Ronald Tavel. Photo by Jack Mitchell.
The playwright, shown here sometime around 1978, was a frequent collaborator with Andy Warhol and an Obie winner.
April 2, 2009
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.
Yes, the blog is back, and it’s important that you keep this research going and help save the museum today…please and thank you!
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Filed under Bigfoot, Breaking News, Cryptofiction, CryptoZoo News, Obituaries, Pop Culture