“It was a time of great excitement.  We’d all been working in theater, film...I did some early French television, and before that I’d been a journalist.  We began warming to the idea of making a commitment to riskier, original work.  We thought it was the best way to achieve what we wanted to make of our lives.”  Together with Breuer and Maleczech, Neumann decamped to New York to join forces with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass and David Warrilow in Mabou Mines in 1971.  Since that time, Neumann has been directed by Lee Breuer in B-Beaver Animation, Shaggy Dog Animation, MahabarANTa, Warrior Ant, An Epidog, and Ecco Porco (2001); by Anne Bogart at The Public Theater (In The Jungle Of The Cities) in 1991; by JoAnne Akalaitis in the first staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play, Cascando (1975), and Franz Xavier Kroetz’s Through The Leaves, for which he won the Best Performance OBIE in 1984.
 
On an afternoon in 1976, at the Museum of Modern Art in East Berlin, Neumann met Samuel Beckett, beginning a relationship that endured until the writer’s death in 1989.  Mabou Mines had already mounted several productions of Beckett’s work in France, of which the author was aware.  As time passed, Beckett entrusted Neumann and Mabou Mines with several “texts” for adaptation to works of theater.  Neumann adapted, directed and/or performed in the world premieres of three such texts over the next thirteen years, during which time Beckett would now and then write or ring to ask, “What are you doing to it now?”
 
In 1979, Neumann directed himself and Bill Raymond (later a Mabou Mines artistic director) in Mercier and Camier, a possible antecedent to Waiting For Godot, at The Public Theater in New York in a staging featuring a string quartet by Philip Glass (later recorded by the Kronos Quartet).  Company, which Neumann co-directed with actress Honora Fergusson, followed at The Public in 1983, also with music by Glass.  Its subject is a boy’s terror on a high diving board, his father calling to him from the water below.  To evoke the boy’s sharpened senses, Neumann employed three swiveling satellite dishes poised and adjusted to listen for “company” in the mind or elsewhere in the universe, the trio of satellites forming a large hollow skull when turned inward…
 
At Company’s final performance on tour in San Francisco, Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn approached Neumann to offer Worstword Ho with the writer’s approval. Worstword Ho, Neumann remembers, took place on a “dark into dim” hillside with a long climbing road, alongside of which lay a “metaphysical” (Beckett’s word) graveyard; there are flashes of hot white light in the distance as the gravedigger tells stories of the dearly departed.  Worstward Ho premiered at Classic Stage Company in New York in 1986, this time without music.  Neumann remembers Beckett saying, ‘With all due respect to Philip, no music, for pity’s sake.  It’s my last gasp.”
 
Company provided the metaphor for Neumann’s comments on Mabou Mines’ unorthodox collaborative style in an interview with Soul of the American Actor in 2004.  “Listen, and you will be sent to the tip of the diving board and off you go, plunging into another’s whirlpool of ideas and images, fantasies and experience.  It keeps you going!  Though you know, as with Beckett, the going is tough.  But if you persist, forms begin to take shape 3-dimensionally, aurally and by way of all the senses, and before you know it a new kind of poetry of the stage springs out of the head and you’re ready to go back to the tip of the diving board again.”
 
Neumann’s work outside of Mabou Mines includes several memorable roles on Broadway: opposite Jason Robards in the Tony Award-winning production of The Iceman Cometh directed by José Quintero; opposite Al Pacino in Richard III; as the Narrator of Robert Wilson’s The Knee Plays from Civil WarS, with music by Philip Glass, at Carnegie Hall.  Off-Broadway, he has appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Beckett, David Rabe, Tony Kushner, Tennessee Williams and Charles Mee, and in regional productions including Peer Gynt at the Guthrie, Lulu at A.R.T. and J. McAuliffe’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s MAO II at Duke University.
 
Neumann is married to the actress Honora Fergusson, herself a veteran of Mabou Mines productions including Company and Mabou Mines DollHouse; They raised two boys and still live in a house outside Princeton, NJ that Fred built over a period of 15 years, while living up the road.  “We were broke, but with property,” he recalls.  In a feat of Beckettian persistence, “I just started one day and 15 years later, it was done.”