Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s complaint is less a swipe at actors than a rejection of theater’s oldest hustle: emotional persuasion as a popularity contest. “Trying to make the audience love them” is the tell. He’s pointing to a kind of performance that courts affection the way salesmen court trust, smoothing over complexity with charm and catharsis. When he says he felt this at fifteen, it reads like an origin myth: the teenage spectator who clocks the con early and never stops resisting it.

The phrase “too much involved” matters because it suggests a system, not a few bad performers. Foreman is diagnosing an industry built around likability and emotional legibility, where the actor’s job quietly becomes audience management. “Over emotional” isn’t prudishness; it’s suspicion. He’s describing emotion deployed as a shortcut, a ready-made route to applause that can block other kinds of perception: discomfort, ambiguity, the stray thought that doesn’t resolve into tears.

The subtext is Foreman’s aesthetic manifesto in miniature. As the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, he spent decades making work that resists easy identification and refuses the cozy contract of “feel with me, then forgive me.” His theater doesn’t want your love; it wants your alertness. Seen in the context of postwar experimental art and anti-naturalist staging, the line becomes a refusal of psychological realism’s moral pressure: that to be moved is to be good, and to be liked is to be true. Foreman’s wager is harsher and cleaner: theater can do more than seduce. It can interrupt.