Education Quote by Richard Foreman

A lot of artists polish their origin story into a clean, upward arc. Foreman, a playwright whose work famously distrusts smooth narratives, does the opposite: he gives you the unvarnished, faintly clunky memory of becoming "the main actor" and leaves the seams showing. The repetition ("junior high in the junior high school group") and the hedging ("you know") aren’t just verbal tics; they signal an anti-myth. He’s not selling destiny. He’s recalling status - small, local, adolescent - as the first intoxicant.

The intent reads as almost disarmingly literal: I moved from one school tier to another and my role got bigger. But the subtext is about how hierarchy trains performance. "Main actor" isn’t a claim to talent so much as a glimpse of how institutions hand out visibility, how kids learn to equate being seen with being someone. Foreman’s later theater, with its resistance to psychological realism and its suspicion of easy identification, can be heard here in embryo: the self as a role awarded by a system, not an essence discovered within.

Context matters: Foreman comes out of a postwar American culture that treated extracurriculars as personality factories, and he later became a key figure in downtown experimental theater, where biography is often treated as suspect material. The flatness of the anecdote is the point. It’s a miniature of how the performing self begins: not in revelation, but in a school production, an assignment of prominence, and the first lesson that attention is a kind of power.