The Living Theatre at Cooper Union: A Symposium with William Coco, Jack Gelber, Karen

Malpede, Richard Schechner, and Michael Smith

Author(s): Michael Smith
Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 103-119
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1145804
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 The Living Theatre
at Cooper Union

A Symposium with William Coco,

Jack Gelber, Karen Malpede, Richard
Schechner, and Michael Smith

Editedby MichaelSmith

Introduction
Strategically standing just east of the renewed bustle of lower Broad-
way, on Astor Place where Greenwich Village gives way to the East Vil-
lage, the Cooper Union is a venerable school of art, architecture, and
engineering. In October 1986 Cooper Union sponsored a series of Living
Theatre events. Twenty-three ofJulian Beck's paintings, curated by Dore
Ashton, were exhibited for the first time since they were painted in the '40s
and early '50s. Michael Sundell put together a display of photographs that
traced the work of the Living Theatre from its beginnings in 1954 to the
present; it was astonishing to see the quantity and variety of work they
have done and the timelessly arresting images they made. Films of such
productions as The Brig (1963), The Connection(I959), and ParadiseNow
(1968) were presented by Sheldon Rochlin's Mystic Fire Video.
Most remarkably, those members of the Living Theatre company who
are living in New York came together with several past Living Theatre
actors to appear on 17 October in The Living Theatre Retrospectacle,a
pageant of short scenes from 2I productions that spanned 32 years. Judith
Malina directed the evening and acted eight leading roles. Gordon Rogoff
narrated, drawing his text from the writings of Beck and weaving the
progression of episodes into a historical and philosophical overview of the
Living Theatre's work.
Six weeks of rehearsalshad been a warm time of reunion and renewal for
the company but had prepared no one for the success of the Retrospectacle.
The crowd that poured into the Great Hall consisted of old and young, the
original audience and the new audience; the response was overwhelmingly
positive, reaffirming the community that has always been of primary im-
portance to the Living Theatre. People remember that Abraham Lincoln
spoke in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. So did Red Cloud, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Eugene V. Debs, and Emma Goldman, and the Great Hall

I03
Io4 Michael Smith
was a traditional site for mass meetings by the labor movement. So the
Retrospectacle continued a proud tradition.
The Living Theatre's series of events at Cooper Union concluded on 23
October with a symposium entitled "The Significance and Legacy of the
Living Theatre," which I moderated. I recorded the remarks of the other
participants-playwright and director Jack Gelber, critic and playwright
Karen Malpede, freelance dramaturg William Coco (who read a written
text), and Richard Schechner, TDR editor and theatre director. My own
words went unrecorded, but I can remember what I said or meant to say.

Michael Smith

MICHAEL SMITH: I think it was Julian Beck who gave me the thought
long ago that anything unique is precious simply because it is unique. You
don't need any other reason to value something. Uniqueness is enough.
Every theatre is unique, of course-each performance is unique-but the
1. Plates i, 2, 4-7, 9-11 Living Theatre stands out. Its persistence, the range of its repertory, its
arefromThe Living marriage of politics and art, its dual function as both a community and a
Theatre Retrospectacle, repertory theatre, both in New York and on the road, its extension to five
held 17 October 1986 at continents, its journeys, its movement from the theatre into the street and
Cooper Union. Pictured back into the theatre make it more than a theatre and yet a theatre par
hereis The Brig (1963). excellence, opening up the concept of what theatre can be and mean.
Fromthe left: Luke Theo- The Living Theatre has been uniquely important to me almost as long as
doreMorrison,Thomas I can remember. Soon after I first encountered theatre in New York other
Walker,GeorgeBartenieff, than Broadway, as a fledgling critic for the Village Voicebeginning in 1958,
Apollo Broome,Carlo Alto- the Living Theatre entered its heyday on I4th Street, within the next few
mare,and Steve Ben Israel. years producing Many Loves (1959), The Connection,a revival of Tonight
(Photo byJeffreyM. Day)
 Living Theatre I05
We Improvise(I955), In theJungle of Cities (1960), The MarryingMaiden
(I960), Man Is Man (I962), and The Brig, all of which I saw. I didn't get to
review these plays-Jerry Tallmer had first pick at the Voicethen. But I got
to know Judith and Julian a little through my friend Joe Chaikin, who
acted there. I was shy and only made it up to the office and dressing rooms
on the third floor a handful of times.
Everything about what they were doing at the Living Theatre was mys-
terious to me, but something clicked, I don't know what. Psychomagne-
tism. Affinity. And I was impressed. I felt they had something to teach me.
Later I realized what I had sensed from the start, what I sought to further
by traveling with them in Europe for a couple of months in 1967, by seeing
them perform on both coasts when they came back to America in '68/69,
by catching Seven Meditationson Political Sado-Masochism(1973) at Wash-
ington Square Methodist Church in the mid-'7os, by occasional personal
conversations and encounters (too few, or just enough), by coming in
from Rhode Island to introduce Julian to his namesake, my elder son, and
to see the ill-starred repertory at the Joyce in '84, by visiting Julian in his
illness surrounded by loving family and friends, and by talking with Judith
and others this past year: they are my teachers, really my only teachers
after school.
Now, then, what have they been teaching me?
I have let them do my politics for me. I feel this to be a shameful
admission, yet it's the truth. It's something they take on willingly because
exemplary action is precisely their aim in the world. Of course, it would be
far better if those they reach and convince with their anarchist-pacifist
actions and preachments would take the ideas to heart and change their 2. The Yellow Methusela
own lives, join in the struggle, and give the potential utopia a better (1982): (from left) Ilion
chance. I came very close to dropping everything and joining the Living Troya, Rain House, and
Theatre in Europe in '67, when they asked me to stage manage Antigone PamelaMayo. (Photo by
JeffreyM. Day)
Io6 Michael Smith

(1967). I saw it as a fateful, all-or-nothing, either-or choice instead of

simply doing it, and didn't.
Their attraction for me was always partly erotic, and I believe there is a
real erotic component in the Living Theatre's politics. ParadiseNow is said
to have turned into an orgy on stage at some performances (there wasn't
anything wrong with orgies in those days), but the erotic charge is not
really sex. It's important to remember that the Living Theatre is a theatre,
led by sophisticated, conscientious, and intensely conscious individuals
who work with large groups of people, the audience; the fact that they
present a radical ideal of liberation-political, economic, personal, sex-
ual-doesn't mean that spectators get to sleep with the actors. It's about
real life, but it isn't real life, it's theatre.
The affinity I feel for Judith and Julian makes me see the work with a
proprietary appreciation that probably disqualifies me from criticizing
other people's perceptions of it. I loved Julian's sets-there ought to be a
book of his stage designs. By the time he came to the Joyce in '84 he was a
master of lighting, as his lights for The Yellow Methuselah(I982) showed.
He was an amazingly resourceful, indefatigable manager-I wish I had
studied that with Julian [see Jack Gelber's "Julian Beck, Businessman" in
TIIo]. He came to be a marvelously droll actor. I loved him, and I love
Judith. As an actress she can go from the sly naturalism of William Carlos
Williams to Racine's formality to the grand passion of her own Antigone;
as a director she has patience, extraordinary clarity of intention, a sure feel
for space, rhythm, and dynamic, subtlety, immense stamina, passionate
commitment, and a direct connection to the Expressionist tradition
through her teacher Erwin Piscator. Politics and life-style aside, they are
unique in their devotion to the poetic literature of theatre and to the Ex-
pressionist enterprise, which was cut down too soon by history.
Now I've been back to New York for a year after staying away for more
than a decade. Since my return to the city, I get a very nonpositive feeling
about it, which truly puzzles me. New York theatre has been through
some kind of slump, clearly, and I'm glad I missed it. But what are we
going to do now? That's the question the Retrospectacle was meant to pose.
I was out in the lobby as the audience streamed in that night, and I was in
the back of the house throughout the performance, running one of the
follow spots forJohnny Dodd, surrounded by standees. Some hundreds of
that crowd were theatre students from New York University, where
Judith and Hanon Reznikov teach, and for them the Retrospectaclemust
have been history actually coming to life. But that doesn't quite account
for the audience's responsiveness and excitement. The spectators gave me
hope for the theatre, and maybe hope for the community.
JACK GELBER: I thought about what effect the Living Theatre has had
on world theatre over the long haul, and I kept coming round and round
and round and round and finally gave up. But I will try, without being too
maudlin, to give you some of my experiences with the Living Theatre and
how they might apply to what's happening in the theatre now-or what's
not happening in the theatre now, here and abroad.
I really wasn't interested in the theatre when I met the Becks. I had
written a play, but I wasn't in the theatre. That's not a contradiction-it's
the way in which people worked in the '5os. I was writing stories and
poems, but it never occurred to me to be involved in theatre. I knew very
little about it, from a practical point of view. Judith and Julian taught me
just about everything I know about the practical aspects of the theatre.
 Living Theatre I07

3.
The Living Theatre Retrospectacleconsisted of short sections from
these Living Theatre productions:
Ladies Voices-Gertrude Stein (95 I)
Doctor FaustusLights the Lights-Gertrude Stein (1951)
Desire Trappedby the Tail-Pablo Picasso (1952)
The Heroes-John Ashbery (1952)
The Age of Anxiety-W.H. Auden (I954)

Tonight We Improvise-Luigi Pirandello (I955)

Phedre-Jean Racine (I955)
The YoungDisciple-Paul Goodman (1955)

Many Loves-William Carlos Williams (I959)

The Connection-Jack Gelber (I959)
The MarryingMaiden-Jackson MacLow (I960)
Man Is Man-Bertolt Brecht (1962)
The Brig-Kenneth H. Brown (1963)

Mysteriesand Smaller Pieces-collective creation (1964)

Frankenstein-collective creation (1966)
The Antigone of Sophokles-Bertolt Brecht (I967)
ParadiseNow-collective creation (1968)
The Legacy of Cain-collective creation, Street Theatre Cycle of
Plays (1970-78)
Prometheusat the WinterPalace-Julian Beck (1978)
The Yellow Methuselah-Hanon Reznikov, Wassily Kandinsky, and
George Bernard Shaw (1982)
The Archaeologyof Sleep-Julian Beck (1983)

When I met them, they liked my play The Connectionand they wanted to
do it. It didn't occur to me that this was not a normal way in which
business was done. People didn't shake hands and say, well, we'll see you
in a couple of weeks or six months. But that's really how we worked.
I waited a long time for them to call. I was like every nervous new
author. I was very hesitant to bug them, but I finally called andJudith said,
"Where are you? We have to cast your play, and we've been looking for
you all over." I asked Judith if she had looked in the phone book, but that
was a period of time when Judith didn't do that, because nobody was
supposed to have their number in the phone book.
I went down and the very first thing Judith asked me to do was to help
her find actors. I had never interviewed an actor in my life and I had no idea
what actors were supposed to be like. With her at my side, we began to see
io8 Michael Smith

4. Tonight We Improvise
(1955): (fromleft) Ilion
Troya, Apollo Broome, people, and she began to ask me: How did this person look? Was he too
Judith Malina, BennesMar- mean, or was he too hip, or was he too square? Did he know anything
denn, Mary Mary Krapf, about drugs? Could he play music? Was he going to jump up and down
Amber,and Carol Wester- and give us a hard time? I began to find out a little bit, a little bit at the
nik. (Photo byJeffreyM. time, about how you actually deal with actors as artists and as part of what
Day) she and Julian called a company, which was something that they very
much saw at that time was not happening in America. They very much
wanted to have a repertory system, a nonstarring system, a system which
didn't emphasize the kind of illusionist acting techniques that were preva-
lent at that time. I didn't know I was rebelling against Broadway, as I'd
never been to Broadway. In that sense it was their reaction to growing up
in New York-I didn't grow up in New York-and being part of a theatre
scene that gave them something to fight against and a crucible in which
they could form their own opinions and their own principles.
A great deal that happened to me on a practical level was to learn about
lighting, to learn about set design, to learn about costumes, to learn about
selling books and coffee, to learn about getting a bounced check, to learn
about trying to get royalties when the baby needed the bottle, so to
speak-all of which were major lessons. It got me interested and turned on
to doing theatre.
The idea that Judith brought with her as a director-that theatre was a
total event, that it was not separated from one's life like a job that you go
to, leaving behind all of the values that you have in your life-was some-
thing that I took very, very seriously. Michael Smith made me think of the
spiritual level on which the Becks work. This was a very important part of
their work. It was not so much that they took the work seriously, although
they did that too, but that the theatre was a sacred place. You could make
 Living Theatre I09

jokes and so forth, but this was an event that had a spiritual level to which
attention had to be paid, and this is something that has carried through in
everything I have ever done in the theatre. I wouldn't think of doing a play
or being involved in a kind of theatre work that didn't offer me that. Since
it doesn't offer me money, it might as well offer me something that I really
enjoy, which is this level of satisfaction.
I think of the people around me-the actors who came and went, the
people who also didn't get paid on Fridays and Saturdays, who had their
checks bounce over and over again, who were trying to hammer out a way
to work in the theatre and do plays that had some kind of significance. You
notice I said "plays," because later on the Living Theatre took a quantum
leap into another kind of theatre, a theatre that they are often identified
with. It's very hard to talk about the Living Theatre as a static entity,
because in fact the Living Theatre is different kinds of theatre depending on
when you saw them. There was a period when they did all the European
masters. They did great productions of Brecht, the most breathtaking I've
seen, and they did wonderful productions of new plays. They did a lot of
experimental drama, and they tried to create on I4th Street a repertory
company. A play like The Connection,which drew large audiences after
they hung on for a very long time with no audiences, could support three
or four performances a week of Jackson MacLow's The MarryingMaiden,
which wouldn't be a box office success even today but had an important
role in trying to give people more than one kind of experience in the
theatre.
Those are some of the things I brought away from the Living Theatre
into my work for the next 20 years. Many of the people I saw working
there did not survive. There are many, many people I worked with who
unfortunately are dead, to be blunt. There were fifteen people in The

5. MartinSheen in The
Connection (1959). (Photo
byJeffreyM. Day)
I Io Michael Smith
Connection, and I think at least six or seven are dead and maybe more,
maybe more, I haven't counted, I can't stand it. There were other victims
of the time, people who could not survive the very brutal economic life,
not just with the Living Theatre but with any theatre. There's no doubt
that we're faced at this moment with the same problem in terms of eco-
nomic severity.
I don't think the problems have changed. The names have changed.
There's now a nonprofit theatre, while Julian formed the Living Theatre
on 14th Street originally as a profit-making organization. This is the kind
of thing Julian and Judith had to live with. They were pacifist anarchists.
They hated money as a vehicle of... they hated money period. To form a
profit-making organization was, I think, a very difficult thing for them to
live with, but there weren't any government grants or private foundations.
I'm not sure that what we have now under the Reagan administration has
made a more viable theatre. Frankly, it's probably worse than the very
clear-cut battle lines that were drawn in the '5os and early '6os.
KAREN MALPEDE: This morning at ten o'clock I picked up Judith and
Hanon and we went to the George Washington Bridge, where we met the
Living Forum, a group of artists who are part of the community around
the Living Theatre and some of them in the Living Theatre. We handed out
9oo apples to the peace marchers as they came off the George Washington
Bridge down this snaky road and put foot on terra firma in Manhattan.
And I tell you that because it's precisely this mixture of even simple little
actions with theatre work and artistic work that is the web of the Living
Theatre and its community. I would throw into that certain kinds of
celebrations like the seder: there's every year a great big Living Theatre
seder. There is a spiritual dimension to the plays and a spiritual dimension
to the life, and a political dimension to the plays and a political dimension
to the life, and of course there is a great joy and delight in creativity every
time we can manage it, and that's most of the time.
I think we should take the enormous response of the audience at the
Retrospectacle essentially as a signal that we as artists and as people who love
the theatre have a real responsibility now to make life in this theatre that's
been dead for years. The hunger of the audience was so manifestly clear,
and the age range was so great, and the response was so wholehearted that I
think we simply have to know and feel that there is an audience that needs
work that speaks to their highest selves in the most beautiful way. I agree
with Jack that the economics are ridiculous and impossible and I think
worse now than they have been for many, many years. But it's really up to
the artists and the audience to figure out a way to deal with that and to
work in spite of that.
I'm going to go back in time a little bit and tell you where my first
experience of the Living Theatre began. I was a high school student in the
Midwest, and an older man who was a college freshman moved to our
block from Scarsdale, New York. He had seen The Connection.I had seen
Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and I had read A Portraitof theArtistas a Young
Man, and I had heard Chicago blues, and I used to drink a lot of Scotch.
That's what we did in those days, and so I knew what art was all about.
And this older college freshman gave me marijuana as he told me about
The Connection. In the backyard at night he would whisper detailed de-
scriptions of The Connectioninto my ear. He said that it had totally changed
him and had showed him what theatre was all about. He was going to give
his life to the theatre, and I said yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. And ever
since then, love and freedom and the Living Theatre and sex and art and
 6. Prometheus at the
Winter Palace (1978):
(from
(rom left) Carol Westernik,
the Living Theatre and beauty and truth and the great affirming yes have
* lef) Carol Westerik,
n1u i ^ . . 11 . .L \.
all been knotted totally together in my chest. Rain House, i Malina,
Rain Hoe, Judith li
Hanon Reznikov,
Hanon R io, Ilio Ilion
Julian Beck was a man who gave off light. He gave off a spiritual light,
I . a
. . Troya, Carlo Altomare,and
glow, a calm, a depth, a meditative warmth and beauty that only grew Apollo roome. hoto
more astonishing as he came closer and closer to his untimely, difficult Apollo Broome. (Photo by
JeffreyM Day)
death from cancer. Judith Malina is really rabbinicalin her fire and passion.
She gives off ideas and argument and debate that become a source of light.
These two people together stood at the center of a community which grew
large. That community, I think, accounts for one of the reasons that the
Living Theatre had such a ritual impact on the audience, because in order
to have a ritual you must really speak to a community. The Living Theatre
has always, I think, seen part of its work as the creation of community as
well as the making of theatre events, and this community, in New York
and all over the world, is a wonderful web and network of diverse people
who all want peace, immediately.
This community endures now, despite the loss of its male center, Julian.
At the art opening of Julian's paintings in the gallery upstairs [at Cooper
Union], his presence was extremely strong. In fact, I dreamed about him
the night before, and he said to me in my dream that he missed all of us.
Later in the dream we all sat down to dinner. There were hundreds and
hundreds of people at the dinner, including Brecht and Helene Weigel. The
community endures in a vibrant way, having mourned and still mourning
Julian's death. Nevertheless, it can go on as a community, and I think that's
crucial and important. It's a mark of the anarchist mode linking this com-
munal structure, a community in which a man and a woman publicly
joined together in theatre work. It's important that there was a female
sensibility and a male sensibility and that there was often a female sensibil-
II2 Michael Smith

ity in the male presence and a male sensibility in the female presence. That
sort of gender openness and wholeness is encouraged in the Living
Theatre. The community, of course, is always in danger, because it's a
positive community acting for peace in a world that's becoming more and
more armed, more and more fragile, more and more tenuous. To make
community and to make art in such a world is an act of great and danger-
ous resistance.
WILLIAM COCO: It is daunting to try and assess the legacy and
significance of an artistic endeavor as rich and complex as the Living
Theatre while it is still in motion, so what I have to say must be taken as
crude thinking about a theatrical organism that remains far from making
its last exit.
What we witnessed at The Living Theatre Retrospectaclewas a titanic
event that shall remain with us for a long time. The energies that radiated
from the stage, the clamorous reception by the audience, the Chord that
brought the evening to a close-along with the screaming in the streets
after the event, and the talking and the pondering, too-all these things
have let us know how little we are willing to settle for in our lives and in
our theatre.
Yet once one has been thrust, as we were that night, into the eye of the
Artaudian hurricane, it is difficult to settle for less. Like Gertrude Stein's

7. CrystalField (left) and

Judith Malina in Ladies
Voices (1951). (Photo by
Jeftfey M. Day)
 Living Theatre I I3

good old Doctor Faustus, we can go to hell by ourselves-but with Ber-

nard Shaw's Lilith to remind us how much curiosity does animate our true
selves, we can make our way toward what she calls "the many starry
mansions" that "remain unbuilt," both in our lives and in our theatre.
One path to the stars lies in the joyful embrace of a theatrical perfor-
mance, and it is the lesson and significance of the Living Theatre to insist
that the theatre itself provides the example and perhaps even the means for
the remaking of our lives. The Living Theatre is committed to a theatre
changing with its time, offering us not simply a mirror or a venue for self-
expression but rather a Hope that is grounded in an Idea and an Idea that
searches for a Form.
The Living Theatre's odyssey has made its way through the Surrealists,
Pirandello, Piscator and Brecht, action painting, the happening, and the
avant-garde poets, along with Sophocles and Racine, Shaw and Mary
Shelley-all were on lively exhibition in the Retrospectacle.In search of a
metaphor to help us comprehend this complex theatrical adventure, we
must look even beyond the theatre itself. Few theatre companies remain
creative beyond a single decade, so to take the measure of the Living
Theatre one must look back to the theatres of Meyerhold and Stanislavski,
who for reasons of fortune, industry, and above all the pursuit of an Idea
were able to sustain their theatres across the decades as the Living Theatre
has.
But for my purposes, I wish to take an example from the visual arts and
for a moment to draw a comparison between the Living Theatre and Pablo
Picasso. In doing so I am thinking of Picasso's incessant creativity, his
primitive sources and style, his eroticism, his women and his minotaurs,
his theatrical experimentation, and his political commitment that includes
Guernicaon one side and on the other the white Dove of Peace which hangs
on the front curtain of the stage at the Berliner Ensemble. Each aspect has
its equivalent in the prodigious work and long years of the Living Theatre.
Now, while Picasso's entire career is exemplary, it is Picasso's cubism
that is especially meaningful here, because it exemplifies the inner mode of
activity that has kept the Living Theatre so very much alive over the
decades. Think for a moment of Picasso's huge cubist sculpture entitled
Bust of Sylvette that stands in New York just above Houston Street, among
the cluster of NYU's three Silver Tower buildings designed by I.M. Pei. It
is a fine piece of outdoor sculpture. There is no perfect view of Sylvette-
all angles are equally revealing. As we walk around this portrait cast in
poured concrete, standing four stories tall, we observe now her tears, now
her anger and despair, now her joy. Each time we integrate yet another
detail, we see in a new light all the parts we have observed before. We
know the woman from every angle, but no angle reveals all.
The visionary journey of the Living Theatre resembles this cubist Syl-
vette, and as the Retrospectacledemonstrated for us, each play the Living
Theatre produces allows us to perceive its vision from another angle. In
doing so we begin to discover even in classical and bourgeois plays that
implicit revolutionary tradition that anticipates the true spirit of the avant-
garde. And again, like each successive angle of Sylvette, each new play in
the Living Theatre's odyssey throws fresh light on the plays we have
already witnessed.
Like Picasso, over an uncommonly long life the Living Theatre never
gets lost in a style, and it never confuses style with vision, because it always
has its eye on the Idea. And the Form is there to serve the vision. Each play
along the way is the occasion for a battle-a struggle-with a different
8.

To the Editor:

On Thursday, 23 October I986, I was sitting in the audience at

Cooper Union to witness the symposium on the Living Theatre. It
was my very first chance to meet some of the people who shaped the
avant-garde and experimental theatre in the I96os. I guess this im-
plies that I really belong to the generation of the '8os. So far I have
read a lot about these truly committed artists, because I am writing a
doctoral thesis about ritualistic theatre. To shake hands with Judith
Malina, feeling the very gentle touch of our palms, was a moving
experience. There were a few brilliant moments during the sym-
posium, but the more I thought about it, the more I became upset.
During its 45-minute presentation, the panel became entangled in
conflicting messages. On the one hand they said it's necessary to
overcome any nostalgic view of the '6os. On the other hand the
modellike character of people like the Living Theatre (and them-
selves) was emphasized. The '6os were clearly demarcated from the
"boring '8os." There was general helplessness when they addressed
young people, who are, as we heard, in need of a vision. Schechner's
prediction that "something" will emerge in the 'gos might be true,
but we were not told what this mysterious "something" might be.
The audience sensed that the panelists did not have a vision either.
This evening was less a call for a new vision than the closing of a
chapter. A bittersweet taste hung over it: a nostalgic pride in the
achievements of the avant-garde of the last two decades and a
sadness about the loss of former visionary values. The suspicion
crept up in me that the abrupt end of the discussion was caused by
the World Series.
I do not know how revolutionary it is to shout: "Fuck the NEA."
It is probably OK that Schechner got applause for this statement,
though I do not know enough about grant and funding policies.
What I do know is that the ensemble in which I am involved is not
only underpaid but quite simply unpaid. I am an actor in a dance
theatre ensemble in Philadelphia called the Jewish-German Dance
Theatre. We are a handful of trained dancers and actors who gather
around the idea of creating a piece about our painful history, the
Holocaust, which separates and, strangely enough, unites us as Jew-
ish and German performers.
We view the dramatic-creative process as a way to enter subjects
which otherwise can hardly be dealt with. The theatrical space gives
us the protection we need in order to enter the depth of this particu-
lar issue. It is a sacred space, so to speak, which allows a different
reality and calls for dangerous moments, almost in the Artaudian
sense. It is but an attempt to let the mysterious "something" happen
to which the panel referred.
It was fascinating to note that the audience at Cooper Union ad-
dressed, several times, issues of religion and church/synagogues.
Even the panelists, especially Malpede, pointed out the rabbinical
background and Talmudic thinking ofJudith Malina. Twenty years
ago, I suspect, the same questions would have caused laughter and
uproar. Today, they were seriously discussed.

II4
 Julian Beck in The Life of the Theatrewrote in I96I: "I go to the
theatre instead of the synagogue. Not to worship but to discover the
way of salvation." Now it is 1986, and in some ways, we are going
back to the synagogue. What we want from religion we do not
know yet. What we want from theatre we no longer know. As we
have been stifled by petrified religion, we became equally disen-
chanted by the retreat of drama into formalism or traditional enter-
tainment. Only recently has the issue of linking drama and religion
been taken up again. The gestural, emotional, and psychological
importance of mythic stories and ritualized actions is being re-
covered. We do not anticipate salvation but rather a place where play
transcends leisure into a liminal experience. It might very well be
that a sacred-political sphere of play is a future for both theatre and
religion. The avant-garde has to struggle for its contribution to this
issue-not give it away to either a new-vogue spirituality or the
Jerry Falwell type of moralism.
What is a group like theJewish-German Dance Theatre struggling
for with a piece about the Holocaust? Is it only healing for the
German and Jewish performers who confront each other during
rehearsals and performances? Or do we spark a cathartic experience
among the audience?
We have tentative answers, but no program. I think that one of the
emotions of the '8os is called uncertainty. Those who are conscious
today lack visionary energy, but at the same time we lost a certain
naivete, too. Financially we try to make a living. Creatively we
make a life with contradictions. We have the choice to delude our-
selves, or to face a situation which is cruel in its violence, its
"boringness," its paucity of resistance, its nihilistic threat of self-
annihilation.
To create a piece about the Holocaust is our expression of
facing
violence, contradictions, and uncertainty. It is also a very particular
expression. To accept particularities and the diversities of experience
is one of the values produced by the active fringes of the '8os. It can
be observed both in religion and theatre, such as liberation
theology
and feminist theology, or gay and feminist theatre ensembles. To
wait for a new universalistic-utopian movement actually
might vio-
late the ethics of particularity: such a movement could just be "an-
other imperialistic point of view," as Augusto Boal
angrily
responded to a TDR report on Latin American Theatre [T49].
Sure, our vision is shattered. But we find ourselves living against
the power of delusions that range from the constant lies of a
political
conservatism and a Falwellian type of suffocating morals to the
dream factory of an upwardly-mobile-computerized
society and the
threat of nuclear annihilation. In regard to these rather
discouraging
trends, the few but growing attempts to claim theatre as a sacred and
transformative space could be dismissed as playful eclecticism, or
worse, elitism. But it is very serious play, and definitely not boring.

Bjorn Krondorfer
The authoris completinghis Ph.D. in Religion at
Temple University.

IlS
I 6 Michael Smith
form of theatrical play: Idea and Form, wrestling with one another like
Jacob and the Angel.
The legacy of the Living Theatre must reside in this lesson. We have
many performances today, but do we have a "theatre"? We have isolated
individual artists but so little of a true theatre community. This is not
because we have no forms, for we possess every choice of form.
Our hope must lie in a search for a necessarytheatre. If we awaken to this
fact in our theatres and in our theatricalized lives, perhaps we shall seek
once more to build those "many starry mansions" of which Lilith speaks
with cosmic optimism. And if we do find again the source of our power,
and mere performance finally does give way to a true theatre, we shall owe
a great part of the wisdom behind that transformation to the living ex-
ample of the Living Theatre-our true and contemporary Theatre of En-
lightenment.
RICHARD SCHECHNER: First of all, the 'gos are coming, and the
significance of a gathering like this is that fact-that only so long will a
society such as ours be satisfied either with the present or the past.
From my point of view the Living Theatre is a conscious phoenix,
constantly committing suicide. I always saw them at the moment they had
died and were gathering the ashes to make something else. I remember, as
Judith well remembers, in I964 when I came up from New Orleans, where
I was editing the Tulane Drama Review, which is the same magazine as The
Drama Review-you can see what happened to Tulane University, it got
reduced to a definite article. I had an appointment to interview her after
seeing The Brig. I saw The Brig I believe on a Thursday or a Friday night,
and I said, "I'm coming back tomorrow to interview you." When I got
there, Sixth Avenue and I4th Street, the theatre had been occupied. And
we conducted that interview, I remember very well, by me rolling up a
piece of cardboard and shouting the questions up three floors, and Judith
hanging out the window and shouting down the answers. So we were
performing that encounter.
Now, there were several realities being constructed. There was "a way
out" for the Living Theatre if they wanted to have a way out. In other
words, they could have abandoned that theatre, or they could have made
some settlement with the IRS. There were always compromises. But they
were always, it seemed to me, interested in driving the logic of whatever
action they were involved in to its extreme and forcing the other side to
become conscious of the logic of their actions as well. Never let the other
person off the hook. That was their motto. That is their motto.
The second time that I came in intense contact with the Living Theatre, I
lost all my clothes, as some of you know. It was at the premiere of Paradise
Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was skinnier. And when Steve
Ben Israel, I believe, came up to me and started shouting-and I knew
him, you know-"I am not allowed to take off my clothes," I felt it was
time to take off my clothes, because I didn't really understand what he
meant. I was directing Dionysus in 69 at the time, and a lot of nakedness was
9. Judith Malina in Many part of that show. But the point was not that you could or couldn't take off
Loves (1959). (Photo by your clothes; the point was that you were not allowed to take off your
JeffreyM. Day) clothes. The point was that an unjust law constrains those who obey. So
my taking off my clothes, though it was theatrical and fun, was not the
10. Steven Ben Israel in point of that scene. And I remember them later on explaining it to me; they
Frankenstein (1966). would not let me off the hook. "No, you didn't understand what we were
(Photo byJeffrey M. Day) doing. It's not about whether you can smoke marijuana or take off your
Living Theatre 117
118 Michael Smith
ii. Paradise Now (1968):
(fromleft) Thomas Walker,
Amber,Apollo Broome,
Hanon Reznikov, Judith
Malina, Carol Westernik,
Ilion Troya, Steven Ben
Israel,and Rain House.
(Photo byJeffey M. Day)
clothes or smuggle yourself across a border without a passport; it's about
the existence of unjust circumstances that put you in a position of breaking
the law to do good."
Third point. The Living Theatre was fun. That, to me, was its Jewish,
Brechtian, Piscatorian balance. They're at their best when in the midst of
all this intensity there's a kind of [shrug], because these people are very
intelligent and they know that the world doesn't change. The world is like
a big dog-you can sometimes slap it, you can sometimes get its attention,
occasionally it will sit down when you order it to, but then all of a sudden
it gets up and it shrugs. There's anarchy on the other side, too, that's the
sad truth. Probably governments are the most anarchic institutions that
you can ever dream up. It's a Kafkaesque and Gogolian kind of anarchy, an
evil anarchy. But it doesn't respond much different than some kind of big
dog. Sometimes it's extremely evil in its actions, as with fascism. Some-
times it tries to do good and steps on people even in trying to do good, as
with the welfare system. And so on. And the Living Theatre always in a
certain sense was armed with that Talmudic shrug.
Now, when I said that the 'gos are coming, I wrote down here that the
audience creates context, and that context precipitates the group, and the
group creates the theatre, and the theatre arouses the audience, and so it
goes. I wrote an essay, you know, five or six years ago called "The Decline
and Fall of the American Avant Garde" [in The End of Humanism]which
was about theatre's withdrawal into formalism and narcissism, a kind of
emotional and political scrim, a Wilsonian silence.
But these days I feel all our worms turning. We're not satisfied with
what we've got-the audience is creating a new context. I don't know if
it'll be the Living Theatre or if it'll be somebody else, but out of that
 Living Theatre II9
context some group will be precipitated, or a number of them, and they
will go beyond this idea of special interest, even if it's a good special
interest, even if it's the special interest of women, of gays, of the left, or of
what have you. There has to be some kind of linking, like what happens
when crystals precipitate in water that's ready, when the fluid is right. All
of a sudden people are saying, "Oh, what you want is what I need." It's
not love, really-it's energy, it's vigor, it's robustness. The love comes
afterward. I sense that stirring, especially among younger people. That's
one of the reasons I decided to edit TDR again: to provide a place where
people can talk to each other, at least provide some kind of context.
The last thing I want to say is that the Living Theatre really is not ups-
and-ups but ups-and-downs. When you exist that long, it's a relationship.
And when it's a relationship, it embodies these terrible ups-and-downs. Its
history has a rhythm of concentration and diaspora, of up and down, of
home and away. If the Mets can win two away, the Living Theatre also
won away. I remember that when I was in India in I976, touring The
Performance Group's Mother Courage, somebody came up to me in a vil-
lage outside of Calcutta and said, "Do you know the 'black sahib'?"That's
an interesting term, because sahib means upper class. And I said, "No, I
don't know. Who is the black sahib?" Not the black guru, you see, but the
black sahib, who turned out to be Rufus Collins of the Living Theatre. If
you know Rufus, he was beautiful to look at, an incarnation of energy, and
there he was, somewhere beyond Calcutta. This explosion blew some of
the Living Theatre to India, to Brazil, to Pittsburgh. And now there is this
gathering here, which could be an exemplary model for us in terms of our
own historical cycles, which do not turn in circles. We're not going to ever
replay the '6os, any more than the '6os replayed the '30s. The 'gos, or
maybe '86 and beyond, will be themselves. This hunger I feel tonight, this
energy, will precipitate something. I can't say what it will be, but I'll stake
my life that it will be.

Michael Smith is a playwright, director,critic, anthologist, and harpsichord

maker.He was bornin Kansas City, Missouri, and educatedat Yale University
and the Caffe Cino. He has two sons,Julian and Alfred. Currentlyhe servesas
assistantpress secretaryto New York City Mayor EdwardI. Koch.