Ellen Stewart

Ellen Stewart (born November 7, 1919, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died January 13, 2011, New York City, New York) was an American theatre director who founded (1961) and for nearly 50 years remained the visionary artistic director of the seminal La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, an Off-Off-Broadway mainstay known for presenting avant-garde international theatre in New York City’s Lower East Side.

In the 1950s Stewart moved to New York City to become a fashion designer. In 1961 she founded Café La MaMa (later called La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club), which was originally housed in a rented basement in a tenement. The theatre specialized in total integration of music, dance, and drama. It produced work by aspiring playwrights and debuted hundreds of groundbreaking shows by such authors as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson (Balm in Gilead among others), Stephen Schwartz (Godspell), and Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy), as well as experimental works from around the world. In 1969 La MaMa moved to a former meatpacking plant, where two theatre spaces were created. Stewart also established La MaMa satellites in many other countries. The Annex, a larger theatre that Stewart opened in 1974 close to the La MaMa space, was renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2009.

Stewart, who became known as the mother of Off-Off-Broadway theatre, was the recipient of numerous honours. She was inducted into the Broadway Theatre Hall of Fame in 1993, and in 2006 she was awarded a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre. In 2007 she received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale.