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Café La MaMa (third location)

Café La MaMa (third location)

122 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003


Right after a performance of Paul Foster’s Balls at Café La MaMa’s second location, Ellen Stewart enlisted the audience to move the entire set, seats, and other items to a new location up the street, at 122 Second Avenue—just before the police raided the 82 Second Avenue location.

Stories

Tom O’Horgan Joins La MaMa

People

By the mid-1960s, musician and director Tom O’Horgan had become part of the La MaMa family. “Tom came into the Cino,” playwright Robert Patrick recalled, “moping and sulking that his life was over and he wasn’t getting anywhere, and that he was a woebegone, middle-aged gay musician. Then Joe Cino said, ‘Here, you can have the floor.’ Tom did two rather conventional nightclub-type reviews with eccentric touches. After Paul Foster saw that, he brought him to La MaMa, where Ellen supported him.” He eventually directed some sixty plays at Stewart’s theater and had even greater success directing the Broadway debuts of Hair in 1968 and Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. Much earlier, in 1964, O’Horgan had directed an important production of The Maids, the first to cast men in the two pivotal female roles (as playwright Jean Genet intended). “I played the Madame,” said Mari-Claire Charba, who was also cast in The Maids. “We presented it at La MaMa, and it was a big success. That was the beginning of his directing career, because before that he was really a composer and a musician.” Charba’s earliest memory of O’Horgan was at a Happening he orchestrated at Judson Church. “He did this thing where everybody was inside the Judson,” she said, “and then they all came out onto Fourth Street where all these drag queens were.”

From Chapter 16 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Jackie Curtis Fired From Miss Nefertiti Regrets

People

Ann Harris remembers Jackie Curtis as a ubiquitous presence around the neighborhood. “My older kids ran into him around town,” she said. “Jackie was definitely around.” George Harris III, later Hibiscus, was Jackie’s classmate when they both attended Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, a special high school for performers in midtown Manhattan. (Jackie, Hibiscus, and actress Pia Zadora were all in the same math class.) Along with Hibiscus’s brother Walter Michael Harris, Jackie Curtis was cast in a 1965 La MaMa production of Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets, as the love interest of Bette Midler, who had just arrived from Hawaii. One day, the temperamental Curtis stormed off the set, and Eyen asked Walter to take the vacant role. He was already the drummer in the offstage band that performed the show’s music, so he would run back and forth performing various duties, like singing a lover’s duet with Midler. “Bette played the Nefertiti role and I took on Jackie Curtis’s role, Tobias, an angel sent by the god Ra to be Nefertiti’s downfall,” Harris said. “I was about fourteen. So I got to sing and perform with a nineteen-year-old Bette Midler and played drums for the other people’s songs when I wasn’t onstage.”

From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


La MaMa’s Influence on Hair

People

“We were doing all these exercises that became the epitome of that performance style of Hair,” Marie-Claire Charba said. “Tom shifted Broadway into all this physicality, and we were precursors to that. Like Hamilton, we did that with Tom Paine. When I saw Hamilton, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that was like Tom Paine,’ which was done—what, fifty years ago? Same thing. Tom O’Horgan took a historical play and moved it into mixed media.” The busy director was simultaneously working on Tom Paine at La MaMa while running the first rehearsal workshops for Hair in early 1968. “There was a lot of crossing of inspirational ideas with those two plays,” La MaMa playwright Paul Foster said, recalling one moment in Tom Paine that was absorbed into Hair. Foster had a scene in which the people of France were starving in order to feed the Termite Queen, who attacked the hungry mob and began eating the clothes off their back. “No, don’t stop, just keep going,” O’Horgan said during a rehearsal, so the performers kept tearing off their clothes until they were naked. “These were young kids and they didn’t have any qualms about getting naked,” Foster recalled. “It was a powerful moment in the show, and it rose out of a need to say something visually.” Two weeks later, Hair featured a similar nude scene when it debuted at the Biltmore Theatre on April 29, 1968.

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


Tom O’Horgan’s Kinetic Sculptures

People

Café La MaMa’s secret weapon was Tom O’Horgan: a multitalented director, musician, and choreographer who worked on dozens of shows at Ellen Stewart’s theater. A musician with no traditional theatrical training, he had worked throughout the 1950s as an offbeat variety entertainer, cracking jokes while playing early English ballads on the harp—even appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. “He was ambidextrous when it came to his playing, whatever he thought the piece needed,” playwright Paul Foster recalled. “It added a whole new dimension to theater.” O’Horgan merged music, gesture, and dialogue by using performers’ bodies to create what he called kinetic sculptures. One exemplar of this approach was Foster’s Tom Paine, a “living play” that seamlessly integrated the auditioning, casting, rehearsing, and script development processes into an organic whole. To master this new theatrical style, all fifteen members of the La MaMa troupe attended five-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week workshops that included music making, movement exercises, and dialogue. “There were people fiddling around with theater form,” Robert Patrick said, “and so Tom O’Horgan and Paul Foster and the La MaMa troupe put it all together into a workshop method that developed the idea of collaborative creation in theater.” O’Horgan’s performers might come out wearing drapery—chanting and moving about—then suddenly swirl and shift into a scene that was developed from another overlapping theme. “Sometimes,” Foster noted, “you just wanted to emphasize the texture, and you’re willing to lose comprehension.”

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore