Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement

by Stephen J. Bottoms

"Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression."
-William Coco

"At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater."
-Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard

"An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home . Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air."
-Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave


Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground ---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway.

This is a theater whose legacy is still felt it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live .

Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality.

No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment.

Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.

Genres: Drama

448 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2004

About the author

Stephen J. Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, where he is also currently Head of Subject for Drama. Previously he taught at the University of Leeds (2005–12) and the University of Glasgow (1993–2005). He is a theatre maker and critic.

Reviews

[John Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In December 1958, an Italian-American named Joe Cino from a working-class family opened a coffeehouse on Cornelia Street in New York City’s West Village where he and his friends, most of whom were gay, could hang out. Using an Italian spelling, he called it the Caffe Cino. Like other coffee shops in the area, it took to hosting shows of painting and simple entertainments such as poetry readings, music, and impromptu dance performances, and then, as happened at the other shops too, somebody decided to put on a play.

Strictly speaking, the Cino wasn’t the first off-off-Broadway venue, since a few other cafés were already doing the same thing. The Village Voice, true to its name, was paying attention; it started covering “Café Theatre” in the late 50s and in 1960 changed the name of its listings to “Off-Off-Broadway,” a term that no one involved now admits to coining. So the Cino wasn’t the first. But it was the first one that mattered. The Cino kept at it and in short order was regularly presenting plays at night, while continuing to operate as an ordinary coffeehouse during the daytime. Soon it was followed by a handful of similar ventures, such as the Judson Poets’ Theater (founded at a church), La Mama ETC (launched in an East Village basement, hence literally underground), Theatre Genesis (also founded at a church), the Open Theatre (an itinerant ensemble), and the Play-House of the Ridiculous and its sibling, the Theatre of the Ridiculous (also itinerant).

Why does any of this matter now? That depends where you stand, but some of the people and places and shows in this book may have either created things you’ve heard of or influenced things you’ve heard of, even if you pay little attention to theater. Tom O’Horgan, who directed Hair when it appeared on Broadway in 1968, began his work with the La Mama Troupe. Maria Irene Fornés, who worked all over, wrote for Judson a sort of counter-Hair called Promenade; when it was presented in Dallas some years back, the producer said, “Hair talks about the revolution; Promenade IS the revolution.” Fornés not only wrote plays but taught playwriting, and one of her students, David Henry Hwang, later wrote the drama M. Butterfly and, more recently, the libretto for an opera called An American Soldier that’s being presented this month in New York. Sam Shepard, possibly better known now as an actor, started at Theatre Genesis; he later wrote an American family drama called Buried Child that could’ve been the end of American family dramas, so thoroughly did it take apart its subject. The La Mama operation itself is, against all odds, still very much alive and kicking in New York. Tony Kushner, who arrived after this scene had come and gone, nonetheless reflects some of its impulses, as he indicated when he described Angels in America as an example of “the Theatre of the Fabulous.” Lanford Wilson, possibly my personal favorite among the playwrights in this volume for his probing ensemble dramas such as Fifth of July, did his first work at the Cino.

However, the aim of this book is not to tell us about things we’ve already heard of—almost the opposite. Stephen J. Bottoms’s purpose is to remedy a bad case of neglect. To adapt a line from Bob Dylan (who was present in some of those coffeehouses), something was happening there, and we didn’t know what it was. Much has been written about a handful of performer-centered ensembles such as the Living Theatre, and about the rise a little later of antitextual, image-oriented directors such as Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman, but this sidesteps a lot. Bottoms puts it well, in a characteristically sinuous sentence: “Today, the achievements of many other downtown artists of the period—from Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol, and from the Judson Dance Theater to the Velvet Underground—are regarded as being of pivotal importance in the histories of their respective art-forms, a fact that makes the collective ‘forgetting’ of the alternative theater movement all the more extraordinary.”

At this point, almost 20 years after Playing Underground was published (I brought home an advance reading copy at the time but didn’t get around to reading it until now), it shouldn’t need a serious review. I’ll assume that this enormously vivid, thoroughly researched, and elegantly constructed book has hit its mark and that the world of American theater is now more fully aware of this chapter in its history. I’ll confine myself to a few more remarks, some of a personal nature.

Bottoms doesn’t romanticize this period. But I’m tempted to, not only because the book takes me back but also because it conveys the freewheeling, try-it-and-see-what-happens spirit of the theatrical times in a way that’s infectious, almost intoxicating. Where personal history is concerned, one note may suffice. In the early 70s, I picked up a recording of a musical vampire tale called Carmilla and always wondered how such a thing came to be. Now I know, though it’s mentioned only in passing here—it was created by the La Mama ETC Company in 1970. Regarding the spirit of the times, there was a lot to it. Sometimes it was political, increasingly so as time passed, but more often in the indirect, broad sense of altering perceptions. Much of it is summed up in the ideas of “imagining new possibilities” and “challeng[ing] or subvert[ing] received conventions and assumptions.” Out with the old, in with the new. And have fun while you’re doing it: as the book’s title tells us, these theater artists were indeed “playing.” And forget about money for as long as you can. None of these groups charged admission to begin with, nor were many of the people involved getting paid much if anything. Many of them, possibly all of them, hoped to advance their careers in some way, and money began to figure in, especially after the Actors’ Equity Association launched its Showcase Code and foundations and government agencies began offering grants to respectable organizations, but for some time the idea was that money would come later or elsewhere.

In my experience, this spirit, however you sum it up, is a rare thing. It emerged in a lot of ways in the arts and in the broader culture of the U.S. in the 60s. Something of the kind emerged in the New York theater scene of the 2000s, which is when theater blogging took off, and when (to pick just one example) theater artists such as Ivo van Hove and his collaborators did their first work in New York; as if in approval, this book came out around the same time. Van Hove and some of the others came to New York from elsewhere, but so did half the city, and many of the artists in Bottoms’s book did the same.

A similar spirit was present, believe it or not, among U.S. technology companies in the 80s and early 90s. This is a separate subject. But I can say from having been part of it that the air was full of new possibilities. The role of Broadway and off-Broadway was played in the tech scene by big, domineering corporate enterprises, which many of the engineers were trying to get away from or just ignoring. Instead of basements, cafés, and churches, people worked in garages, kitchens, and unassuming little office parks. Even commercialism and careerism, never far away in the U.S., were often kept at arm’s length; one place where I worked was funded as a lab, similar to Xerox’s now familiar Palo Alto Research Center, where the idea was basically to look for ideas.

Possibly the biggest news about what Bottoms calls “the underground movement’s anarchic, makeshift spirit” is that one of those terms is a misnomer. Playwright Robert Patrick says, “One of the most American things about the off-off-Broadway movement was that there was no movement—no manifesto, no credo, no criteria. It just happened.” There’s some kind of alchemy here. These theater artists were working separately or in groups, frequently moving from one intrepid band to another or one ramshackle location to another, sometimes seeking broader recognition (Ellen Stewart sent La Mama tours to Europe more than once) and sometimes serving only their immediate community (as Theatre Genesis always did), doing what they had to do (Joe Cino’s motto) or what they could do (Johnny Dodd, a waiter at the Cino, found he had a knack for lighting design) or simply what they wanted to do, and somehow it all added up to something.

The book isn’t nearly as high-level or abstract as it may sound. Bottoms keeps in view the cultural context: Dylan goes electric in 1965; Yippies go to Chicago for the 1968 convention. He can and does discuss the implications of, for instance, cross-gender casting that went both ways, with men playing women and women playing men (he mentions gender theorist Judith Butler in connection with this). But the heart of the book is its many descriptions of plays and players, drawing on published texts, archival materials, contemporary reviews, and interviews.

As James Gleick pointed out, books are time machines, carrying part of our present into a future we’ll never see or, as in this case, taking us back to a past we didn’t witness. This one works exceedingly well.

[Branden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know why this took me over a year to finish, but I'm so glad I did. In my top five best books on the theatre ever.