A New Richard Foreman Play Puts a Twist on His Metaphysical Puzzles

On Dec. 13 — a Friday, wouldn’t you know — I heard Richard Foreman talking to me as if in a dream. As had always been his wont, he was ruminating with a kind of appalled resignation about the unreliability of our own thoughts and perceptions.

He wasn’t there in person. He has been ill. But his recorded voice occasionally filled the air like that of some tutelary demon. I was at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, where the troupe Object Collection was putting on a work called “Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey,” in which a woman at a boulevard cafe wonders if she even exists.

This was the first new play written by Foreman, 87, in a decade, though it was not staged or designed by him. Both these facts are big deals. But before I explain why, a little background.

Man With the Microphone

For many years, around just this time in the early winter, Foreman would allow us to lose our own minds by walking straight into his.

Others might celebrate the holidays at Radio City Music Hall or with a “Messiah” concert. But the annual seasonal spectacle to which I most looked forward, for more than dozen years starting in the early 1990s, took place in a theater at St. Mark’s Church, where one man was spilling the contents of his brain onto a stage no larger than a hotel room. These operated under the rubric of the company Foreman had founded in 1988, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

Here, Foreman presided — as director, playwright, light and sound designer, and disembodied voice — over short, sharp shocks of plays with alarming names: “My Head Was a Sledgehammer,” “I Got the Shakes,” “Panic! (How to Be Happy!),” “Permanent Brain Damage.” That last title offers a fair description of the condition into which, in Foreman’s view, all human beings are born.