The primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral history Project
Celebrating the visionaries who created New York's vibrant Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater.
F-J
"That was our greatest moment where we would hit it like that. It was the most total magic I have ever felt onstage. We were so there, we were on. So tuned in with each other, it was marvelous. Nothing will ever equal it again as far as my loving being in ‘this.’ When we weren’t cooking, it served just as well as ‘Hell.’ It was Heaven and Hell"
"Some nights our only audience [for THE FANTASTICKS] was the kids who lived next door…it was not popular after it opened."
Michael Feingold
Playwright, Translator, Theatre Critic at The Village Voice, Chairman of the Obie Awards (Judges Panel)
Interview #120
READ MORE >>"You take the risk. You dare. You try something. Try something old. Try something new. Find talent. Find the things that people aren’t thinking about…There is always a place for more daring, always a place for more inclusion. There is always a place for more imagination."
George Ferencz
Co-Founder, Co-Producer Impossible Ragtime Theater, Founder Hispanic-American Music Theatre Lab, Resident Director La MaMa Experimental Theater Club
Interview #137
READ MORE >>"I couldn’t copy anybody, I couldn’t pretend to be anybody. I could learn from them, but I had to find my own style."
Crystal Field
Actor, Director, Choreographer, Producer Co-Founder Theater for the New City
Interview #175
READ MORE >>"I was not brought up in theater and in art but I was brought up by people who said ‘we’re gonna do it ourselves’ because we are not mainstream and because we believe in things the mainstream does not believe in."
"The audience that visits you downtown, they’re so warm. If they like you, you’re made."
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"Gretchen had never seen one..I had seen two! It had to be mysterious, romantic, colorful…"
Richard Foreman
Founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Playwright, Director
Interview #17
READ MORE >>"We…were making non-theatre-oriented theatre, but more art-oriented theatre."
"It was a theatre built on improvisation… every day was a new trial… it keeps you on your toes."
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"It was just the joy of doing it. At the time I didn’t really have much thought about a career. I was just doing it and seeing where it took me."
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"There were so many Off-Broadway places… I took whatever. My answer was ‘Yes.’"
"Maybe there will be a revival of Off-Broadway…always less expensive than to see a Broadway show. It depends on where we get our writers from…and how we can learn to develop new plays with that incredible energy exhibited so long ago. Can that be revived?"
"You go into a small theater...and something awakens in you that…[deep intake of breath] ‘I didn’t know this [kind of theatre] existed’. If you can still say that, that’s important, and we need to keep that going."
Jack Garfein
Director, Actor, Teacher, Producer, Author,Co- Founder and Artistic Director of the Samuel Beckett Theatre and The Harold Clurman Theater
Interview #92
READ MORE >>"I can only tell you how you don’t survive a concentration camp…if you feel sorry for yourself. What saved me was the art, the theater…playwrights I read, heard… I understood there was something hidden inside of human beings and I started to see things."
"The greatest power in the world – I just love it – is when you contrive a laugh and the laugh comes. That – that is power. And, I have learned since to let the laugh fall by the wayside if it interferes with the feeling, but, boy, getting everybody to laugh at once, that is my totalitarian power that I love."
"It can be very surprising and can give people some new things to think about… You can change somebody’s attitude about something, perhaps just [get them to] think about what it means."
"When the work comes, you gotta go. That's what you want. You want people to use you up--everything you have. Blessings don't abound unless you have champions. All roads lead to Off-Broadway."
"Off-Broadway is a way for young writers and young actors to find their place. Off-Broadway is still exciting."
Robyn Goodman
Actor, Producer, Co-Founder Second Stage, Artistic Consultant, Roundabout Theatre Company, Founding Artistic Producer, Roundabout Underground
Interview #170
READ MORE >>"When I founded my commercial theater company, Aged In Wood Productions, I brought all my years of working in and with Non-Profit theaters to bear. Without that background I would never be the creative producer I am today. The Non-Profits are the future of new play development. Commercial theater is not a place for much risk. Plays need time and gentle hands and I trust my friends who run theaters."
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"We were young and we just thought we could do it – it never occurred to us we couldn’t…The original cast was the basement for an infinite skyscraper."
"It’s something you just do, you know. If you’re on a desert island and you have a piece of paper, it’s going to happen."
"It’s tricky…you want a level of purity, of adventure, that’s not tied to a commercial endeavor…I take it for granted, operate under the assumption, that younger people will make choices, create things independent of money (you always need money – you gotta give it a life, you know)…I feel positive about the theatre, I have no reason not to be."
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"Nobody realizes when they go to theater-nor should they-just how complicated sometimes it can be to get the impression of effortlessness."
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"The audience is there for the journey, not for a hit play. There’s a wide array of possibility now in this city. Just as Broadway is the largest concentration of theatrical real estate in the world, Off-Broadway has to be the largest concentration of theater artists in the world."
"The world changed because those boundaries between Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and Broadway had come down."
"Each of us…was interested in certain portions of the women’s movement, but I think we embodied the women’s movement in the sense that we worked so cohesively and so enthusiastically together."
"In most Off-Broadway venues there’s a place where the community can gather ahead of time and see itself as it walks into the theater, being ready to respond as a community."
"People want to know who they are and why they’re here… theatre is a good place to ask [that question] because it gives you a place from which to work with others on this question. It gives you a chance to be honest in your existence."
"I’ve always been interested…my whole career…in the relationship of the arts to its environment, public space, architecture and the community."
"To hell with profit. We want to do what is significant."
"I said, ‘Look, [the characters in YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN] just have to be real. They are comic strip characters, and they have to be real. They cannot be goofy … they have to be real actors playing real characters. That’s all.’"
Margot Harley
Producer, Artistic Director, Co-Founder The Acting Company
Interview #168
READ MORE >>"We decided to create a touring company…touring is a really good experience for actors to hone their craft, big theater one night, small theater the next night…There is nothing like that to develop an actor. "
"I hope I get to the point in my life where I can do this…it’s so important just to constantly look at the show, analyze the show, see what’s right and what’s not right."
The Harris Family
Actors, Playwrights, Producers, Musicians, Designers, Stagehands
Interview #201
READ MORE >>"We all came of age in the Experimental Theater Movement. We were kinda meeting the right people at the right time."
Terese Hayden
Founder of Equity Library Theatre and Player’s Guide, Teacher at Circle in the Square
Interview #7
READ MORE >>"I wanted it! I thought that theatre would work! I didn’t have a husband that would buy it for me."
"They need another cultural revolution… we want people to know it’s possible."
"Why do we do things the same way all the time? Isn’t there another way of looking at how we do things? "
Israel Horovitz
Founder of the Gloucester Stage Company and New York Playwrights Lab, Playwright, Actor
Interview #70
READ MORE >>"I was 17 years old… I can remember thinking, ‘I wrote a play, I’m a playwright, I know who I am…’ From that day forward that’s simply been my identity."
"When asked: ‘Which are you first, a woman or writer?’ I used to respond, ‘A writer.’ But since most of my plays are about female experience, now the answer is clearly, ‘A woman.’"
"The audience for Off-Broadway is ready for anything and appreciates anything that’s a little off or edgy or different….they come to the theatre for that engagement."
Jackie Jeffries
Producer, Associate Productor, Production Manager, Production Stage Manager: Negro Ensemble Company, National Black Theatre, AUDELCO Awards
Interview #186
READ MORE >>"If we generate our own income we can keep Black theaters alive. And we can partner with others to make it happen…let’s put it together, …let’s tell the story… we merged together as a people, we’re all one people, so let’s tell the stories… let’s keep it going, there’s so much possibility."
Morgan Jenness
Dramaturg, Literary Manager, Director of Play Development and Associate Producer New York Shakespeare Festival; Associate New York Theater Workshop
Interview #173
READ MORE >>"‘Mr. Papp, I like to think rather than FOR the Public I work AT The Public --kinda for the theater at large. And sir, don’t you feel yourself it goes beyond the walls here- that the work YOU do is for the theater at large?’…(then he said), ‘get out of my office.’"
"A lot of these people did not go to theater school…it was kind of the Wild West and that’s the way we liked it…this immediacy was going to be formed into something solid and meaningful…"
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Geoffrey Johnson
Casting Director, Johnson-Liff Associates, Trustee, Noel Coward Foundation , US Representative, Noel Coward Estate
Interview #142
READ MORE >>"I certainly hope Off-Broadway doesn’t become an extension of Broadway. I hope it keeps its own personality and interest…’cause I think that’s where a lot of the really good things are hatching."
"Anybody who thinks that theatre is a profession is out of their mind. No profession has 80% unemployed and still calls itself a profession . . . it’s a calling and I realized it’s a noble calling, and fun too. - - I used to dream of a poor theatre . . . a theatre reduced of most of the things we think are necessary for the theatre . . . to, in some way, touch upon that ancient thing of gathering together for a story and I think there’s a hunger for it."