Mabou Mines Theatre History: From a Nova Scotia Summer to DollHouse

Mabou Mines has made experimental theatre in New York since 1970, but its story begins on the other side of the country. Before the company existed, its founders were young theatre workers in early 1960s San Francisco. This guide follows Mabou Mines theatre history from those years to DollHouse, and shows where the sources disagree.

UCLA, San Francisco and Paris

Lee Breuer, born in Philadelphia in 1937, entered UCLA at 16. The NYU Fales Library’s guide to the company archive says he and Ruth Maleczech “met studying theater at UCLA in the late 1950s.”

“Around 1960, the couple hitchhiked to San Francisco to participate in the city’s theater scene,” the NYU history continues. They worked at the Actor’s Workshop and with the San Francisco Mime Troupe of the early 1960s, where they met the actor Bill Raymond, and at the San Francisco Tape Music Center they met JoAnne Akalaitis.

In 1964 Akalaitis moved to New York and then to Paris with the composer Philip Glass, and Breuer and Maleczech left for Europe the next year. In Paris they at first stayed with Glass and Akalaitis, “sleeping on the floor,” and with the actor David Warrilow they staged Samuel Beckett’s Play, which premiered at the American Cultural Center in 1967.

1970: Red Horse and a name that “sounded like a band”

In 1969, back in New York with Glass, Akalaitis wrote to the others in Paris suggesting they form a theatre group. In the summer of 1970 the five founders went to Glass and Akalaitis’s house near Mabou Mines, Nova Scotia, to make their first piece, the Red Horse Animation.

The troupe took its name from a site there that Glass was thinking of buying. As Maleczech’s 2013 obituary in The Villager put it, the name appealed to the founders because “it sounded like a band.” Red Horse “played first at the Guggenheim Museum, then at La MaMa, then in venues around the country,” according to American Theatre.

Beckett, the Animations and the collective

The early pieces came out of “intense collaboration and improvisation,” in NYU’s words, mixing visual art, dance, mime, puppetry and music, and the company moved between galleries and stages. In The Lost Ones (1975), Warrilow “narrated and manipulated inch-high inhabitants in a hopeless, confined world,” and won the troupe its first Obie.

Breuer’s Animations ran from Red Horse (1970) through The B. Beaver Animation (1975) to Shaggy Dog Animation (1978). In 1975 Akalaitis directed Cascando, which “opened the door for other members to take on new roles.”

By 1984 the group had, in American Theatre’s phrase, “no leader or artistic director and no group aesthetic,” and its studio was at P.S. 122, a former school in the East Village.

Dead End Kids and the radio years

At Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in the fall of 1980 Akalaitis made Dead End Kids. Billed as “a history of nuclear power,” its first half traced “the development of science,” from alchemy to the discovery of radiation. The Christian Science Monitor called it “Part meditation and part nightclub routine.”

“I consider alchemy to be the beginning of the history of physics,” Akalaitis told the Monitor in 1981. On using technology to warn about technology, she meant “basic stuff: speakers, not thermodynamic lasers.” In 1984 a ten-day run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles raised money to finish her film version, which the Monitor reviewed in 1986.

The same years produced a little-known line of work for the ear. NYU’s chronology lists radio pieces from Easy Daisy (1980) and The Keeper Radio Series (1982) to The Kafka Parables (1986). Bill Raymond directed what American Theatre called “a little-known but ongoing series of radio playlets.”

From Gospel at Colonus to DollHouse: Mabou Mines theatre history since 1983

In The Gospel at Colonus, Breuer “transposed Sophocles’ tragedy into an evangelical celebration,” with blind Oedipus played by all five of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. It opened in 1983 at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn, went to Broadway and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1985.

In Peter and Wendy (1996), Peter and Captain Hook were bunraku puppets with three veiled handlers each, while Karen Kandel “played Wendy and spoke everyone’s lines.” Mabou Mines DollHouse (2003) cast average-sized women opposite little people as the men, on a set scaled to the men. American Theatre’s 2021 obituary gives DollHouse a 1983 opening, but NYU’s chronology and MacDowell both give 2003.

Warrilow died in 1995, Maleczech in 2013 at 74, and Breuer on January 3, 2021, at 83. MacDowell’s page on Lee Breuer’s career quotes a description of him as “a tenacious outsider who refused his sole Tony Award nomination.” The company’s own history of Mabou Mines, with the founders’ dates, counts “more than 120 works” and names four co-artistic directors today.

Year	Event
Late 1950s	Breuer and Maleczech meet at UCLA
About 1960-1965	San Francisco: Actor’s Workshop, Mime Troupe, Tape Music Center
1970	Red Horse Animation in Nova Scotia; the company is named
1975	The Lost Ones wins the first Obie; Akalaitis directs Cascando
1980	Dead End Kids at the Public Theater
1983	The Gospel at Colonus at BAM
1996	Peter and Wendy
2003	Mabou Mines DollHouse

On the same stages: Antenna and Mabou Mines, 1983-1985

No source records any contact between Mabou Mines and Antenna Theater,. In October 1983, reviewing George Coates’s performance works at BAM, Mel Gussow of The New York Times put them in one sentence: “Anyone who has followed the art of Robert Wilson, the Mabou Mines, Ping Chong or Chris Hardman, Mr. Coates’s fellow San Franciscan, should not be surprised by the conceptualist’s inventions.”

Stage	Mabou Mines	Antenna Theater
Spoleto Festival USA, 1983	Dead End Kids	Artery
The Performing Garage, New York	Pretty Boy (1984) and earlier shows	Vacuum (1982) and Artery
Mark Taper Forum, 1984	Dead End Kids	Adjusting the Idle, a Carplays commission with MOCA
BAM Next Wave	The Gospel at Colonus (1983)	Russia (1985)

At Spoleto in 1983, Dead End Kids and Antenna’s Artery sat in the same theatre programme. Both companies played the Performing Garage on Wooster Street, and in 1984, the year Dead End Kids came to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, MOCA and the Taper commissioned Antenna’s Adjusting the Idle for Carplays.

The themes overlapped as well. Dead End Kids was a history of the bomb, and Antenna took up the nuclear age in Russia (1985) and Enola/Alone (1994). Both made work for the ear: Mabou Mines its radio playlets, Antenna its taped voices from real interviews. The difference was structure: Mabou Mines was a collective of actors with no leader, while Antenna was Chris Hardman’s company, and much of its later work had no actors at all.

Two other experiments of the same years are told in our guides to Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater and Tamara, the room-to-room play.

Frequently asked questions

The productions Antenna took to these stages are listed in Antenna Theater’s full production chronology.