La MaMa Ellen Stewart. Photo by Vernon Smith, 1972, courtesy of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private Collection
By Robert Heide
I first met Ellen Stewart (she was born November 7th, 1919, and died January 13th, 2011, and would have been 100 in 2019), the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, in her first theatre, a dirt-floored basement at 321 East 9th Street. Ellen hailed from Chicago via a Cajun parish in Louisiana, and was working as a fashion designer at Saks Fifth Avenue after having graduated from elevator operator, when her neighbor, an aspiring playwright named Paul Foster, and another friend named Jim Moore convinced her to open a theatre in the East Village store where she sold her women’s fashions.
She was skeptical but game, and she contacted her friend, Joe Cino, of the Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street, and asked him to send over a play he had done there—a version of Tennessee Williams’s short story One Arm. It opened on July 27th, 1962. She followed this with Eugene O’Neill’s short play Before Breakfast. Audiences reveled in showing up at this literally underground cellar space, and many plays ensued including an early work by Leonard Melfi entitled Lazy Baby Susan. Melfi went on to become, along with many others over the years, a top La MaMa playwright and he eventually wound up working on a film with Sophia Loren. The famed actress Shirley Stoler, who starred in the cult classic film The Honeymoon Killers, opened her own play there October 19th.
On October 31st, also in 1962, Ellen and Paul Foster put up a dark one-act play, The Room, by Harold Pinter. They were surprised, and a little scared, when Pinter himself showed up in a huff wondering how they came to do his play without his permission. The great British playwright, who later won, among many honors, a Nobel prize, changed his outlook when Ellen turned on her considerable charm and he reportedly said, “Okay, let’s go on with it,” and proceeded to enjoy watching his own weird play in a dirt-floored basement in the East Village on Hallowe’en night.
Two years and one day later, on All Souls’ Day, the creative Harris family, with six children, arrived in the East Village from Florida. Ellen learned they didn’t have a home, found them an apartment in the same building as the theatre, and instantly established the El Dorado Players as her in-house all-children troupe. The kids (one of whom, George, went on to become the performer Hibiscus who founded the famed San Francisco troupe The Cockettes; another, Walter, a pivotal character in the Broadway production of Hair), as well as their parents, became the go-to group for playwrights looking for a cast.
That was the beginning of the extraordinary and long-lasting history of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. Eventually Ellen moved to better digs at 82 Second Avenue, and later to a second floor loft at 122 Second Avenue where she produced and often directed original plays in a club-like atmosphere, serving coffee and introducing each night’s performance by ringing a giant cowbell and announcing in her French accent that it was “dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.” A club membership of $1 was collected and a basket was passed for donations for the actors.
Ellen occasionally also designed costumes for such plays as Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets (1965), which featured a then unknown actress named Bette Midler, and my own play entitled Why Tuesday Never Has a Blue Monday (1966), which starred Patrick Sullivan as a psychiatrist and Marilyn Roberts as his patient, an actress who was confusing her own identity with the roles she was playing. Together the two acted out hysterical animal-sexual scenes. The director, Ron Link, had Marilyn wearing a white dress, but when Ellen saw it she screamed out, “No! No! It must be red!” She designed a billowing red taffeta that moved and swiveled. This year I learned from Mia Yu, Ellen’s personally appointed successor as creative director at La MaMa, that red was Ellen’s favorite color. When I looked around at the grand and newly renovated La MaMa building, formerly called the Annex and now the Ellen Stewart Theatre, at 66 East 4th Street, I noted that all the doors and some of the walls were a super-hot red color. She also designed costumes for the hilariously extravagant transgender Vain Victory and Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit by Jackie Curtis who, along with Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, later became Andy Warhol movie superstars. Warhol wrote an avant-garde play of his own entitled Pork that opened at La MaMa in 1971, the same year Terrence McNally premiered his play there, Things That Go Bump in the Night.
At her first permanent home, in a building at 74A East 4th Street that she bought and which, though currently under renovation, is still the official La MaMa E.T.C. headquarters, Ellen produced an astounding number of plays, musicals, and extravaganzas by an unbelievable roster of playwrights including her original partner, Paul Foster (Tom Paine); Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson, who later were both awarded Pulitzer Prizes; Tom Eyen (Dreamgirls); Jeff Weiss; Charles Ludlam (Bluebeard); Robert Patrick (Kennedy’s Children); William M. Hoffman (As Is); Megan Terry; H. M. Koutoukas; Maria Irene Fornés; Michael Smith; Leonard Melfi; Jean-Claude van Itallie; David Starkweather; Julie Bovasso; Adrienne Kennedy; and countless others.
Two versatile and talented actors who worked at La MaMa, Mari-Claire Charba and Jacque Lynn Colton, turned entrepreneurs themselves one summer, taking a number of La MaMa plays for a tour of Europe. This inspired Ellen to go international, and she developed a distinct style with the help of composer and director Tom O’Horgan (director of the great 1968 Broadway hit Hair by Gerome Ragni and James Rado), establishing the La MaMa Troupe and spreading her legend abroad in a series of theater tours. In addition to Mari-Claire, the actors in the troupe included Marilyn Roberts, Frederic Forrest, Sally Kirkland, Victor LiPari, Beth Porter, Seth Allen, Peter Craig, and Kevin O’Connor. Later, many of these same actors, under O’Horgan’s unique direction, brought to vivid life Rochelle Owens’s incredible and shocking award-winning play, Futz.
In addition to Why Tuesday Never Has a Blue Monday, a full-length play commissioned by Ellen in 1966, my own works at La MaMa included short plays for fund-raising benefits: East of the Sun, an existential work first presented in 1963; Zoe’s Letter in 1964; and Statue in 1966. After a fire at the Caffe Cino started by Joe Cino’s lover and the lighting designer at his theatre, Jonathan Torrey, Ellen came to the rescue of her pal across town and, in addition to providing space for Cino’s plays in her own theater until the restoration of his place was complete, put on a benefit with Ron Link at the Sullivan Street Theater where my play The Bed premiered under the direction of ubiquitous off-off Broadway director Robert Dahdah. Other plays on the bill included Little Tree Animal by Oliver Hailey, Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters by Gertrude Stein, and Humilities by Diane di Prima. The Bed opened at the Cino a few months later with Jim Jennings and Walter McGinn, who was later replaced by Larry Burns. Caffe Cino at 31 Cornelia Street, now recognized as the first off-off Broadway theatre, was in existence only from 1958 to 1968. For my play Moon, done at the Cino both in 1967 and 1968, I employed several La MaMa actors, as did many of the playwrights who repeated their plays at both venues.
Without interruption, Ellen’s La MaMa continued growing, garnering awards, burgeoning in the following years, and offering full seasons of plays and international theater groups; regularly scheduled cabaret events—“The Club”—under the direction of Nicky Paraiso; a rehearsal and teaching space; and an art gallery—La MaMa Galleria—on Great Jones Street.
In 2005 Ellen, along with Villager Chris Kapp, initiated a once-a-month Saturday afternoon historical investigation of the off-off Broadway phenomenon at La MaMa, enlisting those who created it to recount their remembrances. Ellen had her professional archivist, Ozzie Rodriquez, film the events and named me and the late director Robert Dahdah (Dames at Sea, The Bed) as the unofficial “Godfathers.”
In November of 2019, as a celebration of Ellen’s centennial birthday, the 155th Coffeehouse Chronicles took place at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, now under Michal Gamily’s direction, offering video clips of Ellen commenting on many of the activities over the years; live, fully staged excerpts from many of her works, including Antigone, Perseus, Hercules, Asclepius; and other performances by La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company. The festive centennial celebration continued after the performances with the serving of several gaily decorated birthday cakes and libations.
This article by Robert Heide is the second of a two-part piece about the centennial in 2019 of two New York women of the theater, Uta Hagen and Ellen Stewart. The first part appeared in the November 2019 issue of WestView. Robert Heide 25 Plays, his latest book; Uta Hagen’s books, including A Challenge for the Actor; and the book Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre by Cindy Rosenthal (2017) are all available at Amazon.
