolytes both.

The plays that followed became both more vicious and more erotic; where his knife had been turned to politics, it was now turned more to the self, and the presentation of suffering — a central pillar of Barker’s conception of tragedy — invited the audience to locate both the potential for cruelty and the potential for passivity within their own individual consciences. In part, this required a reconception of the great masterpieces of dramatic literature that had preceded him, most importantly in (Uncle) Vanya, which undermined not Chekhov’s plays but their reception as calls to resignation in the eyes of 20th century critics and audiences (the distinction is quite important), and Gertrude — The Cry, perhaps his greatest play so far, in which the explosive loss of self in orgasm is provocatively suggested as a compulsion toward the events of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In all of these plays, Barker (like several of the other dramatists I’ve considered) puts the individual human body as fleshed, fragmented subject at the center of his project, in forms oscillating from neo-romanticism to neo-modernism; in this, and in his considerations of the master-servant relationship, Barker bears a surprising resemblance to one of Brustein’s revolutionary dramatists, August Strindberg, a study of which would probably reward students of both writers.

In recent years Barker’s work has become less and less classifiable. While he retains an incisive perspective upon the artist’s world (and — for Barker as for many of these writers — he radically considers all individuals artists, at least of their own lives and selves), he has also devoted time to meditative speculations in both large- and small-scale forms; he is currently engaged on a project called “Plethora and Bare Sufficiency,” which is testing the limitations and possibilities of theatre and drama in both epic (BLOK/EKO) and chamber-theatre (Dead Hands, Slowly) contexts. Sarah Kane said, “In a few hundred years Howard will be like Shakespeare. No one will really understand what Howard Barker’s done until he’s been dead for a long time.” But he remains with us, for now, and at least a few recognize his contribution to this century’s theatre of revolt.

Howard Barker’s plays can be found in two uniform editions. A five-volume set from John Calder is available, but more recently his plays have been appearing in a new uniform edition from Oberon Books; six volumes have been published so far, along with other single-title editions. The reader coming to his work for the first time is directed to the titles mentioned above for a sample. Barker’s two formal books of theory — Arguments for a Theatre and Death, The One and the Art of Theatre — and his peculiar memoir A Style and Its Origins are also essential.

The secondary literature on Howard Barker continues to grow, and possibly one day there will be some kind of Journal of Barker Studies to rival similar periodicals devoted to Beckett and Brecht. Until then, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume study (the most recent of which is linked here) of his plays through 2008 and Charles Lamb’s shorter but still indispensible The Theatre of Howard Barker are good starts, as is Howard Barker: Conversations in Catastrophe, a collection of interviews ranging through all of Barker’s career which was published this summer. My own writings on Barker are collected here.

Richard Foreman

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Richard Foreman. Photo: Paula Court.

One of the revolutions theorized in a new Theatre of Revolt must be a revolution not only in society or politics, but also in the realm of consciousness: in the perspective from which one sees the world and approaches the material from which one constructs it. Richard Foreman (b. 1937), in this sense, must be among most radical of the eight dramatists I’m considering here. Since 1968 and the foundation of his Ontological-Hysteric Theater (which closed its doors a few years ago), Foreman’s project has been to take Brecht’s efforts to contemplate and reconsider conventional perceptions of reality and, utilizing may of the same estranging techniques, transform them into metaphysical speculations about how to interpret and engage with the world. If Brecht hoped to undermine capitalism and fascism, Foreman undermines the given structure of the world itself in a liberating project to see it — and human possibility — anew.

Foreman turns epistemology into slapstick comedy: the objective world is the banana peel on which the individual subject is constantly slipping, with ensuing perceptual pratfalls. Foreman’s landscapes, then, have over the years become more and more littered with barriers and perverse intrusions of the natural world. The urge of the human being to dominate his environment turns the Foreman character into a miles gloriosus, striding across the stage with firm confidence and conviction, only to be tripped up by the untied shoelaces of his own imperfections. The strong erotic element of Foreman’s plays reveals the feminine as the possessor of an uncertainty that nonetheless provides metaphysical truth and the ability to forego domination: instead, she remains open to new experience, even as that experience may be denied by an oppressive masculinity.

But does this experience necessarily come at a price? If so, it is a low one: it is only the confidence that one is always right that must be repudiated. The desiring will operating through the body guarantees that stasis is not possible: frenetic activity on Foreman’s stage is not always chaos, but sometimes a canvas from which the subject can pick and choose significances and meanings. Even so, anxiety cripples many Foreman characters, at least early in the plays, but more often than not one or more characters sees a light at the final curtain: not certainty, perhaps, but a new perspective that allows reinterpretation and liberation: the self, even if it constantly changes, is at least finally whole. This is a form of reconciliation with the world that permits creativity — for new selves and new worlds.

Because his interest is in the individual subject, Foreman has always been an internationalist; his plays have sometimes found more success in Europe, especially Austria and France, than in the U.S. The final three plays at his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre acknowledged not only the shrinking world (in which space itself, one of the Kantian a priori categories of experience, is foreshortened and disguised) but also its mediation through digital technology. As human perception stretches across the oceans in this artificial manner, he suggests that the spread of the subjective imagination may be accompanied by a consequent loss of depth in the human character, as the subject engages more and more in two-dimensional representational simulacra of the Other. We face not other individuals, but screens, mistaking the binary digits of the aptly-named “digital” world for depth. The content of these surfaces consists of both less than the individual and more than the image: another mechanical banana peel which threatens the equilibrium of the subject. Globalization has had both laudatory and destructive effects on economies, cultures and nations — Foreman suggests it’s had both of those effects on the individual subject as well. His exploration of these effects contributes to a world theatre in which traditional forms of drama seem pathetically inadequate — and places Foreman among those dramatists who work to determine a form of revolutionary theatre that suits the new century.

After more than 40 years, Richard Foreman’s plays and theoretical writings are spread across a variety of volumes and periodicals, from the 1976 Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos from NYU Press to forthcoming collections from both TCG Books and Contra Mundum Press. The best starting point for his work — essential, but introductory — is Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theatre (1992), originally published by Pantheon Books but available in a paperback reprint from Theatre Communications Group. Gerald Rabkin’s Richard Foreman (1999, from Performing Arts Journal Books) should be consulted for essays, interviews and early criticism about Foreman’s work from a variety of writers, including Foreman himself. Better, there is Richard Foreman: Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Volume 1, a 2008 DVD from Tzadik, which contains a wealth of archival video material from Foreman’s entire career, including Ernie Gehr’s film of the complete 1972 Sophia=Wisdom Part 3: The Cliffs. While it is no substitute for a live Foreman production, the DVD provides perhaps the best available examples of his theatre work.

If the post above seems broad, I have written about several individual plays and productions of Foreman’s work here.