The Notebooks of Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman (above) is an experimental playwright and director in New York.

Since 2000 he has made the entire contents of his notebooks available online and free of charge to anyone in the world.

You can view them, download them, put them onstage, rearrange, edit, or add to his words: he does not care.

In this respect Foreman and I are identical: do what you want with what you find on bookofjoe.

He told Jason Zinoman of the New York Times, for a story published in this past Sunday's paper, "I can imagine that people are doing things that I would despise. But that's my business. Why should I subject myself to it?"

I like it.

Foreman said, "I like to think of the notebooks as a pool of raw material. I make plays out of it, so why can't other people? I just identify with this idea that I'm a funnel for this material that doesn't particularly belong to me."

Here's the website containing Foreman's notebooks.

Go to the right hand column and click on the words "notebook texts."