Robin Hirsch discusses his 41 years at the helm of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, where he produced some 700 shows a year in every conceivable genre (and quite a few inconceivable ones): from science to stilt-walking, from Afro-American poetry to Latin jazz, from Shakespeare at Midnight to the entire Iliad as an experiment in Breakfast Theatre; from Suzanne Vega singing her first songs to Eve Ensler launching her Vagina Monologues, from Senator Eugene McCarthy (the good Senator McCarthy) reading his poetry to Dr. Oliver Sacks reading his prose, from American Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Roald Hoffmann to Romanian Poet Laureate Nina Cassian, from Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry to David Amram, the inventor (with Jack Kerouac) of Jazz-and-Spoken-Word, from members of the Royal Shakespeare Company honoring dead poets on their birthdays to members of Monty Python reading their own stories to local kids.
On her tenth anniversary in 1987, Cornelia was proclaimed “a culinary as well as a cultural landmark” by Mayor Ed Koch. She was forced to close 5 years ago by vile landlords who had taken over the building, tried to evict her six times on spurious grounds, and raised her rent to 84 times what it was when she opened. She is now “in exile”, with popup performances by Robin and various Cornelia alums, trying to keep alive the spirit of artistic experimentation, growth, and camaraderie which she fostered and sustained for more than four decades.
Robin Hirsch was born in London during the Blitz to German Jews who had escaped Hitler. This complicated inheritance informs much of his work, both as a writer (LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI, perhaps the only Holocaust related memoir to have been called “very funny” by the New York Times) and as a performer (MOSAIC: FRAGMENTS OF A JEWISH LIFE, his seven-part solo performance cycle—“completely glorious” according to the Village Voice). He is a former Oxford, Fulbright and English-Speaking Union Scholar, a two-time NYFA Fellow, and the recipient of numerous other awards, but the titles of which he is proudest were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture, Wine Czar, and Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, which he founded in 1977 with two other artists, Charles McKenna and Raphaela Pivetta, and which was forced to close by vile landlords in 2019.