Words Without Music: A Memoir (29 page)

What was interesting about those early works was that from the beginning they had a musical personality. How that happened, I’m not quite sure. It may have been my approach. I was really looking for a
language
of music that was rooted in the grammar of music itself. I was working in a very foundational way, building the language of the music that I was going to be working with for the next ten years.

When our ship docked at the pier on Twelfth Avenue in Manhattan that April of 1967, JoAnne and I were greeted by a host of friends, among them Michel Zeltzman; my cousin the artist Jene Highstein; Bob Fiore, a Fulbright student of film I knew from Paris; and the sculptor Richard Serra.

I had met Richard when he had arrived in Paris a few weeks after me on a Yale Traveling Fellowship, and right away we became friends. It has been a friendship that has lasted for decades and had important consequences for me, especially after my return to New York. While in Paris, we spent a lot of time together, talking about art and absorbing the nuances of Parisian culture. Richard took life classes at the Grande Chaumière, a studio on Boulevard Montparnasse—and when we first met he was still polishing his skills in drawing, much as I was doing with the fundamentals of music. Besides that, we both had local heroes among the Europeans. I remember many afternoons having coffee with him on the terrace of one of the big Montparnasse cafés. The rumor was that both Giacometti and Beckett would frequent this particular café. Richard was hoping to get a glimpse of Giacometti and I of Beckett. We saw neither, but we enjoyed each other’s company. Richard spent his second year in Florence, and, as he would be in Paris from time to time, we would often meet. I found out later that he was from Oakland and, as a youngster, had known Mark di Suvero, a strange coincidence that these two men, not very different in age (Mark being the older), would both become famous for large, monumental outdoor sculpture and had known each other practically from childhood in Oakland.

When he met me at the pier in New York, Richard announced, “Don’t worry. I’ve got your truck.”

“What do you mean, you’ve got my truck?” I said.

“Well, I’ve been moving furniture, but I just got a little teaching job, and I’m going to be working for the Castelli Gallery. I don’t need to move furniture anymore, so here’s the truck.”

Richard had returned from Europe a year ahead of me, and he pretty much knew the ropes when it came to scratching out a living in the city.

I wound up being in the moving business on and off for the next two years. My partner in my first moving company was Bob Fiore, who in his professional life would go on to shoot and edit Richard’s film
Hand Catching Lead
(1968) and Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty
(1970), among others, and would also work with the Maysles brothers on the Rolling Stones documentary
Gimme Shelter
(1970). Bob liked the name the Prime Mover and we used it for a while. We understood immediately that anyone reading the
Village Voice
ads would have no idea who any of the advertisers really were, so the name meant everything.

The second year I worked with my cousin Jene. We came up with a far better name, advertising ourselves as Chelsea Light Moving, which turned out to be much more successful. To me the name conjured an image of dapper young men in uniforms with white linen gloves. Of course, we were nothing of the kind. We didn’t have uniforms, much less linen gloves. We didn’t even have insurance, which would have been unheard of in those days. We had Richard’s truck, but after a while it fell apart. After that, we rented trucks by the day.

Living in New York was still cheap, and JoAnne and I found our first loft on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street, on the edge of the flower district. JoAnne’s job was to book the work that the ads brought in. The moving business operated as a mini-seasonal affair in which the last week of every month and the first week of the following month were the working days. Nothing much else happened the other two weeks, making it an ideal job for a musician or artist. JoAnne just booked everything she could into each day, regardless of the vertical or horizontal distances the move required. We never complained about her scheduling skills, though our clients always did. We figured any job that was tackled and accomplished in the same day was a job well done, though sometimes we didn’t finish and the first day spilled over to the second or the third day. We hardly ever broke anything.

When JoAnne wasn’t booking our jobs, she was cleaning houses. That was her day work, but she soon became involved as well in her theater life. Our theater ensemble, unnamed at this point but later to become Mabou Mines, reassembled piece by piece in New York: JoAnne and I first, Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer next, and David Warrilow, who joined us from Paris, later on. JoAnne, Ruth, and Lee met Ellen Stewart, the founder of Café La MaMa, which went on to become the legendary off-off-Broadway La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. These were the great early days of La MaMa on East Fourth Street. Ellen was very interested in and enthusiastic about what young people were doing in theater and, at that time, we were young people. We presented ourselves as a company of five, and later on we were joined by Fred Neumann, also from Paris, and Bill Raymond, already living in New York.

Besides La MaMa, the other institutional downtown theater—institutional in the sense that they had full-time people working there and presenting pieces—was Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Joe had started his New York Shakespeare Festival company in the 1950s on Avenue C, and in 1967 moved to Astor Place. Joe once told me that when he started his first theater, he furnished it with theater seats he found abandoned in the street, which is believable, because later on I adapted a loft on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Bleecker Street for performances in exactly the same way. I always liked Joe’s spirit and I liked the fact that he had one foot in the classics and one foot in off-off-Broadway. He loved to do Shakespeare, but he also would pick up orphan companies like Mabou Mines who were doing very experimental pieces at that time. He considered it an important part of his job to give young theater groups places to work.

Joe was always an idealist and passionate about any issue of free expression and speech and experimental theater. In the early 1970s, I came across a book that contained his testimony when he had been called to appear before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1958. This subcommittee’s main power was to intimidate and frighten people, making them think that they would never work again unless they told everything that they knew. They put Joe in the crosshairs and he took the microphone and he turned the tables on them. He roasted them.

When he was asked if he used the productions of his plays to inject propaganda that would influence others to be sympathetic with the beliefs of communism, Joe replied, “Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare said, ‘To thine own self be true.’ Lines from Shakespeare can hardly be said to be subversive.”

When pressed to reveal names of people he might have known who were Communist Party members, Joe stated, “There is a blacklisting device in the theater and film industry, and the naming of people this way does deny these people the right to work, which I think is terribly unfair and un-American. I just think it is wrong to deny anybody employment because of their political beliefs. I have always been opposed to censorship.” He castigated them thoroughly and let them know that they were complete idiots and beggars at the table of art. He was a man of tremendous vision and integrity.

The next time I saw Joe at the Public I told him, “I just read your testimony from the fifties, during the McCarthy days.”

“You did?!”

“Yes, and you were fantastic!”

“I’m so glad you read it,” he said. He seemed very moved. I think people had forgotten by then what he had been like when he was our age.

The last time I talked to Joe—he was quite sick toward the end—I was working on a piece at the Public, and he was there in the hallway. It was less than a year before he died, in 1991. I remember he stopped and looked at me. He took me aside, and said, “I’m always happy to see you in my theater, Philip.” He looked me in the eye and I knew he meant it, that he wanted people like myself there. That was the kind of man he was.

NEW YORK’S DOWNTOWN THEATER SCENE
in the late 1960s was alive with new companies and new work. An unbelievable amount of talent and energy was launched at that time, and significant parts of it still remain in their original homes in the East Village. Some of it was a bit obscure and hard to find, but many of the companies were reaching out to a new audience of young artists, performers, and producers who, like themselves, were beginning to move into the East Village and the newly discovered SoHo district.

Almost all the players were there when we arrived from Paris: Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater, Meredith Monk’s the House, Bob Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater (though actually based in Vermont), and our own soon-to-be-named Mabou Mines Theater. Besides that, Richard Foreman, Jack Smith, and countless other independently minded people were working, and in 1971 George Bartenieff and Crystal Field founded the Theater for the New City as a home for new plays.

The different theater companies worked in various ways. Some were built around a visionary, like Meredith Monk, Bob Wilson, or Richard Foreman. Others, like Mabou Mines or the Performance Group, were more oriented toward people working collectively. In Mabou Mines, the members were all called co-artistic directors. There was no
leader
of the company. We were proud of the fact that we worked as a collective.

All of these companies were resolutely unconventional. Most of the work had very little to do with ordinary storytelling and very little to do with Broadway, off-Broadway, or off-off-Broadway. We were off-off-way-off-Broadway. We weren’t interested in the traditional theater. We didn’t measure our work by those standards. In our acting and performing, we were looking for a theatrical language that was different from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the American school of naturalism with which we had grown up. When JoAnne had done summer stock before we left for Europe, there was a different play every week: it could be Shakespeare, it could be
A Man for All Seasons
, it could be a Broadway play. A lot of people who trained in that work went on into film or television, but the kind of work we were doing followed in the European tradition of experimental theater. Both JoAnne and Ruth traveled to the South of France in the spring of 1969 to study with the seminal Polish director Grotowski, working along the lines of the practices and theories he wrote about in his book
Towards a Poor Theatre
. What Grotowski meant by “poor theater” is that you didn’t
have
anything. Everything had to be made by the actors: the costumes, the words—everything was built, was handmade. And it was not narrative work. It was radical, in the sense that it didn’t depend on the artifice of theater. It depended on a kind of emotional truth in the acting. I still recall Grotowski’s plays, and they were beautiful. Of all these new active theater companies, I believe it was Mabou Mines especially that knew European experimental work firsthand and managed to align it to an American aesthetic. In retrospect it seems natural that it should have come about in this way.

Though all of these quintessentially American companies were fully acquainted with theater history and philosophy, Mabou Mines emphasized collaborative work techniques, which eventually extended to its directors. JoAnne would become a formidable director, writing, adapting, and directing new work, as did Ruth Maleczech and Fred Neumann.

We had come to New York with a piece ready to go: Samuel Beckett’s
Play
, which we had done in Paris. The theater aesthetic of Beckett’s work had taken hold of the company from its beginning. The sets and costumes were uncomplicated—three urns (façades of urns, really) in which the performers would sit, while a moving spotlight set in front of them and operated by Lee would light their faces in turn. The actors’ faces were plastered with a heavy coat of oatmeal, which gave them an eerie, fresh-out-of-the-grave look. The music I had composed, inspired by Beckett’s text, was already recorded.

Play
was presented at La MaMa on Fourth Street and was warmly received. Ellen had already put the entire company on stipend. She was like that. If she liked you, she signed you up and took a chance. She provided a regular stipend of fifty dollars a week for each member, which meant that JoAnne and I together had one hundred dollars a week. That, plus my moving business and JoAnne’s occasional house cleaning (now becoming increasingly occasional as her theater work took over), was enough to keep us going. In those days, no one had health insurance and, fortunately, the need never came up.

The next work for the company would be
The Red Horse Animation
, a new original work by Lee Breuer. Its realization by the entire company occupied us for years. It was first presented at the Paula Cooper Gallery, then at the Guggenheim Museum in November 1970, and at La MaMa in June 1971. For this piece I composed a “tapping music” to be performed live by the actors on a floor that was set in four-by-four-foot modular plywood squares, each square amplified with a contact mike. Most of
The Red Horse Animation
was learned and rehearsed in New York City but the final work, including the amplified floor and a wooden wall capable of physically sustaining an actor pinned perpendicularly on its surface, was built and rehearsed in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, not far from the company’s namesake, the town of Mabou, known for its coal mine. The company by then was artistically secure and mature enough to make original and striking pieces, and in the early 1970s it embarked on a period of beautiful collaborative works. Power Boothe, who designed the floor and wall for
The Red Horse Animation
, was the first resident artist with the company, and in time was followed by others, including Jene Highstein.