Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer Cindy Rosenthal Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s. By Iris Smith Fischer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. pp. 266. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Iris Smith Fischer’s monograph fills a significant gap in experimental performance history, as it is the first text dedicated exclusively to examining the work of Mabou Mines, one of the most important avant-garde theatre groups in the United States. Although the New York–based company received its first Obie (Off and Off-Off Broadway Theater) Award in recognition of its work in 1974, Mabou Mines came to prominence in the 1980s with groundbreaking productions such as A Prelude to Death in Venice (1980), script and direction by Lee Breuer, and Dead End Kids (1980), conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Beginning with a clearly written and insightful introduction, the book is organized chronologically in five chapters, ending with a brief epilogue. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s also includes a section of excellent production photographs and a useful appendix with a timeline of members’ activities and company achievements, from 1957 to 1980. Writing about a group that “set out to create indescribable performance” (v), Smith Fischer carefully documents the first and lesser-known decade of Mabou Mines’s production history, beginning in 1970, when the company was supported in its first three years by Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, and then, over a ten-year period, by Joe Papp of the Public Theater. Smith Fischer weaves together accounts of core members’ artistic backgrounds as she tells the story of how Mabou Mines’s multidisciplinary performances came about. In her introduction Smith Fischer states that detailing company members’ biographies is not her intent here. Her focus is on the “coming together” of the multitalented founders, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, and the group’s rehearsal processes and productions. Actors Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond joined the group in 1971; Terry O’Reilly joined in 1973. Smith Fischer also suggests why some members had moved apart or left the group by the end of the 1970s. Smith Fischer argues that Mabou Mines rejected the notion of the actor as an interpretative artist, and instead, performers were seen as “creative agents” (1). This company of individual artists—“Co-Artistic Directors”—sometimes with disparate visions, often struggled with collaboration as they consistently “made new” and often provocative work together. The group ultimately evolved into what Smith Fischer describes as a “company of directors,” with Breuer [End Page 154] acknowledged as the “first” director and Akalaitis as “the second director” with a “sensibility and vocabulary of her own” (120). In the introduction, Smith Fischer situates Mabou Mines’s work in the 1970s within the context of longer, ongoing conversations in theater and performance studies about the avant-garde—or avant-gardes. In Smith Fischer’s analysis, the idea of and adherence to the “Avant Garde as Community” is crucial to an understanding of how Mabou Mines functions: members support each other through their efforts to create and foster a common language and techniques and through sharing responsibility (organizing childcare within the group is but one example). In the first chapter, “Coming Together,” Smith Fischer charts the complex movements of the couples, Breuer and Malaczeck and Glass and Akalaitis, from coast to coast in the United States and throughout Europe, where they encountered English actor David Warrilow. The five determined to make New York City’s downtown arts scene their base. In this section and throughout the volume Smith Fischer clarifies the connections and the distinctions between Mabou Mines and experimental theatre troupes associated with 1960s radicalism— the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Mabou Mines in the 1970s “was not political” (in Akalaitis’s words): “There was no ideal about politics, or what theatre should be, could be, or how we wanted to change it. . . . [The ideal was] excellence, and finding a performing technique that was American—one that was personal, yet very stylized and technical” (35). Working...