Dozens of websites are popping up, seemingly daily, on topics ranging from 1 800 Batteries to Hydraulic Design. But, now there a new website for those with a downtown theatre sensibility -- The Richard Foreman website, devoted to the works and thoughts of the avant garde playwright and director.

Located at http://www.foreman.ontological.com the website contains everything from a biography, a resume, interviews, and intriguingly enough -- his notebooks.

"The Maestro" has posted (and continues to post) hundreds of pages of unedited text from his notebooks for the past 15 years. Foreman's OBIE-award winning plays are generated by his daily entries into these notebooks, which he later arranges selections of into theatrical scenarios.

The material is offered for free, with Foreman's aspiration that innovative young directors and authors use the texts to create their own pieces of theatre. All that he asks is that "if you make use of this material in performance:
a) you simply notify me, so I can know if this material is stimulating anyone.
b) any material used for production or publication displays in program or title page -- relatively prominantly -- the statement that the text involved is re-arranged material taken from the notebooks of Richard Foreman."

Writer/director/designer Richard Foreman is considered one of the premier forces in avant-garde theatre. His plays include Permanent Brain Damage (Risk It! Risk It!), The Universe,I've Got the ShakesMy Head Was A Sledgehammer. Foreman has won eight OBIE awards, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the 1998 Edwin Booth Award, and the NEA's Lifetime Achievement Award. The Off-Off Broadway theatre, Nada, is currently running their second annual festival of plays written by Foreman dubbed No Strings Attached, part two, Mind Attack. Foreman is currently at work writing his next show Paradise Hotel. -- By Sean McGrath