Energetic founder of the pioneering experimental theatre club La MaMa
The major impetus and example for much of our first fringe and alternative theatre 50 years ago came from New York, specifically a small group of off-off-Broadway and Greenwich Village cafe theatres where Ellen Stewart, who has died aged 91, reigned supreme as the founder and artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.
Although never renowned as an actor or director herself (she took to directing in later life), Stewart generated creative energy and excitement in others, incontrovertible proof that theatre can only thrive given the right circumstances or opportunities.
She considered her artists as her family and, in the earliest days, kept them in clothes from her work as a designer. Many actors slept in her apartment or in the theatre itself. In British terms, she was the Lower East Side's Lilian Baylis, with elements of Sybil Thorndike and Thelma Holt.
Stewart was a voluble and energetic figure, instantly recognisable in her extravagant hairstyle, usually arranged in cornrows and bedecked with bangles and beads. She came to theatre by accident. In 1962 she wanted to help out a friend with theatrical ambitions and the aspiring playwright Paul Foster, so she opened a basement theatre ? naming it "La MaMa" as everyone knew her as "Mama" ? in a tenement on East 9th Street and put on little-known plays by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill and Harold Pinter. Soon she was a magnet for some of the most significant talent of the decade: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte all worked there, as did the playwrights Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Harvey Fierstein.
La MaMa was soon home, too, to leading new directors: Robert Wilson, Tom O'Horgan, Joseph Chaikin and the Romanian maestro Andrei Serban. The composer Philip Glass worked at La MaMa at the start of his career. Stewart also welcomed the visiting companies of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor, and travelled widely on the international festival circuit.
Her private life remained private. She married at least once, and had one son, Larry Hovell, who died in 1998. She was born in Chicago where her father was a tailor and her mother a teacher. She trained as a teacher at Arkansas State College and worked as a riveter in Chicago during the second world war.
Arriving in New York, she worked as an elevator operator in Saks on Fifth Avenue before her dress sense and vivid personality propelled her into the office, where she was appointed an executive designer, the first black woman, she said, to be given such a position: "Saks gave a lunch in my honour but the restaurant refused to seat me."
La MaMa, also known as Cafe La MaMa, took over her life and she greeted audiences from the stage each night by ringing a cowbell and announcing, in her velvety voice: "Welcome to the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre." Her outlook was visionary, combative and international, never commercial or empire-building.
The project soon attracted federal and foundation grants, but there was no money from New York itself until 1985. La MaMa was considered a rough-house, with no "standards of excellence" compared with other, more high-profile venues.
In the late 60s, Stewart bought a four-storey building in the Bowery district at East 4th Street ? the theatre's headquarters to this day ? with Ford Foundation money, creating an office and two 99-seater theatres. She lived in an apartment at the top. Almost immediately she acquired, with more Ford Foundation money, a seven-storey loft building a few blocks away, which provided rehearsal space. La MaMa's art gallery was leased from the city at East 1st Street.
A bigger performance area, a 300-seater theatre, was added in 1974 when she opened the Annex, a converted television studio, a few doors down the street. This was renamed the Ellen Stewart theatre in a gala celebration in 2009, attended by many of her now famous colleagues.
The New York Times's chief theatre critic, Ben Brantley, recalled seeing Stewart's leonine head countless times across a crowded lobby: "For many of us, the image of that radiant head is as linked with the spirit of the East Village, as the cradle of experimental theatre in New York, as the pencil silhouette of Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, is with Seventh Avenue."
Even in the darkest days ? keeping the place going was always a struggle ? Stewart refused to solicit money from her illustrious alumni: "I'll be damned if I'm going to call on them," she said as she scrabbled around to pay creditors, on the brink of closure, in 1992. She survived that crisis and La MaMa has become an institution on its own terms, with a staff of 21, all paid basic salaries.
Stewart herself never stopped working, supervising up to 70 productions each year. She is survived by an adopted son and eight grandchildren.
Beth Porter writes: Lanford Wilson introduced me to "Miz Stewart", as we always called Ellen, in 1966. Lanford wanted me to play opposite Frederic Forrest in his play The Rimers of Eldritch at La MaMa. We opened that summer to rave reviews in the Village Voice, the only paper willing to review shows south of 14th Street.
Ellen and her artistic director, Tom O'Horgan, invited me to join the new La MaMa troupe, starting rehearsals for a six-month European tour. Ellen had been told that good reviews abroad would assure a Rockefeller grant so she could carry on presenting her slate of new plays in the US. After touring Europe for six months, presenting a rotating repertoire of short plays, we staged the premiere of Paul Foster's Tom Paine at the 1967 Edinburgh festival and then in the West End of London. We made our own costumes and masks and learned to play the crumhorn, the celeste and the serpent, to fence and to speak with acceptable French and English accents. Ellen was our harshest and most supportive critic.
I remained with La MaMa for several years before Ellen asked me to co-found and run the UK branch of LaMaMa. We were solely a touring company called the Wherehouse LaMaMa because we had no base. The company was a collective, with no assigned director. Ellen kept an eye on us, sending financial support to tide us over between gigs. In 1970 she presented us in repertory in New York. Ellen simply wanted us to be the best we could be.
? Ellen Stewart, theatre producer, born 7 November 1919; died 13 January 2011
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