Kenneth Bernard, a playwright who rattled the expectations of audiences and critics with avant-garde works staged by the Playhouse of the Ridiculous and other theatrical groups in New York and beyond, died on Aug. 9 at a Manhattan nursing home. He was 90.
His son Lucas said the cause was hypertensive cardiovascular disease complicated by other health problems.
By day Dr. Bernard was an English professor at Long Island University, a job he took in 1959 and held for more than 40 years. By night he was a central figure in the experimental theater movement that began bubbling up in the small performance spaces of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
His works were a favorite of John Vaccaro, the director behind the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, whose assaultive, anarchic productions were part of the stew that gave rise to punk, queer theater and more. The first Bernard play staged by the troupe, “The Moke Eater” (1968), was about a man who tries to get his car repaired in a small town and ends up in a nightmarish sort of gantlet.
By then the Ridiculous had been going for several years, featuring the works of two other out-there writers, Ronald Tavel and Charles Ludlam. The Bernard plays, which also included “Night Club” (1970), “The Magic Show of Dr. Ma-Gico” (1973) and “The Sixty Minute Queer Show” (1977), were in some ways even more transgressive.
“In contrast to Tavel’s arch verbalism and Ludlam’s distinctive blend of travesty and tradition, Bernard brought to the Ridiculous a nightmare imagination rooted in the grotesque,” Gerald Rabkin wrote in Performing Arts Journal in 1978. “He did not reject the playfulness, the phallicism, the sexual ambiguity that had characterized early Ridiculous work. But he subordinated them and added a scream of pain.”
His works, though, were often more sideshow than traditional play, exercises in the meta that blurred the lines between rehearsal and performance. Any playgoer or reviewer who went in expecting a traditional story with a linear plot (and expecting not to be offended) was overmatched.
Ernest Albrecht, the theater critic of The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., was not onboard with Dr. Bernard’s use of actors portraying monkeys as a metaphor for society’s deterioration in “The Monkeys of the Organ Grinder,” staged in that city in 1970.
“Sad to say the play is never more eloquent than a cage full of monkeys,” he wrote, “and never more satisfying than when it has ended.”
When “The Moke Eater” was staged in Atlanta in 1977, Helen C. Smith, reviewing for The Atlanta Constitution, was baffled. “I didn’t like the play, don’t pretend to understand much of it,” she wrote.
But those critics who got what Dr. Bernard was after recommended his work to adventurous theatergoers, as Rob Baker of The Daily News did for “The Sixty Minute Queer Show” when it was staged at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan in 1977 under Mr. Vaccaro’s direction.
“It is a pastiche of short skits parodying virtually every play presented at La MaMa in the past 10 years, including several of Vaccaro’s own.” he wrote. “The spoofs are outrageous but never mean, for Vaccaro’s style is to move and to provoke as he destroys, to leave us haunted after the hysteria.”
Kenneth Otis Bernard was born on May 7, 1930, in Brooklyn to Otis Bernard and Mary Travaglini. His father was a businessman and writer of Christian-themed books. His mother, an independent-minded woman, invested in lychee groves in Florida.
When his parents divorced shortly after he was born, with the Depression in full force, his mother moved to Florida for a time, leaving him in the care of the American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless. Later he was taken in by relatives in Framingham, Mass., before rejoining his mother in New York when he was about 12.
Dr. Bernard earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the City College of New York and, after serving in the Army from 1953 to 1955, did postgraduate work at Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. in English literature.
He had become interested in experimental theater and begun writing when a friend took him to see a Ridiculous production of a Ludlam play at the Bouwerie Lane Theater in Manhattan in 1967. He was impressed and offered some of his plays, including “The Moke Eater,” to Mr. Vaccaro.
The timing was fortunate; Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Vaccaro were parting ways. Mr. Vaccaro agreed to put on “The Moke Eater,” which was first staged at Max’s Kansas City, the nightclub and restaurant on Park Avenue South frequented by Andy Warhol and other trendsetting artists and musicians.
“The Sixty Minute Queer Show” (which, as Mr. Baker put it in his review, “lasts a bit longer than 60 minutes and is more about the queerness of queer-baiting than about queers”) was the peak of the Bernard-Vaccaro collaborations. One character, a dictatorial director, was played by Mr. Vaccaro himself.
Dr. Bernard married Elaine Ceil Reiss in 1952; she died in 2019. In addition to his son Lucas, he is survived by another son, Judd; a daughter, Katey E. Bernard; and four grandchildren.
Dr. Bernard wrote poetry and fiction as well as plays and published two fiction collections. He also occasionally ventured a straightforward opinion article, as in 1978, when he wrote an essay in The New York Times criticizing public schools’ emphasis on athletics that benefit only students who are physically fit and sports like football that few people play after their 20s.
“The key to a lifetime of healthful sports activity is early exposure to activities one can perform at 70 as well as at 20 and 45,” wrote Dr. Bernard, who had been a fine gymnast in high school. “In this light, activities like hiking, bird-watching and yoga are of more value to the average student.”
