Abigail McGrath was an aspiring actor with a day job as a copywriter at an ad agency — and working weekend nights manning the door at Max’s Kansas City, among other side hustles — when her friend Susan Hoffman, otherwise known as Viva, a member of Andy Warhol’s entourage, asked her to find a tub for a film Warhol had cast her in. An unusual tub, she stressed.
Ms. McGrath said she’d be happy to help, but only if she could appear in the movie. She procured a see-through tub that had been used in a commercial, and soon she and Viva were tucked into it, laughing their heads off, being filmed by Paul Morrissey, the Warhol collaborator known for his attempts to inject some sort of narrative structure into Warhol’s blank, improvisational movies.
The plot of “Tub Girls,” as it was called and such as it was, apparently involved Viva entertaining various guests in the bath, one of whom was Ms. McGrath. It’s a rare film; not many people seem to have seen it. Ms. McGrath’s appearance was rare, too: She was one of the few so-called superstars among Warhol’s film subjects who were Black. (Dorothy Dean and Pat Hartley were the others.) Ms. McGrath was also the rare paid Warhol performer, earning $100 for her work — not bad for 1967.
Ms. McGrath — actor, writer and co-founder of the Off Center Theater, a beloved Manhattan institution devoted to progressive works and plays for children — died on Dec. 20 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 84.
The cause was liver cancer, said her son Jason Rosen.
Ms. McGrath had hoped that her star turn in “Tub Girls” would launch a film career, but that did not happen. Instead, she and Anthony McGrath, whom she would later marry, founded the Off Center Theater, which had its first headquarters in a church on West 66th Street. The couple produced political satire, experimental works, Shakespeare plays and free theater for children. They would drive their truck to the city’s roughest, most impoverished neighborhoods to perform at schools, in the streets and in parks
“Just as children need sunshine and parks and schools and libraries,” Ms. McGrath said, “so they need the theater.”
They staged revamped versions of classics: In their “Cinderella,” marriage to a prince did not solve her problems — F. Murray Abraham, who was among Off Center’s regulars, often played the prince, and Ms. McGrath was often Cinderella — and their “Little Red Riding Hood” concluded happily with the wolf becoming a vegetarian.
John Leguizamo, who joined the company when he was 19, was another Off Center veteran. Christine Baranski appeared in “Operation Midnight Climax,” a spoof about the C.I.A. written by Neal Bell, one of the theater’s adult productions. Mel Gussow, writing in The New York Times in 1981, praised the “taut production” of the play and called Ms. Baranski a “knockout” who seemed “destined to have a sizable movie career.”
In 1983, The Village Voice described the company as “outrageously funny and brilliant.”
Still, Off Center’s finances were always precarious — such is the nature of grass-roots theater — and it operated on a shoestring budget, supported by grants and donations and, early on, the proceeds from passing a hat, which apparently in 1974 violated a city ordinance, so they had to stop. In 1979, during a dispute between Actors’ Equity and the Off Off Broadway Theater Alliance, the McGraths had to scrap their entire season’s schedule, and Ms. McGrath began baking, selling bread and other baked goods to restaurants in the theater district.
“If I can’t make people happy with my theater productions,” she told The Times, “perhaps I can make people happy by baking bread.”
Abigail Calachaly Hubbell was born on Sept. 18, 1940, in Manhattan, the only child of Helen Johnson Hubbell, a Boston-born Harlem Renaissance poet who wrote under the name Helene Johnson, and William Warner Hubbell III, a stevedore who later worked as a subway conductor. Abigail’s unusual middle name was the name of her mother’s imaginary childhood friend.
Abigail grew up in the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn and attended the Little Red School House in the West Village, one of the city’s first progressive schools, and Washington Irving High School. “Genteel poverty” is how she described her upbringing, which was filled with outings to the theater and the opera. “Growing up with a poet is fun,” she told an interviewer in 2007, “because you never know you are poor.”
She studied theater arts at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. While there, she fell in love with Leonard Rosen, a fellow student; they married, had a son and were divorced before graduation. (“I entered Bard a virgin and came out a mother,” she said.) After she graduated, she and her son, Jason, spent a few weeks in Paris, where she worked as a mannequin — that is, a non-dancing showgirl (Ms. McGrath liked to say she had two left feet) — at the Folies Bergère.
When Ms. McGrath returned to New York, she lived as young actors do, juggling a patchwork of jobs to pay the rent. She had a day job as an advertising copywriter. She worked in an improv group, as an understudy. She modeled. She ran a coat-check concession at the Village Vanguard and then at Max’s Kansas City, where she also manned the door, turning away “the bridge and tunnel crowd,” as regular folks from outside Manhattan were known. She had an infallible eye for the “right” people, she said, until she didn’t. That was the night she threw the director Stanley Kubrick out for being overserved.
On weekends, she sold box lunches in Central Park.
In addition to her son Mr. Rosen, Ms. McGrath is survived by another son, Benson McGrath, and a granddaughter.
In 2001, Ms. McGrath opened Renaissance House, an artist residency, in a family home on Martha’s Vineyard. She named it in homage to her mother and Dorothy West, Ms. Johnson’s cousin and a Harlem Renaissance novelist.
The Off Center Theater never really shut down, though she and Mr. McGrath sold its headquarters on West 18th Street in 1989. They continued to perform in other venues until Mr. McGrath’s death in 2018.
Though a couple since the late 1960s, the McGraths did not marry until 2016. “We didn’t realize they weren’t married,” Mr. Rosen said.
At Ms. McGrath’s death, F. Murray Abraham wrote in an email to her sons. “Those two greats came through for me at a very low time in my life,” he said, referring to Ms. McGrath and her husband. “An actor’s only an actor when he’s working, and that 10 bucks a show was very needed. OCT was the real thing, and I’m so proud to have been part of it.”
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