NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Israel Horovitz, an influential and oft-produced playwright whose career was tarnished by accusations by multiple women that he had sexually assaulted them, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
His wife, Gillian Horovitz, said the cause was cancer.
Horovitz enjoyed his biggest successes off-Broadway and in regional and European theaters, including at the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts, which he helped found in 1979. His plays gave opportunities to a number of young actors who went on to become household names.
A Horovitz double bill of “The Indian Wants the Bronx” and “It’s Called the Sugar Plum,” which enjoyed a long run at the Astor Place Theater in Manhattan in 1968, had a cast that included Al Pacino, Marsha Mason and John Cazale. Two years later his “Line” was staged at the Theater De Lys in Greenwich Village with Cazale and Richard Dreyfuss in the cast; that play later moved to the 13th Street Repertory Theater. It was still running until recently, and, with an ever-changing cast, was said to be the longest-running play in off-off-Broadway history. (Horovitz lived in the Village.)
Horovitz made Broadway twice. In 1968 he wrote the “Morning” segment of “Morning, Noon and Night,” three one-acts; Terrence McNally and Leonard Melfi wrote the other two, and Horovitz’s cast included a young comedian named Robert Klein. In 1991, his “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard,” a two-hander that had been developed years earlier at Gloucester, went to Broadway with Judith Ivey and Jason Robards; it ran for 124 performances.
Horovitz occasionally tried Hollywood, perhaps most notably with the screenplay for the 1982 film “Author! Author!,” which starred Pacino as a playwright dealing with various stresses. In 2014 he adapted one of his plays into the film “My Old Lady,” which he also directed; it starred Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Horovitz wrote scores of plays: In 2009, the Barefoot Theater Company in New York organized a celebration of his 70th birthday that involved performances and staged readings of 70 Horovitz plays by theater companies around the world.
But his accomplishments were tainted. News reports in the 1990s brought complaints about his behavior to light, and they received new scrutiny in a 2017 article in The New York Times that carried the headline “Nine Women Accuse Israel Horovitz, Playwright and Mentor, of Sexual Misconduct.”
In the article, the women — some were actresses in plays he had written and directed, others had worked for him — recounted instances of assault, including being groped or forcibly kissed by him. One said he had raped her; another said he had forced her hand down his pants. One woman was 16 at the time of the alleged assault.
Decades earlier, in 1993, the weekly newspaper The Boston Phoenix reported that women at Gloucester Stage Company had accused Horovitz of sexual misconduct, but nothing was done. After The Times article appeared — one of a number of such articles about prominent men that helped propel the #MeToo movement — Gloucester Stage severed its ties with him.
Horovitz, responding to the accusations, told The Times that while he had “a different memory of some of these events, I apologize with all my heart to any woman who has ever felt compromised by my actions, and to my family and friends who have put their trust in me.”
“To hear that I have caused pain is profoundly upsetting,” he added, “as is the idea that I might have crossed a line with anyone who considered me a mentor.”
Israel Arthur Horovitz was born on March 31, 1939, in Wakefield, Massachusetts. His father, Julius, was a truck driver who became a lawyer when he was 50; his mother, Hazel Rose (Solberg) Horovitz, was a trained nurse and homemaker.
Horovitz traced his stage career to his writing a novel at 13.
“It was praised for having a wonderful childlike quality, but it was rejected in this letter that my mother saved,” he told the entertainment website ClashMusic.com in 2014. “So I wrote a play that was put on when I was 17. Nobody said it was a good play, but everybody said, ‘It’s a play,’ and I thought, So that’s who I am: I’m a playwright.”
He attended Salem Teachers College in Massachusetts in the late 1950s planning to become an English teacher, but left to pursue playwriting while supporting himself as a taxi driver and stagehand. (Years later he earned a master’s degree in English literature at the City University of New York.) In 1962, a fellowship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art took him to London, and for the 1964-65 season he was playwright in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Theater and the Aldwych Theater in England.
He returned to the United States and was working in advertising when “The Indian Wants the Bronx” brought him attention and an Obie Award in 1968. The play, about two hoodlums who harass an Indian man named Gupta who speaks no English, was widely staged thereafter; a production by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 1976 had a cast that featured Gary Sinise, John Malkovich and Terry Kinney.
The long-running “Line” was the very definition of theatrical simplicity. Horovitz described the play in a 2012 interview with the website Stage Directions:
“It’s a piece of tape on a barren stage, and five people line up behind this piece of white tape, and they desperately fight to be first. And they have no idea what the line is for. It’s not a play that is going to go out of style. And it adapts to its time.”
Clive Barnes, in his review in The Times in 1971, wasn’t wild about the play but saw potential in the playwright.
“He can write true and dazzling dialogue,” Barnes wrote, “even when the dialogue has little to be true or dazzling about. Also, he can create people — real breathing, living people.”
As his career advanced, Horovitz found that his works had particular appeal in France; at his death he had homes there and in Gloucester as well as in the Village. The Cultural Services division of the French Embassy recently called him “the most-produced American playwright in French theater history.” Many of his works drew on his love of France.
“My Old Lady” involved an American who inherits an apartment in Paris and, when he goes there expecting to sell it, finds it occupied by a woman and her daughter. In “Out of the Mouth of Babes” — a comedy that had a run at the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan in 2016 with a cast that included Ivey and Estelle Parsons — four women are drawn together by the death of an instructor at the Sorbonne with whom each had been involved.
Many other Horovitz plays were set in his native Massachusetts, especially in or near coastal Gloucester. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Gloucester Stage Company said that the accusations against Horovitz had led it to commit to focusing on works by women, Indigenous people and people of color.
“Israel Horovitz’s dedication to socially relevant and intellectually stimulating theater was the cornerstone of Gloucester Stage Company’s first 40 years,” the statement said. “That concept will live on, through new voices, for the next 40 more.”
Horovitz and Gillian Adams married in 1981. He had married Elaine Abber in 1959 and Doris Keefe in 1961. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children from his second marriage: Rachael Horovitz, a film producer; Adam, a member of the Beastie Boys; and Matthew, also a producer. He is also survived by two children from his third marriage, Hannah and Oliver Horovitz; a sister, Shirley Horovitz Levine; and five grandchildren.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
