Firehouse Theater

The Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis and later of San Francisco was a significant producer of experimental, theater of the absurd, and avant guard theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Its productions included new plays and some world premieres, presented often with radical and exploratory directorial styles. The Firehouse introduced playwrights and new plays to Minneapolis and San Francisco. It premiered plays by Megan Terry, Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van Itallie, María Irene Fornés and others, and presented plays by Harold Pinter, John Arden, August Strindberg, John Osborne, Arthur Kopit, Eugene Ionesco, Berthold Brecht, Samuel Beckett and others. In a 1987 interview Martha Boesing, the artistic director of another Minneapolis theatre, described The Firehouse Theater as "the most extreme of all the groups creating experimental theater in the sixties, and the closest to Artaud’s vision." Writing in 1968, The New York Times said that The Firehouse Theater "has been doing avantgarde plays in Minneapolis nearly as long as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater has been doing the other kind, and with much less help from the Establishment." That same year, when a federal grant was provided to support the Firehouse, it was pointed out in the Congressional Record that The Firehouse Theatre "is the only major theatre dealing experimentally with the writing of plays and their production outside the metropolitan New York area."

History

The Firehouse Theater began in Minneapolis in the summer of 1963. Director Marlow S. Hotchkiss, artist James F. Faber, actor John Shimek, and director Charles Morrison III joined forces, and raised funds to renovate an 1894 fire station located at 3010 Minnehaha Avenue near the corner of Lake Street. The theater space they created was a 166 seat theater on a proscenium stage with a small thrust into the audience. It was envisioned as a place for new playwrights and avant-garde drama. The first production was The Connection by Jack Gelber, which opened August 22, 1963. After the performance the audience and company stayed for a discussion, and that became a standard feature of The Firehouse Theater.

In 1965 the theater presented a group of six plays that had been developed by director Tom O'Horgan, and which were then remounted off-Broadway in New York at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club under the title Six from La Mama. The same year the theater faced funding problems, and another kind challenge was the theater’s desire to be part of the community with a dependence on open auditions with amateur actors drawn from the local pool. The theater then regrouped and found new vision. It became a non-profit organization and received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Some important members of the company left, and Marlow Hotchkiss invited Sydney Schubert Walter to be the artistic director. Walter had been part of New York’s Open Theatre. Walter describe his initial reaction, "I came here to the most bizarre collection of talents I’d seen. We had a hairdresser playing a villain, for instance... They promised me a fine crop of amateur actors and I got an assortment of freaks and misfits, so I stayed."

The theater experimented with the playing space — it evolved into a flexible modular space, with a less defined playing space and audience area. It developed a new style known as transformational theater, in which the performers, like shape-shifters, could transform from character to character. Audience involvement and improvisation were often featured. Directorial ideas took the form of wild explorations, strobe lights, film projections, and nudity. The theater would go on the road and tour other cities in the United States and also Europe.

In the spring of 1968, The Firehouse Theater toured Europe with its production of Megan Terry’s play with music, Jack-Jack, described as a "wildly physical satire on American life." The European tour of Jack-Jack was preceded by a seven week run in Minneapolis, and when the theater returned it ran for another three weeks. According to The New York Times, the nude scene in Jack-Jack "…is far more explicit than anything on the New York stage this season. But at the same time it is so much like a classical painting come to life, of nymphs and satyrs frolicking on the green, that no one in Minneapolis seems to have objected loudly enough to attract the censors."

The following July the theatre was presenting Brecht’s A Man is a Man in the parks of Minneapolis, and it attracted controversy when some, including a police officer, objected to a scene in the play that enacted a man’s genitals being shot off. The theater was known for protesting the Viet Nam war, and in October of 1968, the artistic director, Sydney Schubert Walter, received an induction notice from the military. He was, at 33, older than the usual maximum age to be drafted, which was 26. Walter went to the federal building in Minneapolis to refuse the induction, claiming that his civil right were being violated. Walter was accompanied by the theater company, and others, who staged a protest in support of him. Walter expected that he would face further trouble.

In 1969 The Firehouse Theater appeared in New York at the La Mama performing the plays Rags and Faust. Back in Minneapolis the theater performed A Mass Actors and Audience on the Passion and Birth of Doctor John Faust According to the Spirit of Our Times, by Marlow Hotchkiss, which was to be last production in The Firehouse Theatre in its Minneapolis location. The theater lost its lease at the 19th century fire station, and moved to California Street at Polk San Francisco. The company lived as a commune. Their first season in San Francisco began with a production of Blessings on March 20, 1970. In 1974 the theater faced a budget crisis, lost their space, and the members disbanded.

Production history

• Acts Without Words,1967, 1969 Samuel Beckett
• Antigone, 1969 Sophocles
• Baal,1965 Bertolt Brecht
• The Birthday Party,1967 Harold Pinter
• Blessings, 1970
• The Brass Butterfly, 1963 William Golding
• The Brig, 1964 Kenneth H. Brown
• The Caretaker, 1963 Harold Pinter
• Carne Man, 1965
• The Connection, 1963 Jack Gelber
• The Dance of Death, 1964 August Strindberg
• Danton's Death, 1965 Georg Büchner
• Doomeager, 1973
• Dreamscapes 1972-1973
• Endgame, 1966 Samuel Beckett
• Escape by Balloon, 1970-1972 W.E.R. La Farge in collaboration with The Firehouse Theater Company
• A Few Skits and Songs about Things Right and Wrong with the World, the Church, and You, 1964 Richard S. Wilson
• Fourteen Hundred Thousand, 1966 Sam Shepard
• The Future is in Eggs, 1966
• The Gloaming, Oh My Darling, 1965 Megan Terry
• Happy Days, 1968 Samuel Beckett
• A House by the Stable, 1963
• The Hostage, 1964 Brendan Behan
• The Immoralist,1964 Andre Gide
• Iphigenia Transformed, 1966
• It Should Happen to a Dog, 1963 Wolf Mankowitz
• Jack, or The Submission, 1966 Eugène Ionesco
• Jack-Jack, 1968 Megan Terry
• Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry, Place, 1965,1968 Megan Terry
• Krapp's Last Tape, 1967 Samuel Beckett
• Look Back in Anger, 1964 John Osborne
• Lord Halewyn, 1965 Michel de Ghelderode
• A Man is a Man 1968 Bertolt Brecht
• The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, 1965 Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• A Mass Actors and Audience on the Passion and Birth of Doctor John Faust According to the Spirit of Our Times, 1969 Marlow Hotchkiss
• Mortality or the Passion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1967
• Mysteries, Miracles, and Moralities, 1967
• Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad, 1965 Arthur Kopit
• Peer Gynt, 1967 Henrik Ibsen
• The People vs. the Ranchman, 1967 Megan Terry
• Play, 1965 Samuel Beckett
• Rags, 1968-1969, 1971 Nancy Walter
• Red Eye of Love, 1964 Arnold Weinstein
• Santa Claus, 1963 E. E. Cummings
• Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, 1965 John Arden
• The Sideshow, 1966
• A Song for All Saints, 1966 James Lineberger
• Stab and Dance, 1973-1974
• Still Falling, 1971
• The Successful Life of Three, 1965 María Irene Fornés
• Sweeney Agonistes, 1965 T. S. Eliot
• Tango Palace, 1965 María Irene Fornés
• The Thing Itself, 1967 Arthur Sainer
• The Three Men of Gotham, 1965
• Traveling Light, 1972
• Trunity, 1968 Nancy Walter
• Victims of Duty, 1967 Eugène Ionesco
• Viet Rock, 1966 Megan Terry
• Waiting for Godot 1966 Samuel Beckett
• Where's de Queen, 1966 Jean-Claude van Itallie
• The Window, 1972
• Woyzeck 1968, 1971 Georg Büchner