NOTES ON RECENT
READING
Stephen J. Bottoms’s Playing
Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement
It’s taken me 18 years to get around to Stephen Bottoms’s jampacked
critical history of Off-Off Broadway (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2006, 401 pp), but I’m glad I finally got the chance, especially as I was at
least a molecule in the remarkable moment it chronicles in modern American
theatre. I was an undergraduate theatre student at Brooklyn College when the
movement quietly began, graduating in 1962, and then leaving New York for two
years to get my MFA in Hawaii. So I wasn’t able to participate at the
beginning, which, had it been otherwise, might have radically changed my life’s
direction.
It soon did so, however, for several of my college classmates, who began to putter about in the zero-budget environs of early Off-Off endeavors, particularly at Caffe Cino, Judson Church, and La Mama, of which I only began, dimly, to become aware on returning to New York in 1964. By then, I was married with a kid and in need of a steady income, no longer footloose enough to mingle amid the unpaid, unwashed, if not untalented denizens of the West and East Villages.
I remember in the mid-1960s running into hippie-ized college theatre pals on Second Avenue, me dressed neatly as per my status as a budding academic, they in ragged jeans, shaggy beards and mustaches, and abundant hair of the type soon be memorialized in a Broadway hit. Smugly, I felt as if I’d made the right choice. Little did I know that one or two of these scruffy artists would, a few years down the line, be able to buy and sell me. Among them, Joel Zwick, then a burgeoning avant garde director (mentioned in passing by Bottoms), even became one of the most successful sitcom directors in TV history, also directing My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Others, although they may not have become zillionaires, made seriously valuable contributions to the kind of alternative theatre that was springing up in churches, basements, lofts, and storefronts all over the downtown area. While only a few make it into the pages of Bottoms’s excellent book, and then only in passing or in photo captions (like Larry Loonin or Shellie Feldman), I’m proud of what they contributed to those countless shows I participated in only as a spectator.
Except once. In 1966, Wilson Lehr, a former professor of mine, was directing a play at the fabulous Ellen Stewart’s La Mama (when it was at 182 Second Avenue, before it moved to E. Fourth Street) by a La Mama regular, Bruce Kessler, another former classmate. Off-Off was notorious for its campy spoofs, riddled with sexual innuendoes, of iconic cultural institutions, and Bruce’s The Contestants (not mentioned by Bottoms) was a takeoff on TV game shows in which I played the slick, Bob Barker-ish MC.
A Facebook friend I haven’t seen in person since then, Nancy
Gabor, played the show’s sexy hostess, wearing a flashy, legs-revealing costume
with black mesh stockings. Others in the cast included yet another college
friend, Blanche Dee (somewhat older than me and what one might call pleasingly
plump to avoid accusations of fat shaming), who would one day appear on
Broadway in the nude, and Allen
Garfield, who went on to considerable success on stage and screen as a
supporting actor.
The play, awful as I’m sure it was, had some historical interest. Bottoms tells us of how La Mama was forced to close because of a conflict with Actors Equity over its nonpayment of union actors; when the dispute was settled, The Contestants was the first show La Mama produced. Another reason to remember it is the great photograph of the costumed cast standing and sitting in La Mama around Wilson and Stewart (with whom I would spend several days in Beijing 25 years later). It was published in the only other book providing a historical overview of Off-Off Broadway, David Crespy’s Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960's Ignited a New American Theater (2003). Playing Underground, by the way, is no slouch in the photo department.
There have, of course, been other books about Off-Off, but they’re mostly about specific individuals, companies, themes, or plays; a decent number of play anthologies can be found online. I plan to cover Crespy’s book this year (I couldn’t find my copy so I ordered a used one online), but, its insights and stories aside, it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as Playing Underground. Bottoms provides quite thorough descriptions and appraisals of all the leading (and many of the secondary) actors, writers, directors, and producers of the movement, not to mention detailed histories of every significant theatre or company. He discusses, with keen critical insight, numerous plays, the titles of many likely be as unknown as Sanskrit to most readers, but representative of the kinds of comedies, musicals, and dramas on which Off-Off thrived.
Bottoms, a theatre professor at Manchester University in the UK, who now goes by the name Stephen Scott-Bottoms, offers a remarkably well researched study, based both on the archives and many interviews, although, born in 1968 and raised in Yorkshire, he was too young to have himself seen what he writes about. He provides quality assessments of the four leading institutions, Caffe Cino, La Mama, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poet’s Theatre, with excellent portrayals of their charismatic leaders, Joe Cino, Ellen Stewart, Ralph Cook, and Al Carmines. Numerous other, equally important figures (and groups, like the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre) are discussed, the artists including the likes of Charles Ludlam, Robert Patrick, John Vaccaro, Michael Smith, Joe Chaikin, Sam Shepard, Penny Arcade, Larry Kornfeld, Jeff Weiss, Marshall Mason, and Lanford Wilson, among so many others, along with the shows they created, and the circumstances—sometimes sordid—of the worlds they inhabited.
Bottoms’s smoothly written, academically precise but always crystalline overview covers thematic issues, like the place of nudity, drag, homosexuality, and politics, and gets into the weeds on all the principal topics concerning the financial and artistic difficulties involved in sustaining a movement that sought a freewheeling, unconventional approach to making theatre with barely any funds to support it. The transition from presenting plays for either no admission fee or a dollar-a-week club membership to a profit-based or, at the least, grant-sustained, system is closely analyzed, as are all the other developments (like the profits that came to several OOB shows after moving to OB) that, inevitably forced such a quixotic artistic paradise to fade before the onslaught of real-world practicalities.
There are very few items of significance overlooked by Bottoms. Anybody familiar with the period will note some artist, show, theatre, or group that might have been included, even if only briefly (like actor/director/playwright LarryLoonin, whom I like to call the Zelig of Off-Off Broadway). But that—like these comments—would have swelled the book to impractical lengths. I do feel compelled, though, to note two notorious shows of the 1960s I expected to encounter, even in allusions, as having been unquestionably influenced by the freedoms being mined by the underground theatre: Barbara Garson’s MacBird! (originally staged by my classmate Roy Levine, 1966), and Lennox Raphael’s Che! (1969). Both fall somewhere in the gap between OOB and OB.
The first, done at the Village Gate, in Greenwich Village, was a frank satire on the Kennedy assassination, in which Lyndon Johnson is imagined as the Macbeth-like leader responsible; it created a political firestorm over free speech that almost led to its closure. Although technically Off-Broadway, it’s doubtful it would have been produced without the outside the envelope-influence of Off-Off.
The same could be said of Che!, seen at the Free Store Theatre in Cooper Square (bordering both the West and East Villages). Another political satire, this one inspired by Che Guevara, it had conservative forces falling all over themselves because of obscenity charges (“profanity, filth, defecation, masochism, sadism, masturbation, nudity, copulation, sodomy and other deviate sexual intercourse,” according to the judgment that eventually killed it). It presumably was even more outrageous than what was routinely done on Off-Off stages. At that very moment, Oh! Calcutta! (in which I had other college friends!), was drawing crowds. Its mention in Bottoms’s book brought Che! to mind, as they were both part of the same historic free speech in the theatre debate.
Off-Off-Broadway, as Bottoms carefully notes, had an impact not only on American stages, but across the globe—witness the Fringe in London, for example. In Japan, which had a similar explosion of untraditional theatre, the name for such work is angura, a bastardization of “underground.” Kudos to Stephen J. Bottoms/Steve Scott-Bottoms for choosing so pertinent a word for his title.
