Watering the Off-Broadway Garden
The founder of the 'Village Voice' Obies recalls what led to their inception 50 years ago
by Jerry Tallmer
May 6th, 2005

I think it was those red serpents that set the whole thing off.

In the summer of 1955, some months before a fellow named Ed Fancher called to talk with me about joining Dan Wolf and himself in starting a new newspaper in Greenwich Village—that is to say, to lure me into it—I'd read, in Commonweal magazine, a short but glowing review by that journal's Richard Hayes of a play I'd never heard of by a playwright I'd never heard of in a place I'd never heard of. The play was called The Maids, the playwright was a French criminal named Jean Genet, and the place turned out to be a tiny hole-in-the-wall called the Tempo Playhouse, up a rickety set of iron stairs at 4 St. Marks Place in what was not yet called the East Village, though it soon would be.

 

As you sat down on a wooden folding chair you saw before you a sort of high-backed chaise longue or love seat, and not much else. Presently, on that hot night in the summer of '55, one red, writhing serpent rose up, twisted up, from somewhere within the bowels of the love seat, and on the instant was joined by another, the two of them linking, unlinking, sinuous, poisonous, evil as hell. Attached to these two huge hideous worms was, as we discovered in the next moment, a human being. They were long kitchen scullery gloves—red-rubber scouring gloves—worn like condoms on her two arms.

Her name was Julie Bovasso. Her name in the play was Solange, the more dominant of two sisters who drudged in the kitchen stink for the Madame they loved and hated and pretended to be. Julie Bovasso, age 21 or 22, had walked over the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan to build herself that playhouse on St. Marks Place where she introduced Jean Genet to the United States of America with those two rubber gloves. And after Genet, Ionesco, and after Ionesco, Ghelderode. Attention must be paid to such a sensibility, such a passion. On a Monday in June of 1956 the first Village Voice Off-Broadway ("Obie") awards came into being, and the very first such award for Best Actress went to Julie Bovasso for The Maids.

Obie originals: Julie Bovasso, Shelley Winters, and Jason Robards Jr.
photo: Fred W. McDarrah

 

Some Highlights include

Obie Awards, as best actress, 1955, for "The Maids," for bestexperimental theater,

1956, triple award for writing, directing, and acting,

1968, for "Gloria and Esperanza"

Rockefeller Foundation grant,
1969

New York Council on the Arts grant, 1970

Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1971

Public Broadcasting Corp. award, 1972

Vernon Rice award for acting, 1972

Outer Circle award for acting, 1972.

 

The Plays Of Julie Bovasso

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