Ellen Stewart's La Mama ETC as Lower East Side Landing Site

Abstract

Ellen Stewart's La Mama Café opened its doors as a basement theatre/café on the Lower East Side of New York City with Tennessee Williams's One Arm in 1962; money from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Doris Duke Foundations funded the purchase and renovation of their dilapidated building in 1969. This marked a major turning point in the history of Off-Off Broadway (OOB) theatre; of the four main venues of OOB (Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, Judson Poets’ Theatre, and La Mama), only La Mama survives today. La Mama did not institutionalize through structural trappings alone but produced new relationships within the urban ecosystem. While some OOB theatres confronted the demands of institutional durability with ambivalence, La Mama entered the 1970s with transformative conceptions of space and urban cultural cohesion. As a consequence, the theatre defied socially destructive municipal policies through interdependence and collaboration between artists, their funding sources, and municipal systems.