The Downtown Pop Underground

---

Agosto Machado was a Chinese-Spanish Christopher Street queen and Zelig-like figure who witnessed the rise of the underground theater and film movements, the 1960s counterculture, gay liberation, and punk rock. [more]

---

Andy Milligan directed some of the earliest shows at Caffe Cino and La MaMa, and later went on to make trashy, low-budget movies such as The Ghastly Ones, Vapors, Seeds of Sin, The Body Beneath, The Man with Two Heads, and Torture Dungeon. [more]

---

Best known for his Pop Art silkscreened work, Andy Warhol was a key connector figure who circulated not only through uptown art circles, but also within the underground film, poetry, theater, and music scenes. [more]

---

Ann Harris began collaborating with her six children in the early 1960s after her oldest son—an eleven-year-old soon-to-be Hibiscus—hatched the idea to start a family theater troupe after learning that his mother had written two plays in college that had moldered in a trunk for years; by the early 1970s, she was writing songs for Hibiscus and his sisters in the Angels of Light. [more]

---

Bette Midler was cast in the 1965 La MaMa production of Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets at the age of 18, and later performed a cabaret act at gay bathhouses with with pianist Barry Manilow (who also sometimes performed at Caffe Cino). [more]

---

After moving to Downtown New York, Bruce Eyster became fast friends with the likes of Harry Koutoukas, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and others; he also appeared in a few of Koutoukas' shows until they had a falling out after the playwright demanded that Eyster bleach his hair white and shave off all his body hair for his play Too Late for Yogurt. [more]

---

Playwright and performer Charles Ludlam briefly worked with John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous before forming his own Ridiculous Theatrical Company and mounting his breakthrough play, Bluebeard, at La MaMa. [more]

---

Longtime Village resident Chris Kapp was a performer in Hot Peaches and the Play-House of the Ridiculous, and was also the long-time director of “Coffeehouse Chronicles” at La MaMa. [more]

---

DIY theater impresario Ellen Stewart cultivated an extended family of theater folks after she founded La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street building, which then moved to various East Village location before settling in its permanent home on East Fourth Street. [more]

---

Eloise Harris, the fifth child of the Harris family, got her Equity card at the age of nine performing in Invitation to a Beheading at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and later joined her brother Hibiscus in the Angels of Light. [more]

---

George Harris, Jr. was married to Ann Harris, and together they raised six children who were all involved in theater at Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and Judson Church. [more]

---

Hair co-creator Gerome Ragni could be seen hanging out in downtown hotspots such as the Chelsea Hotel to La MaMa, soaking up ideas that eventually made it into the Broadway version of that show. [more]

---

Haralambos Monroe “Harry” Koutoukas was an outré playwright with a kaleidoscopic way with words, whose plays were presented at many of the key Off-Off-Broadway venues: Caffe Cino, La MaMa, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poets’ Theatre. [more]

---

Actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein had his La MaMa debut in the 1971 Warhol play Pork well before winning two Tony Awards for writing and starring in Torch Song Trilogy. [more]

---

Hibiscus was a gender-fluid performer and founder of the psychedelic drag troupes the Cockettes and Angels of Light who was among the very first who succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, in 1982. [more]

---

The playwright and performer Jackie Curtis was a working class Lower East Side native who was raised by his grandmother, “Slugger Ann,” the proprietor of a rough East Village bar named Slugger Ann’s. [more]

---

Jacque Lynn Colton often performed at Caffe Cino, Judson Memorial Church, and La MaMa; she was also among the first to tour Europe as part of the emerging La MaMa Repertory Company, expanding the downtown diaspora’s reach. [more]

---

Jayne Anne Harris, the oldest of the Harris sisters, appeared in the Judson production Sing Ho for a Bear, an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, among many other productions; in the early 1970s, she joined Hibiscus’s Angels of Light. [more]

---

John Vaccaro was the mercurial director who orchestrated the Play-House of the Ridiculous, whose shows were unrelenting explosions of color, glitter, and noise underscored by social satire. [more]

---

During the early 1970s, Laugh-In star Lily Tomlin met and fell in love with Jane Wagner, who first introduced her to the likes of Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, whose Vain Victory show was then playing at La MaMa. [more]

---

Lisa Jane Persky first met Harry Koutoukas in 1965, when she was about ten years old and her family moved into 87 Christopher Street; by 1973, Koutoukas had cast Persky in her New York stage debut at La MaMa, which was followed by a role in Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars opposite Divine in 1976, the same year she became a founding staffer for the New York Rocker and shot Debbie Harry's first cover photo. [more]

---

The youngest of the Harris family siblings, Mary Lou Harris appeared in several Off-Off-Broadway productions in the 1960s before teaming up with her sisters and brother Hibiscus to form the Angels of Light. [more]

---

Melba LaRose was the star of Jackie Curtis’s first play, Glamour, Glory, and Gold: The Life and Times of Nola Noon, Goddess and Star, which was directed by Ron Link, who went on to direct many Off-Off-Broadway shows, including Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars. [more]

---

Actor Michael Arian joined the Play-House of the Ridiculous, where he worked with director John Vaccaro for many years and met Ruby Lynn Reyner, whose band Ruby and the Rednecks featured Arian as a backup vocalist. [more]

---

Soon after moving to New York City, Patti Smith met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who shared a room with her in the Chelsea Hotel and later shot the iconic cover photo for her debut album, Horses; along the way she appeared in Off-Off-Broadway shows (at La MaMa and elsewhere) and performed poetry in various downtown locations. [more]

---

Playwright Paul Foster met Ellen Stewart in the early 1960s and helped her open the first of Café La MaMa, which was soon showcasing Foster’s plays—including Balls, Tom Paine, and Madonna in the Orchard. [more]

---

Cabaret performer and Off-Off-Broadway music composer Paul Serrato managed the Paperbook Gallery in Greenwich Village, where he met Jackie Curtis and began writing music for Curtis's Lucky Wonderful and the underground hit La MaMa show, Vain Victory. [more]

---

Robert Patrick was a Caffe Cino regular who began hanging out there in 1961, an immersion that led him to become a prolific playwright with boundless energy; after Caffe Cino closed in 1968 he moved over to the Old Reliable, a dive bar and Off-Off-Broadway theater venue on the Lower East Side. [more]

---

Before he co-created the hit Broadway musical Dreamgirls, Tom Eyen had more humble beginnings at Caffe Cino and La MaMa, which presented his Off-Off-Broadway hit Frustrata, or the Dirty Little Girl with the Red Paper Rose Stuck in Her Head Is Demented. [more]

---

Tom O’Horgan was a multitalented director, musician, and choreographer who worked on dozens of shows at La MaMa before hitting the bigtime as the director of the Broadway musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, though he continued to return to La MaMa after his mainstream success. [more]

---

Walter Michael Harris was the second child of the Harris family, the younger brother of Hibiscus (born George Harris III, aka G3), and was the youngest cast member in the Broadway debut of Hair. [more]