The Living Theatre is an American theatre company founded in 1947 and based in New York City. It is the oldest experimental theatre group in the United States.[1][2] For most of its history it was led by its founders, actress Judith Malina and painter/poet Julian Beck. After Beck's death in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov became co-director with Malina;[3] the two were married in 1988.[4] After Malina's death in 2015, her responsibilities were taken over by her son Garrick Maxwell Beck, Tom Walker and Brad Burgess. The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the 1983 documentary Signals Through the Flames.
Based in a variety of small New York locations which were frequently closed due to financial problems or conflicts with city authorities, they helped to originate off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway as significant forces in U.S. theater. Their work during this period shared some aspects of style and content with Beat generation writers. Also during the 1950s, the American composer Alan Hovhaness worked closely with the Living Theatre, composing music for its productions. In 1959, their production of The Connection attracted national attention for its harsh portrayal of drug addiction and its equally harsh language. In the early 1960s the Living Theatre was host to avant-garde minimalist performances by artists including Simone Forti and Robert Morris.[6]
The Brig (1963), an anti-authoritarian look at conditions in a Marine prison, was their last major production in New York before a tax dispute led to the closure of the theatre space and the brief imprisonment of Beck and Malina.[7] Judith defended Julian at the IRS hearing dressed like Portia from The Merchant of Venice.[5] For the rest of the 1960s, the group toured chiefly in Europe. They produced more politically and formally radical work carrying an anarchist and pacifist message, with the company members creating plays collectively and often living together. Major works from this period included the adaptations Antigone, Frankenstein, and Paradise Now, which became their best-known play.[8]Paradise Now, a semi-improvisational piece involving audience participation, was notorious for a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while disrobing; this led to multiple arrests for indecent exposure.
The group returned to the U.S. in 1968 to tour Paradise Now, Antigone, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, and Frankenstein. "That madman who inspires us all, Artaud, does have some advice," Beck said in an informal address at Yale University after his return, "and I think he is the philosopher, for those of us who work in theatre, whom we can reach toward most quickly, of whom we can say, yes, here is one man since Rousseau who does uphold the idea of the non-civilized man."[9] He added: "Our work had always striven to stress the sacredness of life."[10] In 1971 they toured in Brazil, where they were imprisoned for several months, then deported.
The Living Theatre has toured extensively throughout the world, often in non-traditional venues such as streets and prisons. It has greatly influenced other American experimental theatre companies, notably The Open Theater (founded by former Living Theatre member Joseph Chaikin) and Bread and Puppet Theater.[11] The Living Theatre's productions have won four Obie Awards: The Connection (1959), The Brig (1963 and 2007), and Frankenstein (1968).
Julian Beck (top) and Judith Malina (middle) rehearsing at The Living Theatre
In 2006, The Living Theatre signed a 10-year lease on the 3,500-square-foot (330m2) basement of a new residential building under construction at 21 Clinton Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Clinton Street theater is the company's first permanent home since the closing of The Living Theatre on Third Street at Avenue C in 1993. The company moved into the completed space in early 2007 and opened in April 2007 with a revival of The Brig by Kenneth H. Brown,[12] first presented at The Living Theatre at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in 1963. The re-staging, directed by Judith Malina, won Obie Awards for Direction and Ensemble Performance.
In October 2006, the company opened a revival of Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, the 1964 collective creation that defined the interactive and Artaudian style[clarification needed] for which the company became famous.
In late 2007 / early 2008 the company founder Judith Malina performed in Maudie and Jane, a stage adaptation, directed by Reznikov, of the Doris Lessing novel, The Diary of Jane Somers.
In April 2008, Hanon Reznikov suffered a stroke. He died on May 3, 2008.[13]
In 2010, the company presented Red Noir, adapted and directed by Judith Malina. In 2011, the company presented Korach, by Malina, and a revival of Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, directed by Malina and Tom Walker. Also in 2011, the company created The Plot Is The Revolution, starring Malina and Silvia Calderoni, a co-production with the Italian group Motus. In 2012, the company presented The History of the World, written and directed by Malina. In 2013, the company presented Here We Are, written and directed by Malina. The company also vacated its Clinton Street space.
In 2014, Judith Malina's play No Place to Hide premiered at the Clemente Soto Velez Center on the Lower East Side. The production later took to the streets of New York for the Underground Zero Festival, and was performed at Burning Man. Malina was writing Venus and Mars when she died in April 2015.
Goals and influences
From its conception, The Living Theatre was dedicated to transforming the organization of power within society from a competitive, hierarchical structure to cooperative and communal expression. The troupe attempts to do so by counteracting complacency in the audience through direct spectacle. They oppose the commercial orientation of Broadway productions and have contributed to the off-Broadway theater movement in New York City, staging poetic dramas.
The primary text for The Living Theatre is The Theatre and its Double, an anthology of essays written by Antonin Artaud, the French playwright. It was published in France in 1937 and by the Grove Press in the U.S. in 1958. This work deeply influenced Julian Beck, a bisexual painter of abstract expressionist works. The troupe reflects Artaud's influence by staging multimedia plays designed to exhibit his metaphysical Theatre of Cruelty. In these performances, the actors attempt to dissolve the "fourth wall" between them and the spectators.
Julian Beck was an American actor, stage director, poet, and painter. He is best known for co-founding and directing the Living Theatre, as well as his role as Reverend Henry Kane, the malevolent preacher in the supernatural horror film Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986). The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the documentary film Signals Through the Flames (1983).
Judith Malina was a German-born American actress, director and writer. With her husband Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Open Theater was an experimental theatre group in New York City, active from 1963 to 1973.
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
A political drama can describe a play, film or TV program that has a political component, whether reflecting the author's political opinion, or describing a politician or series of political events.
Susan P. Stroman is an American theatre director, choreographer, and performer. Her notable theater productions include Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers, The Frogs, The Scottsboro Boys, Bullets Over Broadway, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and New York, New York.
The Theatre and Its Double is a 1938 collection of essays by French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. It contains his most famous works on the theatre, including his manifestos for a Theatre of Cruelty.
Jack Gelber was an American playwright best known for his 1959 drama The Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of the Living Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations. Gelber continued to work and write in New York, where he also taught writing, directing and drama as a professor, chiefly at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he created the MFA program in playwriting. In 1999 he received the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievements in theatre.
The Connection is a 1959 play by Jack Gelber. It was first produced by the Living Theatre, directed by Living Theatre co-founder Judith Malina, designed by co-founder Julian Beck, and featured music by jazz pianist Freddie Redd.
Antigone, also known as The Antigone of Sophocles, is an adaptation by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht of Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles' tragedy. It was first performed at the Chur Stadttheater in Switzerland in 1948, with Brecht's second wife Helene Weigel, in the lead role. This was Brecht's first directorial collaboration with Caspar Neher.
Marguerite Duffy, known professionally as Megan Terry, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist.
Hanon Reznikov was an American actor and writer.
The Brig is a play written by Kenneth H. Brown (1936–2022) based on his experiences as a U.S. Marine. It was first performed in New York by The Living Theatre on May 13, 1963, with a production filmed in 1964 by Jonas Mekas. The Brig received three Obie Awards in 1964, for Best Production (play), Best Design and Best Direction.
Dramatic Workshop was the name of a drama and acting school associated with the New School for Social Research in New York City. The German expatriate stage director Erwin Piscator began a long association with the school in 1940. Among the faculty were Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, among the students Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Beatrice Arthur, Walter Matthau, Tennessee Williams and Elaine Stritch. The Dramatic Workshop considerably contributed to the resurgence of the Off-Broadway theatre.
Daniel Fish is an American theater director based in New York City.
George Michael Bartenieff was a German-born American stage and film actor. He was noted both for his character roles in commercial and non-commercial films and on television, and for his work in the avant-garde theatre and performance world of downtown Manhattan, New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a co-founder of the Theatre for the New City, and of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.
Bennes Mardenn was an American actor, director, teacher, and mentor.
Signals Through the Flames is a 1983 documentary film on the work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina as the founders of The Living Theatre performance company. The title of the film is taken from the work of Antonin Artaud in his book on theatre theory called The Theatre and its Double. The film was produced by Mystic Fire Video as a project of the now defunct Mystic Fire Video bookstore in New York City. It was directed and edited by Sheldon Rochlin.
Petra Vogt is a German actor, visual artist, performance artist, poet and one-time partner of poet and publisher Ira Cohen.
Prior to his career in social criticism, the American writer Paul Goodman had a prolific career in avant-garde literature, including some 18 works for the stage. His plays, mostly written in the 1940s, were typically experimental. Their professional productions were either unsuccessful or flopped, including the three productions staged with The Living Theatre in the 1950s and one with The American Place Theatre in 1966. His lack of recognition as a litterateur in the 1950s helped drive him to his successful career in social criticism in the 1960s.
1 2 Botting, Gary, "The Living Theatre", in The Theatre of Protest in America (Edmonton: Harden House, 1972), 18.
↑ Hinant, Cindy (2014). Meyer-Stoll, Christiane (ed.). A Subversive Practitioner. Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgessellschaft. p.33. ISBN978-3864421099. Column was staged in February 1962 at the Living Theatre, New York, and features an element from [Robert] Morris's earlier work Two Columns, 1961, which consisted of two eight-foot-high rectangular plywood boxes painted gray. In the performance of Column, one of these boxes was placed vertically on an empty stage for three-and-a-half minutes, then a string was pulled, causing it to fall on its side, where it lay for another three-and-a-half minutes
↑ Beck, Garrick (2017). True Stories: Tales From the Generation of a New World Culture. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. pp.32–39. ISBN978-1-5320-2600-3.
Rostagno, Aldo, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck (1970). We, the Living Theatre. New York: Ballantine Books.
The Living Theatre (1971). Paradise Now. New York: Random House.
Malina, Judith (1972). The Enormous Despair. New York: Random House.
Pierre Biner (1972) The Living Theatre New York: Avon Books.
Malina, Judith (1984). The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1947-1957. New York: Grove Press, Inc.
Mystic Fire Video (1989), Signals Through the Flames. Documentary. Originally released by The Living Theatre in 1983 as a motion picture, produced and directed by Sheldon Rochlin and Maxine Harris.
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