25 Plays

Robert Heide is a seminal playwright in the Off-Off-Broadway coffee-house theatre movement. His plays have been produced in New York’s Greenwich Village at the famed Caffe Cino and in the East Village by Ellen Stewart at La Mama, by Crystal Field and George Bartenieff at Theater for the New City, by Irene Forn s and Julie Bovasso’s New York Theater Strategy at Westbeth, at Lynne Meadow’s Manhattan Theatre Club, and in many other venues. His early studies began in the theatre department at Northwestern University. In New York, he studied for two years with Stella Adler, who then sent him to apprentice with John Houseman at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, CT; he studied as well with Uta Hagen and with director Harold Clurman. His mentor and close friend, Edward Albee, invited him to become a member of the Albee/Barr/Wilder Playwrights Unit. In the 1960s, he acted in Andy Warhol’s films Camp and Dracula/ Batman, both with Jack Smith. Warhol filmed Heide’s Caff Cino play, The Bed, as a split-screen movie which premiered at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. As a member of the Playwrights/Directors Unit at the Actors Studio, he attended sessions conducted by Estelle Parsons, Ellyn Burstyn, and Horton Foote.