Mabou Mines Archive

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 well-known writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers; and performed around the globe, cementing its reputation as an innovative force in the theater world.

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 active 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. "Mabou Mines came together as a group to create formal works that would explore language and acting."1

Influenced especially 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 easily between the art world and the theater, often performing in galleries as well as on stages. But its work with Beckett's writing firmly situtated 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 talented performers and artists, including 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 extensively in the United States and abroad.

Mabou Mines has remained committed to its ideal of complete artistic control. As the company stated in a 1990 press kit, "The artistic purpose of Mabou Mines has been and remains the creation of new theatre pieces from original texts and the theatrical use of existing texts staged from a specific point of view. Each member is encouraged to pursue his or her artistic vision by initiating and collaborating on a wide range of projects of varying styles, developing them from initial concept to final performance."2

References: 1. Unknown author, unpublished manuscript. A history of Mabou Mines through 1989. 2. Mabou Mines, company history included in press kit, 1990.

Chronology of Productions:

1970: The Red Horse Animation

1971: Come and Go; Play

1972: Arc Welding Piece; Music for Voices

1973: Send/Receive/Send

1974: Mabou Mines Performs Samuel Beckett

1975: Cascando;The B. Beaver Animation

1976: The Saint and the Football Player

1977: Dressed Like An Egg

1978: Shaggy Dog Animation

1979: Mercier and Camier; Southern Exposure

1980: A Prelude to a Death in Venice; Dead End Kids; Easy Daisy(for radio); Sister Suzie Cinema; Vanishing Pictures

1981: Wrong Guys

1982: The Keeper Radio Series

1983: Cold Harbor; Company; Hajj; The Joey Schmerda Story(for radio)

1984: Imagination Dead Imagine; Pretty Boy; Through the Leaves

1985: Flow My Tears the Policeman Said; It's A Man's World; Starcock; The Interview Series (for radio)

1986: CEO; Dead End Kids(Film Version); Help Wanted; The Kafka Parables(for radio); Worstward Ho

1987: Sueños

1988: The Gospel at Colonus

1990: B. Beaver Animation(reconstruction); Mabou Mines Lear; The Miller Series(for radio)

1991: In the Jungle of Cities; The Quantum

1992: The MahabharANTa, and Selected Stories from the Insectiad

1993: The Bribe

1994: Mother; Reel To Real

1995: An Epidog

1996: Peter and Wendy; Pootanah Moksha; Red Horse Animation(reconstruction)

1997: Happy Days

1999: Belén: A Book of Hours

2000: Animal Magnetism

2001: Ecco Porco

2003: Cara Lucia; Mabou Mines DollHouse

2005: Red Beads; Summa Dramatica

2007: Song For New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting