STEWART, Ellen

(b. c. 1920 in Alexandria, Louisiana), founder of the La Mama Experimental Theater Club, which has nurtured avant-garde off-Broadway playwrights since 1962.

Stewart's life before moving to New York City in 1950 is, at best, sketchy and vague. Her interviews always vary her origins. Apparently, her African-American family's origin is either Creole or Geechee (slaves who settled along the Ogeechee River in Georgia). "Some of my people were in vaudeville and burlesque," she told one interviewer. Her father was perhaps a laborer or a tailor, and her mother was perhaps a schoolteacher. Their names are unknown. Her birth year is given as 1920 in several sources, and some sources list her birthplace as Chicago.

As children, Stewart and her brother (who was perhaps her foster brother), Frederick Lights, had a miniature theater constructed from a shoebox and used thread spools to represent actors. Lights studied theology at Howard University, then drama at Yale University. Stewart has said that his difficulty in finding a producer for his first play led her into theatrical production.

Stewart later lived in Chicago, working as a seamstress and dressmaker, and she was married several—perhaps as many as five—times. She moved in 1950 to New York City and worked there as a seamstress, then as a designer for Edith Lances's custom corsetiere salon at Saks Fifth Avenue (1950–1957). After working freelance for several years, she designed sport dresses and beach wraps for Victor Bijou's custom salon, also at Saks. Throughout the 1960s Stewart's daytime dress designing supported her productions of avant-garde theater.

In 1962 Stewart met two theater people, Jim Moore and Paul Foster, and they decided to open a combined boutique (an outlet for her own line of dresses) and theater. The first locale was in a basement space at 321 East Ninth Street in New York City's East Village. A building inspector, who was a former actor and sympathetic to them, suggested opening with a restaurant license to make the operation legal, creating Café La Mama ("Mama" was Stewart's nickname). Workshop productions began in the summer of 1962 with an adaptation of Tennessee Williams's short story One Arm (1948), followed by Michael Locasio's In a Corner of the Morning and the first New York staging of Harold Pinter's The Room.

In 1963 a zoning inspector closed the space on East Ninth Street. The next venue, a loft space at 82 Second Avenue, was similarly closed after Foster's play Balls was produced. The third space, also on Second Avenue (number 122), was turned into a private nonprofit club in order to avoid any further building violations. Patrons paid a nominal membership fee for a week's admission to the newly named La Mama Experimental Theater Club.

The following year (1964) began a new policy, which was retained. Previously, a chosen playwright would hold auditions for an individual production. Because Stewart wanted to produce as many plays by aspiring playwrights as possible, she began an ensemble troupe of young actors. For Stewart, "the playwright is the inspiration, the beginning, the germ," she told a reporter. "All things must serve him in their particular way." With new plays by new playwrights to run for one week, Stewart believed an acting ensemble was essential.

During the early 1960s young actors and playwrights flocked to New York City's Greenwich Village area. In addition to La Mama, Joe Cino's Caffè Cino, Julian and Malina Beck's Living Theater, Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater, and the Judson Poet's Theater were venues supporting the latest new theater projects. Workshop productions of the Open Theater were often staged at La Mama. A young playwright might stage a piece at the Caffè Cino and then a revised production would open later at La Mama. Consequently, these performance spaces were fluid. That is, actors and playwrights could be and often were associated with all of these performance spaces. Stewart's La Mama is the only one that remained as of 2002.

Between 1962 and 1966 alone, La Mama presented more than 200 different plays. In addition to a resident acting troupe, Stewart retained directors. The playwright-director Tom O'Horgan directed more than fifty plays between 1964 and 1968, including a revised production of Rochelle Owens's Futz! in 1967. Among the many aspiring playwrights nurtured by Stewart during the 1960s were Ross Alexander, Tom Eyen, Paul Foster, Tom O'Horgan, Sam Shepard, David Starkweather, and Lanford Wilson.

Whatever the play, an evening at La Mama retained a communal atmosphere. After Stewart cooked soup to feed the acting troupe, director, and playwright, the audience would enter and settle into their seats. Stewart would ring a cowbell to start the performance, greeting the audience with these words: "Welcome to La Mama, dedicated to the playwrights and all aspects of the theater." For Stewart, theater was a family, and she was the mama.

Not only did Stewart provide a physical and spiritual home for aspiring playwrights, she wanted their work published. When she approached various publishers, she was told that only reviewed works would be seriously considered. Only two New York City publications, the Village Voice and the East Village Other, covered La Mama's productions with any regularity. Undeterred, Stewart asked others for advice, and she was told that European newspapers reviewed everything. The Becks' Living Theater, during its exile in Europe (1964–1968), had been receiving critical acclaim. Following this example, Stewart sent O'Horgan and an acting troupe on a European tour. The plays presented there in 1965 included Adrienne Kennedy's Black Mass, Shepard's Chicago, and Wilson's This Is the Rill Speaking. Reviews of the twenty-one plays were highly enthusiastic, and twelve were eventually published.

Since 1965 foreign tours have been a routine of the La Mama schedule. These tours have been so successful that La Mama branches are thriving in Canada, Colombia, England, and Japan. The La Mama theaters regularly book each other's productions so that playwrights around the world have international exposure.

By 1967 Stewart's finances were severely strained, and she applied for and received grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the Kaplan Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. That year La Mama was able to purchase a six-story building at 74A East Fourth Street, which remains its present location. The first floor is its repertory theater, and above it are spaces for workshops and storage. Stewart's apartment is on the top floor. An ensemble troupe regularly develops works by new playwrights. An annex at 66–68 East Fourth Street was purchased in 1974.

Since 1962 Stewart's La Mama Experimental Theater Club has fostered emerging playwrights by providing a workshop atmosphere in which to develop a production, and a performance space in which to stage new theater.

There is no biography of Stewart. Interviews and profiles of her include Josh Greenfeld, "Their Hearts Belong to La Mama," New York Times Magazine (9 July 1967), and George W. Anderson, "Visiting La MaMa's Founder," America (8 Feb. 1997). See also Stuart W. Little, Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theater (1972); Ellen Stewart, "Finding Ways to Survive," Backstage (21 Dec. 1990); and John Heilpern, "La Mama Courage," Vogue (Aug. 1992).

Patrick S. Smith