At a warm and well-trod Brooklyn coffee shop shortly before the end of 2025, I sat down with the actor, director, and beguiling mover Paul Lazar to discuss the process and possibilities in reconstructing Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon’s 2006 opera What to Wear. Presented in January at BAM as part of the Prototype Festival, the production served simultaneously as a celebration, introduction, and memorial to the artistic output of Foreman, who passed away in the early days of last year’s festival season. The memory of this passing, along with the nature of the research and rehearsal of What to Wear, led our conversation to explore the ever-dying and always-living nature of Downtown Theater, and what Foreman’s work has to say in a world leaning ever more into the literal.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Denney: What was your first experience with the work of Richard Foreman here?
Paul Lazar : I’ve been— I can’t even say how many years it’s been that I watched his work because he’d usually do one piece a year. The pieces that mattered the most to me of all those were Miss Universal Happiness and Symphony of Rats. Recently, the Wooster Group re-did Symphony of Rats.
PD: I saw that version.
PL: Their own version, which was magnificent. Whole world away from the original. Miss Universal Happiness was one of my absolute favorite theater pieces. A great combination of two auteur sensibilities coming together.
PD: Did you see their restaging of Nayatt School?
PL: I’ve seen it before. I didn’t see it this time.
PD: There was a moment right toward the end where the stage kind of emptied out and it just was a big, long table and Kate Valk went through and described what happened in the original part of the show. It was spectral. Like, “Spalding Gray did this, Ron Vawter did that.” There was like such a palpable feeling of memory in it that stuck with me all year.
PL: Wow.
PD: I would love to talk about the performance of memory, both because this production comes almost a year from Richard Foreman’s death and it’s also a kind of picking up of the mantle of these yearly Foreman spectaculars. Is that something you thought about in bringing the piece back?
PL: The thing about the work of an auteur, at least in the world that I grew up in— the downtown theater world— is that when they pass away, their work goes with them. To state the obvious, a playwright leaves the script behind, and it’s enough of a guide. It’s enough of a guide that a valid production can be produced from that artifact. But if the Wooster group stops making work, who’s going to redo a Wooster Group piece the way it was? It goes away because every aspect of it is their own invention, as opposed to the playwright who fits his invention into a pre-existing form. So it is an incredible anomaly that there’s a very good video that John Sterns made of the one time that this piece was done in 2006 at Cal Arts. And there are just enough people around who were in the original who were available to work on this. So, between that collective memory and the videotape, we were able to reproduce something that will be less-and-less likely as his work lives on. This is kind of a unique resonance that’s gonna happen. It’s very fortunate.
PD: It makes me think of the work of Robert Caro, it is like a right time, right place scenario. The fact that he was kind of at the right moment where he could interview all these people that knew [Robert] Moses and knew his world. Do you think downtown theater is at a similar point of inflection where there’s just enough people to be able to do these kinds of faithful recreations?
PL: I think that’s right. I like the Robert Caro connection, it’s absolutely true in terms of the chronology.
PD: Not to keep living in a morbid territory, but there’s this kind of generation churn going on. It feels like such a cliché question to ask, but is downtown theater dead or is it just turning over a new leaf?
PL: I would say that I could make a really compelling argument because of real estate, because of finances, because of the porousness of the border between more experimental work and commercial work, because of many downtown venues no longer existing, I could make an extremely compelling argument for the answer being yes. But then I go out and see work, and the answer is no. There’s just people doing stuff. It’s so cool. I mean, I can name you so many. And there’s people like Richard Maxwell. and Tina Satter, who matured into the status of people like Foreman and the Wooster Group. Those people occupy a very important position, being American artists. and being American artists in a nontraditional medium. They’re not funded. They’re treated like hell. But they persist and they’re still very important. There are just so many great artists that the answer is that it goes on. It continues. People continue to do this, against all odds.
PD: What are some shows here in 2025 that support the second half of your argument that this kind of downtown scene is alive and well?
PL: You mean whose work?
PD: Yeah.
Paul: Jess Barbagallo, Tina Satter, [Richard] Maxwell, Goat Exchange. You know, I draw blank sometimes.
PD: Nile Harris is someone that I come back to again and again.
PL: Yeah, absolutely. Hugely agree with that.
PD: Particularly since we’re talking about auteurs here as well. Not that I think Nile is fully auteur, but I do think there’s a deep unified vision in his world.
PL: Absolutely. I’m glad you thought of him. Then there’re performers like Scott Shepard and Pete Simpson who are so powerful that even though they do mainstream work as well, they bring that sensibility to everything they do.
PD: Totally. I think I saw a performance of Pete’s. It was Amanda Horowitz’s adaptation of True West that was at Collapsible Hole—
PL: Yeah, that was Pete Simpson. It was one of the most remarkable things when he did the sex scene between the mother and the father.
PD: And the water barrel—
PL: Absolutely astounding. If you were to ask Pete about his trajectory, he would say he’s a child of the downtown theater. This is going back decades, but his performance in Rich Maxwell’s piece Drummer One was mind-bending for everybody in the downtown theater. There were new possibilities born that evening from what we were watching:as performers, as directors, as well as in writing, you know?
PD: What should people know about Richard Foreman before stepping into the theater?
PL: What’s cool about Foreman is that the stuff where our consciousness lives— social forces, psychological forces, a series of recognizable real-life situations that deliver a message— has very little to do with what Foreman’s interested in. Foreman’s interested in all the other layers of reality. The less conscious layers of reality. Everything underneath is the best I can put it. You don’t have to worry about literal meaning. The spectacle alone is so staggeringly exquisite and surprising.
PD: In doing such a thorough reconstruction, what have you come to appreciate in kind of getting in the nitty-gritty of getting this piece on its feet?
PL: I’ve learned about the subtlety with which he moved human bodies. His startling way of putting bodies into motion, in ways that integrate with the music was staggering. The way things would fit together was like looking into a Swiss Watch. It just fell together in this magnificent way. So that’s a huge thing. Another thing that I learned was about the staging. It’s so masterful. I find it incredibly moving. The objects are magnificent, hilarious and kind of heartbreaking. I don’t know what it’s like to watch it once, but if you live inside of it, you learn that there’s an incredible anxiety and vulnerability in whoever created it.
PD: It sounds like, and I’m sure this is not the case at all, that so many things have been going right in this process in terms of timing, the archive actually having what you were looking for, etc.. What are some of the challenges you faced in bringing this work back to life?
PL: The biggest challenge is you can look at the piece on video, and you can see it. But what is going on there? You can take it apart—which we did— and you can reproduce it. And if you sing the notes correctly and put your body in the positions that were manifest originally, that’s 90% of the piece. But there’s a 10% difference. What is everyone doing? Where is everyone at? What’s coming off people? What’s going on inside of these people? That’s the 10% that’ll make the piece either alive or a reverential sort of archival museum experience. So, there’s a very specific zone that everybody needs to be in. Sometimes, paradoxically, it requires telling someone “this is what you’re doing at this moment.” It’s a great deal to do with the way you relate to the audience in this place. It’s some kind of thing with the audience, but it’s certainly not a seduction. It’s more. This is very hard to articulate, but if you ask what the challenges are, the challenge is to find that. Find that and infuse that and then infuse the performers with that. From the video, you can hear what Foreman says, but, paradoxically, it’s only helpful to a point. Because having him in the room does something that even if I spoke word-for-word Foreman’s words, I do not do.
The thing with Foreman was, he was never going to tell you what you should be thinking.. All he was going to tell you is a way to put your body. Put your body like this. Move like this. Do this gesture. Do this gesture. But he didn’t need to say more because it’s this ineffable thing that artists bring to the work and, in a way, affect the room. I had to say to performers you’re not accusing the audience, you’re dismissing the audience. That’s just one example. Just a way to relate to elements in the room that’s got the quality that I got from Foreman’s works in general, and this piece in particular. That was the challenge.
PD: Can you speak a little bit more about “accuse and dismiss.” What’s the distinction between accusing and dismissing?
PL: It’s status. If you’re accusing the audience, the audience has power. They’ve done something to you and you have to respond in an accusatory way. T The most obvious example would be a comedy. If you don’t get the laugh, you’re failing in this traditional comedy. And so that makes the audience’s laughter, or lack thereof, the arbiter of success. They either laugh or they don’t. So the power’s in their hands. In Foreman’s work, the story goes, if there was any part that consistently got a laugh, he would cut it. He didn’t want everybody in the room to all be in the audience to be in the same place having the same experience that they know they’re having at the same time. That realm and level of consciousness was off-putting to him. That means that more power resides in the performer and less in the audience than in a traditional play. How do you obtain and maintain and lavish and live with that power and employ that power? That’s an important thing with his work, it seemed to me. Enjoy that power, because performers—and I include myself in this, very much— are very inclined to give the power back to the audience. Love me. Love me. Hey, how do you like it? You dig it? Oh, good, good. So, you got to be somewhere else altogether than that.
PD: So wonderfully said. Something in Foreman’s work that is so deeply lacking these days, is a kind of resistance to spoon feeding. Certainly at a commercial level, and an off-Broadway level as well, the desire to just give people exactly what they want, in a very one-to-one way, feels so present these days. Creating something that challenges that mode of viewing, even though this is a 20 year old piece, feels deeply radical today.
PL: I totally know what you mean. I have a kind of a mixed response because I think that the traditional theater—I’m speaking very personally— Is a treasure trove, you know? There’s so many great, interesting, pieces that, to me, are rooted in political consciousness, psychology, mythology, that when a traditional piece of theater is done with a certain kind of integrity, it can be magnificent.
Patrick: How did you find that sense of integrity in staging What to Wear?
Paul: I’d never done an opera before. So the incredible virtuosity of the chorus and the principles sets a level. Just to be able to hit those notes, and do it in sequence, already puts people in a place of focus that’s well on the way to working in an absolutely serious way. Another thing that happened in terms of the integrity of it is the chorus are very young people. Maybe some of them have heard of Richard Foreman, but not necessarily. And certainly, none of them could have have seen his work, right? What happened with these performers could have gone any number of ways. What did in fact happen was the movement and the music, combined, galvanized this group into this fierce cadre. The demands of those things are such that they infuse the entire cast with the proper kind of focus to do this in the way that I believe was intended. I mean, God knows there will be people who say the opposite. Oh, Foreman would never da da da or whatever, but some people will say our approach was wonderful. O One of the dangers that I see is the enterprise of nostalgia. If saturated with some nostalgic sense, that can be a poisonous thing. It’s got to be valid in the moment for itself as opposed to some reverie.
Patrick: What is the poisonous quality of nostalgia, particularly for some of these venerated downtown figures?
Paul: Richard would have done this. Richard, blah, blah, blah. That can be a straitjacket. I feel like that’s an important piece of information, what Richard would have done or should have, did say, but what’s the energy in the room? You’re not going to have a list of things explaining to the audience we’re doing this because Richard said. When we performed the piece at Mass MoCA, the costume person remembered that Richard had said ” Make the audience uncomfortable. Find someone out there, focus on them, and do what you can to make them uncomfortable. So, we tried that and it just couldn’t have been more wrong. It did not work. We had to keep working it and keep working it, keep infusing it with elements that I could see in the video. And a huge help of the co-director of the piece is Annie B. Parsons, who’s a great choreographer and a great theater director in her own right. Her take on what the opening needed matters a lot more than what Richard did or didn’t say 20 years ago. If we just sort of passively accept something because he said it, that’s a kind of reverence that is more deadly than invigorating.
PD: Something akin to a Richard Foreman/ChatGPT hybrid, where you can just plug in your question. I’d be fascinated to see the large language model of Richard Foreman.
PL: Yes. They could feed all his texts and all his interviews, put all that together and they could get something that would be alive and dead. You know, I’m hoping that our thing is alive.
PHOTO by Stephanie Berger
Leave a Reply