La MaMa Cantata

The first Broadway show Ellen Stewart saw was "A Streetcar Named Desire," with Marlon Brando. "I hated it," she later said. "It was just talking the whole time." That was not the kind of theater Stewart was destined to do.

When she quit her job as a fashion designer at Saks Fifth Avenue and took a trip to Morocco, Stewart encountered the ghost of a Jewish mentor, who told her to get a pushcart. She traveled back to New York and rented a basement for $50 a month, which she offered as a space to beginning playwrights. "There'd be 10 people in the audience, maybe. But it was my pushcart," she said.

That was the beginning of La MaMa Experimental Theater Company, whose 50th anniversary season is being celebrated by a series of new works. These include "La MaMa Cantata," composed and directed by Elizabeth Swados, which features these and other fascinating stories by and about Stewart, the mama of La MaMa.

Swados presents Stewart's words verbatim, taken from interviews and articles, as lyrics to new music in a wide range of styles, from funk, gospel, and rap to doo-wop, klezmer, and world music. The sung-through form sometimes de-emphasizes or outright distracts from the stories, but they are worth a careful listen to understand the challenges Stewart had to overcome to help create the Off-Off Broadway movement. They are bracing. Stewart was once arrested as a prostitute, because what else could she be as a black woman who gave shelter to impoverished white male playwrights?

"La MaMa Cantata" debuted on Nov. 7, the perfect birthday celebration for Stewart, who would have turned 92 on that day but died in January. It is performed concert-style by a group of 17 singers, young, sexy, and joyous. Six of them, including one man, sing as Stewart. Swados could not cast just one performer, she writes in the program, to play "such a vast multifaceted incomprehensible character." The rest of the cast acts as chorus or as mostly unnamed characters reminiscing about Stewart. Jeanna Phillips plays Swados herself, who at one point sings about Stewart: "She had enormous brown almond-shaped eyes, which had seduced philanthropists, actors, directors, dancers, shahs, princes, tribal chiefs, rabbis and many other professionals of all classes, and me, an 18-year-old, hopeful, political, mediocre folk singer." More than 40 years later, Swados, best known for the 1978 Broadway musical "Runaways," may or may not still be hopeful and political, but her music ranges way beyond folk, and she is far from mediocre.

Presented by and at La MaMa E.T.C., 66 E. Fourth St., NYC. Nov. 7 and 8. Mon. and Tue., 7:30 p.m. (212) 475-7710 or www.lamama.org.