In the summer of 1988, as a young directing student at Columbia University, New York, I was sent on a placement at a downtown experimental theatre company I’d never heard of. Swiftly assigned to floor sweeping and other ASM duties, it was impressed on me by everyone I met that I was fortunate to be working for one of the most significant arts groups in the city, and that the best thing that I could do would be to keep my head down, learn what I could, and never get involved in the personal politics.  I did what I was told and over the next few days graduated to manipulation of a flying polar bear rug and coffee ordering.  A few more days into rehearsal a hushed, eager rumour went around the crew:  ‘Ruth is arriving today’. 

And there she was.  A short, flame-haired woman with a piercing gaze and a cigarette in her mouth, fresh from a film shoot.  I found myself in her way as she strode towards the cramped backstage area.  ‘Who are you?’  She looked me up and down and then stared into my eyes.  I stuttered nonsense.  Something in my life had just changed utterly.

Over the coming weeks, as I continued my polar bear duties, Ruth started to grill me.  For some reason she had decided, almost immediately, that I was worth investigating.  By the end of the rehearsal period I was assigned to another project at Mabou Mines, a company of which I’d now come to realise the significance, managing an exhibition about the group’s past work (I was being given a history lesson).  One way and another, the company, and its fearsome co-founder, were to sit at the centre of my life for much of the next decade.

There are many stories like mine: artists who were selected, encouraged, inspired by Ruth.  To all of us, as well as to her peers among a legendary generation of New York theatre makers, and to the thousands of audience members who watched her walk the tightrope of her extraordinary performances, the news yesterday that she has died at the age of 74, is, simply, devastating.

Ruth was one of the most significant American theatre makers of the last 50 years. With Lee Breuer, Joanne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and, for a while, Philip Glass, she spent her twenties scouring Europe for the keys to theatre’s future.  Escaping the political confusions of 60s America, they sat at the back of Berliner Ensemble rehearsals, took workshops with Grotowski, staged Beckett in Paris and eventually decided they were ready to form a company (named, for typically obscure reasons, after a small Canadian town), returning to New York to reinvent American theatre.  The Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk and many others bear the influence of Mabou Mines’ radical questioning of what theatre could be.  Without them what we think of as the Amercian avant-garde would be a very different, far less original place.

Mabou Mines was a collective, and each of its founders (soon joined as ‘co-artistic directors’ by Fred Neuman, Bill Raymond and Terry O’Reilly) could propose any project. Eventually (often after much argument about which, when and how) each project would get done.  Over the years the company almost bankrupted itself several times, and built up an impressive body of emotional scars in the attempt to combine everything from super-scale Japanese Bunraku to cutting-edge live video to football players and Chinese opera singers in the pursuit of a new ‘American Hybrid’ theatre.  Even the failures were glorious, and more often than not there were genre-shifting successes. 

Ruth created work as a director, and was also one of the best thinkers theatre has seen – I guess what the Germans would call a dramaturg – interrogating everything, bringing mental mountains of reference, spotting brilliantly impossible combinations.  But most of all she was an actor. An artist-actor, making unique works from her responses to the texts, movements, and designs to which she, as a performer, was exposed.  Unlike many actors the technology of theatre was of deep importance to Ruth – the placing of a light, the treatment of a microphone might be as significant to her as the words (and she loved words) of any text in creating a performance.  She responded to space as a visual artist would, and she had a musician’s sense of rhythm, but she was an actor, always an actor, bringing her own evolving body, her own complex history to every movement, every breath.  Out of all the elements on the stage, she would meticulously construct her performance, precise in every detail.  Then every night she would throw herself into her construct like a fury.  She regularly threw up before going on stage: the stakes were that high.

Ruth was widely credited with being the force that kept Mabou Mines going.  While other core members created extraordinary work both with and outside the company, and as some left over the years, it was Ruth who was in the Mabou Mines office every day, typing away at her old typewriter, barking instructions at the latest administrator, sending out begging letters, holding it all together by sheer force of will – and love.  For several years I was with her in the office many of those days, slowly promoted by her through the non-existent ranks to the heady heights of Associate Director.  ‘Why?’ I eventually asked her.  ‘Why spend all that time on all of this other stuff?’ ‘Because an actor needs a company more than anyone,’ she replied.  ‘A writer, a visual artist, a director, they have a body of work. An actor needs a company, to grow with, to learn with, to build from one thing to the next. Mabou Mines is my body of work.’

And why would I turn up at that office to be with her? Why did dozens, hundreds of others do likewise over the years, displaying a fierce loyalty that her sometimes-frustrating decisions would only stoke higher?  Because if Ruth was one thing as much as she was a great actor, she was a mentor.  Finding herself in a 70s New York where the often parent-less went to re-invent themselves as drag queens, art heroes, rock and roll poets and addicts; Ruth brought up her own two children (the truly extraordinary Clove Galilee and Lute Breuer) in the belief that the whole of the downtown art world was one huge, gloriously dysfunctional family, where everyone must help everyone, and a flicker of talent or originality should be gathered around, and fanned into flame.  She trusted her instincts completely, and if she sensed something in you, her generosity in gifts of time, inspiration, challenge, support was boundless.  If you had that trust from her, you weren’t going to give it up easily, no matter how many hours in the Mabou Mines office writing begging letters and choking on second hand smoke might be involved.

Eventually I got to work with Ruth on two projects that remain among the most important in my life – and certainly among the most influential for me in terms of how I would work in the future.  She wanted to set up a residency programme for emerging artists, a way of formalising the support that she and others in the company could give to the next generation.  It became Mabou Mines Suite (named by Fred Neuman), aka Mabou Mines Resident Artist Programme.  I helped her bounce back and forth the shape of it, find the funds, identify the artists.  I learned that this was something I wanted to do too. And I have, everywhere I’ve gone since – always with her in mind.

Then in 1992 she asked me to work with her as a director, to make something that she could act in – to contribute to that ‘body of work’.  Gathering an extraordinary team – many of whom had were literally or figuratively the children of Mabou Mines – including David Neuman as choreographer, Patricia Spears Jones as writer, Paul Clay as designer, and Carter Burwell as composer – we decided together that we wanted to dig into, take apart, reconstruct Gorky’s hulking novel The Mother (which Brecht had in turn turned into a sharp political play). We worked on it for two years and created something complex, strange and special.  Through it all Ruth was teaching me, never by taking on the director’s role, but by showing, from an actor’s view at the eye of the stage storm, how theatre, her kind of theatre, gets made.

The Mother – it wasn’t an accidental choice – but nor was it a sentimental one.  Our production took apart our mother, left her staring into a cheap, child’s video camera, desperately searching for the political in the personal.  Always searching.

And Ruth expected all of us to keep searching, to keep working, whatever happened.  I remember once collapsing onto her shoulder in some downtown bar, broken-hearted, after a man she’d introduced me to, another member of her extended family, had left me for someone new.  She hugged me, then fixed me with a stare: “It’ll be good for your art,” she rasped.

And of course she was tougher on herself than on anyone.  She took the world, and particularly the city of New York, to her heart.  After 9/11 her hair, which had been dyed redder each passing year, suddenly grew out grey - her tribute to the dead and to the wounded city.  She moved mountains to create a new theatre piece, ‘Song for New York: What Women do While Men Sit Knitting’, in response to the tragedy, and eventually, having said what she needed to say, allowed the red back into her hair.

After her first major cancer bout I saw Ruth in a snowy Manhattan for the first time in many months.  She was worried about my move to Wales - its lack of big cities troubled her - but once I started talking about the work I was making she relaxed. “And what about you, Ruth.  What’s next.”  Her eyes lit up.  “I’m doing Moliere, The Imaginary Invalid – you know, the one about the hypochondriac, Argan. Moliere played Argan, I’m going to play Moliere.’  I remembered another fact – Moliere died playing the role.  “Why that play Ruth?” I asked gently.  “Because,” she replied, “When I was in that fucking hospital, I said to myself - what role can I still play if I never get out of this fucking bed!”

Unlike Moliere, Ruth died while she was still intermittently rehearsing the play, and before it was ever fully staged.  To my great good fortune I spent a morning with her a week before her death. She was very ill, but still planning for the production, which by then had become as complex, personal and surprising as any Mabou Mines piece of work.  It was as exhilarating as ever to hear her talking about how she was putting the project together, as inspiring as ever to realise how she was arranging every element of her life to make another piece of theatre possible.  She didn’t quite make that show, but she died in her own way: still working, surrounded by her children, full of ideas, and leaving behind an extended family who will miss her hugely, mourn her fiercely, and value her mentorship for ever.