[Mb-hair] Nice Ellen Stewart/La Mama Artcile...

[Jim Burns]

There's also a couple of nice photos, if yougo the url, listed below....
______

"Speaking From the Capital of the Global East Village"
By LIESL SCHILLINGER 
February 12, 2006, The New York Times 

WHEN Ellen Stewart set up shop in her East Ninth Street basement 45
years ago, her neighbors noticed the procession of handsome white men
coming to visit a black woman and called the police. "The people in the
building didn't want me there because I was a negress," she said,
sitting in her living room, regal and serene, her once-jet-black hair
now a halo of white with loose braids at the top. "They kept lodging
complaints, then one day a man came to me with a warrant for my arrest
for prostitution! I said, 'I'm not a prostitute, I'm running a theater.' 

An official who showed up said he could give her a license if she called
her theater a cafe. Needing a name on the spot, an actor called out, "It
has to be 'Mama,' " she recalled. The official added "La" for effect,
and Cafe La MaMa was born. 

Last month, Ms. Stewart was once again visited by city officials, only
this time they were led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who was
presenting Ms. Stewart with an honorary key to the building — on East
Fourth Street — that has been the home of La MaMa's Annex since 1974.
The city had been the landlord of that building and five others used by
nonprofit and arts groups for decades, but late last year, it sold them
to the occupants for $1 each. 
La MaMa wasn't the only one that got a bargain, though. The city has
also gotten good value. 

Over the last four and a half decades, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club
has presented more than 2,500 shows, played host to artists from more
than 70 countries, and earned more than 30 Obies and scores of Drama
Desk Awards, Bessies and Villager Awards. Ms. Stewart was one of the
first New York theatermakers to nurture difficult works by Sam Shepard,
Harold Pinter, Lanford Wilson, Eugène Ionesco, Philip Glass, Robert
Wilson, Jerzy Grotowski, Jean-Claude Van Italie and Joseph Chaikin,
among many others. She herself has received, among other accolades, a
MacArthur fellowship, 15 honorary doctorates and numerous lifetime
achievement awards in numerous countries. And at 80-plus, she is still
going. On an annual budget of $1.2 million, never charging for rehearsal
or theater space for groups who perform there, the company presents
between 50 and 60 shows a year, from three-week Equity showcases to
one-night presentations. And that doesn't include the La MaMa companies
she has spawned all over the world. 

This season's calendar is representative. 

Among its eclectic offerings are Brooke O'Harra's production of "Major
Barbara," which serves up George Bernard Shaw Kabuki-style; the mournful
15th-century Dutch meditation "Death and the Ploughman" performed with
song and movement; a musical about the late East Village resident
Quentin Crisp, performed and written by his friend David Leddick; and a
trilogy about the Trojan War that uses puppets and was conceived by
Theodora Skipitares. 

Nowadays, this sort of genre blending is common in theater, but Ms.
Stewart, by many accounts, is the one who started it. Theater, it turns
out, was not her first calling. In 1950, she started work as an
executive designer of women's clothing for Saks Fifth Avenue. "Edith
Lances created an atelier for me and put an ad in The New York Times for
couturier's assistants," Ms. Stewart recalled. "When the white women
came and saw who they had to work with, they refused. For that matter,
most of the places around Saks Fifth Avenue, a colored couldn't eat. You
could go in and sit, but you never got served." Taking advantage of a
State Department program, Ms. Lances found a way to bring qualified
Jewish women from Europe to work. "Right off the bat, Edith got 10 of
these ladies who came from the pogroms, from Auschwitz, from all these
terrible places, and they were my assistants. I was the only thing in
America they had, and they all called me 'Mama.' She used her earnings
to finance an experimental Off Broadway theater company. 

La MaMa's archives contain some highlights of those early years:
playbills that anticipated a revolution in graphic design; photographs
of a young Harvey Fierstein; film of Mr. Chaikin acting; and scenes of
the parade that Tom O'Horgan — director of "Hair" — led down Second
Avenue on April 2, 1969, taking Villagers to where a determined Ellen
Stewart was speaking to reporters about her new performance space. Con
Ed hadn't repaired a gas main break on the street, she pointed out; the
stage might be unheated, there might be no lights, there might be
problems with the sound — but a show was going to happen. 

Her ambitions broadened in the early 70's, after she took a production
of "Medea," directed by Andrei Serban, with music by Elizabeth Swados,
abroad. The actors ended up performing the play at the ruins of Baalbek,
in northern Lebanon — a vast site built by Roman emperors that
contains temples to Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus, and covers many city
blocks. 

Ms. Stewart recalled the exhilaration and affirmation of that long-ago
staging. "Lebanon is a very proper country, and before the war, it was
considered the Paris of the East. Ladies came to the festival in tiaras
and long dresses, the men came in their tuxedos. Andrei staged it so the
audience had to follow the actors throughout the temples. Diane Lane was
6, she played one of the children; Priscilla Smith was Medea, and the
winds were so high that her costume was out like a sail." 

Sitting in her apartment, which occupies the top floor of one of La
MaMa's two buildings, she paused for breath and relived the moment. 

"The women hitched up their dresses and gave their shoes to their
husbands. Their husbands tied their jackets around their waists, and
everyone was sweating and panting and joining in like it was a
bacchanal." 

Local legend had it that a white bird, the spirit of Dionysus, lived in
those ruins. 

"Nobody had ever seen the white bird, but that bird came out from
somewhere that night, and flew across the ruins, flapping his wings,"
she said. "After Baalbek, we couldn't imagine playing anywhere else
unless we had a big space. It changed our lives, it changed everything
about us, and our ideas about how really to do theater." 

Returning to New York, Ms. Stewart embarked on a campaign to acquire the
Annex space where La MaMa E.T.C. performs its big productions. The Annex
opened on Oct. 18, 1974, with the trilogy of "Electra," "The Trojan
Women," and "Medea." 

She was drawn to classical plays, she explained, because they allowed
for, and honored, a multi-ethnic cast. "I wanted to do plays that a
black person could play in where they didn't have a needle in their arm,
or their mother was washing clothes, or their father was in jail, or
their mother was a prostitute," she said. 

This spring, Ms. Stewart is planning many other trips abroad. She is
scheduled to travel with Ms. Skipitares to Albania, where they are to
create a play with students from the Arts Academy in Tirana. After that,
she returns to Manhattan to present her new production of "Hercules,"
with her Great Jones Repertory Company. She is also considering going to
Manila for a weeklong workshop, before returning to work on productions
bound for the Venice Biennale and Taiwan. That's quite an agenda for the
next few months. 

"Let me tell you something," she said. "We're huge. You can't tell it
all." 

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company 

Speaking From the Capital of the Global East Village - New York Times 

Address:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/theater/newsandfeatures/12schi.html?ex=1140584400&en=f31951c12560da2e&ei=5070