Mabou Mines is a collaborative, avant-garde theater company based in New York City. Founded in 1970, the company took its name from an old mining town in northern Nova Scotia, near where founding members JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow developed The Red Horse Animation, the group's first original performance piece. Since then, Mabou Mines has produced scores of plays; collaborated with writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers; and performed around the globe.
Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech met studying theater at UCLA in the late 1950s. Around 1960, the couple hitchhiked to San Francisco to participate in the city's theater scene. Working at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop and the San Francisco Mime Troupe they met Bill Raymond, and at the San Francisco Tape Music Center they met JoAnne Akalaitis. In 1964, Akalaitis moved to New York City but left for Paris soon after with composer (and future husband) Philip Glass. The following year Breuer and Maleczech left San Francisco for Europe. The two couples met up while traveling in Greece, went back to Paris, and with actor David Warrilow, began to work on staging Samuel Beckett's Play. It premiered at the American Cultural Center in 1967. It was also in Paris that the group first met actor Frederick Neumann. In 1969, back in New York with Glass, Akalaitis wrote the others in Paris suggesting they form a theater group in New York.
Influenced by Jerzy Grotowski's teaching and Beckett's work, Mabou Mines went on to produce experimental theater pieces like Breuer's Red Horse Animation, pieces that resulted from intense collaboration and improvisation, and incorporated elements of visual art, dance, mime, puppetry, and music. Arc Welding Piece (1972), for example, featured an artist using an arc welder to make cuts in a large piece of metal, while actors expressed various states of emotion, their faces enlarged by magnifying lenses. In 1974, Fred Neumann joined the group to work on Breuer's second "Animation," The B. Beaver Animation. Bill Raymond joined shortly thereafter. In its early years, Mabou Mines moved between the art world and the theater, often performing in galleries as well as on stages. But its work with Beckett's writing firmly situated the group within a theatrical context. After an early residency at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York, the company began performing at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, and other venues in New York and elsewhere.
From the beginning, creative roles were fluid and collaboration was key, but Lee Breuer served as the company's primary director. In 1975 however, Akalaitis directed Cascando and opened the door for other members to take on new roles, for the company to expand, and for multiple projects to come together simultaneously. Akalaitis went on to direct Dressed Like an Egg (1977) and Southern Exposure (1979), and wrote and directed Dead End Kids (1980); Neumann directed Mercier and Camier (1979); Maleczech directed Vanishing Pictures (1980). Other performers worked with Mabou Mines, including L.B. Dallas, Linda Hartinian, Ellen McElduff, Greg Mehrten, Terry O'Reilly, and B-St. John Schofield.
The company steadily expanded its repertoire and continued its tradition of collaboration, working with performers and artists, such as composers Bob Telson, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, and David Byrne. Mabou Mines has adapted works by Shakespeare (Lear, 1990), Franz Xaver Kroetz (Through the Leaves, 1984) and Help Wanted, 1986), Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, 1985), and Bertolt Brecht (In the Jungle of Cities, 1991). The company has toured in the United States and abroad.
