Larry Kornfeld
May 21, 1930-August 14, 2023
We are sorry to learn of the passing of Larry Kornfeld, a beloved member of Arlington Community Church. Larry and his wife Margaret, who passed away earlier this year, brought so much intelligence and spirit and caring into our congregation. They are deeply missed.
Larry’s memorial service will be held at Judson Memorial Church in New York.
Larry’s obituary was written by a close family friend, Steve Scott-Bottoms, while Larry was alive and able to comment. As you might expect, Larry’s story is long and full of interesting detail.
All, here is the stunning obituary that our dear friend (dad’s biographer) Steve Scott-Bottoms wrote with dad’s full knowledge/approval. I’m so grateful to him, and so happy dad was able to embody his history at the end.
Yesterday, August 14, 2023, the pioneering American theater director and educator, Lawrence Kornfeld, passed away peacefully in Northern California. He was 93 years old, and was predeceased earlier this year by his beloved wife of 57 years, Dr. Margaret Zipse Kornfeld. One of the single most influential figures in the development of New York’s downtown, off-off-Broadway theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Kornfeld belongs–in the words of producer Albert Poland–“on the Mount Rushmore of the American avant-garde.” He had the rare ability to combine radical artistic experimentation with an enormous sense of joy and fun. Among his many accomplishments, Kornfeld was our foremost theatrical interpreter of the reputedly unstageable plays of Gertrude Stein.
Born in Brooklyn, on 21 May 1930, Kornfeld was educated in his home borough, at Erasmus High School, Adelphi College and Brooklyn College. Yet in the early 1950s, military service took him far from home. Stationed in postwar Europe, he was among the MPs assigned to clean up the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau–where he was obliged to sleep on-site in the German officers’ barracks. This was a profoundly traumatizing experience for a young Jewish man, and proved formative for his subsequent life. On his return to the United States, Kornfeld sought emergency psychotherapy with the Gestalt pioneer Laura Perls. She encouraged him to find expression and healing through the arts, and introduced him to Judith Malina and Julian Beck—the co-founders of the avant-garde Living Theatre.
Apprenticing himself to this self-proclaimed poets’ theatre, Kornfeld swiftly became immersed in the bohemian art world of Greenwich Village, rubbing shoulders with a veritable who’s who of radical painters, musicians and writers. He learned much from Beck and Malina, and from close associates such as the poet-philosopher Paul Goodman, but he also gave much back. It was Kornfeld who, as the Living’s literary manager, recommended Jack Gelber’s play The Connection for production. This metatheatrical drama about heroin addicts, which featured live jazz improvisation, proved to be the controversial, breakout success of 1959.
In 1961, Kornfeld struck out on his own, becoming the resident director at Judson Poets’ Theatre–a new, off-off-Broadway initiative at Judson Memorial Church, in Washington Square. He scored an immediate critical hit with the theatre’s opening production–the world premiere of Joel Oppenheimer’s The Great American Desert (1961)--which Kornfeld staged in the intimate confines of the church’s choir loft. Shortly afterward, the church dispensed with its fixed pews, enabling the theatre to mount productions in the main sanctuary, and Kornfeld made full use of the expansive space now available to him as a director. His production of Gertrude Stein’s What Happened (first staged in 1963, and repeatedly revived) famously included a sequence in which a grand piano was pushed across the full width of the sanctuary by singing performers, while still being played by Al Carmines—the church’s associate pastor.
“Larry was like a sculptor who would see things and mould the piece around things that you’d never seen before,” remembered playwright Maria Irene Fornes. Kornfeld’s precisely choreographed approach to staging was inspired in part by his love of modern dance, particularly the work of choreographers such as George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. Tellingly, the cast of What Happened featured associates of Cunningham’s including Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Valda Setterfield, all then members of the paradigm-shifting Judson Dance Theatre.
Kornfeld was a boldly visual director, and his productions frequently included eclectic musical scores by his key collaborator, Al Carmines. Yet Kornfeld never developed a signature theatrical “style” of his own, in the manner of peers such as Tom O’Horgan and Robert Wilson. Rather, he sought to extrapolate staging solutions for each new production from within their source texts. At Judson, he directed the first-ever productions by notable playwrights including Rosalyn Drexler (Home Movies, 1964), Rochelle Owens (The String Game, 1965) and Maria Irene Fornes (Promenade, 1965 – for which the Promenade Theater is named), using his strong sense of dramaturgy to help structure and develop new scripts. He and Carmines also continued to explore the work of Gertrude Stein, and achieved an unlikely commercial success in 1967 with In Circles–their musical version of her A Play in Circles a Circular Play. That show’s deceptively breezy style only sharpened the poignancy of darker lines such as “I can never forget the slaughter.” In 1974, the emotional complexity that Kornfeld excavated from Stein’s Listen to Me prompted Village Voice critic Michael Feingold to describe the director as being “so attuned to the text that at times he appears to be breathing with Stein.” This production, Feingold asserted, was “the best thing I have ever seen anywhere.”
Among Kornfeld’s many career awards were three Obies for Distinguished Direction—for What Happened, Listen to Me, and Leon Katz’s Dracula: Sabbat (1971). The last, a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the form of a black mass, made chillingly atmospheric use of Judson’s church organ, and featured a semi-naked ensemble cast wreathed in darkness. This unnerving production was remounted, later the same year, as the inaugural offering by Theater for the New City—a venture that Kornfeld had co-founded with three other Judson alumni (Theo Barnes, George Bartenieff, and Crystal Field). Artistic differences prompted his departure the following year, but in subsequent years he continued to collaborate widely with avant-garde peers. In 1987, for example, Kornfeld stepped in to direct Charles Ludlam’s Medea, for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, following the actor-playwright’s untimely, AIDS-related death. Kornfeld’s last production at Judson Poets’ Theatre, in 1979, was a collaboration with legendary downtown actor Jeff Weiss, who took the title role in yet another Stein play, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Among the other cast members was the director’s eleven-year-old daughter, Sarah.
Over a decades-long career, Kornfeld worked both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theatres across the United States. Yet in 1980, he also began a second career as an educator, when he accepted a visiting position as director and lecturer at SUNY’s Purchase College, a noted conservatoire. He then served briefly as professor of directing at the Yale School of Drama (1982-83), before returning to Purchase in 1983 as the Dean of Theatre Arts and Film. The many young actors that Kornfeld mentored at Purchase, over the years, included Edie Falco, Hal Hartley, Kirk Acevedo and Stanley Tucci. He continued teaching and directing at Purchase until his retirement in 2005.
The following year, he and Margaret moved to the San Francisco bay area. Despite being a life-long New Yorker, Kornfeld had experienced a serious reoccurrence of his post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of 9/11, and was persuaded that a move away from the city might benefit his health. He spent his remaining years among California redwoods, surrounded by his family. Kornfeld is survived by his daughter Sarah, grandson Luca, and his eleven godchildren.
Author:
Stephen Scott-Bottoms
Professor of Theatre and Performance
University of Manchester, UK