The word “crazy” comes up quite regularly when talking to people Mabow Mine Theatrical company.
Take one of Sharon Ann Fogarty’s early experiences with the legendary group. Nine years before she became one of her co-artistic directors. It was “Mabou Mines Ria,” a gender-reversed work of “King Ria,” directed by Lee Breuer and starring Ruth Maleczech as a monarch.
“I had a dog and all these kids in the opening scene, so my job was to pick up the kids around 5 o’clock, drive around, run the scene and put it back,” now 65. Said Fogarty, aged. “Then I came back and was doing various other parts. One of them was holding Isabel Monk while Honora Ferguson hollowed out her eyes. It was a crazy and crazy time. “She continued. “But it was really fun.”
Starting Thursday, Mabou Mines is celebrating 50 years of theater experiments with a three-day megamix. This is a retrospective of its most notorious, bold, beloved, memorable, or yes, most crazy project. (The company is actually 52 years old, but the celebration was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.) The work includes a live reading along with a companion exhibition of archived materials at 122 Mabow Mine Houses. , Concerts, movies included. Community center in East Village. The group settled in 2017 after decades of pandemics.
Performing arts, by definition, exist at this time, making it a daunting task to mount the blockbuster packages of Off-Off Broadway companies in particular. Mabou Mines came up with the idea of an extended birthday party after founding member JoAnne Akalaitis led a 12-hour compliment to playwright María Irene Fornés at the public theater in 2018. “Why don’t we run a marathon for all the works?” Fogarty recalled.
This was over 60 works, so I settled on 31. “Some are excerpts, some are full, some are music,” Fogarty said. “Some things, like juicy scenes, take an hour or even 15 minutes.”
The program will bring back members of the former company, along with guests from Sympathico such as Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel. They will perform “Through the Leaves” by Franz Ksaver Kreuz, produced by the Mabow Mine in 1984, on Thursday. The next day, Akaritis will oversee David Greenspan, Ellen McElduffin, and former office worker Ellen McElduff in Samuel Beckett’s “Play” staged by the Mabow Mine in 1971.
The time machine dates back to the first project of the Mabow Mine, “Red Horse Animation” (1970). This project was devised during the withdrawal in the isolated town of Nova Scotia, where the company’s name came from. On Saturday, Akaritis, who was in the original work, will replay it with a pair of Mabow’s first-generation heirs: writer, director, actress Clove Galerie, daughter of Broyer and Malecheck, and choreography. His teacher, David Neumann, and Ferguson and Frederick Newman, members of Mabow who died in 2012. (The music was written by Philip Glass, then husband of Akaritis and another founding member.)
Close family ties have always been part of the Mabo Mine Matrix — a group born of experiments in the 1960s that obscured personal, artistic, and political affairs. 84-year-old Akalaitis recalls that the children and babysitters of company members tagged on tour in the 1970s were included in the rehearsal budget later added in many theaters today.
“In retrospect, it was based on a very healthy socialist principle that we were all equal and everyone was paid the same amount, whether they were working or not,” she said. I mentioned the principle of. “And when I didn’t have money, I didn’t have money — I didn’t have money For some.. “
Broyer, who died last year, quickly emerged as the dominant figure, directing some of the troupe’s most famous shows, including “Peter and Wendy” (a story of Peter Pan told by a solo actress and a puppet in 1997). did. And “Mabo Mining Puphejmo” (in 2003, in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, a man was played by an actor under 5 feet tall, and a woman was played by an actress near 6 feet).
At the same time, the company accepted consensus decisions, but it didn’t necessarily help speed things up. “Consensus building is very difficult, but I think it’s the only way to do that,” Akalaitis said. “If you have a group of people who basically have a big ego and someone else doesn’t want to be a boss, the only way to do that is that everyone is a boss.”
Today, the company still divides leadership responsibilities into four co-artistic directors, Fogarty, Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlet, and Carl Hancock Rux.
The main reason the Mabow Mine has endured for half a century is that it has always attracted like-minded people who have succeeded in their experiments. Kandel recalled his first experience at the company working on “Mabou Mines Lear” with Breuer and Maleczech. “There was a kind of confidence that I could find my way there no matter what role I played,” Kandel, 69, said in a video conversation.
“I was shy, then there was something in me, and that was what I wanted to see Lee coming out,” she continued. She said, “At one point,’Why are you climbing this pole?'” Lee’s reaction was as follows: “Don’t let Stanislavski ask me those questions. [expletive].. Just climb the pole! (Kandel continues to star in Mabow’s hit “Peter and Wendy.”)
The artists who formed the Mabow Mine (excluding Akaritis and Glass), shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969, complete the film “Moimeme” directed by Broyer, although the past and present are inextricably intertwined. It never happened.
Broyer’s son, Mojo Rowin, captured the footage and shot it with his father for 16 hours in a zoom during a pandemic. There was no script and the conversation wasn’t dubbed, so 38-year-old Lorwyn was trying to understand some sort of through line. line. “I did most of the work after he died, and he provided me with something like this, so it really feels like a collaboration, but he also does it for me. I left all this space, “he said. “So I wrote a script, I decided what these things mean.”
On Saturday, “Moi-Même” will be unveiled as an ongoing work backed by a live band and foley artist Jay Peck, with Kandel calling out to all adults and Declan Kenneally calling out to all children.
In a sense, it will be a bridge between the prehistoric times of the Mabo mine and what lies ahead. “In the future, hopefully we’ll still feel like us, but we won’t look like us,” Kandel said.
