Living Theatre

Living Theatre, experimental Off-Broadway group formed in New York in 1951 by Julian Beck (1925–85) and his wife Judith Malina (1926– ), who had been one of Piscator's students. Their company first appeared in public at the Cherry Lane Theatre, one of the first productions of their original and iconoclastic career being Gertrude Stein's Dr Faustus Lights the Lights. From 1954 until 1956 they performed in a loft at Broadway and 100th Street, but it was closed by the Building Department because its 65 seats were considered too many for safety. In 1959 they opened a theatre seating 162 at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue, and used it until 1963, when they were evicted for non-payment of taxes. During this period they produced The Connection (1959; London, 1961) by Jack Gelber (1932– ), a play about drug addiction involving some improvisation in performance. The final production before the company left for Europe was Kenneth Brown's The Brig (1963; London, 1964), based on his experiences in a US Marine Corps prison.

During the 1960s the Living Theatre was the most influential of the experimental groups which emerged from America. In 1961 it won three first prizes at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris, and from 1964 to 1968 it toured Europe with four pieces made by Collective Creation in which they played themselves and interacted with the spectators. Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (1964) was a series of exercises and improvisations; Frankenstein (1965) dealt with the creation of an artificial man through acculturation; Antigone (1967), based on Brecht, justified civil disobedience as a protest against the war in Vietnam; and Paradise Now (1968) was intended to inaugurate a non-violent anarchist revolution by freeing the individual. In 1968 and 1969 the group toured the USA with these four pieces, which they presented in London in 1969. In 1970 Beck, Judith Malina, and several other members of the group went to Brazil with the intention of working with oppressed minorities, but were arrested and imprisoned on drug charges and deported to the USA. They continued developing new performance techniques, mainly in the service of political manifestations. The company is still active in New York under the leadership of Judith Malina and her present husband.