Unlucky you if you've never seen a Richard Foreman play. I've Got the Shakes: Performing Richard Foreman will give you more than a glimmer of his mind, humor and genius. His words and the extensive interviews with his collaborators tell some colorful stories and give insightful details of his rehearsals and performances. They also chronicle a New York downtown theatre scene that certainly no longer exists now as it once did.

Willem Dafoe, Oscar-nominated actor and perfomer

Theater is “writing on water,” the very nature of the art form is that it's there and then it's gone. This is especially sad for people who never got to experience a Foreman show. But Shauna Kelly's I've Got the Shakes: Performing Richard Foreman achieves the next best thing. Kelly plunges us into Foreman's mind, vision, humor, revolutionary artistic process, and his profound effect on the people he worked with. This book is a celebration of rule breaking, essential reading for all theater kids.

Sara Farrington, playwright

This book by Shauna Kelly is a revelation, a gift to theater history, and an essential key to the work of theater director Richard Foreman. Kelly brings alive Foreman's often confoundingly beautiful performances and unearths his unique process. Her incisive conversations with his cast members (including Willem Dafoe and T. Ryder Smith), designers, technicians, “dwarves,” and the master himself, are a delight. Richard Foreman has had an immense impact on the theater makers of today - Kelly's work ensures he will influence the directors of tomorrow. You will feel as if you are in the rehearsal room with him, his ideas, and the people making them happen.

Mark Russell

I've Got the Shakes: Performing Richard Foreman is fun to read but also a profoundly significant study of Foreman's theater. I'd compare it to Stanislavsky Directs (Gorchakov). It is the fullest document of how the theater works were made. The four interviews with Richard are excellent. There is nothing like it. And it also serves as festschrift for him. It's done in the manner of oral histories that I love - Studs Terkel's work, and Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens (Brazaeu).

Charles Bernstein

I learned about editing films by working with Richard, observing the musicality of the plays, the rhythm of the moves, the sounds, the breaks, sudden, aggressive, abrasives, with melodic touch, repetitions of words, sentences, screams and whispers, all mixed and edited together as one. It really gave me keys to collage in film editing and rhythm, its intensity and my own inner life. I find magic and pure ecstasy in Richard's work and world. It brings you to trance and addiction and each year I was waiting like a kid without its sugar or a junkie without its drug, for the next Richard Foreman play. Addiction to Richard's intensity on stage is a substance we all want and seek. He is the mentor of all filmmakers and for me my first NYC home with Anthology Film Archives. His malicious eyes have genius to choose actors and the best ones: amazing faces, and bodies, unusual treasures. As I look at the photos [in the book], I remember the actors' voices and actions and how new it was to me at the time, with a feeling I had entered a new world and could never go back in time. Like the freaks in FREAKS, I wanted to be one of them. One sentence will always accompany me and says so much about the soul of Richard: “If you like it, don't do it.

Marie Losier

Richard Foreman changed my theatrical life forever when I attended Rhoda in Potatoland almost fifty years ago. He revealed to me what a real theatrical auteur is. After seeing "Rhoda.." I would never make theater the same way again. This book surrounds and captures the ineffable aspects of Foreman's work by describing it from a million angles. His live plays are no longer available to be seen, but if you read this book carefully while watching some of the archival video available, you just might get a glimmer of Foreman's genius. This is an important book about one the greatest theater makers ever.

Eric Bogosian