NRO Weekend February 3-4, 2001
Dreaming in Red
Courtesy of your tax dollars.

By Naomi Schaefer, assistant editor, Commentary

few years ago Richard Foreman received the MacArthur "genius" Fellowship. It's easy to see how this must have happened. A bunch of very smart people went to one of his plays. When none of them could tell what it was about, they just concluded he must be smarter than everybody else.

In the last 30 years, Foreman has created what seems to be his very own genre of theater. Every winter, with the help of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, he writes, directs, and/or produces a play at the Ontological Hysteric Theater located — where else? — on Manhattan's Lower East Side. These performances tend, well, toward the baffling. This year's performance of Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty is no exception.

Two characters, one who looks and sounds like the effeminate body builders Hans and Frans from Saturday Night Live and the other who must have missed the roadie caravan for the Who, engage in completely incoherent dialogue for an hour and ten minutes. Meanwhile, a gang of six mutes dances around them, strumming on plywood guitars, waving red flags, scrubbing the floor, and making lewd gestures, among other things.

To his credit, Foreman acknowledges the nonsensical nature of the work. According to his website, here is how he composes his plays:

I write — usually at the beginning of the day, from one half to three pages of dialogue. There is no indication of who is speaking — just raw dialogue. From day to day, there is no connection between the pages, each day is a total 'start from scratch' with no necessary reference to material from previous days' work.

Then, after a few months of this, he looks through the pages, picks out some he likes, and then "rewrites a little for continuity." Very little, it seems. He is aiming for "themes" and "scenarios" and "tensions," not, he explains emphatically, "narratives."

But narratives (defining narrative to mean only that one sentence has to do with the next) help people (specifically those of us who are not geniuses) to understand plays. With Foreman's work, you can walk out thinking about a character or even a scene without having even the slightest understanding of what you just saw.

Nevertheless, you have to wonder, what does it all mean? Why are those women marching across the stage with stuffed chickens on giant poles? Why is that man trying to smash a giant fishbowl full of baby dolls? Why is that other man wearing a pointy hat with random Hebrew letters on it? Sure, there are all these fun props backstage that never get used, but is that really a reason to bring out the stuffed dog?

Since the props don't tell you what the play is about and the dialogue doesn't help either, I tried the program. Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty

is obviously not a play of political analysis. This is a theatrical event that would echo the anguish of a world inside the head and heart of those who believe that dreams of a better world ("Christmas on Earth" — Arthur Rimbaud) no longer inform what is now the nightmare of a life in which selfish private pleasure is promoted as the only safe haven.

I'll give you a minute to read that again.

Here is the translation, in English, I think: Communism may have been an abysmal failure, resulting in the murder of millions, but at least it gave us something to dream about. As a "political" form, Communism isn't any better or worse than anything else, but at least we thought about something other than our own property.

And Foreman has tapped into a certain market with this message. New York is filled with people who really did (do?) dream about Communism. You can get a good idea who they are from looking at the audience of this play. The almost daily performances, which are always sold out and even have waiting lists, are populated largely by professionals in their 20's, 30's, and 40's. These nice businessmen, doctors, and lawyers, who do not travel much below 14th Street in their day-to-day lives, occasionally like to make nostalgic trips to the Lower East Side to see such plays and visit the nearby KGB bar, which features a wide array of vodkas and some lovely Soviet memorabilia.

Surely they too don't want to engage in any mundane "political analysis" to determine the merits of Communism or capitalism. But now at least, thanks to Richard Foreman, these young men and women can spend an evening reminiscing about the good old days before the Berlin Wall crumbled, and their lives became empty. Of course, if the waiting list for that night is too long, at least they know their tax dollars are helping the cause.