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My Emails About André

JL;DR SUMMARY Rachel Shteir's article reflects on Andr Gregory, an influential figure in American avant-garde theater, renowned for his unique sensibility and long-standing impact on stage and film. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

FilmMemoirAmerican TheaterPerformance ArtCultural NostalgiaAlice In WonderlandAvant Garde TheaterAndr GregoryMy Dinner With AndrDirectors

Places mentioned

New York City, New York, United States
"Beginning with Alice in Wonderland, his sensational 1970 adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books, made with his troop The Manhattan Project, he defined his unique sensibility on the stage through a body of work that bore the indelible mark of his own imagination."
Los Angeles, California, United States
"They were also terrible parents."
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
"Call me Wally. Taming and tameness are of course central themes in My Dinner with Andr, at the heart of Andr and Wallys debate over whether its better to be comfortable (-ly numb) or uncomfortable and searching, but lostwhether to live to make art or make art to live. I imagine most of your students land on Wallys sideIm just trying to survive!against the man-child of privilege who has the luxury to take himself on a whim to Tibetan monasteries to be blissed out by the love-glow of a German-Buddhist Rinpoche, or to Dick Avedons cliffside Montauk"
Chicago, Illinois, United States
"But they were coterminous with the three movies that mark the beginning of the Grand Renaissance that New Louisville aspires to."
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
"My Dinner with Andr came out in October of 1981. I was 10 years old at the time, in college-town Virginia, which means impossibly peripheral to the remote world of New York art-house cinema, let alone experimental theater, or the moneyed Upper East Side Jewish immigrant aristocracy."
Poland
"Gregory, like one of his idols, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, drifted away from mainstream theater and began to experiment with performance art."
France
"Like another one of his idols, the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht, Gregory wanted (and wants) the theater to be more than a show."
Germany
"He wants it to be sacred. It was also his salvation, from his tyrannical Russian Jewish parents, something I learned in his memoir."
Russian Federation
"My mother was a Russian dancer in Paris and suffered the pain of exile."
Austria
"Jean Lenauer, the Vienna-born director and actor, who as the waiter at Andr and Wallys table uses his wizened face and a subtle tilt of his giant smoke-stained, white comb-over to be part Greek chorus, part Bergman-like Death, and part eye-roller extraordinaire"

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Retrieved 2026-06-12 05:31:19 UTC
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