Lee Breuer: A Walker Remembrance

Many of us at the Walker and across the Twin Cities are mourning the loss of outrageously brilliant director and theater maker Lee Breuer on January 3rd. For over 40 years, his work offered me some of the most indelible and ecstatic experiences I’ve had in the theater.

While working at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in my mid-20s, I was thunderstruck by Lee’s inspired injection of Sophocles’ Oedipus tragedy into a Black gospel church setting in his masterwork The Gospel at Colonus (1983). It radically shifted what I thought was possible with experimental American theater, bridging the spiritual and the cerebral, the rapturous and the formally inventive, reimagining a classical work with courage and inspired verve. I must have seen Gospel 20 times, slipping into an empty seat in the back of house most nights after work. I couldn’t stay away—it didn’t fail to leave me emotionally racked and renewed each time, full of joy and hope. How cool, I wondered, must this place called the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis be to have commissioned and workshopped it before BAM? Lee smartly tapped into rich veins of Minneapolis’ own Black music community while in residence here—inviting collaborators guitarist/singer Sam Butler and the Steele Family (especially J.D. and Jevetta) who helped shape its deeply soulful musical essence and later toured with the work to Broadway, and around the world for decades.

After that, I went to as many Mabou Mines (the collective founded by Lee with David Warrilow, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech and JoAnne Akalaitis) shows that I could, awed by the aesthetic diversity and inventiveness of the ensemble’s work. Upon my arrival at the Walker in 1997, I discovered how deep and rich the histories of both Mabou Mines and Lee were at this institution. From 1971-82, the Walker was their home away from home, hosting six major residencies and presenting 14 separate works including major pieces stewarded by Lee such as B. Beaver Animation, A Prelude to a Death in Venice, and Hajj. Inspired by this history and my own growing appreciation for his work, I reached out to Lee right away hoping to rekindle the Walker/Mabou connection.

By the next year, Walker had co-commissioned and began to help develop Lee’s gothic music-theatrical poem Red Beads with our good partners at Red Eye Theater, which itself was modeled after Mabou Mines. The brilliant collaboration featured the work of puppeteer extraordinaire Basil Twist, Japanese composer Ushio Torikai, and a host of local and national performers.  That was one wild ride! Lee irrepressibly worked me over throughout the process for larger budgets, bigger fans (for Twist’s new form of wind puppetry), more tech, and a larger choir even just hours before we opened doors – always with good humor and affection. I do shudder remembering the seeming chaos that ran late into the night before its premiere. The dress rehearsal that I came to view never appeared to be able to get started amidst the multiple actors, technicians, choir members, and designers all focused on different priorities amidst set and prop elements strewn everywhere. I went home, fearing we had a train wreck on our hands. But by the next evening, Lee had brought beauty and order to the chaos, apparently working miracles again, this time in only eight hours!  When Red Beads landed in New York City years later the Times reported “What is transformational for the audience is the work’s beauty…theater as sorcery.”

Five years later I was blown away by Lee’s audacious re-imagining of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and immediately agreed to present the work in our then brand new McGuire Theater at the Walker.  It was a smash hit, one that not only reminded local audiences of Breuer’s controversial genius but also showed off in spectacular fashion the theater’s potential for beautifully framing large new works. While I worked on it for several years, I still regret not being able to bring Lee’s exquisite Irish music meets bunraku puppetry piece Peter and Wendy to town (the scale was beyond us and we couldn’t convince any organizational partners locally to join in). I later schemed with Lee to help commission and develop a new Oratorio collaboration between Lee, Sam Butler, and The Gospel at Colonus composer Bob Telson, but Bob and Lee’s emerging different visions for the work made clear that it was not meant to be either.

Lee Breuer was scrappy, passionate, globally minded, eclectic—a benevolent hustler for the theater he believed in and for the many collaborators he loved.  A theatrical conceptualist and street theorist, Lee was a deeply free spirit, a caring nurturer of younger artists, and a conjurer of new theatrical worlds constantly pointing to new paths forward for the American stage. He will be missed greatly.