Book Review: Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, Edited by Bonnie Marranca

 Act Two Hundred Seventy Two of Dick Higgins' Clown's Way, A Drama in Three Hundred Acts. From Jefferson's Birthday (Something Else Press, New York 1964), Copyright © 2025 Estate of Dick Higgins. (Clown's Way in its entirety is printed in Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins.)

By MARK BLOCH, July 2025

Clown’s Way, reproduced in Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, is a play that originally appeared in Dick Higgins first published book, Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964) and could be considered an early durational performance piece, made up of 300 short acts, each basically one event score and preceded by a time duration in seconds—between 0 and 60—with the last 31 “acts” carrying only appropriated images that appear carved from woodcuts to be “performed.”  While acts numbered 1-233 use just words, on the very last page, following the illustrations, Higgins earnestly lists every prop mentioned therein, 78 in all. He also closes with definitions of two made-up words: “foo,” and “kung,” the second a sound with a clearly defined attack and a slow decay such as the clang of a large bell, while a foo is made by waving a microphone near a loudspeaker. At the time there wasn’t language to identify such a thing as feedback, certainly common but not conceived of as anything but a nuisance. Pierre Schaeffer probably used such mistakes as art in the early 20th century in his experimental audio compositions as did rocker Johnny “Guitar” Watson in 1954. But when John Lennon used it to open I Feel Fine ten years later, he transformed the world’s youth via transistor radio. Similarly, between 1959 and ’63, Higgins defined and presumably used “foo” because he thought doing so might help transform the world’s adults—with theater.

Paperback Cover of Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, 214 pages, 6 x 9 inches, Edited by Bonnie Marranca, Imprint: University of Michigan Press, July 2024.

I would have liked it if Alchemies of Theater were called, instead, “A Theater That Might Have Been” or “Index Card Alchemies.” But “Alchemies of Theater” is also appropos because it manifests the daring theatrical vision that Gertrude Stein and Antonin Artaud’s Theater and its Double inspired in the young Dick Higgins, implying transformative forces. As a man certifiably ahead of his time, his ideas, never conventional or widely adopted, did anticipate transmutational new worlds, including that of Performance Art, later to come, a matter of taxonomy that arises in this book. Yet another fantasy title for this book might have been “Theater of the Mind,” indicative that Bonnie Marranca, the creator of this uplifting volume, rightfully conceives of his work as “a theater of possibilities,” even ending her Preface that way. She states “often it was a theater of the mind he envisioned” as she uses her own book with its own visions to adeptly shepherd those imaginings from Higgins’ mind directly to ours.

That said, the visionary Dick Higgins (1938–98) also knew the difference between theory and practice, hence the index cards. In his Danger Music Number 25, the visual artist, publisher, poet, composer, and playwright stated simply, “Decide what you want to do and do it,” precisely what he did for much of his life and it turned out to be more than enough. But now, with an option to untangle and imagine other potential outcomes, new implications for the theater were front and center for this reader as I read this timely book, published last year by the University of Michigan and edited by Marranca. While his work as visual artist, publisher, poet, composer and filmmaker have all been previously explored, Marranca has now made it possible to reassess the complex Mr. Higgins only as a “genuine man of the theater.”

As the author of more than three dozen books, the founder of both the important publishing enterprise Something Else Press (and other presses) and the highly influential anti-art Fluxus “group,” Dick Higgins is well-known as a major figure in several influential artistic communities in downtown New York, across Europe, and Japan.

Still from Dick Higgins, Saint Joan at Beaurevoir (1959) at The Player's Theatre, NYC March 21st, 1960. Dick Higgins website, Copyright © 2021 Estate of Dick Higgins.

But Alchemies of Theater now presents a larger playing field on which to appreciate him as this book assembles a broad selection of his writings and creations of only theater-related work, largely unpublished or long out of print, that includes plays, performance scores and writings as well as performance-related drawings previously plucked from their theater context, recalling that Higgins was a postmodern deconstruct-er of drama long before such things became primary projects of our culture and for our theater in particular, as an early reposition-er of traditional author-director roles and a pioneer in the use of electronic media in the theater at the precise moment that it became the only logical thing to do—even reminding us that Higgins got credit in The New York Times for writing (in a collaboration with Richard Maxfield) the world’s first “electronic opera.” He also co-created the first theater troupe that gave technology equal billing with performers in his (and Al Hansen’s) New York Audio Visual Group. And Marranca points out that Higgins could also be credited with creating what is now commonly called “devised” theater—two decades before the thespian bandwagon took a crack at it.

Bonnie Marranca, Professor Emerita of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, the author of six books, herself, and editor of 13 more, is the person to applaud for this new window on Higgins’ theatrical achievements. She recently stepped back from publishing the distinguished PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art but will continue to work on the book division of the press with some 50 titles still in print.

Combined front and back covers of Dick Higgins, Jefferson's Birthday/Postface, (Something Else Press, New York 1964), These two separate works are bound back-to-back in one volume. Postface is a reminiscence about how happenings began by one who was there. Jefferson's Birthday contains all of the works Higgins wrote between April 13th, Thomas Jefferson's birthday, 1962 and April 13th, 1963. Dick Higgins website, Copyright © 2021 Estate of Dick Higgins.

Marranca began researching this book in 2018 in various Higgins archives, where an enormous number of graphic pieces, plays, and dance works suddenly set him in a context far beyond the Fluxus realm she had known him for. 

Marranca decided to bring forth this fresh look into Higgins’ theater endeavors well before his being featured as an artist and publisher in a recent book and exhibition at  Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum (Call It Something Else, September 27, 2023- January 22, 2024) and also prior to a program of his early rarely-seen films was trotted out late last year at New York’s Film Anthology. Marranca explains she was inspired to do the book when she saw There Will Never Be Silence, Scoring John Cage’s  4’33’ back in October 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, impressed by three pictographic works by Dick. (Full disclosure: I am a lifelong fan-friend of both Higgins and Marranca. I also happened to have been very moved by that exhibition, organized by David Platzker, of MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints, with Jon Hendricks, Consulting Curator, because it provided clarification of the Minimalism-Fluxus connection. As a person who had emerged into the baffling art world of the ‘70s, that distinction had always conveniently eluded me so was good for me to read about its different but important impact on Marranca.) 

Still from Dick Higgins’ Sound of the Animals Dying, 13 to 1 (for C. Oldenburg)"  from "Twenty-Seven Episodes for the Aquarian Theater to the Recognition of Antonin Artaud." L to R: Dick Higgins, Frank Trowbridge, Alison Knowles, Jed Curtis, Agna Redermann. Photograph by Manfred Leve. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

Luckily for us, Marranca’s response was cobbling together Alchemies of Theater, containing as many of his always-unorthodox theatrical contributions as she could find, and presenting new generations with the opportunity to discover Higgins, one not previously lost on me, despite (or perhaps because of) those confusing 1970s. Her introductory essays weave wide-ranging theatrical context into the rare content she compiled. Demonstrating how Higgins’ singular role as an attempted exploder of theater norms of the 1960s went more or less ignored while his work as a precursor of “post-dramatic” avant-garde traditions slowly worked its magic surprisingly well, she provides kudos and explanations that he deserved but never got—for proposing a complete and radical deconstruction of drama at a time that it was needed. We have long known that Higgins’s celebrated platform, “Intermedia” introduced the inter-disciplinary as “a new arts ecology” Downtown but as important as he has been to historians of the avant-garde as a Fluxus artist and publisher, little formal attention has been paid to his consistent vision of the theater that specifically employed that ecology to transform what the ancient Greeks created as a major civic and religious force, intertwining their culture and their social lives, a way to honor their gods and engage in discussions about society, politics, and morality. She shows us that when the far-sighted Higgins wasn’t writing actual theatre or performing in it, he wrote thoughtfully about it, persistently trying to make a dent.

Dick Higgins began his career as a playwright, not a visual artist like many of his Fluxus-era contemporaries. But with a handful of other non-musicians, he gravitated to the musical composition classes of John Cage early ("Composition" and "Experimental Composition" at The New School, 1956-61) and also even studied with (and then published) Cage’s own teacher Henry Cowell, perhaps becoming the only person (musician or not?) to study under both men. Higgins then, before his coining of the “Intermedia” word (which he always credited as originating with Samuel Coleridge), began combining strange old theater ideas with new elements: notecards, short texts, diagrams, lighting experiments and other unorthodox, chance-laced, avant garde approaches. Marranca’s sectional essays become essential in walking us through not only his plays and his ideas about dramaturgy, but Higgins himself: his place in the theater and its place in him as it applies to each section. 

Marranca structured this book around 13 examples of his plays and performance scores, mostly from the 1960s. In the first section, after a strong 12 page introduction, each of Higgins’ works are presented individually in chronological order, more or less, employing visual components as needed. Those are followed by 19 either conceptual and/or strictly visual art pieces for performance, further exemplifying his Intermedia idea. These completely usurp the place of scripts and written scores: nine of his “Graphis” drawing pieces combine performance with drawing (For example his Graphis No. 19 is a visual plan for Act I of Higgins’s long play Saint Joan at Beaurevoir from 1960), five of his short, famous Danger Music texts and then five additional one-page poetic text works follow that unite language and music—to create a space where theater meets dance. 

Finally, Marranca’s volume concludes with a short but important section of Higgins’ writings on the theater, conveyed effectively via just five pieces: one each from the five different decades in which he was working.

Poster from the world premiere of Dick Higgins, Stacked Deck (1959). Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

Thus, the book’s structure emphasizes what he did, with enhancements by Marranca about how he might have thought about it all.  It bears repeating that most of the book is dedicated to the 13 plays, with several potentially transferable back to index cards where some originated, epigrammatic texts to be reshuffled and performed ad infinitum as new works. Published unbound card versions might have emerged decades ago if Higgins had not grown impatient with Fluxfounder George Maciunas, scheduled in the early 1960s to publish his works in a “Fluxbox” format, Maciunas’ plan for him (and other Fluxus artists) to produce packaged “complete works of” multiples. When Maciunas couldn’t quite get to it, Higgins abandoned ship and started his own publishing company, well-documented elsewhere.  Despite the fact that many of Higgins’ works lend themselves to the playful formats that Maciunas loved, and despite these works are those of a 20-something and indicative of the frisky ‘60s zeitgeist, they read both as serious evidence of Higgins’ brilliant dedication and as daring willingness to explore cultural research and development: i.e. aesthetic alchemy. With the implementations of the work as serious as its author’s intentions, readers can now examine both the plans and execution of these works for the first time in decades, if not ever. For this reader, these 13 works, packed with unorthodox but user-friendly zaniness, convey both an entertaining delight and a solemnity worthy of respect.

 Dick Higgins, Act Two Hundred Seventy One of Dick Higgins, Clown's Way, a drama in three hundred acts. From Jeffersons Birthday (Something Else Press, New York 1964). Copyright © 2025 Estate of Dick Higgins. (Clown's Way in its entirety is printed in Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins.)

Marranca provides welcome erudition in her introductions, focusing in on details that explore Higgins’ gripes and reactions as well as the grand visions of his project, questioning repeatedly if or why he could seem both omnipresent and overlooked. How might he have changed theater in a different kind of world with a different kind of cultural bird’s eye view is food for thought here— her close reading of his risky innovations begins a potentially valuable Higgins reevaluation. 

Unfortunately, the success or failure of his specific theatrical endeavors are only intimated at here. Marranca would be a good candidate to further elaborately critique the details, given her proximity to theater of all kinds in her life’s work as PAJ editor. But she settles for barely introducing Higgins to us in this handbook, no small task, hinting occasionally that someone else might grab that baton from her after this thoughtful introduction to a wondrous world. The auteur Higgins required a re-introduction in the context of theater and this short book provides it. 

But what might the future hold for these works within the theater canon? Can we imagine a place for them? In everything he did, Higgins went large, including fancifulness. He did not hold back. So these can strike one as outside the box, period pieces or even dated novelties. But, pictures and all, they are also fun “reads” that have endured, and almost 70 years of Fluxus documentation and the history of instruction-based art have shown us that quirky unorthodox nuggets scalable to card size need not lack gravitas or entertainment value. So to expect to see these pieces attempted by new groups of performers would not be unreasonable.

Poster from Dick Higgins, Saint Joan at Beaurevoir (1959) poster for performance at The Player's Theatre, NYC March 21st, 1960. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

If what appears in these plays feels kooky, game-like and facetious, it is because Higgins was busy hammering away at every convention. Consequently, very few playwrights have produced such original texts using every tool at their disposal, and not just the “theatrical.” Higgins turned toward an Italian Futurist influence from earlier in his century, not based solely on dramatic literature, but poetry, sound and chance. Later, when Higgins saw events on the world’s stages separating into new art forms increasingly called Performance Art, he offered, as always, his brainy distinctions about how we might think about these developments, as does Marranca. It is ironic to me is that ‘70s Performance often seems like  a perfect venue for his ideas, not a threat, 15 years after he began with Happenings and Events, but he seems to have witnessed it almost like an invasion from afar.

Speaking of nuanced distinctions, Marranca’s book structure interestingly refers to but does not embrace “Intermedia” in its presentation of Higgins’ output. She coaxes his work out of its sprawling undifferentiated zone of pure creativity, then chops his oeuvre into pure, un-intermedia-ted topics: “Plays, Scores, Performance, Drawing, Music, Dance and Writings.” Meanwhile Higgins is busy pulling out every stop and boundary in his own attempt to present The Void, a common alchemical activity amongst his contemporaries in those days (though neither he nor Marranca calls it that). 

Citing stereotypes as an enemy, he “declared war on the script,” proclaiming “improvisation was no help,” “replacing… structural elements with chance.” Then presciently in 1966, Higgins embarked upon a world “not governed by rules,”  with form determined “according to its needs,” concluding that, “a concept like this is very disturbing to those whose mentality is compartmentalized.” Sixty years later we are more, not less, categorized though as I said, he and Fluxus eventually were recognized for their role in breaking down every boundary between known media. While Intermedia is still not a commonly used phrase, we see its effects everywhere.

Program for Dick Higgins, Inraads Rebuff'd or the Disdainful Evacuation, Judson Poets Theatrer, March 3-5, 1962, Judson Memorial Church Archives, The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, Used by permission of Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY.

Meanwhile, he idealistically but incorrectly (as of this freakish moment, anyway) predicted, “we are approaching the dawn of a classless society” (but in the ‘60s, yes). Meanwhile, he did accurately forecast, “Populism is a growing tendency rather than a shrinking one” for both East and West, with theater “damned by its inability to reflect its surroundings” offering only “minor innovations” that do little more than “provide dinner conversation” when something more earth-shattering was worked for and apparently needed. The world changed a lot in the 1960s and ‘70s but again, viewing it right now, perhaps not enough. In retrospect, we can see Higgins going for total societal transformation, wielding theater as his main tool.

Each of the four sections are preceded by an illuminating Bonnie Marranca essay. In Section 1, his collection of scripts comprise 122 pages (from page 3 to 125) of this roughly 200 page book, then lead to the final fourth section, the five brainy “Writing” examples, that provide a challenging slog in just 25 pages.

Higgins’ first essay there, Towards an Abstract Theater (1958) is a one page text that cites theater as the common denominator for all the arts and therefore the best venue for a group experience. He stresses the importance of interpretation in a medium where a single motion on a stage or a spoken cluster of words carry transformative meaning. The audience absorbs what is written on the page as a performed virtual “calligraphy” and then, according to Higgins, must decide if there is evidence that what was manifested live was effective.

  Dick Higgins, From Act Two Hundred Sixty Six of Dick Higgins, Clown's Way, a drama in three hundred acts. From Jefferson's Birthday (Something Else Press, New York 1964). Copyright © 2025 Estate of Dick Higgins. (Clown's Way in its entirety is printed in Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins.)

In essay two, Intermedia (1966), the proscenium theater, an outgrowth of 17th century ideals of social order, place his dramaturgy at the receiving end of a continuum stretching to Rauschenberg, who called his life-art object-constructions-paintings “Combines,” to Allan Kaprow, his classmate in the Cage class who created “Environments” in the spring of ’58 when art started moving off the walls and into rooms, to making the distinction when they began to include live people, calling them “Happenings.” Finally, he describes Hansen (the Cage classmate who wrote a primer on Happenings that Higgins published), Ben Patterson, Nam June Paik, Cage, and Philip Corner fusing the theatrical with music, followed by Joe Jones, Emmett Williams and Robert Filliou, who then add poetry and sculpture to the mix. Higgins thus conveys why these adjacent types of innovations, not Romanticism, are most important to their era. Perhaps Higgins helped move theater closer to dance, using dancers, musicians and visual artists rather than actors in his pieces. (His friends at the Judson Dance Theater kept going in this and other directions.)

Ultimately his work was the all-important examination of “a trace,” i.e. “evidence that something has happened.” Anticipating Performance, he advocated “movements and sounds which can be produced by or with the human body” and the use of props—but only if they weren’t “conventionally used.” 

In the third (and longest) essay, The New Humanism (1978), he discusses what Structuralism could have been at a time, the late ‘70s, that he describes as a vacuum, accusing it and Post-Structuralism of being “far out ways of looking at Balzac,” rather than strategies for understanding the era’s new experiences and new art experiences, and doing so on many levels. I appreciate the suggestion that such a thing might have been useful, whether it came from “theory” or not. Anything to sort out those odd 1970s. Perhaps he wanted to replace what was perceived as “realism” in Balzac with an all new variety, advocating the non-mythic—not narrative—as yet more “ornament.” Did the (theater) world move on with a shrug? Did the dance world do it better? Humans do seem to like their narrative and cherish ornamentation. A new humanism is Dick‘s counter-proposition: Intermedia, post-Happening, post-Fluxus and what he calls the “post-cognitive” to enlarge and bring alive theatrics in real time, requiring on-the-spot processing by all involved. (Although Marranca points out that while he loved chance, he did not advocate improv.) He always comes back to the work and the audience, expanding tasks and enlarging possibilities with the work, romanticizing its power, not the worker’s, elevating the importance of the audience, the receiver, the reader, thus strengthening the hermaneutic circle. He criticizes the formal Marxism of both the Art and Language and the New Critics group and the jargon in Artforum for not talking about Pop Art, Fluxus, concrete poetry, and Happenings adequately. He accuses Charles Olson, the overseer of Black Mountain College’s final incarnation, of hyper-self-awareness, even summarizing that “the devil is in our universities,” not in their intellectualism but their politics and trendiness, resulting in an “artist as metaphor” syndrome. Again, Higgins looks to the work, not the artist, for answers, whether it is Beethoven or Charlotte Moorman.

The fourth written piece, Performance, Taken Socially (1983), is another essay that pushes forward the work. He sees artist, audience, language and artists’ CVs all united in a cycle of careerist codependence. With performance at the center, almost like a prop, their interdependence becomes another staging. Here is Higgins coming to grips with the approaching Performance Art juggernaut. 

Dick Higgins, Graphis #19 (Act One of Saint Joan of Beaurevoir), 1959. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

Finally in Signature Performances (1993), the fifth and last text here (a short piece which I’m so glad his daughter Jessica told me she found surprisingly moving, personal and self-referential when she perused this book for publication), Higgins urges us to take the personality of creators with a grain of salt. He uses Happenings and Fluxus as examples to explore the idea of work that derives its authority from its association with its originator. This creates a problem if the personality of the performer dominates the focus, causing the audience to be disconnected from the hermeneutic circle—disconnecting with the work—if only a work’s creator can perform that work. Higgins makes a plea for work that supersedes authorship. 

Let’s conclude with a partial review of Higgins’ reception as a playwright and how he received his peers.

 In 1960-61 the young Higgins’ earliest known theater work finally appeared, mimeographed, called 100 Plays. In private schools in the Northeast, he recounts, “I wrote six hours a day and began most of the things in the 100 Plays.”

One of the 100 Plays was the first piece in this book, 27 Episodes For The Aquarium Theater from ’57-59 with sections dedicated to Ray Johnson, Pat and Claes Oldenberg and others. Along with parts of another work of his, the aforementioned Clown’s Way, it was performed at the Epitome Coffee Shop, a Larry Poons venue in the Village for art events and Beat experimentation. It was then performed again at the 92nd Street Y. Furthermore, its Section VII only was done on national TV on the I’ve Got a Secret program as well as later within the confines of a Kaprow Happening. So it got around.

Next, Higgins’ play Stacked Deck also was performed at the 92nd St Y and raved about in The New York Times. 

In 1962, Inroads Rebuff'd, a numbered series of 13 instructions that shares authorship with the performers—to be worked under a leader rather than a director—another part of the 100 Plays, was staged at the Judson’s Poets Theater in ’62 featuring Poons, Ay-O and Florence Tarlow and reviewed less than glowingly in the Village Voice in March ’62. Marranca points out that it nonetheless it represented a shift in direction from scenes and characters to a set of instructions. Accordingly, Maciunas later put the piece into his Flux Year Box 1. I also enjoyed Marranca’s explanation of how Judson fit into the theater scene at large and where Higgins fit into it.

Poster from The Broadway Opera (1962), Higgins Evening, November 11, 1962, Cologne Germany. Performers included Wof Vostell, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Tomas Schmit. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

He then kept inventing plays until at least 1998 that appear here but with a giant gap appearing in his output between 1964 and 1985, a critical two decades in which he created few theatrical pieces—with the exception of Spring Game in ’74 (using shadow puppets) and The Hanging Gardens of Vienna (an undated immersive environment he did in Europe with his wife Alison Knowles). In 1969 his Act: A Game of 52 Soaphorse Operas was included in the book his press published called  foew&ombwhnw (1969), (The book’s subtitle was A Grammar of the Mind and a Phenomenology of Love and a Science of the Arts as Seen by a Stalker of the Wild Mushroom) along with two other theater works, Notes on the Graphis Series and his Saint Joan at Beaurevoir, as his theater and publishing efforts converged.

That long gap were the years when Higgins worked mostly as a publisher, cementing his public identity not as a playwright. This followed a period in which his Stacked Deck, following its 92nd St.Y performance with costumes and sets by Knowles, and particularly the soundtrack, was lost, complicated by its composer’s Richard Maxfield’s tragic suicide in ’67. (It was Maxfield who took over Cage’s New School course when the latter departed.) (Furthermore, Stacked Deck was later produced at the LA County Museum of Art in 1982 with a new score by Pauline Oliveros.)

While Maxfield’s score was what qualified Stacked Deck as the “the first electronic opera,” the review in the Times by critic Allen Hughes stated that while indeed interesting and important, the electronic aspect “turned out to be one of the least remarkable things about it.”

In fact, Hughes called Stacked Deck, “one of the most extraordinary theatre pieces ever created,” containing “the makings of a compelling stage work.” Yet, never does a specific thing have to be done “in a specific way at a specific time,” he said. “An electronic work permits members of cast to improvise,” the headline announced.

With the twenty-two minutes of electronic tape intended merely to intensify the text and temper of the drama with no “conventional melody and harmony” and little actual singing, Hughes said there was stage action but “no story,” only “thirteen pitiful isolated beings,” that frustrate one another. In place of scenery, Hughes was impressed with the rapidly changing lighting effects “composed” by “performer” Nick Cernovitch, subject to “improvisatory alteration(s).”

Still from Dick Higgins, "Time" from "Twenty-Seen Episodes for the Aquarian Theatre to the Recognition of Antonin Artaud.," L to R: Dick Higgins, Frank Trowbridge, Alison Knowles, Jed Curtis, Agna Redermann. Photograph by Manfred Leve. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

One would think such a review would be enough to propel forward, um… dramatically, a theatrical career but it did not, perhaps because an important interruption occurred when Higgins and Knowles fatefully joined Maciunas in Europe for the founding of Fluxus, unknowingly changing the lives of all in attendance—and beyond. 

Marranca’s book plumbs a valid subtext about Higgins’ disconnect with the “traditional” international theater community which he called euphemistically the “Going Thing.” Like Fluxus events, Higgins’ preferences were defined by “the ethos of the collective” not individual egos. The Living Theatre preceded him in that, with Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Mabou Mines morphing into view later to further resonate with Higgins’ use of visual and sound poetry, sculpture, recording tape, non-virtuosic performers, and a union of art forms in a larger avant-garde legacy of ‘60s and ‘70s New York performance. By the time of Stacked Deck in 1960, The Living Theatre had also already pushed back against all conventional, psychological theater, setting the stage for two decades of rule-breaking by innovators like Higgins and others.

He performed the Graphis No. 82 work on May 1 and 2, 1962, at The Living Theatre on 14th Street, with Phil Corner, Yvonne Rainer, Malcolm Goldstein, Judy Ratner, Arlene Rothlein, and Lette Eisenhauer as cast members. He preferred dancers, painters, poets, and composers as primary performers (with the exception of Tarlow, a bonafide thespian who also attended the Cage class.) His long 1960 essay “What Theater Can Be,” was also delivered as a lecture at The Living Theatre, then published in Postface/Jeffersons Birthday (1964), his first book with Something Else Press. What can theater be? Higgins disliked the work of many of the successful playwrights of his day, from Tennessee Williams to Jack Gelber who wrote The Connection that The Living Theater rode to international renown. At one point Marranca wondered aloud how much the work of Edward Albee differed from the times of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile Higgins disdained nihilism and existentialism at the same time he was rejecting psychological, naturalistic dramas.The brief, humorous poem-plays of Ruth Krauss were more to his liking, many of them directed by Remy Charlip who also directed Maria Irene Fornes’ work. Works by his fellow Happenings artists could elicit a reaction that they “are no more than highly visual, highly conventional theatre.” Higgins pulled no punches when discussing his likes and dislikes in which the rationale for his distinctions could be razor thin.

 While he resonated with the new intermingling of performer and audience shared by his other Cage class contemporaries Kaprow or Hansen, apparently he did not like the way The Connection broke similar barriers. (I would like to hear more about that.) He preferred the approach to poetry of another Cage classmate Jackson Mac Low as well as Tuli Kupferberg, Brion Gysin, Robert Filliou, and Emmett Williams to other members of their community including Charles Olson, Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, or Edward Dorn.

He found many of his contemporaries outmoded for the new social realities of his day, predictable and pandering to the bourgeois, studying what was happening both in Europe (Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter) in addition to Albee, Williams and Inge domestically. Higgins rejected the nihilism of Samuel Beckett because “this refuses me the possibility of feeling sorry for myself.”

Poster for Dick Higgins, The Tart, or Miss America (1963) as well as Solo for Florence (1963), Orchestra (1963), and Celestials (1963) starring Lette Eisenhauer, Ay-O, Alison Knowles, Al Hansen, William Meyer, and Florence Tarlow. Performed in 1965 at a boxing ring at Sunnyside Garden Ballroom and Arena. Directed by Gloria Graves. Dick Higgins Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries. 

While he did mention his neighbor-friend, the Caffe Cino (off-off Broadway) playwright Robert Heide in his texts and as mentioned, dedicated passages within plays to the likes of his friend Ray Johnson who attended Black Mountain College (Higgins also used Cernovich, another Black Mountain attendee, as a Stacked Deck collaborator, mentioned above), he did not feel obliged to be congenial with the school of Olson or the styles of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, or Kenneth Koch in the New York School even though they, like him, worked with visual artists. Despite his penchant for Surrealism and reverence for Artaud, Higgins didn’t like that Frenchman’s dark, catastrophic side, which might account for some of Higgins’ feelings about a work like The Connection, about addiction. Higgins, despite his own foibles, was more tuned into Stein who he saw evolving out of James Joyce and the complex texts of Arno Schmidt in Germany. With his Something Else Press, Higgins published several books by Stein. Citing her joy, Marranca pointed out that Higgins opposed anything which would “impose itself on my freedom,” emphasizing that the only thing Dick Higgins was really against was “no freedom.”

A few years before his death, Higgins created Buster Keaton Enters Paradise, a full-length play with shadow puppets that was performed at a Broadway gallery in SoHo. Spring Game in 1974 had also used the puppets and now adding Keaton, the work was set in eleven scenes based on eleven Scrabble games, with film clips projected during the scenes, and an eight-person chorus “commenting” on them. In her longest essay, introducing the opening Plays and Performances section, Marranca reflected on Higgins’ and his generation's knowledge and use of the techniques of vaudeville, burlesque, silent film, comedy, puppetry, and games that were evident in both Happenings and Off-Off Broadway, which Marranca called a neglected field of performance scholarship, ripe for exploration. Pushing him upstage in this regard, perhaps, Higgins, she explained, though a “son of privilege” who saw himself as a kind of “Everyman,” loved Keaton and used him elsewhere in his oeuvre, always reminding us (and perhaps himself) that his ultimate goal was to present art as “generally a folk-cultural activity. Like the songs we have all sung and the games that we have played,” he once admonished, referring to the enduring mainstream strategies that seem to have charmed Marranca and, according to her, been underestimated by the avant garde.

Indeed, while Higgins, an advanced thinker that understood art’s place in history as well as anyone, believed “in the promise of American democracy and the possibility of social transformation for all its citizens,” he ultimately used his intellect to output a simple heartfelt thing that lives not in the eye or the mind but the human body: “I think you have to have joy in something happening to have theater,” he said. WM

Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins
Edited by Bonnie Marranca
214 pages, 6 x 9 inches
Imprint: University of Michigan Press, July 2024.