OFF-OFF-BROADWAY, aN elegy

Nothing exists in a vacuum. A tenet of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics as much as quantum physics, each thing that exists is born in specific reaction to other existing entities. Nuclear reactions, political revolutions, and certainly artistic movements all arise because of and in relation to specific atomic conditions, to a zeitgeist, to an historical event. Certainly the American theater is no exception to this process of becoming--Off-Broadway, as its name indicates, arose in reaction if not direct opposition to the popular-entertainment establishment of Broadway. Off-Off-Broadway, though named such only well after its inception, grew as a reaction to the increasing commercialization of Off-Broadway. Indeed, the two “offs”-Broadway began with not dissimilar goals: Theodore Mann, artistic director of the Circle in the Square Theatre at which, in 1952 with a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, the Off-Broadway movement is credited to have begun, said of visiting Off-Off-Broadway shows in early ‘60s, “I feel like I’m looking at myself ten years ago.”

To understand the emergence, and importance, of the Off-Off Broadway movement, then, it is necessary to understand the limitations of the commercial theater. Since the late 19th century, Broadway has been the dominant legit theatre force in America. Between 1895 and the 1920s, roughly 80 theaters were constructed in the Times Square area (along Broadway between 37th street to the upper 40s). In the 1927-28 season, 257 plays opened. After the Depression, the rise of Hollywood “talkies,” the outlawing of burlesque by Mayor LaGuardia and thus conversion of legit houses into grindhouses or cinemas, and the post-war rise of household television sets, Broadway productions had been slashed. The 1950-51 season had 94 openings. By the 1969-70 season, there were only 59 productions opened, 15 of which were revivals; of the 80 Broadway theaters originally constructed, 36 remained. As is often the story in unsubsidized-arts history, the economic uncertainties of live theater had stanched the willingness of producers to take risks. Broadway productions of straight plays in 1961 budgeted minimums of $100,000 (approximately $800,000 in 2013), when the top ticket prices were around $10.

Off-Broadway’s attempt to instate a theater unconcerned with grosses and profits was valiant, but by the early 1960s, a decade after Summer and Smoke, the movement was running into itself. With the popular success of Off-Broadway playwrights, like Edward Albee, and the increased professionalism and critical attention, production costs inevitably rose. Preproduction costs had ballooned from an average of $1,500 in the early ‘50s to $15,000 in the early ‘60s, and weekly operating costs had tripled to an average of $3,200. Though Off-Broadway had established a devoted audience base, it faced a parallel problem to the larger Broadway houses: a limited number of seats to be sold on any given night, an inherent ceiling in the possible revenue, and an economic obligation to a single theater space. The national economy was itself slowing, after its l950s post-war explosion, and as the Times Square area, particularly with the construction of the Port Authority Bus Terminal along 42nd street, fell into disrepute, Greenwich Village bohemia and the Off-Broadway theaters increasingly became tourist destinations. The theaters that began as havens for playwrights and non-commercial productions “pursued, in addition to aggressive fund-raising, several ways to cut costs or raise money, notably the casting of stars to attract an audience and a reduction in royalty payments by selecting older texts no longer under copyright.”

While both Broadway and now Off-Broadway were and remain integral to the life of American theater, the pressure-cooker of economics, as well as the institutionalizing of a movement that was conceived precisely against an institution, was bubbling up something new. The rise of reputable theater programs at universities was sending a new generation out into the living theater world armed with classical texts and the now-congenital Method Acting, but in many ways such formal education proliferated formal productions. In a 1961 issue of The New Republic, theatre critic Robert Brustein lamented that Off-Broadway plays “look like Broadway rejects,” that they were “off”-Broadway “not because they are too good for Broadway but because they are not good enough.” Where was the theater, now, that gave creative freedom to the playwright and actors, the theater-makers, not the theater-financiers?(1)

In the first years of the ‘60s, something was happening in the Village that would converge with this imperative for a new theater. It was an interest, artistically interdisciplinary, in cross-utilizing spaces. Hanging paintings in a cafe, for example, is not a new idea--cafes of Paris have been loaded with paintings for centuries--but the cross-pollination of arts that was happening inherently in the little neighborhood of the Village in the early ‘60s was sparking new ways of thinking of space, new definitions of what art is and what performance could be. Modern dancers like Anna Sokolow (also a co-founder of the Actors Studio) and Merce Cunningham were actively exploring the operations of the body in space, and in a space. A spring 1962 performance of graduates from Robert Dunn’s class at the Merce Cunningham studios was hosted by the Judson Memorial Church, that had just the past November begun hosting play performances. That first performance of the Judson Dance Theater marked the beginning of the avant-garde dance scene, and the Judson Poets’ Theatre would become, with Caffe Cino and La Mama ETC, the most influential experimental theater space. 

To understand why the proliferation of the use of non-proscenium spaces was so pivotal in the surge of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, we must remember what theater is, in its most essential form. In his book Architecture, Actor, and Audience, a plea for the consideration by theater-makers of the space in which they in fact make theater, Iain Mackintosh articulates theater’s core, what differentiates it from cinema (that has so insidiously come to be theater’s foil, if not its replacement): 

Theatre is a three-dimensional and three-way event... actors communicating, not simply with you, the spectator, but with you and he, or she, over here, and that group over there. All interact one with the other... Performances vary greatly from night to night... This is because the audience’s role is an active, not a passive one... Despite the production having been precisely prepared by the director, both audience and actor find themselves in a situation which is essentially anarchic.

Yet the proscenium stage persists as the norm for commercial theater (2), and, as instituted (and as it is generally credited by Wagner in 1876), is constructed precisely to minimize this actor-audience interaction, or at least to shift the power dynamic entirely in the actors’ favor. Adolphe Appia, an architect and stage scenic and lighting designer whose theories perhaps more than any other’s created the modern atmosphere of a dimmed house, wrote in 1912:

Up until now, all we have asked of the audience has been to sit still and pay attention. ...To encourage it in this direction, we have offered it a comfortable seat and have plunged it into a semi-darkness that favours the state of complete passivity... If the playwright and those who perform his work are to bring about a change of direction--a conversion--then the spectator must, in his turn, submit to it (the awakening of art in oneself) too. His starting point is himself, his own body. From that body, living art must radiate and spread out into space, upon which it will confer life.

For even the most venerated practitioners of the proscenium approach, an interplay of audience, performance, and theater space was essential; no one component of the trifecta should overpower the others, if a transformation is to occur. It’s a philosophy embodied by the modern dance movement, such as Merce Cunningham (and his partner John Cage), arms taken up and carried forth to the present by students in that 1962 Judson performance, like Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. But narrative, or text-based theater, however many parallels can be drawn to the physical theater of dance, in many ways was transformed to greater effects and diversity by the avant-garde approach, and the Off-Off-Broadway explosion of the 1960s in nontraditional, or “found,” theater spaces, contained an unparalleled immediacy. 

Instrumental to this appropriation of non-proscenium spaces for our theater was the coffee house. The little neighborhood of Greenwich Village was concentrated with cafes and coffeehouses, spaces which since the mid-’50s had played host to the rise of the Beats and of the jazz scene, places for poetry readings and political discourses. Coffee houses, without formally offering live performances or public readings, avoided paying cabaret fees, and with espresso as the strongest drink available, did not pay liquor license or nightclub license fees; they were intimate settings where people could legally congregate, without much overhead or a formal structure. They were ideally poised to become the gathering places for those who challenged, politically and artistically, the status quo--where anything could happen, anyone could have a voice, and commercial success was a last priority. 

In 1958, as the popularity of coffee houses was reaching peak (and notorious) levels, Joe Cino opened his cafe at 31 Cornelia Street. Though Cino never claimed to have been looking for a coffee house space in which to stage play readings and performances (3), Cino himself was a dancer and actor. In his hometown of Buffalo, he took dance lessons, and after moving to New York City at age 16 continued his dancing and took acting lessons at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse. Cino had, in those younger years, some success, particularly as a dancer, but did not have the build of a professional. After working as a waiter for some months, Cino saved enough (combined, probably, with a bank loan and/or a loan from his lover) to open the Cornelia Street space, and from almost the very first night there was magic in the space. The usual poetry readings of Village coffee houses led, for Cino, to dramatic readings, and dramatic readings to staged productions. Accounts differ as to when exactly poetry gave way to theater at the Cino--Joe Cino himself is quoted as saying he never intended to stage full productions, but only to create “a beautiful, intimate, warm, non-commercial, friendly atmosphere where people could come and not feel pressured or harassed.” He also says, though, summarizing the enduring spirit of the cafe’s graduates, “I also thought anything could happen.”

What is known is that in the early Caffe Cino days, the “stage” was a playing area of twenty-seven to sixty-four square feet.(4) Crates, the standard wooden beverage-shipping kind, were available for raising actors, later tied together by Lanford Wilson for one of his productions to make a single, more solid raised space, until an eight-by-eight foot movable platform was installed by director Andy Milligan. These limitations of the cafe’s space were integral to the explosion of creativity that happened within. The “room,” as Joe referred to the entire space, could and would be rearranged to suit each play. Playwright Robert Heide explained, “‘The room’ was in a sense ‘the mind...’ of Joe Cino...” and for the sheer exercise in imagination that theater is, what could be greater than transforming an entire space into an imagination itself? The space was there to serve the performance, and the performance to serve the space. 

An actor in a premiere by frequent Cino playwright David Starkweather recalled the third performance of the evening, or rather, early morning, one a.m., with the room utterly empty but for Joe Cino and perhaps one other dozing patron. At the suggestion of cancelling, Cino refused, requiring them to play for the room alone. “We did it, and it was [great]... The play was clean, it was crisp, it was moving in exactly the way the author had meant it to be. Those thirty-five minutes of art-for-art’s-sake are my most vivid memory of the Caffe Cino.” 

Indeed, more than anything, Cino’s room provided a place of total creative autonomy for the playwrights. Cino rarely, if ever, read scripts--he selected productions often on little more than whims. Playwright Doric Wilson was given his first performance date based on his astrological sign, and anything about the script itself was of absolutely no concern of Cino’s. The play, And He Made a Her, was a smash, and extended its run from the original single weekend to two full weeks with two shows on Saturday. Though Wilson and Cino fell out not two years later, over the tricky game of subverting Equity rules (5), after Cino’s suicide in 1967 Wilson “stood outside [the cafe], kicking the wall... For Wilson, it was the end of the first American theater to openly present plays with gay issues.” The Caffe Cino was not a gay theater, per se, but the utter freedom allotted the artists, to create and perform plays about anything and everything that inspired them, engendered plays about issues the playwrights living in ‘60s Greenwich Village faced daily.(6)

Regular playwrights at the Cino over the next seven years, for most of whom the Caffe Cino was their first real producing experience, included Robert Patrick, John Guare, Tom Eyen, Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Tom O’Horgan, and, most renowned of all, Lanford Wilson. By 1962, the call that Cino had begun for a new kind of theater was being picked up by others, most notably Ellen Stewart, or, La Mama. Crossover between Caffe Cino and La Mama ETC (Experimental Theater Club) began with the very first La Mama production: an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ short story “One Arm,” by Andy Milligan, first staged at Joe’s. In 1962, the “ETC” had not yet been added. Stewart’s place was simply Cafe La Mama, located in the basement of 321 East Ninth Street, another space licensed as the cheaper “cafe” than a theater or performance space, and instant coffee, tea, or hot chocolate could be served as proof of cafe status. 

If Joe Cino’s “room” was his mind, a space of its own magic and whimsy, a place he found and settled into and was utterly unable to survive without him, the first La Mamas were its antithesis. Unlike Cino’s primary purpose of providing a space empty of purpose except to welcome, and relying on those who stumbled in to use the space for creation, Ellen Stewart founded her club with every intention of housing an artist-driven theater. Stewart’s childhood foster brother, Fred Lights, had attended Yale Drama School, and in the early ‘50s wrote a musical that was optioned for Broadway. The show as it appeared to the masses, 1955’s The Vamp, starring Carol Channing, bore almost no resemblance to the play that Lights had intended. The show was an unmitigated failure, with its opening night also its closing night, and Lights was prepared to quit theater forever. Stewart was, at the time, a designer for Saks Fifth Avenue--but after an eight-year career was dismissed for failing health, as well as, probably, outraged customers discovering their thousand-dollar gowns were being designed by a black woman. If her intentions in the opening of a theater-cafe were artistic rather than political, much like the gay artists who were several blocks west imbuing the Caffe Cino with artistic rather than political intentions, the very existence of the two spaces illuminates how the personal can be politics as much as any overt political intent. 

In the earliest days, Ellen Stewart planned to support her cafe by operating a fashion boutique during the day in which she could sew and sell clothes, but in no time Stewart was consumed with just keeping the theater itself alive. In its first year, the cafe was closed by city officials perhaps ten times, and Stewart herself had been arrested more than once. Rather than a single space to which people were drawn and into which everyone was welcomed, finding the first La Mamas became as much a part of the club’s experience as any of the theater that happened within. However, in that single year---indeed, in only nine months, between the “One Arm” production and the closing in April 1963--Mama had presented twenty-eight scripts, fifteen by new writers.

The second La Mama space, at 82 Second Avenue, while larger than the basement, able to squeeze in about fifty audience members, truly began what La Mama blossomed into. To offset city fines (this second space incurred fourteen forced closings between June 1963 and November 1964), Stewart began charging $1 membership fees. The “club” part of La Mama Experimental Theater Club was instituted to, again, bypass city ordinances about entertainment venues and the requisite expensive licenses--La Mama was legally a private club. La Mama occupied three other spaces intermittently, between its 1962 inception and the settling into its final (and current) home at 7A East 4th Street, for a total of six moves between 1962 and 1968. In this transience, La Mama ETC provides a theatrical model as vibrant as, if perpendicular to, Cino’s tenacity. 

Theater, Ellen Stewart proved, and a theatrical community, can exist almost anywhere. The space is not, or does not need to be, the core of the work. Rather, it is the artists who enter a space and fill it with the work that form the core. The club’s movement became a kind of political meta-theatrical performance; the interplay between city, proprietor, and artist inspire questions not only as to the role of the city in defining its inhabitants, but also the role of arts and artists in shaping civilizations, and individual rights to congregate, perform, or merely inhabit public and private spaces. In her Second Avenue space, Ellen Stewart adjusted the club’s mission to formally produce only new works by emerging playwrights. Stewart and Cino continued their exchange of talent, but as the La Mama spaces grew in size, the works that premiered at the respective theater assumed properties better suited to one or the other. Cino’s fixed, if malleable, little space was ideal for one-acts--as such, the plays tended to be verbally-dense, ideal for single- or two-handers, like The Madness of Lady Bright or Jeff Weiss’s A Funny Walk Home, in which Weiss himself plays a young man returning home from a mental asylum, where he has been treated with lobotomy to cure his homosexuality, and for which Weiss won an Obie.(7) At La Mama, full-lengths were developed, with the greater stage sizes, and a deeper integration of text-based theater with music, performance art, dance, and visual elements emerged. The encouraged use of multi-media elements in the space provided a spiritual home for, among others, Tom O’Horgan, who would see the little musical Hair through its earliest experimental incarnations to the 1968 Broadway opening, and would direct the Broadway premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

In pursuit of her original purpose of providing writers and performers a place in which to be judged on their own terms, to present work not just to a little room of like-minded artists but to a public, Ellen Stewart began an active luring of more mainstream critical attention. She started partnerships with Off-Broadway producers, like the powerhouse team Albarwild, to transfer hit OOB shows to legit theaters, with varying success. In addition to continuing city-ordinance troubles, more legitimacy drew more attention from Actors Equity, who by 1966 were pushing against the unpaid--but popular--production.(8) Caffe Cino folded in 1968, a few months after Cino’s death, a victim, finally, of a city council (led by future mayor Ed Koch) concentrated on sanitizing the vagrant acts occurring in unlicensed coffee houses, the litigious Macdougal Area Neighborhood Association, and its own disorganization without the man who had nurtured a “room” of such support, in which “anything might happen.” La Mama ETC, riding the success of its graduates (especially O’Horgan’s work with Hair), secured grants from the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundations, and moved into its final home, 7A East 4th Street, where it thrives today. Stewart passed away in 2011, but the spirit of her artist-first environment not only survives but has influenced both American and European avant-garde and traditional theater for almost fifty years. 

However instrumental each specific space, and the larger space of the neighborhood of the Village, may have been to the explosion of a theater reactionary to the hegemony of “producer-employee,” the common goal of all these artists was universal: artistic freedom. Freedom from the obligation to recoup, to adjust a vision, essentially, to the fickle desires of the masses and their pocketbooks. And the quality of work either directly or indirectly influenced by such freedom, the roster of artistic talent who would progress to indelibly influence American theater, and America as a whole, is as much a plea as anything for the subsidizing of the arts. It should also, though, be an inspiration to theater-makers and artists everywhere, amateur and professional alike, to reconsider what is necessary to create vital and sustaining work. 

1. A notable exception to the increasing Broadway resemblance in the Off-Broadway movement was the Living Theatre, whose productions and purposes, while intersecting with and included in the umbrella of Off-Broadway theatre at the time, was distinct and unique, deserving of its own voluminous history.

2. Only two Broadway theaters, Circle in the Square (founded by the aforementioned Theodore Mann et al. as what would become an Off-Broadway house) and Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, use a thrust stage rather than a proscenium. Even in the Off-Broadway world, both commercial and non-profit (the monoliths of contemporary Off-Broadway), non-proscenium staging is rare.

3. The closest to an artistic goal Cino claims to have had was finding a place to show the paintings of his lover, Ed Franzen, who was looking for exhibition space at the same time Cino was looking for a cafe.

4. The disparity here is indicative both of the chronic problem of researching early OOB history, namely an absence of paperwork and inconsistencies in what paper trail there is, and also of the fluid nature of the space itself--tables could be moved to present the playing space however best served an individual production, and for a cafe with a legal seating capacity of about ninety, comfortably sitting sixty to seventy-five, could be utterly empty for performances, or for successful productions could pack in well over a hundred.

5. Cino planned a revival of And He Made a Her, for which he intended to charge admission. Equity prohibited such collection and charging could put actors at risk of losing their union membership. Wilson canceled the production and didn’t set foot again in the Caffe.

6. Doric Wilson would participate in the Stonewall Riots and found TOSOS, the first professional gay theater company. Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright would run longer than any other OOB play, and is heralded as the first to receive mainstream critical attention and spark the gay theatre movement.

7. In A Funny Walk Home, lines between actor and person were so blurred that, when at the bottom of the play, after numerous horrors are experienced and enacted, a tear-streaked Weiss turns to the audience and begs, “Won’t somebody please stop this? If anyone has been moved, if anyone has felt love or pity, won’t somebody please stop this play?” the audience did actually rush to end the play.

8. A letter to the editor, published in the November 20, 1966 issue of the New York Times, offers this insightful perspective on Equity’s displeasure with Off-Off-Broadway: “[Equity]--which, in order to maintain its position as... a bargaining agent... must see every situation in terms of labor vs. management--has chosen to overlook the fact that its own members who have worked at Cafe La Mama are not dissatisfied with their conditions of participation. Note that I do not use the word ‘employment...’ The issue... is that of the informal theater collective vs. the conventional producer-employee system... The extraordinary fact of the [Off-Off-Broadway] experience is that the producer, in the traditional sense, is not necessary to the theater.”

9. The Poets Theater, along with Theater Genesis, were instrumental in the proliferation of the OOB movement, and deserve their own histories and explorations, much less mentions in this unfortunately brief history.