Edge: WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD By Richard Foreman

WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD
By Richard Foreman
[February 8, 2007]

RICHARD FOREMAN RETURNS TO
THE ONTOLOGICAL THEATRE
WITH HIS LATEST MIXED MEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA

In 2005, Edge featured Richard Foreman's "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods are Pounding My Head' " in which he noted that "I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button". He then announced his 40+ career as New York's leading avant garde theatrical director had come to an end, and he was going to begin exploring film. Now Foreman is back as a new hybrid vision

Still young and artistically radical as he approaches 70, Richard Foreman's 45th Ontological-Hysteric production plunges into a new world in which human consciousness is turned inside out. Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! is his second project defining a new kind of theater in which film and live action trace parallel contrapuntal dream narratives.

Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! postulates the invention of the airplane (controlled by a horde of baby-doll pilots) as the death knell of the unconscious mind. Foreman is responding to a world in which visionary sages and poets are being replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable and hand-feed them to the public. In Richard Foreman's universe, his muse and ally, the unconscious, fights back to life in a shape resembling “the stone that rolls up the hill backwards” (the evil one) and from such “evil”, life renews itself.

February 5, 2007

Throw a Bucket of Ice Water on Your Brain
By BEN BRANTLEY

Those among you who presume you are still alive might be interested to know that Richard Foreman is throwing a funeral for you at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church.

Never mind that your pulse says your heart is still pumping. Mr. Foreman says the most essential part of you — your independent, intuitive mind — is a cold corpse. He has thoughtfully whipped up a memorial service, a dazzling exercise in reality-shifting called “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!,” that is as invigorating as it is mournful. Who knows? It might indeed be enough to wake the dead.

Two years ago Mr. Foreman, the great gray wizard of experimental theater, announced that he would no longer be creating the exquisitely unsettling dreamscapes that had been his specialty since the 1960s. It was time, he said, to bid farewell to the theater.

You have to be skeptical when brilliant artists declare they are leaving the art they love. Mr. Foreman has continued to ply his exotic trade of nonnarrative, nonlinear play making, set in fun houses crammed with mysterious cultural detritus, but with one essential difference: He has added film to the mix of what had been resolutely and religiously theatrical productions, which would seem to be a case of sleeping with the enemy.

“Wake Up” is Mr. Foreman's second film-theater hybrid. Even more than his first, “Zomboid!,” presented last year, it shows how this priest of the theater has embraced his old adversary only to disarm it. Mr. Foreman creates beautiful filmic pictures for his audience's consumption. But he refuses to let us wallow in them.

The theory at work would seem to be that we have come to trust too much in the surfaces of artfully arranged pictures and information. Hooking the mind to such surfaces, Mr. Foreman says, is fatal to the unconscious. (“When the world sees itself, it doesn't,” says a line from the script.) While "Wake Up" is clearly a bid to resurrect theatergoers' deeper imaginations, the elegiac undercurrent that courses through the show suggests its creator worries that he may be too late. ...

...But as exhilarating as "Wake Up" is, it is also steeped in melancholy. Usually with Mr. Foreman, snatches of music summon thecomic frenzy of silent movies. This time the aural backdrop is darker: a mixture of ringing cellphones, a wandering plaintive soprano and a hushed percussive beat that suggests an advancing army. "It can't be fixed" is the mantra that stuck in my head.

But that's probably just my unconscious mind talking. (Yours may have a different opinion.) Hey, that means it's not dead after all. Mr. Foreman appears to have done his job.

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