Agnieszka Matysiak
Richard Foreman’s Theater of Memories in Old-Fashioned Prostitutes: A True Romance
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 19 (2025), pp. 169-180

Abstract: Since 1968, which is the date of founding the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Richard Foreman has invariably shocked theater-goers with his phantasmagorical and elaborately designed “pieces.” Unsurprisingly, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes: A True Romance (2013)—the play grounded in the inimitable Formanesque avant-garde setting—explores and re-visions, as almost all of Forman’s works, the concepts of reality and representation. However, there seems to be a new turn to this latest creation as it resonates heavily with the issues of memory, remembrance and forgetting, all of which are reflected in the structural and linguistic layers of the play. What is more, Foreman’s excessive use of “repetition, conflation, regression, echoing, overlap, and simultaneity” (Malkin 1)—although significantly reappraised in the play—may constitute, as Jeanette Malkin noticed in the context of postmodern drama, a direct link with the idea of the Renaissance memory-theaters initiated in Italy by Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro (1550). I would therefore propose to approach Foreman’s 2013 theatrical piece as a post-millennial treaty on the early modern memory-theater, and Samuel, the main character, as the figure that acts out his role not only within the space of the stage/page, but also within the spatial construct of his own melancholic theater of memories.

Keywords: theater, theater of memories, Richard Foreman, Off-Off Broadway, avant-garde,
postmodern drama, Giulio Camillo

DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.19/2025.12

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