lodibet Abigail McGrath, Founder of an Experimental Theater, Dies at 84

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 Citylodibet, 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,PESO99 official 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.

ImageMs. McGrath with Viva in the little-seen 1967 Andy Warhol film “Tub Girls.”Credit...Billy Name Estate/Courtesy Dagon James

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.

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