Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
Stephen J. Bottoms. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 401pp.
David A. Crespy. Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. (New York: Back Stage Books, 2003). 192pp.
6th edition
In the late 1950s, when New York City’s professional theater was defined as either Broadway or Off-Broadway, terms based loosely on both geographical and legal/technical definitions, an alternative phenomenon appeared, its heart located in both Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side (a.k.a. the West Village and East Village). It came to be called Off-Off-Broadway (OOB) and is still around, although not quite what it was in its formative years of the 1960s, when it inspired revolutions in all aspects of theater, onstage and off.
The Off-Off movement has been described and analyzed in many books, written during its heyday and afterward by prominent participants as well as by critical observers. Today’s column looks at works by two scholars, Stephen J. Bottoms and David A. Crespy, whose books—written within four years of each other, over 30 years after the 60s ended—were the first comprehensive overviews of the original movement. I look at the younger book, Stephen J. Bottoms’s Playing Underground, in more detail as, while both books treat much the same material, Bottom’s goes deeper and is the more thorough of the two.
I was a molecule in the remarkable moment in American theater chronicled by these studies. When the movement quietly began, I was an undergraduate theater student at Brooklyn College, graduating in 1962, and then leaving New York for two years to get my MFA in Hawaii. So I wasn’t able to get involved at the beginning, like several of my classmates; otherwise, it might have radically changed my life’s direction, as it did for friends who began to putter about in the zero-budget environs of early Off-Off, particularly at Caffe Cino, Judson Church, and La Mama. I only began to dimly become aware of these stirrings when I returned to New York in 1964, married, with a baby, and in need of a steady income.
I was no longer footloose enough to mingle amid the unpaid, unwashed, if not untalented denizens of Washington Square, Cornelia Street, St. Marks Place, or Second Avenue. I remember in the mid-1960s running into hippie pals on the mean streets, me dressed Ivy League, as per my status as a budding academic, they in ragged jeans, facial forests, and the kind of locks soon memorialized in a certain Broadway musical conceived near where we stood. Little did I know that one or two of these scruffy artists would, a few years down the line, be able to buy and sell me. Among them, Joel Zwick, then a burgeoning avant-garde director (mentioned in passing by Bottoms), even became one of TV’s most successful sitcom directors.
Others made valuable contributions to the kind of alternative theater springing up in churches, basements, lofts, and storefronts all over the downtown landscape. While only a few make it into the pages of Bottoms’s book—and then only in passing or in photo captions—I’m proud of what they contributed to shows I participated in only as a spectator. Except once.
In 1966, Wilson Lehr, a beloved professor of mine, was directing a play at Ellen Stewart’s Café La Mama (when it was at 122 Second Avenue, before it moved to East Fourth Street) by a La Mama regular, Bruce Kessler, another former classmate. Off-Off was notorious for its campy spoofs, riddled with sexual innuendos, of iconic cultural institutions. Kessler’s The Contestants was a takeoff on TV game shows in which I played the slick, Bob Barker-ish MC.
A friend I haven’t seen since then (except on Facebook), Nancy Gabor, played the show’s sexy hostess, wearing a skimpy costume with black mesh stockings. Others in the cast included yet another college friend and La Mama devotée, Blanche Dee, who would one day appear on Broadway in the nude. Allen Garfield, who went on to stage and screen success, was also involved.
The play had some historical interest. Bottoms tells us of how La Mama was forced to close because of a conflict with Actors Equity over its nonpayment of union actors; when the dispute was settled, The Contestants was the first show La Mama produced. Another reason to remember it is the great photograph of the costumed cast standing and sitting in La Mama around Wilson and Stewart. It was printed, however, in today’s other OOB book and is reproduced here. Note that Nancy’s last name should be spelled Gabor, and Shellie’s last name should be Feldman, not Friedman.
Bottoms and Crespy’s books aside, most others about Off-Off are about specific individuals, venues, companies, themes, or plays; a good number of play anthologies also exist. An earlier version of my discussion of the Bottoms book—posted elsewhere—mentioned that I couldn’t locate my copy of Crespy’s Off-Off Explosion, but I’ve since obtained and read a copy. It turns out to be quite close to Bottoms’s in its coverage of OOB’s four principal 1960s theaters. While introducing material not found in Playing Underground, it’s also far less exhaustive.
Bottoms provides quite thorough descriptions and appraisals of all the leading (and many of the secondary) actors, writers, directors, and producers of the movement, not to mention detailed histories of every significant theater or company. He discusses, with keen critical insight, numerous plays, the titles of many are likely as unknown to most readers as Sanskrit, but representative of the kinds of comedies, musicals, and dramas on which Off-Off thrived.
Bottoms, a theater professor at Manchester University in the UK (who now uses the name Stephen Scott-Bottoms), offers a remarkably well-researched study, based both on the archives and many interviews. However, born in 1968 and raised in Yorkshire, he was too young to have himself seen what he writes about. Like Crespy, he provides quality assessments of the four leading institutions, Caffe Cino, La Mama, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poet’s Theatre, with excellent portrayals of their charismatic leaders, Joe Cino, Ellen Stewart, Ralph Cook, and Al Carmines.
Numerous other, equally important figures (and groups, like the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre) are discussed in far more depth than by Crespy, the artists including the likes of Charles Ludlam, Robert Patrick, John Vaccaro, Michael Smith, Joe Chaikin, Sam Shepard, Penny Arcade, Larry Kornfeld, Jeff Weiss, Marshall Mason, and Lanford Wilson, among so many others. So are the shows they created, and the circumstances—sometimes sordid—of the worlds they inhabited.
Bottoms’s smoothly written, academically precise but always crystalline overview covers thematic issues, like the place of nudity, drag, homosexuality, and politics, and gets into the weeds on all the principal topics concerning the financial and artistic difficulties involved in sustaining a movement that sought a freewheeling, unconventional approach to making theater with barely any funds to support it. Crespy also tackles these subjects, but not as fully as Bottoms. There’s a reason why Bottom’s book is twice the length of Crespy’s, and it’s not because of padding.
The transition from presenting plays for either no admission fee or a dollar-a-week club membership to a profit-based or, at the least, grant-sustained, system is closely analyzed. So are all the other developments (like the profits that came to several OOB shows after moving to OB) that inevitably forced such a quixotic artistic paradise to fade before the onslaught of real-world practicalities.
Bottoms overlooks very few items of significance. Anybody familiar with the period will note some artist, show, theater, or group that might have been included, even if only briefly (like actor/director/playwright Larry Loonin, whom I like to call the Zelig of Off-Off Broadway). But that—like these comments—would have swelled the already thick book to impractical lengths.
I do feel compelled, though, to note two notorious shows of the 1960s I expected to encounter, even in allusions, as having been unquestionably influenced by the freedoms mined by the underground theater: Barbara Garson’s MacBird! (originally staged by my classmate Roy Levine in 1966), and Lennox Raphael’s Che! (1969). Both fall somewhere in the gap between OOB and OB.
The first, done at the Village Gate, in Greenwich Village, was a frank satire on the Kennedy assassination, in which Lyndon Johnson is imagined as the Macbeth-like leader responsible; it created a political firestorm over free speech that almost led to its closure. Although technically Off-Broadway, it’s doubtful it would have been produced outside the envelope-influence of Off-Off.
Crespy, who briefly alludes to MacBird, ignores Che!, which was seen at the Free Store Theatre in Cooper Square (bordering both the West and East Villages). Another political satire, this one inspired by Che Guevara, it had conservative forces falling all over themselves because of obscenity charges (“profanity, filth, defecation, masochism, sadism, masturbation, nudity, copulation, sodomy and other deviate sexual intercourse,” according to the legal judgment that eventually killed it). It presumably was even more outrageous than what was routinely done on Off-Off stages. At that very moment, Oh! Calcutta! (in which I had other college friends!), was drawing crowds. Its mention in Bottoms’s book brought Che! to mind, as they were both part of the same historic debate about free speech in the theater.
Off-Off-Broadway, as Bottoms carefully notes, had an impact not only on American stages but across the globe—witness the Fringe in London, for example. In Japan, which had a similar explosion of untraditional theater, the name for such work is angura, a bastardization of “underground.” Kudos to Stephen J. Bottoms/Steve Scott-Bottoms for choosing so pertinent a word for his title.
While Crespy’s Off-Off Explosion contains many details not mentioned by Bottoms and is of considerable importance in understanding the OOB movement and its leading movers and shakers, it’s undeniable that Bottoms’s is the superior work, both for the extent of its coverage, especially of important plays, people, and productions, and the quality of its writing. Crespy’s book, however, includes a final chapter unlike anything in Bottoms. Titled “Creating Your Own Off-Off Broadway,” it’s a how-to explanation about creating an adventurous group dedicated to alternative theater. Much of it is based on the experience of Crespy himself—a specialist in the plays of Edward Albee (mentioned often in the book)—who’s a Professor of Playwriting, Acting, Dramatic Literature & Theatre History at the University of Missouri.
In addition to its practical advice, the 26-page chapter offers descriptions, of varying lengths, of important OOB-type troupes around the US that were active in cities like Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin when the book was published. While such information is welcome, it seems an unnecessary addendum to a book about a movement concentrated in the 1960s. On the other hand, a fleshed-out version might have made a worthy follow-up volume to Off-Off-Explosion.
Next up: Barry Singer, Ever After: Forty Years of Musical Theater and Beyond, 1977-2020
Peter Filichia, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
