Shortly after I graduated from art school, I began to work as a performer in Anne Bogart’s company. In her early work, Anne created a series of pieces called The Emissions Project where we performed in disused and abandoned spaces, like an empty detective’s office on 42nd Street and an empty school on the Lower East Side. Anne’s highly choreographic visual aesthetic, in which she used the city as her stage, enabled audiences to see their surroundings with fresh eyes. This theatrical form broadened the tools of storytelling to bring the environment directly in conversation with the performers, creating its own visual poetry. This was what I wanted to do artistically. Forever.

En Garde’s first show in New York City was in 1986 on the façade of a then-empty condo on Chambers and Greenwich streets. Called Naked Chambers, and written by the now-late Dick Beebe, the story was about a mountain climber who became an urban art thief, who climbed in and out of the apartment windows of this twelve-story empty condominium with paintings on his back. Each night we placed thirty folding chairs in the streets that looked up at the building so that the audiences could watch the story unfold. In the windows were videos of actors playing out scenes of alleged tenants. One night, the president of Actors’ Equity, Alan Eisenberg, came strolling down the street, looked up at the building, looked at me, and immediately realized there was nothing legal about this endeavor from a union perspective. Seeing that the show was free and there was no money, he laughed, shook his head, and kept walking. I was immensely relieved that I never heard from the union.

My inspiration for wanting to start a site-specific theatre came from my unending passion for public art and its ability to reach new audiences by virtue of its accessibility.

Together with the playwrights and directors at En Garde Arts, I developed a storytelling aesthetic that was not just about the spoken word but that used “place” as a key element in the narrative. Cobblestone streets and empty meat lockers in New York’s meatpacking district, which harkened back to the nineteenth century, became the perfect backdrop for Reza Abdoh’s Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990). The statue of JP Morgan, at the intersection of Wall and Broad streets, was a perfect symbol for Jonathan Larson’s musical JP Morgan Saves the Nation (1995). Director Tina Landau loved the twisted metal pier that jutted out over the Hudson River beside the Penn Yards, which she envisioned as a symbol for the House of Atreus for Chuck Mee’s adaptation of Orestes (1993)—and every night Jefferson Mays, the then-unknown actor playing Orestes, took his life into his hands as he climbed up to the top of this precarious yet magnificent structure.

The artists working with En Garde Arts all created highly public and highly accessible works that enabled audiences who had never been to the theatre before to come. At the Towers Nursing Home for Another Person is a Foreign Country written by Chuck Mee and directed by Anne Bogart, kids from the nearby projects arrived popcorn in hand, thinking they were coming to see a film, and were joined by local residents from surrounding apartment buildings. When we were on Wall Street, office workers stopped to catch the show on their way home from work. These new audiences were awakened to the magic of theatre, some of them for the very first time. And those who were used to seeing theatre in traditional settings saw their city with new eyes.