"What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play"
About this Quote
The line has the swagger of understatement, the kind that smuggles a revolution in through a side door. "One day I decided" makes aesthetic rupture sound like a casual errand, flattening years of dissatisfaction with theatrical habit into a single, clean act of will. That compression is the point: Foreman frames innovation not as a lightning strike from the muse, but as a choice to stop cooperating with the defaults.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of realism and narrative comfort. A "new kind of play" implies the old kind had become too fluent, too consumable, too good at lulling audiences into passive recognition. Foreman's work with the Ontological-Hysteric Theater treated theater less like a story-delivery system and more like a live pressure chamber for perception: images, interruptions, signage, sound cues, and disjunctive action that refuse to let you sink into plot. So the intent behind the quote isn't self-mythologizing genius; it's a manifesto for attention. He decided to write differently because the mind, under modern conditions, feels differently.
Context matters: Foreman comes out of the postwar avant-garde pipeline (Beckett's austerity, Brecht's estrangement, Cage's chance operations, the downtown New York scene's anti-bourgeois energy). By presenting the shift as a decision, he also needles the institution. If theater is stuck, it's not fate; it's consensus. Foreman's sentence dares artists to treat form as an ethical question: what kinds of consciousness are we training, and who benefits when art stays legible, linear, and easy to digest?
The subtext is a quiet indictment of realism and narrative comfort. A "new kind of play" implies the old kind had become too fluent, too consumable, too good at lulling audiences into passive recognition. Foreman's work with the Ontological-Hysteric Theater treated theater less like a story-delivery system and more like a live pressure chamber for perception: images, interruptions, signage, sound cues, and disjunctive action that refuse to let you sink into plot. So the intent behind the quote isn't self-mythologizing genius; it's a manifesto for attention. He decided to write differently because the mind, under modern conditions, feels differently.
Context matters: Foreman comes out of the postwar avant-garde pipeline (Beckett's austerity, Brecht's estrangement, Cage's chance operations, the downtown New York scene's anti-bourgeois energy). By presenting the shift as a decision, he also needles the institution. If theater is stuck, it's not fate; it's consensus. Foreman's sentence dares artists to treat form as an ethical question: what kinds of consciousness are we training, and who benefits when art stays legible, linear, and easy to digest?
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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