O'HORGAN, Thomas ("Tom")

(b. 3 May 1926 in Chicago, Illinois), composer and director who directed avant-garde, antiestablishment plays in the 1960s, most notably the musical Hair.

O'Horgan was encouraged in his theatrical pursuits by his father, Foster, a talented singer who loved the theater but who went into the printing business instead of pursuing his dream. An only child, O'Horgan was, as he once said in an interview, "spoiled rotten" by his parents. In grade school O'Horgan told his teacher he wanted to be a stage manager and played with a puppet theater his father had made for him. In the fourth grade his teacher, Robert Sheehan, introduced O'Horgan to a version of the opera Hansel and Gretel, and O'Horgan began singing the part of Hansel.

From that time on, theater and music were synonymous to him. After graduating from high school O'Horgan attended DePaul University in Chicago, where he studied music composition, dabbled in writing operas, and formed his own opera group. He eventually earned his B.A. and M.A. and began working on a doctorate. He eventually moved to New York City and sang in a male quintet. Returning to Chicago, O'Horgan worked with the Second City theater group, which was called the Playwright's Theatre Club until 1954 and The Compass Players from 1955 to 1959. The group included Barbara Harris, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May. While there, O'Horgan wrote nearly two dozen musical scores for various productions. He then developed a bizarre nightclub act in which he played the harp and sang.

After traveling around the country performing in nightclubs, O'Horgan returned to New York and began directing plays off-off Broadway, most notably at a downtown experimental theater club called Cafe LaMama. His directorial debut at Cafe LaMama was Jean Genet's play The Maids, in which O'Horgan followed Genet's staging instructions and cast two men in the roles of the two sinister maids. O'Horgan directed plays at Cafe LaMama over a period of eight years, from 1961 to 1968. He also acted and composed music there. At one point O'Horgan decided he did not want a normal home and possessions. He moved out of his loft apartment and stayed with Ellen Stewart, who owned Cafe LaMama. "This was all really part of a movement," O'Horgan said in a New York Times Magazine article in 1972. "The whole materialistic thing seemed ridiculous to a lot of us."

O'Horgan directed his first off-Broadway production, called 6 from LaMama, at the Martinique Theater on 11 April 1966. In a review in the New York Times, critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "The major contribution here is by the director, … O'Horgan.… [He] shows a fundamental … gift: the ability to see in a script the physical unfolding that will articulate its essences and rhythms."

O'Horgan worked tirelessly on what appeared to be an endless series of plays, including Rochelle Owens's black pastorale Futz, for which he won an Obie in 1967. He also directed the film version in 1969. In his New York Times review of the play critic Clive Barnes noted, "Mr. O'Horgan has evident talent, and wherever it's leading him, it's leading him fast."

It soon became apparent where O'Horgan's talent was leading him. As part of the experimental underground New York theater world, O'Horgan knew two members of the Open Theater group who had cowritten an off-Broadway musical slated to go to Broadway. Gerome Ragni and James Rado, along with their collaborator, Galt MacDermot, asked O'Horgan to direct it. The musical Hair, a trenchantly topical production about race, politics, and war, opened on Broadway in May 1968. Referred to as the hippie antiestablishment musical, the play focused on antiwar and other philosophies espoused by the 1960s longhaired, counterculture youth. Hair also included explicitly physical and profane segments, including a scene in which the actors disrobe, marking the first time full frontal nudity by a group of actors occurred on a Broadway stage.

Outrageous and daring for its day, Hair was a hit. Michael Smith, writing in the 2 May 1968 issue of the Village Voice, summed it up succinctly when he wrote, "Instead of reviewing Hair I should simply report that something downtown, dirty, ballsy, and outrageous has hit Broadway at last, … and hopefully Broadway will never be the same."

Hair's notoriety grew so quickly that productions opened in Europe in both Munich and London in the fall of 1968. Productions in Hamburg, Germany; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and Sydney, Australia, quickly followed. With his 1968 off-Broadway directorial hits of Futz and Tom Paine, which was originally conceived for the LaMama troupe and taken to Europe first, O'Horgan's reputation was growing rapidly. He was hailed as Director of the Year in a 1968 Newsweek article. O'Horgan's success continued into the 1970s with his direction of the plays Lenny and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, both appearing on Broadway in 1971. He also directed the restaging of Hair in 1977.

Although O'Horgan's work reflected the 1960s in terms of its rebellious and antiestablishment nature, his directorial efforts were sometimes lambasted for presenting work in a way that was more campy than relevant. Nevertheless, O'Horgan was one of the primary avant-garde directors who took New York theater, which many critics believed was in its death throes, and injected it with imagination and vision. Although his vision could be bizarre and heavy-handed in terms of visual and physical tricks, O'Horgan had a knack for getting the most from his actors. One technique he devised for his prerehearsals involved using sensory techniques to help actors integrate their mind and body and then channel the resultant "energy" into an unfettered performance. One critic noted, "O'Horgan does not so much direct actors as 'tune' them."

O'Horgan, the only director ever to have had four productions running simultaneously on Broadway (Hair, Lenny, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Inner City), has continued to direct plays by authors such as Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson. He has also been involved in staging operas and numerous other projects. Additionally, he has written more than forty musical scores for operas, plays, drama, films, and television.

Howard Junker, "Director of the Year," Newsweek (3 June 1968) provides a look at O'Horgan and his work just as he was rising to prominence. Also see two other profiles of O'Horgan: "The Cerebral Trip Is Over," Time (25 Oct. 1971), and Maggie Paley, "Superstar Becomes a Circus," Life (Oct. 1971). An especially interesting article about O'Horgan that describes making the rounds with the director as he visits productions of several of his plays is John Gruen's "Do You Mind Critics Calling You Cheap, Decadent, Sensationalistic, Gimmicky, Vulgar, Overinflated, Megalomaniacal?" New York Times Magazine (2 Jan. 1972).

David Petechuk