Richard Foreman, the avant-garde playwright and impresario who founded the Ontological Hysteric Theater, won a bookshelf of Obie Awards, and received a MacArthur fellowship in his late 50s, died on Jan 4 in Manhattan. He was 87.

Mr. Foreman established his company in 1968 and went on to present more than 50 of his own plays. The company name refers to the metaphysical study of the nature of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the situations he worked with were, as he told John Rockwell of The New York Times in 1976, “basically hysteric — repressed passions emerging as philosophical interactions.”