Ellen Stewart's La Mama ETC as Lower East Side Landing Site

Abstract

Ellen Stewart's La Mama Café opened its doors as a basement theatre/café on the Lower East Side of New York City with Tennessee Williams's One Arm in 1962; money from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Doris Duke Foundations funded the purchase and renovation of their dilapidated building in 1969. This marked a major turning point in the history of Off-Off Broadway (OOB) theatre; of the four main venues of OOB (Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, Judson Poets’ Theatre, and La Mama), only La Mama survives today. La Mama did not institutionalize through structural trappings alone but produced new relationships within the urban ecosystem. While some OOB theatres confronted the demands of institutional durability with ambivalence, La Mama entered the 1970s with transformative conceptions of space and urban cultural cohesion. As a consequence, the theatre defied socially destructive municipal policies through interdependence and collaboration between artists, their funding sources, and municipal systems.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Shane Boyle of Queen Mary University of London and Lindsey Mantoan of Stanford University in California for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1 Stewart received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. These ‘Genius Grants’ are unrestricted prizes (then $300,000) paid over five years, awarded annually to United States citizens working in any field, who demonstrate originality and creativity in their work. Stewart used her winnings to purchase and renovate a fourteenth-century convent in Italy, now a retreat center called La Mama Umbria (Rosenthal 2006: 15).

2 For more on the MAC, see Bailey (1984); Shefter (1992); and Tabb (1983).

3 Theatre critic Jerry Tallmer first used the term ‘Off-Off Broadway’ (OOB) in 1960 to describe the small café theatres that had been opening in downtown Manhattan. In 1966, Michael Smith argued that OOB was not a movement, but a particular point of view that held freedom of exploration as paramount to Off-Broadway's increasing professionalization (Smith 1966).

4 Kathakali is a form of classical dance from Southern India.