Ozzie Rodriguez, a playwright, actor and director for La MaMa Experimental Theater Club — the Manhattan company that helped give birth to the Off Off Broadway movement — who carved out a unique role in the avant-garde theater world by maintaining its vast archive of costumes, scripts, props and other ephemera, tracing more than 60 years of history, died on July 24 in the Bronx. He was 81.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was cancer, said Mary Fulham, La MaMa’s managing director.
Mr. Rodriguez, a Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent, arrived at La MaMa in 1967 when a friend, the director Nelly Vivas, needed an emergency replacement for an actor who had abandoned her upcoming production of three one-act plays.
He went on to appear in dozens of boundary-pushing productions, including Sam Shepard’s “Melodrama Play” (1971), Jean Genet’s “The Maids” (1971) and Shuji Terayama’s “La Marie-Vison” (1970). He also toured the world with various La MaMa offshoots.
As a resident director at the company since 1972, he mounted more than 30 plays. He also wrote or adapted seven, including “Alma, the Ghost of Spring Street” (1976) — based on a real-life Manhattan murder case — which he also directed, and which marked the professional acting debut of Anna Deavere Smith, who later became best known for her one-woman shows.
But it was as the director of the La MaMa archive, a job bestowed on him by the company’s celebrated founder, Ellen Stewart, in 1987, that Mr. Rodriguez achieved a singular distinction.
The idea of collecting theatrical materials and mementos accumulated over decades, meticulously cataloging them as historical artifacts, and presenting them to the public was as ambitious as it was unusual.
“No one had an archive,” Mr. Rodriguez said in a 2014 interview with the Innovative Theater Foundation. “Theaters, especially of our size, didn’t have archives.” Ms. Stewart, he added, “did it because she was a visionary.”
La MaMa has a proud legacy to showcase. “Eighty percent of what is now considered the American theater originated at La MaMa,” the playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein once said, with a dash of hyperbole, in an interview with Vanity Fair. Mr. Fierstein developed his Tony Award-winning play “Torch Song Trilogy,” which debuted on Broadway in 1981, at La MaMa in the late 1970s.
Ms. Stewart, a former dress designer with no experience in theater, started the company with her own money as a shoestring operation in an East Village basement in 1961. Her goal was to showcase the work of her playwright friends.
Along with similarly aligned venues like Caffe Cino and the Judson Memorial Church, La MaMa evolved into a theater equivalent of what CBGB — the crucible of punk rock on the Bowery — would become in the 1970s: an anything-goes incubator that served as a springboard for some of the most inventive talent of its generation.
Countless luminaries made their mark at La MaMa, including playwrights (Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson), actors (Al Pacino, Robert De Niro), composers (Philip Glass, Elizabeth Swados) and directors (Julie Taymor, of “The Lion King” fame; Tom O’Horgan, best known for “Hair”).
Ms. Stewart, who was Black, crafted La MaMa as an avowedly multicultural institution, a platform for playwrights like María Irene Fornés, who went on to win eight Obie awards, the Off Broadway version of a Tony, and Adrienne Kennedy, best known for her Obie-winning 1964 play, “Funnyhouse of a Negro.”
“There was no limitation,” Mr. Rodriguez recalled in a video interview last year. “It didn’t matter how old you were, where you came from, what color you were or how much money your daddy had or what your education was. If you had a dream, she was going to let you try to make it a reality.”
The archive was originally housed in a basement of the company’s East Village headquarters. In 2006, it moved to a 5,000-square-foot space a few doors down that doubled as a museum, housing more than 10,000 items that captured the legacy of La MaMa.
The archive now draws about 2,000 visitors a year, with tens of thousands more logging on to its digital incarnation.
The vast trove includes production stills featuring future Broadway and Hollywood stars like Bette Midler and Diane Lane, as well as years of correspondence and a vast array of original scripts by La MaMa’s pioneers.
There are Greek tragedy masks from Andrei Serban’s “Fragments of a Greek Trilogy” (1974), a critically acclaimed four-hour reinvention of works by Euripides and Sophocles with music by Elizabeth Swados.
Also included are giant papier-mâché doll heads designed by the celebrated playwright and director Robert Wilson for a 1965 production of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “American Hurrah.”
“The La MaMa archive is the history of the Off Off Broadway movement, which really came to life during the ’60s,” Ms. Fulham, the managing director, said in an interview. “During those times, it was the civil rights movement, it was the gay rights movement. It was the women’s movement and the antiwar movement.”
“All of the work being done downtown,” she added, “was happening within the context of those social movements.”
Oswald Rodriguez Jr. was born on Feb. 20, 1944, in the Bronx, the eldest of five children. His father was a truck driver, and his mother, Gloria (Valle) Rodriguez, was a seamstress.
After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in 1962, he began to forge a career as an actor.
Along the way, he also took jobs at the publishing companies Knopf and Harper & Row — experience that eventually inspired Ms. Stewart to choose him to start the archive.
Ms. Stewart “immediately started emptying out her closets, and things that were under the bed, and things from all over the world because we’d been touring internationally,” Mr. Rodriguez recalled in 2014. “I had no idea the kinds of things that Ellen had stored, or where she had stored it.”
Mr. Rodriguez is survived by his sisters, Shirley Segarra and Rainee Morel, and his brother, Robert.
He would spend the rest of his life serving as the de facto company historian. And to him, that history mattered. As he put it in the 2014 interview, “We had always been at the frontier of something — legally, illegally, or by accident.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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