The Return of The Living Theatre

The Return of the Living Theatre: Paradise Lost
Author(s): Gerald Rabkin

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1984), pp. 7-20
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc
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The Return of the
Living Theatre:
Paradise Lost
Gerald Rabkin
At the intermission of The Yellow Methuselah-one of the four offerings in

the Living Theatre's truncated season at the Joyce Theatre last winter-I
ran into a friend, a playwright who has been on the experimental theatre
scene for almost two decades. We shared a silent glance of commiseration
which testified to the enervating experience of the work we were witness-
ing. "You know," he quietly stated, "the Living Theatre never was any
good." I said nothing, the energy of defense depleted, but inwardly I rebel-
led. No, I silently shouted, you forget too easily: for almost two decades the
Living Theatre was American experimental theatre, the alternative to a
theatre of realism and commercialism, the prophetic source of so much of
the radical energy that emerged in the sixties, the energy that produced
you. Can you deny that even at their most controversial their vitality was
never in doubt? That for those of us who cared this was theatre as it should
be: provocative, committed, unignorable? The flash of inward anger faded,
replaced by a deep sadness. For the reasons I silently enumerated the
Joyce season is so dispiriting. In essentials the work-themes, formal
strategies-hasn't changed that much from the exile period. And yet
everything has changed. Why? The theatre has always consciously assail-
ed the "professional" theatre, but now their polyglot amateurism, rather
than asserting the claims of life over art, suffocates all in its path. Provoca-
tion becomes boredom, living is dessicated. Yes, the most depressing reali-
ty is not incompetence but irrelevance. A disturbing thought: is my friend
right? Had all my previous faith been misplaced? Had the work of the Living
Theatre always been fatally flawed, flaws ignored for political reasons: the
Becks' undeniable history as the martyrs of American theatre, harassed,
persecuted, exiled? Was the Living Theatre, made by history, now ambush-
ed by it?
I thought back to another time, another country-the America of Nixon,

Vietman, Abbie Hoffman-to another return: the Living Theatre's last ma-
jor tour in 1968-69 after half a decade of European exile. On one level, the
return was a triumphant progression: from September 1968 to March 1969
the troupe travelled some 18,000 miles back and forth across the United
States. Wherever it went-Kansas City, Berkeley, or Brooklyn-it filled
auditoriums, gymnasiums, churches, theatres with audiences who respond-
ed passionately-even if oftentimes negatively-to what was clearly one of
the major theatres of the time. And yet, despite the undeniable social impor-
tance of that tour, the Living's return was not greeted with unalloyed critical
enthusiasm. One might have expected a stark division between traditional
mainstream reviewers disturbed by the group's strategies of provocation,
and more experimentally tolerant weekly and monthly critics (an opposition
indeed observable in critical reactions to such earlier experiments as The
Connection and The Brig). But in 1968, ironically, it was Clive Barnes (then
the Times critic) who defended the group's affirmation of "man's need for
ritual and involvement" against Eric Bentley's angry critique, "I reject the
Living Theatre," which castigated the group's "cult of intimacy," its
guruism, and its avoidance of any real political dialectic. Bentley's attack
was echoed by such serious critics as Harold Clurman, who called the
group "anti-art," and Robert Brustein, who asserted that the group con-
tributed little of substance "beyond its athleticism and its exotic style of
life." I remember my contemporary reaction to these attacks, strongly feel-
ing when I saw the repertory that Bentley, Clurman, Brustein had missed
the real point: that the work of the Living Theatre-at least the notorious
Paradise Now-was indeed consciously anti-art, art, that is, as a passive,
crafted artifact with at best indirect connection to the social imperatives of
the convulsive world which it reflected. I too had been furious at the pro-
vocative hostility of Paradise Now (forewarned, I had left my wallet at
home), until the sheer power of the event forced me to conclude that it
basically achieved exactly what it set out to achieve: a passionate oblitera-
tion of the distinction between perfomers and spectators, between actors
and acted upon. I went back four times to be disturbed.
Now, nagging doubts: does the unfortunate experience of the Joyce season
prove Bentley et al. right after all? It is not really a question of admitting
aesthetic misjudgment that troubles me, but of rejecting part of my own in-
tellectual and emotional past. Since I am sure that this dilemma is ex-
emplary of many of my theatrical generation, perhaps a brief account of
what the Living Theatre meant to me through the years will be of more than
parochial interest. I write for myself as well as others, hoping that rumina-
tion will lead me to conclusions about the reasons for the recent (there is no
Martha Swope
THE YELLOW METHUSELAH
other word) disaster.
My journey with the Living Theatre goes way back, but not quite to its
origins in a basement on Wooster Street in 1948, a beginning aborted when
the police closed the theatre before it opened, thinking it had discovered a
clandestine whorehouse. Nor was I aware of the first performances in
Julian Beck and Judith Malina's apartment in 1951 of four short plays by
authors decidedly not part of the familiar repertoire of that era: Paul Good-
man, Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Bertolt Brecht. I first
became aware of the theatre because a college friend of mine had been
cast in "An Evening of Bohemian Theatre," the third offering in its first
public venture: a season of unconventional theatre at the Cherry Lane
Theatre in 1951-52. For a young enthusiast who thought the theatre began
and ended with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the bill of "bohe-
mian" plays-which added Picasso's Desire Trapped by the Tail and Eliot's
Sweeney Agonistes to Stein's Ladies Voices-was a revelation to me. At
first I angrily rejected what I saw: this was poetry, literature, not theatre;
there was no narrative, structure, conflict. But then I had second thoughts:
was there perhaps a larger theatre vision available than one wedded to the
tenets of realism? I avidly attended the rest of the Cherry Lane productions
and forced myself to come to terms with Paul Goodman's verse drama
about the wife of Marcus Aurelius, Faustina, and, most particularly, with
the last production of the season, a childish, anarchic assault on all con-
ventionality by some old, bohemian Frenchman in a play I had never heard
of, Jarry's Ubu Roi.
Even though it was more difficult (there were no tickets and virtually no
publicity), I kept up with the Living Theatre when next it surfaced a few
years later in a loft at Broadway and 100th Street. Of the work offered there,
I chiefly remember Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, the first production I had
ever seen of that great nightmarish work, and Tonight We Improvise, the
Beck's initial experiment with Pirandello's radical dissolution of the boun-
daries between art and life. The loft period was a harbinger of the radical
theatre model of the later exile period: it really was a poor theatre rejecting
a society which measured the importance of art by its economic resources.
But the model was not long to survive: destiny stepped in again in the name
of the state-the omnipresent co-star in the theatre's long drama-to cur-
tail the proceedings. The City Department of Buildings decreed the loft un-
safe and shut it down.
Two years later the theatre surfaced again, obviously more substantially
funded, this time in an ex-department store on the corner of Sixth Avenu
and 14th street. It was here from 1959 to 1963 that for me, as for many
others, the Living Theatre emerged as the most vital and important theatr
in the country. The Becks produced nine productions, comprised of ten
plays, mostly in repertory, during that period, all of which I saw at least
once. Several of these were landmark productions which introduced into
the American theatre styles and influences which though now familiar then
were virtually unknown. Brecht and Artaud, for instance. Brecht's compa-
nion Lehrstiicke, He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No, had been among
the first choices for the theatre's new repertoire. Even when the Living
Theatre offered In the Jungle of Cities in 1960, Brecht was chiefly known by
theatre audiences for the long-running but toned down off-Broadway
Threepenny Opera. With its mysterious struggle set in a mythical Chicago
between an enigmatic Malayan and a poor man who rises to power, Jungle
was a disturbing revelation. I well remember the compelling chemistry be-
tween Julian as the Malay and the young Joe Chaikin as his opponent. Two
years later, the Living Theatre reinforced its commitment to Brecht with
another memorable production of a then little known play, Man is Man,
again with Chaikin in a lead. The Artaudian influence came more slowly.
Remember that in the fifties The Theatre and Its Double was not yet
available in English. When they read the translation soon to be published by
Grove Press, the Becks were immediately struck by Artaud's articulation of
their own theatre vision. It was not until the last production of their 14th
Street period, however, that they were able to make that influence directly
felt in their "cruel" realization of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, a relentless
depiciton of the horrors of military incarceration. In its virtually plotless
repetition of numbing ritual humiliations, The Brig was not only cruel to its
audiences (this was not a play!) but to its harassed and beaten performers,
who indeed offered themselves as martyrs at the stake signalling through
10
the flames. It should be noted, moreover, in light of the Living's subsequent
reputation, that the production was meticulously crafted.
Two other important productions must be cited from the 14th Street period:
Jackson MacLow's The Marrying Maiden, which altered its structure
aleatorically by drawing on the rules of chance in the hexagrams in the I
Ching-a Cagean form of experimentation rarely, if ever, seen in the
theatre-and Jack Gelber's powerful mixture of Naturalism, Pirandello, and
jazz, The Connection. Presented not as a staged performance, but as a
"real" gathering of "real" heroin addicts being filmed by a documentary
crew, The Connection seemed to mark a new direction for the Living
Theatre, a move away from the poetic repertoire to an aggressive contem-
poraneity. Here was a new play, daringly staged (I had never before seen a
play "begin" with the house and stage lights on, with the performers
gradually moving onto the scene), that broke genuinely new ground in
theme and technique, and the serious critics of the day, rallying to the pro-
duction's defense after its rejection by the daily reviewers, offered it the
highest praise.
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ANTIGONE
These early years should remind us that, like Othello, the Living Theatre
"has done the state some service." I speak, of course, of the state of
theatre, not the political state to which the Becks have always been oppos-
ed. At a time when Broadway reigned supreme over American theatre, when
the European Absurdist challenge to realism was just beginning to make
itself felt, the Living Theatre demonstrated that the repertory of theatre
could be vastly and profitably enlarged, that poetic imagination rather than
naturalist illusion could be a theatre's guiding aesthetic. During the fifties
and
andearly early
sixties I feltsixties
myself a vicarious
I feltmember of the community
myself of ar-
a vicarious m
tists that recognized the Living Theatre's unique, aesthetically ecumenical
role; I speak of such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning,
Allen Ginsberg-even such mainstream successes as Tennessee Williams
and Edward Albee-who offered the group praise and, as their legal dif-
ficulties mounted, defense.
Two intertwined realities ended the most creative period of the Living
Theatre: the Becks' growing political commitment to anarchism and its rejc-
tion of hierarchical institutions (a commitment which had already resulted
in at least six arrests for participation in pacifist demonstrations by 1963),
and their consequent unwillingness or inability to deal with financial
realities. The Brig had been running for five months when an eviction order
arrived because of arrears of $4500 in back rent. The landlord was joined by
the IRS which descended on the theatre and seized it, declaring it to be
government property in lieu of some $28,000 in back taxes. Thus began one
of the Living Theatre's customary real-life dramas in a morality play cycle
which pits the forces of authoritarian darkness against the forces of light,
life, and art. I, as so many other Living Theatre supporters, followed the
drama avidly, offering at least moral suport, as it culminated in a
clandestine performance of The Brig under the noses of the IRS, and that
most theatrical of events, a trial, in which the Becks, defending themselves,
pleaded with the IRS agents to take off their ties and live a more meaningful
life. Despite their assertion that they had done nothing wrong, the Becks
were found guilty and faced fines and jail sentences-Judith 30 days,
Julian 60-sentences which they returned from Europe in 1965 to serve.
Since America had crushed their theatre, the Becks took the path available
to them: European exile. They had been well received in Europe since their
first tour in 1961, privately endowed with the help of such as De Kooning,
Rauschenberg, Goodman, and Ginsberg, when the State Department (no
NEA, NEH then) declined to offer support. The love affair between European
intellectuals and the Living Theatre had begun: the group won the Grand
Prize for Experiment-never before given to an American theatre-from the
prestigious Theatre des Nations in Paris. No surprise, then, that the Becks
with some of their troupe (others, like Chaikin, opting to remain in New
York) should go where they were welcome. I visited Europe several times in
the 1960s but I never caught up with the Living Theatre, though I tried to
keep track of their whereabouts. I heard about a fascinating sounding pro-
duction of Genet's The Maids in Germany, with men in the female roles, but
never saw it. I noted, as the decade progressed, that the group seemed con-
stantly on the move, that they had developed new pieces called Mysteries,
Frankenstein, Paradise Now. I read every report I could about them, and
noted with bemused admiration the continuing conflicts with authority,
such as the withdrawal from the Avignon Festival in 1968 because of the
banning of Paradise Now. By the time the troupe returned to the United
States with its new productions in 1968, / was in Europe on sabbatical
leave. I devoured the controversial reports, finally catching up with the
group in London in 1969 when they performed their repertoire at the Round
12
House.
It was immediately clear to me that this was and wasn't the experimenta
theatre I had seen evolve in New York. On one hand, there definitely was
thematic continuity from the end of the 14th Street period: Mysteries clearly
had its roots in the ritual humiliations of The Brig; the spirit of Artaud was
manifest in its Plague finale. The other pieces similarly incorporated
negative rituals. But these tableaux of destruction and repression were now
countered by a proliferation of positive imagery-rituals of affirmation,
communality, non-violence, love-derived from a variety of mystical and
contemporary sources (the Kabbalah, R. D. Laing), affirmations which
apotheosized the love-zap of the sixties then at its countercultural zenith.
And this love-zap had clearly transformed the theatre. Indeed, it was no
longer a theatre in the formal sense; it was a tribe, a commune. The new per-
formers on stage (there were few familiar old faces) were not primarily ar-
tists sharing in collective effort, but members of a family cultivating alter-
native modes of living. And yet, I thought, why not? The violent, polarized
era we lived in then demanded new strategies, and even if I could never
subscribe to the mindless exhortations to turn on, tune in, and drop out, I
was at least a fellow traveler and more than willing to hear the new Living
Theatre out. Despite the new polyglot cast of performers, there still was
craft here and there certainly was passion and involvement.
The notorious Paradise Now, like a lightning rod, attracted almost all
discussion of its provocative strategies as representing the quintessential
aesthetic of the Living Theatre. It obscured the fact that Mysteries and
Frankenstein were essentially well crafted. If the former did conclude with
the now familiar convention of dying in the aisles, it had not yet become a
cliche, and the latter expressed its anti-violent theme non-simplistically;
Frankenstein was rich with memorable imagery, most notably when the
members of the company created the Creature in silhouette out of the
human pyramid of their bodies. For me, the latter was one of the electric
moments in contemporary theatre, just as the lining up of dead people's
shoes at the end of Mysteries was one of the most moving. But Paradise
Now was another story: a work which consciously denied traditional craft in
its rage to drive theatre into the streets. I've already revealed my ambivalent
reactions-my discomfort at its bullying hostility and self-righteousness,
and my grudging admission that one did not have to buy its utopian visions
to accept it as an expression of theatre at its most radically significant.
The American and European tours of 1968-70 represented the climax of the
Living Theatre's second stage. The energy generated by the many perfor-
mances of Paradise Now seemed paradoxically (since its goal was the
reverse) to have been depleting. Indeed, the American tour even evidenced a
curious ambushing by history. American counter-culture had, in many
ways, developed more radically than its European counterpart. Despite its
provocations, Paradise Now, for many in its American audiences, did not go
13
Martha Swope
THE YELLOW METHUSELAH
far enough. When the loin-clothed performers invaded the aisles at the
beginning of the performance protesting the suppression for their rights to
remove their clothes or smoke marijuana, more than a few less constrained
spectators immediately stripped naked and/or lit up. These gestures were,
of course, a rather safe bravado, but they reveal the beginnings of the Living
Theatre tragedy of cultural displacement. The Living Theatre was wounded
by the accusations by some radical allies that at heart it had been co-opted
by bourgeois culture. By the time the theatre began an Italian tour in late
1969, it was no longer what it had been. Discussions of decentralization
grew, and by the time Mysteries was performed for the last time in Berlin in
January 1970, a declaration was issued announcing that the theatre was
dividing into four cells to be located in four different countries, from Britain
to India. Although the plan was partially initiated, the fact remains that the
Living Theatre, despite its collectivist ideals, was-and is-the Becks, and
its history is theirs.
The determination to create a theatre of the streets led them in the early
seventies far from the centers of theatrical sophistication: invited to Brazil
in the spring of 1970, the Beck "cell" experimented with a series of col-
laborative street plays until the work ended wtih the group's arrest on
charges of marijuana possession. Released after two and a half months of
captivity, the theatre regrouped in Brooklyn where it began to adapt the
Brazilian work to the American scene. I saw two examples of this work in
14
New York in 1973, both parts of an ambitious political cycle in progress, The
Legacy of Cain: The Money Tower at BAM's Lepercq Space and Seven
Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism at the Washington Square
Methodist Church. Though impressed by The Money Tower's constructivist
audacity and several powerful images of torture and repression, I was
distressed by the works' unrelieved rhetorical stridency; this was theatre
for the converted, black and white denunciations of society's organized
tyranny without an iota of ambiguity. On the move again, the Becks
journeyed to another unlikely base: Pittsburgh, where they announced a
departure from confrontation tactics in favor of a more subtle attack on the
Establishment. I saw none of the Pittsburgh work, but noted from reading
the text of Six Public Acts in TDR [67] that despite the new conciliatory in-
tentions the piece was still governed by rigid antitheses: "the ruler or the
ruled/the rich or the poor/the master or the slave/the sadist or the
masochist/war or peace." I wondered how the steelworkers reacted to this
stark vision of their oppressed condition.
By the mid-seventies news of the Becks was hard to come by. Then they
resurfaced in Rome. At the nadir of their fortunes in America, they had
received prestigious invitations to Europe (Europeans having longer
memories than Americans) and returned to exiled patronage. In Rome the
theatre once again regrouped and after a period of sustaining its commit-
ment to paratheatre of the streets, factories, and hospitals, reverted to its
mid-sixties condition: creating new pieces for theatre presentation and tour
in hospitable European venues. The Legacy of Cain paratheatrical cycle
ended in 1978, and the group created four major-scale productions, three of
which we witnessed last winter at the Joyce. Only the first of the large-scale
works-Prometheus at the Winter Palace (1978)-was not presented here,
which is a pity because reports in PAJ [14] and the Village Voice make it
sound the most intriguing of the bunch. Instead, the group revived An-
tigone, which had been created in the mid-sixties and presented on the
famous 1968-69 tour.
Which brings me back at last to the lobby of the Joyce and my troubled
thoughts on the theatre's long, controversial, restless (the base of opera-
tions has once again shifted: to Paris), but honorable history. I stated earlier
that the work on view seemes even to me-as to most Living Theatre sym-
pathizers that I spoke to or read (e.g., Erika Munk's desperate admission
that she "always loved the artists though not always their work")-a
disaster. This strongest of rhetorical judgments demands justification. Let
me, then, briefly describe the repertoire, its themes and strategies, the
reasons, in my view, for deficiency, and some general observations on the
overall failure in light of the Living Theatre's history.
The litany of recent abuse accused the Living Theatre of not changing with
the times, of remaining mired in the concerns of the late sixties. In choice of
repertoire, however, the accusation is unfair. The work has made an effort
to confront the sensibilities of an unrevolutionary era. Indeed, the two most
15
recently created presentations-The Yellow Methuselah and The Ar-
chaeology of Sleep-are centrally not political at all, though they have ob-
vious political implications. Antigone, of course, retains its fundamental
confrontation between the repressive power of the state and the commit-
ted, non-violent rebel, but I think it not unfair to credit Judith Malina's claim
that in the present political climate its focus has changed: without the
background of Vietnam protest, with the rise of feminist concerns, An-
tigone's sexual identity assumes an increased importance, and the play
now suggests a revolt against authoritarian patriarchy. Of the other presen-
tations, only Toller's The One and the Many (Masse Mensch) is primarily a
political work, but it is not a play that could have been produced in the
1960s because it posits what would have been considered then a divisive
and negative theme: the defeat of the non-violent aspects of the revolution
by the violent. (It must be noted that Frankenstein possessed more than a
trace of this theme.) Written in a Munich prison after the failure of the
Bavarian Revolution of 1919 by one who had participated in both the central
committee of the revolutionary body and in the string of disastrous events
that followed, Masse Mensch guiltily asks what caused the bloodshed. It is
a powerful indictment of the great political tragedy of our century which
challenges the revolutionary assumption that violence, abhorred as a
weapon of the warfare state, can be used against the state to destroy
violence itself. It is a conspicuously relevant choice for revival.
A shift in Living Theatre strategies can be noted: a movement away from

collectively created ensemble pieces back to the group's original reliance
on the ground texts of experimental or radical plays. Of the recent reper-
toire, only The Archaeologyof Sleep was not based on a modern classic (An-
tigone being more Brecht than Sophocles). The Yellow Methuselah is
essentially a condensation of Bernard Shaw's "metabiological penta-
teuch," Back to Methuselah, with the admixture of material from The Yellow
Sound by Wassily Kandinsky. In conjoining artists adaptor Hanon Reznikov
describes as "two iconoclasts ... bent on answering the needs of a dawn-
ing century," the group reached beyond politics to metaphysical specula-
tion on human destiny in an era in which the substantiality of matter has
been fundamentally challenged. However forced the wedding, or dubious
Shaw's doctrine of creative evolution, this speculation could certainly serve
as a viable source for theatrical elaboration. As could the fascinating sub-
ject of dreams, the root of Julian's speculations on The Archaeology of
Sleep. Denying that sleep is a "black hole" of nothingness but rather a time
of intense mental activity that influences every waking moment of life, the
piece intercuts dream images drawn from the members of the company
with lectures and demonstrations of experiments, with the Beck's
daughter, Isha Manna, as the archetypal dreamer around whom all revolves.
Political resonances arise not from the primary images (except the
Strangelovian experiments with Julian again doing his Frankensteinian
mad scientist), but from the contrast between the forces of logic and
order-the tyrannical Superego-and the mystical freedom of the unfet-
tered consciousness of the dreamer.
16
No, the problem was not the repertoire per se, but what the theatre did with
its material. Thematically, the work did demonstrate the will to confront
new realities in a new era, but aesthetically its realization proved inade-
quate to its subjects; faults of the theatre which had always existed but
which could at least partially be forgiven in light of the theatre's compen-
sating virtues were now magnified. The greatest problems arose from the
group's continued reliance on strategies derived from its exile period: the
dependence on provocation and forced audience involvement, and, most
fundamentally, the heterogeneous, multinational makeup of the company
itself. Though the Living Theatre has long been able to sustain its pro-
vocative role socially, as its innumerable conflicts with authority attest, it
has refused to recognize that as an aesthetic strategy provocation quickly
loses its cutting edge. True, this time around confrontations with the au-
dience are less hostile than in Paradise Now, but the core assumption re-
mains: involvement can be compelled, passivity aggressively breached. The
American avant-garde quickly learned the poverty of that assumption, but
here we find spectators still dragooned on stage, embarrassing audience
interrogations, and the aisles of the theatre continually invaded by per-
formers in enervating demonstration of breaking the proscenium barrier.
There is, of course, no reason why an imaginative director cannot use the
entire house, but it can no longer be assumed that that now familiar use is
still provocative.
The company itself is the major problem. Despite their consistent anti-
realist aesthetic, the Becks never really developed new acting technique,
THE ONE AND THE MANY
Cio 1 Kit
even in their pre-exile period. Productions were formally radical in response
to specific texts (e.g., The Brig) because the actors were able to find per-
sonal ways to animate the larger experimental designs, which were indeed
present. One reason Joe Chaikin stayed behind when the theatre went into
exile was to concentrate in the fledgling Open Theatre on developing
specific new acting techniques for the new radical repertoire. In the exile
period, of course, the question of technique was defiantly rejected as the
ideal of a commune of loving individuals rather than collaborating artists
became the principle of group composition. As Julian wrote then: "The ac-
tors at the Living Theatre are awkward, untutored, defiant of the conven-
tions which portray people who live in democracies, who are rational, good,
well-behaved, and who speak museum verse." And since the theatre
nomadically travelled all over Europe the people who attached themselves
to it were of many nationalities. A dangerous aesthetic developed: specific
language did not matter; since direct communication was paramount, the
polyglot group could play in any language, depending upon national con-
text. Chant, ritual, extreme physicalization replaced language as the princi-
ple means of expression. Within the radical framework of the Paradise Now
era, these values were theoretically understandable, though many critiques
of the work of that period addressed themselves specifically to the Living's
refusal to accept the reality that not all worthy individuals are worthy ar-
tists.
Given the Living Theatre's recent more reflective direction, the retention of
the aesthetic of the Pardise Now era is particularly unfortunate. Indeed, the
company is now more polyglot than ever. In the sixties the core of the
group, despite the European additions, was still American and the work
possessed an overall linguistic consistency. But this new group-apart
from the Becks, not one member remains from the late sixties-is pre-
dominantly non-American or non-English-speaking. The verbal result is a
cacaphony of accents and butchered English. What was so disturbing in
the presentations were not individual verbal atrocities, but the blithe
assumption that they didn't matter. No clash of accent was too bizarre to
deflect the aesthetic of direct communication. (E.g., "Tenk of eet dees way"
advises Ismene to her sister Judith's very American Antigone.) Surely a
Tower of Babel with linguistic integrity would have communicated more ef-
fectively than painful monolingual inadequacy. There were one or two
moments when performers spoke in their native languages and we rejoiced:
perhaps these actors are not so incompetent after all. We have indeed
learned from experimental theatre that language need not be the dominant
theatrical tool; but when it is used it must be with precision as the vessel of
a specific culture, particularly when it expresses a dramatic text. Even
Peter Brook seems to have learned this lesson.
Which raises a related, disquieting question about the company: is it

ironic that a theatre dedicated to the spirit of the non-hierarchical colle
should possess so little ensemble continuity? As the disappearance of
non-Beckian cells after the 1970 declaration reveals, the Living Theat
18
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SLEEP
the Becks, who remain the twin stars which attract new foreign bodies into
their orbit. True, major theatres rely on dominant artistic leadership, bu
surely the absence of a sustained core of personnel in the Living Theatre
must at least partially explain its inability to create-a la Grotowsk
Chaikin, Ludlam, Mabou Mines-a consistent performance vocabular
based upon long collaborative interaction. Without a tradition of ex
perimental technique, the Living Theatre falls back, I fear, on facile at
titudinizing and imprecise physicalizations of extreme states of agitation
and, conversely, meditative, spaced-out transcendence.
Space precludes an extended critique of the recent repertory, but I hope

have sufficiently explained my critical displeasure. I hope it is also clea
that I take no satisfaction in these misgivings, which cannot be said fo
many negative critiques I heard or read. I have traced my long journey with
the Living Theatre precisely in order to place its current failure against
record of honorable accomplishment only too easily forgotten in a cultur
dominated by the question: what have you done for me lately? Lik
everything in art or life, the Living Theatre was never unflawed, but for most
of its history it was important. That importance has waned if not disap
peared, and I have suggested several reasons why this should be so: the
19
failure to develop a sustained ensemble based on shared technique, the in-
ability to replace stale strategies of provocation, the unwillingness to face
the specific density of language. Theatre is an art of time and place, and
these failings reveal that the Living Theatre has suffered greatly from both
history and expatriation. History is fickle; it confers importance on artists
whose visions offer ideas whose time has come, and then pulls that impor-
tance away when social imperatives and perceptions shift. The Living
Theatre has undeniably suffered this fate, though not without protest.
However unfashionable, it will persist in its denial that (as the New York
Times put it recently) "money is the long hair of the '80s." If the Becks'
social idealism now seems so naive it is perhaps more judgment of our time
than of them. In this respect, I salute their indefatigable persistence.
But the wandering this persistence has necessitated has exacted an even
greater toll than history. Place-rootedness-is essential for a theatre's
continued growth, and the long exile of the Living Theatre has dried up its
sources of creative energy. It remains a hybrid without roots-both and
neither American nor European. The recent American season was stillborn
because it was so removed from the sensibility of our current experiment.
After poineering many of the strategies that created this new experiment,
the Living Theatre was not around to witness its evolution. There is not a
touch in their work of the cool experiment of the seventies, the distanced,
fragmented precision of the new radical theatre of Foreman, Mabou Mines,
the Wooster Group. The Living Theatre precociously first spoke the perfor-
mance language of Brecht and Artaud but never moved from childhood to
maturity. Had it remained part of the American experimental community it
would have inevitably shared reciprocal aesthetic energy. Nor has it helped
that, as with so many things American, Europe has tended to celebrate it
for the wrong reasons: for its aims rather than achievements, for the Becks'
exemplary status as martyrs to America's cultural repression rather than
for the innovation of their work. Home, Robert Frost has written, "is the
place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." The cruel
dismissal of their latest work must surely have confirmed the Becks' feeling
that Europe is their real home, since America doesn't want them. And I'm
made very sad by this thought, because though once a champion, I too have
been one of the rejectors, a sorrowing witness to an American tragedy.
Gerald Rabkin is a Contributing Editor of PAJ.
20

The Return of The Living Theatre

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The Return of the Living Theatre: Paradise Lost

Author(s): Gerald Rabkin

At the intermission of The Yellow Methuselah-one of the four offerings in

I thought back to another time, another country-the America of Nixon,

other word) disaster.

_ M _ . ; ' D e : RF--i- ! ~~!;d ' i:~:~ i~ ~ -

thar,nttepltcl tt owihteBcs aeawy enops

ed.~~~~~ Aatimewe rawyrigndsupee vrAe

A shift in Living Theatre strategies can be noted: a movement away from

THE ONE AND THE MANY

Which raises a related, disquieting question about the company: is it

Space precludes an extended critique of the recent repertory, but I hope

Gerald Rabkin is a Contributing Editor of PAJ.

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