The primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral history Project
Celebrating the visionaries who created New York's vibrant Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater.
K-O
"Putting a personal face to injustice has a power that reading history books cannot duplicate."
"As a director, my job is to empower colleagues and to be stretched by them in creative collaboration."
Steve Kaplan
Producer, Director, Comedy Writer, Teacher, Actor, Co-Founder Manhattan Punch Line Theatre
Interview #192
READ MORE >>"A lot of things are comedy. It’s not just the gag, not just the slipping on the banana peel, but that comedy tells the truth and specifically it tells us the truth about people, and sometimes the truth is sad. But it’s not tragic and it’s not melodrama. It’s that odd place between laughing and crying."
"I fell into theatre because I was handy, I was there."
"The Off-Broadway theatre was confined. It really began to focus on what American theatre needed, and that was the play."
"Every play is different and the experience and how I do it is different…You have to be willing to just be lost."
Lawrence Kornfeld
Director, Educator, General Manager/Assistant Director The Living Theatre, Co-Founder/Co-Artistic Director Judson Poets’ Theater, Co-Founder/Artistic Director Theater for the New City, Director of the Theatre Program New York State Council of the Arts
Interview #183
READ MORE >>"I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write music…Julian’s (Beck) conception of the theater, and Judith’s, was that they were artists. From the very beginning their motto was: ‘We’re not doing this as a leap-frog to Broadway. We don’t want Broadway. We want a theater, a living theater.’ That satisfied my soul to not be commercial…Commercial Theater was a step down"
Eric Krebs
Founder and Operator of the John Houseman and Douglas Fairbanks Theaters and the George Street Playhouse, Producer
Interview #23
READ MORE >>"Do what you love in any way you can and assume that it’s going to last a couple of years and go away."
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"The mission of The Writers Theatre was to enrich the quality of language on the living stage, with a specific emphasis on adaptation…what we wanted to do was create a space and environment for writers to work...that exists now, but there weren’t many places then where you could do that."
"When David Bowie died, [we realized] ‘Valentine’ portrayed his cancer, and the cancer was killing everyone around him, including himself...The show [LAZARUS] suddenly made sense after that…the audience was weeping, the cast was onstage, weeping – it’s just one of those moments you will never, ever forget."
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"It was the first time that things kind of slid out of category, you didn’t call something a dance or a play, because things started getting combined."
Baayork Lee
Actress, Dancer, Singer, Director, Co-Founder National Asian Artists Project
Interview #95
READ MORE >>"If I were auditioning now I wouldn’t be working…it’s harder, you have to be able to sing, dance, tumble, play instruments...’Triple Threat.’ We invented that word, Chorus Line invented that phrase."
"Everything we did at the time was informed by social consciousness."
"I had never seen these things I’d made outdoors. And I found that they took on a kind of life outdoors that had so much more vitality in it… There’s something about a natural setting and this bizarre, man-made artifact in that setting that sets up some kind of an energy that’s really exciting."
"One of the great things about the theatre in New York, and the people who have this quest to be in theatre, is nothing will stop it from happening. It has to happen. And when Off-Broadway became more expensive - that's how Off-Off-Broadway started."
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"…what are our values and how do you express your values through the play, or how are the values of the play expressed through your design?...They become one and the same in this process."
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"I don’t know what this is, but it’s fascinating and I wanna do it."
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Virginia Louloudes
Executive Director of The Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York (A.R.T./New York)
Interview #88
READ MORE >>"And the work they do in the schools – nobody knows the real story – how many Off-Broadway theatres are working in the schools. It is the best kept secret."
"A life in the theater is a life of absolute active learning for your entire life. It’s the most precious life there is."
Robert LuPone
Dancer, Actor, Director, Producer, Artistic Director Co-Founder Manhattan Class Company
Interview #154
READ MORE >>"You have those moments … when the sphere of influence of theatre is beyond the composite parts and beyond even the audience’s understanding; it’s tribal; it’s ancient; it’s in our souls, and we carry it forever. That’s the place we touch every now and then, and it makes it all worthwhile."
"I believe the future is already here."
"I hear people’s voices…they’re engraved in my brain."
"I want theatre to be as necessary as television and iPhones."
Ellen Maddow
Composer, Writer, Actor, Mediator, Co-Founder The Talking Band
Interview #194
READ MORE >>"We still have a desire to do it…. I don’t know if I would have had a career in the theater if not for this. I don’t think I fit into any other kind of way of being in the theater. I came to playwriting later, started as a performer. I was always interested in making my own stuff. I saw that The Open Theater was doing that so The Talking Band was modeled on the idea that you can make it up and do it yourself."
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Christina (Chryse) Maile
Co-Founder Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective
Interview #144
READ MORE >>"Each of us…was interested in certain portions of the women’s movement, but I think we embodied the women’s movement in the sense that we worked so cohesively and so enthusiastically together."
"Sometimes it's almost hard to tell a performance from a protest, you know? Sometimes they overlap a little bit."
"The Open Theater…was extremely of the moment. Politically of the moment. Spiritually of the moment. I mean, it was perfect for its time. It was of its time."
"I do have an ability to see the single line that goes from here to there. That’s almost always the one thing that you have to have; it’s one thing that’s very hard to communicate to someone else. Someone else will not have that same vision."
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Norman Thomas Marshall
Founder of the No Smoking Playhouse, Actor, Playwright
Interview #2
READ MORE >>"Off-Off-Broadway was so welcoming and so open to anything…I think 2 or 3 of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen anywhere were Off-Off-Broadway."
Christopher Martin
Founding Artistic Director, CSC (Classic Stage Company)
Interview #138
READ MORE >>"Audiences have always understood Shakespeare; that’s why we have so many Shakespeare festivals in this country! Why…because people wanted to see the plays"
Marshall W. Mason
Founder and Artistic Director of Circle Repertory Company
Interview #41
READ MORE >>"Directing is a pragmatic art… under the circumstances what can I do?"
"What's going to happen to New York without this kind of theater; where artists will have stories to tell but no space to tell them in?"
"Some people just don’t have any judgment about commercial material. They have judgment about classy material. The moment they decide they’re going to do something really commercial…it ain’t gonna work!"
"We’re not going back, we’re going forward. We have to be ready for change, we need to stay open to what’s being offered and coming our way. These young people today are amazing. What does remain the same and is not open to change is going to be in trouble."
Abigail Rosen McGrath
Director, Producer, Playwright, Activist, Co-Founder Off Center Theatre
Interview #204
READ MORE >>"We did shows about New York City that were informative…without making a judgment – that was very important to me. It’s so easy to dump…cheap shots…you show people what it is and then they can make their own decisions. What makes people good is the freedom to make mistakes…we learn from them"
"You want to be in control of your own destiny. That was the fun part of Off-Off-Broadway . . . we were just in control of it all."
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"Theater should be intimate, it’s not supposed to be in a barn…Theater is always a leap of faith...there’s no guarantee."
"We’ve always needed to hear stories and we’ve always needed to be around live people telling us stories. We know how that sustains us."
"I do think the theatre is the ultimate human art form...and the more airs, and variations, and subtleties, and stuff we can throw into that, the smarter and better we'll be."
Gloria Miguel
Actor, Playwright, Director, Choreographer Co-Founder Spiderwoman Theater
Interview #172
READ MORE >>"See me…I’m still here…as a Native I’m still here…as an elder…I’m still here talking, loving, hating…talk to me!...I never talked when I was a kid. People asked my mother ‘does she talk?’ I’m talking now in theater, theater gets me out."
"Steve Mills started out when he was 14 years old doing amateur night and singing on street corners with Benny Rubin and Fred Allen…I felt as if I had stepped into 1935 when I married Steve [by then a famed Burlesque performer] in 1966…I stepped into a time machine."
Maude Mitchell (and Lee Breuer)
Actor, Dramaturge, Adapter, Teacher, Mabou Mines Senior Associate Artist
Interview #145
READ MORE >>""
Barbara Montgomery
Co-Founder of Black Women in Theater, Inc., Actress, Director
Interview #71
READ MORE >>"Off-Broadway for me, it just opened my soul."
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Charlotte Moore
Co-Founder, The Irish Repertory Theatre, Artistic Director, Director, Producer, Actor, Playwright
Interview #129
READ MORE >>"We just kept going and kept going. We’ve never closed. We’ve never stopped. Ever. You can’t win every time. No matter how courageous you’re allowed to be, you have to be able to take chances."
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James Morgan
Producing Artistic Director of York Theatre, Scenic Designer
Interview #121
READ MORE >>"New York without Off-Broadway theatres is not a place I want to be"
"You have to remake the world. You have to create the theatre in your image."
"The future of the American theatre is Off-Broadway."
"The whole point of non-commercial theatre is to offer an experience that the commercial theatre couldn’t or wouldn’t. --- I believe that criticism at its best becomes a minor art form, a specialization of the personal essay; so that a critic is both a theatre citizen … and an artist himself."
Dorothy Olim
Producer, General Manager, Operating Officer of ATPAM, K/O Management, Inc., K/O Advertising, Inc.
Interview #22
READ MORE >>"You have to want to be in the theatre under any circumstances."
"Just keep trying to do things. I will, and that’s my message to anybody working and starting out in theatre, just keep on trying to do stuff."
Steve Olsen
Founder of the Laurie Beechman Theatre at the West Bank Cafe, Restaurateur
Interview #32
READ MORE >>"So many people came out of downstairs; I’m a lucky guy."
"When I was starting… [I] was wherever the work was, you know? Just creating stuff, making it up as we went along. It was really pretty exciting."
"People never quite get what makes Theatre 80 what it is, they just know they love performing there, they love seeing plays there. Part of it is that Dad designed a space where the theatre disappears during a performance."