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Ronald Tavel (born May 17, 1936 or 1941, according to some, New York City), the Obie-winner author of the play “Bigfoot” (1970) has died mysteriously March 23, 2009, on a flight from Berlin to Bangkok (where he lived).

“Bigfoot” is about Bigfoot, and the creature, along with Esau and other intriguing characters, including humand and Bigfoot children, are components of the story. I’ve read that the play calls for a forest of redwoods at stage right, a throne in the center, a monastery schoolroom and an outside garden at stage left, and Jacob’s Ladder to the heavens.

The Village Voice noted that Tavel’s “deeply introspective and tragic…play, Bigfoot, a study of humans’ animal nature that won him the unusual honor of being named the first playwright-in-residence at Yale’s Divinity School. (It’s worth noting, however, that Bigfoot does not lack humor: One of its characters is the head of a monastery, Abbot Costello.)”

Ronald Tavel. Photo by Jack Mitchell.
The playwright, shown here sometime around 1978, was a frequent collaborator with Andy Warhol and an Obie winner.

The Daily News Page Six unfolds the strange story in this fashion:

Did black magic and a curse play a role in the death of Ronald Tavel — the Obie-winning playwright and Andy Warhol collaborator who mysteriously died aboard a Thailand-bound jet last week?

Tavel, 68, who was returning to his Bangkok home from an art conference in Berlin on March 23, “drank and over-drank and became dehydrated during the flight, and then his heart just stopped,” a source told us.

Fellow playwright and friend Larry Myers says Tavel — who penned the Obie-winning “Boy on the Straight-Back Chair” and “Bigfoot,” and scripted Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” — had been on a downward spiral ever since becoming fascinated by the dark arts, which he began weaving into his avant-garde work in the late ’80s.

“He wrote one about Satanism and black magic for Theater for the New City and everything went wrong,” Myers told us. “The actors got sick, pages from the script vanished, scenery crashed, the lights went out. He told me somebody had put a curse on him. It completely creeped him out and it [bleep]ing freaked me out. And right after that, he packed up and moved to Thailand.”

Tavel, whose oddball works were part of a downtown movement called “The Theatre of the Ridiculous,” was a “very religious person, but when he started exploring the dark forces, and got into the occult and spiritualism, he was never the same,” Myers said. “The moral is: Watch what you write about . . . the shadow finally overtook him.”

In another weird twist, Ira Silverberg of the Sterling Lord Literistic agency told us Tavel delivered his new novel, “Chain,” five days before his death. “The story is wrapped around the obsessive relationship an expat has with a local male prostitute in Bangkok,” Silverberg said. “It’s full of the spirit of Tavel.” While the apparent cause of death was a heart attack, authorities are awaiting autopsy results.

The New York Times has a more formal obituary.

The play “Bigfoot” was first published in print in Bigfoot and Other Plays, Winter House, New York, 1973.

Thanks to researcher Richard D. Hendricks for alerting us to this news.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Bigfoot, Breaking News, Cryptofiction, CryptoZoo News, Obituaries, Pop Culture. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.