{ 8 }
Rehearsals for the Living Theatre production of The Connection, scheduled to open in July 1959, were going badly. In late May, director Judith Malina had yet to cast the parts. The jazz musicians who would both act and play in the production were often incapacitated by drugs. In early June, after Jackie McLean, an immensely talented alto saxophonist, arrived late for rehearsals, Malina asked playwright Jack Gelber if he thought McLean was high on drugs. “That’s heroin, baby,” replied Gelber. McLean “faltered and fell, his eyes quivered, dilated, closed.” When McLean finally shook it off, he apologized to Malina for being so “unfocussed and wandering.” The apology itself was hardly reassuring: “I won’t do it … often.”1
As Gelber recalled, the musicians “were always high on heroin” and were so unreliable that they had to be replaced regularly. A few weeks later, one of the musicians was strung out, while another could not play unless he got some drugs quickly into his system. Each day seemed to sprout another crisis. In the midst of rehearsals, Gelber rushed to tell Malina that someone had “taken an overdose in [the] men’s room.” Sure enough, “slumped behind the toilet wall” was some fellow. When he finally came out of it, he explained, “I’m just tired.” His sapped energy may have had something to do with the “size 24 hypodermic needle” on the floor of the restroom.2 Another actor went berserk, “throwing things at the other actors and trying to kill people.” Judith and her husband, Julian Beck, were forced to take him to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, an especially difficult task for them since they questioned the very notion of insanity.3
These events were, as Gelber realized, perfectly correlated to the play. Gelber intended The Connection to bring “drama and reality” closer together. It pivoted around a group of junkies, from varied backgrounds, waiting for their drug fixes to be delivered to an apartment. If such a scenario made up the entirety of the play, then it would have simply mimicked the existential angst of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, produced in New York only a few years earlier. Instead, The Connection was anchored deep within the New Sensibility: chaotic rather than ordered, almost a happening, on- and offstage, with a gritty realism punctuated by jazz improvisation.
But more was happening on the Living Theatre stage. One character, named Jaybird, has written a play about heroin addiction. Jim Dunn is presenting the play, serving as an emcee of sorts, sometimes as a director of a film of the event. He is accompanied by two photographers, who over the course of the play exchange clothing and identity with one another; at the end of the play, one of the photographers has decided that he wants a dose of heroin. Musicians, McLean included, are also on the stage, both as participants in the waiting game and in the dialogue, but also jamming, less an accompaniment to the action than as a central part of the play’s ontology.4 Sometimes they seem to be stoned. At various points in the drama, actors leave the stage to join the audience.
The actors addressed the audience from the stage. Viewers were told that they need not make a “connection” between “jazz and narcotics.” Jim states that he is striving for “the authenticity of … improvised art.” Leach, another junkie, remarks, “I mean this is a play, man. It’s not really real” (44). Solly, an intellectual junkie, lectures: “Suicide is not uncommon among us. The overdose of heroin is where the frail line of life and death swings in a silent breeze of ecstatic summer.”5
Jaybird’s play had a script, but he preferred that the dialogue and music be improvisational and spontaneous. As the play progresses, Jaybird grows increasingly frustrated. He had wanted four heroes in the play, but none has emerged. Why, he asks Cowboy, the man who has procured the heroin, “can’t you act like a hero? It’s the basis of Western drama, you know. Can’t you give an heroic speech?”6
Meanwhile, the effects of the drug-taking led to chaos onstage, with some actors nodding off, others falling, still others wandering off the stage. As one of the photographers is readied for his first dose of heroin, Jaybird protests: “It’s not supposed to work this way. I’ve given you latitude. But this is too much.” One of the addicts, Leach, calls Jaybird’s bluff, telling him he’s the playwright: “You’re supposed to know all about it. I mean this is all a play, man. It’s not really real.” The more that the actors swear that they are not really using heroin, the more the plea rings hollow. “You don’t think we’d use the real stuff? After all, narcotics are illegal.”7
But as the characters tighten the tourniquets around their arms to make their veins pop out, they appear to be going beyond the playwright’s expectations. Larry Rivers, who had considered being an actor for the play but ended up doing posters for it, reported that “there was real heroin in the capsules handed out to the anxious actors waiting onstage, some of whom shot up in front of the audience.” The audience, according to Rivers, was titillated by this dose of realism. In her journals, however, the usually forthcoming Malina made no mention of onstage drug use.8
To further diminish distance between audience and actors and between “drama and reality,” during the intermission performers mingled with the audience, hitting them up for a few bucks so that they might presumably be able to make a score later. Once the play resumes onstage, one character thanks “each and every kind, gentle and good contributor in the audience. You have helped a most noble cause … that flows in our veins.”9
In its controlled chaos, the Living Theatre’s production of The Connection anticipated what would soon be the newest expression of avant-garde rumbling: the happening. Just a few months later the painter and performance artist Allan Kaprow (yet another devotee of John Cage) staged what many consider the first happening, although obvious precursors can be found in Dada and in Cage’s Theater Piece no. 1. Kaprow’s piece, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, at the Reuben Gallery in New York City, featured carefully constructed sets. In a sense, there was nothing improvisational about the piece. But in the process of experiencing it, as gallery goers moved from room to room, changes in lights, sets, poetry, music, and speeches happened. In one room performers squeezed oranges. Actors and audience intermingled; the experience seemed singular and original—a veritable three-ring circus of sensory exhilaration. Kaprow maintained that the happening, building on the work of Jackson Pollock, demanded that “we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street.” The artist must now “utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch.” And it was unique—resistant to repetition or purchase, thus challenging the monetary modus vivendi of the art world.10 What Kaprow wanted in his happenings, as did Judith Malina in her theater, was a total work of art, unlimited in its range and materials, unafraid to err in excess.
For The Connection, the limitations of the stage, the melding of the music and dialogue, the self-reflexivity tied to realism signaled its status as a sort of happening. The play ended with playwright Jaybird pacing back and forth amid the chaos onstage, saying to the audience, “I wanted to do something far out. Yes, I’m guilty of trying to have a little shock value.”11 Both Malina and Beck had been enthused by reading Ginsberg’s Howl in March 1958: “It is,” Malina noted, “a scream of anguish and beatific love.” Its focus on madness appealed to Beck: “I feel that it is my poem.”12 Meditating in the early 1960s about the creative value of madness, Beck announced: “Go into the madhouse and find out the truth.” He proudly declared that the actors at the Living Theatre were “awkward” and “untutored.” This allowed the Living Theatre to be more real and raw. “All niceness must then be exploded,” Beck asserted.13
Imagine this potential scenario. Louis Calta, a second-string theater reviewer for the New York Times, has been unimpressed by the first half of the play. He stands in the lobby during the intermission, contemplating what he is going to write in his review. Perhaps he is chatting with someone. One of the performers, with the befogged eyes of a real heroin addict, nudges toward Calta and says, “Hey, man, dig this, I need some bread for a fix. You cool with that? Spread a little jam on my hand, won’t ya?” Wishing he was anywhere else in the city but the theater lobby, Calta returns to his seat, fidgeting and glancing at his wrist watch for the rest of the performance, waiting for the moment he can exact recompense.
The Connection, Calta writes the next day in the New York Times, is “nothing more than a farrago of dirt, small-time philosophy, empty talk and extended runs of ‘cool’ music. There is a quality of sensationalism that undoubtedly will offend the squares.” Calta proudly considered himself one of their number, offended by contrivances intended to engage the audience in the action of the play. Such “improvisations” struck Calta as “frustrating,” like “looking through a peephole into a darkened room.” Calta probably wanted to grab his hat and make for the nearest exit when during the play a character “rhetorically screams at the audience and asks: ‘Why are you here, stupid? You want to watch people suffer?’ ” The Connection, Calta concluded, demonstrated how heroin users fall into “a condition of listless weariness.”14 That was what Calta claimed he felt as a member of the audience.
The review was devastating. The Living Theatre had just spent a huge amount of money and put immense effort into constructing a new theater on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. This theater had been the dream of Julian Beck and Judith Malina for over a decade. Now, while the paint on the walls had barely dried, it appeared to be in jeopardy, done in by a play that has offended a reviewer for the most influential paper in the city. Disaster loomed.
When we first encountered Judith Malina earlier in this volume, it was New Year’s Day 1952, and she was oscillating between despair and elation. She ached with embarrassment over the debacle the night before when she had lost it onstage. Yet, after hearing Cage’s Music of Changes, she was exhilarated by artistic energy and a desire for change. As she puts it in a poem, “The change must come now! / Even tomorrow will be too late.” But how can she channel her overflow of energy? “I desire to burn; but then I desire so many contradictory things.”15
The life of Judith Malina revolved around her desire to act and direct, to be an avant-gardist of the highest order. She had remained married to Julian, and together they cared for their child, Garrick. Their relationship was intense; each shared ambition for the Living Theatre. They were hardly lovers anymore; Julian’s inclinations, sometimes open, other times repressed, were homosexual in nature. Judith was a lusty and active heterosexual, scooting through lovers, ranging from composers Lou Harrison and Alan Hovhaness to writer James Agee. Hovhaness wrote of his love for Malina: “Your beauty, love for your talents, for your brilliance, and most of all love for your passions.”16 Yet her passions remained frustrated, and she sought guidance in therapy sessions with Paul Goodman (also a novelist, critic, and more), whose sexism sometimes sapped her confidence, while she also tried to prove herself Julian’s equal as an artist. It was a rocky relationship.
During these years, Malina had become an antiwar, antinuclear activist. Along with Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, Malina refused to heed air raid warnings and drills, maintaining that they promoted a false sense of security. Arrested in 1955, Malina’s spunk and her disdain for authority quickly came into play as she jousted with the judge. Her in-court screaming earned her a trip to Bellevue to determine whether she was psychologically sound. Thanks to a good lawyer, Malina did not linger long in the asylum.17
In 1957 she again challenged authority by refusing to take shelter during an air-raid drill. “We wanted to say no to the man in power … to say no to the cynics who fear that love won’t work, and to the fools who think that hate will.” Sent to the Women’s House of Detention (Julian was also arrested and confined elsewhere), she came under Day’s protection and guidance, spending much of her day mopping floors and finding her “mind disavowed.” But she found relief in establishing close relationships with other prisoners, who were mostly incarcerated for prostitution and drug use, and the experience convinced her that community was not a utopian dream. If it was possible in prison, then why not in the theater, too?18 Passionate about pacifism, Malina was, as always, heady with contradictions. As she put it in a haiku: “Hating violence / When I struck my beloved, / My hand hated me.”19
When they were not in prison, Julian and Judith scurried to attend cultural events. They were regulars on the rounds of theater and art openings, and the parties that followed. It must have been exhausting. On a Saturday night in April 1958, Malina and Beck went to Hoboken for a party celebrating Goodman’s novel Empire City. They then returned to the city for another party, at artist Rachel Rosenthal’s, where they mingled with Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg. Also present was experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who “spurred on the bongo players.” Such gatherings were, of course, a fun outlet: “Here one laughs and enjoys oneself thoroughly and then returns to the same tears that had been left midair.”20 But these parties also helped Julian and Judith make connections, raise funds, and gain sponsors so that the Living Theatre might live again.21
The Cherry Lane incarnation of the Living Theatre had ceased in the summer of 1952 when the New York City Fire Department declared the premises a fire hazard. Malina was so incensed that she reportedly ran after a fire department official while waving a bamboo spear that had been used in a production. Beck and Malina scoured the city for theater spaces, sometimes performing in makeshift circumstances. To support themselves, and to keep the dream of a theater alive, Julian got work at the New York Public Library, typing out entries for the card catalogue; later he worked as a shoe salesman.22 They found a space for the Living Theatre, close to their Upper West Side apartment. It was hardly perfect, since it lacked city approval, sufficient exits, and seating capacity. Nonetheless, Judith and Julian grabbed the opportunity in 1953 to have a home for their productions. After many run-ins with authorities, the theater was shut down in December 1955, for having sixty people in the audience for a theater that allowed seating for only fifteen.23 The search began again.
Finally, in 1957, the Living Theatre, phoenix-like, reappeared. The new space had been a department store—its five stories offered plenty of room for the theater and offices. One floor would become rehearsal space for Cunningham’s dance company. But the existing interior had to be gutted and redone. With the ardor of teens, Julian and Judith, along with supporters, set about the task.
They regularly put in twelve-hour shifts. First they had to gut much of the building; “six or seven of us, not even stopping to joke or to rest” tore down plaster walls and stripped away “dry old wood” into what looked like a funeral pyre. Then the process of rebuilding began, interrupted regularly by new problems (leaky roof, inadequate funds, failure to secure proper permits).
Throughout the summer of 1958 they labored. Stacks of lumber, over three thousand bricks, and other materials had to be moved into the structure, and reed-thin Julian staggered under the weight, while Judith was “bewildered utterly” by the challenge. But things slowly emerged; “The stage rose marvelous and mysterious out of the tile floor.” Soon, Judith was upholstering the theater seats with “black and white striped awning material” and then “painting the seats in their subtle tri colors, a beige, a gray, a dull violet.” She found the work arduous but “satisfying.” They painted the theater ceiling black, the walls with “alternate stripes of black paint,” all the while fending off creditors, battling unions, and beginning to cast for their initial production: William Carlos Williams’s Many Loves. With the dawning of 1959, things looked up, as the finishing touches were applied to the theater, including “two copper enameled doors” that “recall[ed] the great doors of the Italian cathedrals.”24
They desperately needed Many Loves to be a hit. It was a wise, somewhat safe production choice. Williams had composed the play in 1940, but it never had a major staging. Williams, who had helped Ginsberg along in his career, had also served as a mentor to Beck. The play had some nice experimental touches, offered slightly provocative sexual content, and was sophisticated in a Noel Coward sense, yet with rougher-edged figures and settings. One character proclaimed, “The theater is a trial, truly. It’s not a play thing. But in the theater to kill you’ve got to kill! … Or they’ll walk out on you.”25
Audiences did not walk out on the play but the production did not kill either. It received a respectful review from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, although he struggled to understand the relationship between the three one-act plays, concluding them to be mere “character sketches.” Malina’s acting was solid (in three roles, “a strumpet,” “a lesbian,” and “a garrulous mother” with nary a maternal instinct) and Beck’s stage sets imaginative.26
More than a middling success was needed. The next scheduled production, by Goodman, based on the story of Abraham and Isaac, showed no signs of blockbuster status. It was a “flop,” Julian acknowledged, because it was moralistic and philosophical rather than imaginative and creative. It lasted for seven performances, and the financial situation of the Living Theatre daily grew more dire.27
They were determined to survive as a theater company and to live up to their principles. Malina and Beck insisted, “The theatre must be worthy of the life of each spectator.” The “actor breathes” and the “spectator lives” and through some symbiosis, “life is intensified.” The theater that they envisioned harkened back to its Greek origins, speaking in a universal language, engaging everyone in a common ritual. The goal, Malina and Beck proclaimed, was “catharsis,” attained by the willingness of actor, director, producer to “expose themselves, body and spirit … at great risk.” In turn, this would “produce catharsis and enlightenment for an anonymous audience.” To reach this goal, “music, painting, sculpture, and dance” were “essential elements of the performance.” Style, too, was of the essence. But it could not be derivative; it must be part of a process of discovery and experimentation.28 Nothing less would suffice, but would such ideals attract audiences to the theater?
Little did they know that salvation was near to hand, thanks to Gelber’s The Connection. It all began one evening in late March 1958, when Gelber, a young man with sandy-colored hair and an agreeable demeanor (“a hipster version of Huckleberry Finn”), showed up at the Malina/Beck apartment toting a manuscript of his play.29 “The Becks were very nice,” Gelber remembered. He was impressed and also taken aback by the bourgeois nature of their apartment, its book-lined walls. He was relieved to find out, after a brief discussion, that “they were very sincere and obviously knew something about drugs. They were asking me the right questions. They were not corny.”30
Gelber had been born in Chicago, to a working-class Jewish family. After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana, he wandered around, working at jobs ranging from an apprentice steam fitter in a shipyard, to a rare-book dealer, to a “pressman and duplicating machine operator” at the headquarters of the United Nations. He had been writing short stories, but they had failed to find publishers because, as he put it, “My work falls between the academic and the slick.”31
Gelber claimed that he had no special interest in the theater. But he was enmeshed in the jazz world, albeit in an odd manner. He enjoyed the music but was “attracted” to its “listeners.” What he liked about them was that, he said, “They were either prostitutes whom I wanted to fuck, or people interested in literature.” At the same time, living in San Francisco, he felt part of the beat scene and found it “stimulating,” And he wanted to write, coming up with an idea for a play about addicts, connected in an “organic manner” through jazz music: “I had to write a play… . I had no choice.” He was most proud of how the “play’s structure follow[ed] the form of a jazz improvisation, with actors and musicians giving solos based on a common theme.” Gelber wanted his work to be seen as sui generis. When asked if he had been influenced by the Nobel-winning playwright Luigi Pirandello, he replied that he had been influenced by many things, including his mother.32
Such cockiness was not in evidence the night he had presented his play to Malina and Beck. He was twenty-six years old, with a wife, and a child soon to arrive. His play about drug addicts had failed to find a producer, but he hoped that Malina and Beck, with their reputation for openness to something different, might give the manuscript a read. “I waited a long time for them to call,” Gelber recalled. “I was like every nervous new author.”33
They agreed to check it out, reportedly depositing it atop a stack of manuscripts, perhaps seventy in number, which they had gathered in their bathroom, where they tended to read submissions. The premise of the play—its improvisational jazz, its self-consciousness, and its gritty realism—immediately appealed to Julian. Fifty years later, Malina recalled that he ran into the bedroom announcing, “This is the play we want to do.”34
Gelber later stated that it was Malina who had been immediately excited by the play, running out of the bathroom screaming to Julian, “It’s terrific, it’s great,” However, Malina was at first skeptical.35 Not about the content, certainly; she was familiar with drug addicts from her time at the Women’s House of Detention. Rather, her hesitancy concerned the play’s overly self-conscious avant-garde dimensions. By 1959, however, it was becoming less unusual for playwrights to break down barriers between audience and actors—this was something that Pirandello had done in Tonight We Improvise, a play that the Living Theatre would also stage.
Malina came around, and the play was on. Much to Gelber’s surprise and delight, he was immediately summoned to help cast the play. He admired Beck and Malina’s dedication to avant-garde ideals, such as rejecting divisions between life and work.36 Malina loved interacting with Gelber: “He is shrewd, canny, enigmatic.” He had connections with the world of junkies that lent bite to his play. Years earlier he had been renting a room on the Lower East Side, living with a young woman from the Middle East. All of a sudden one morning, while he was stirring cocoa over the stove, “police burst in with pistols.” The young woman had recently served time for drug use, and the cops figured the apartment would be full of illicit drugs. The cops, he claimed, thought the cocoa might be heroin. They did manage to find a small amount of marijuana in the apartment, and Gelber decided to take the rap for it, even though it was the girl’s, not his. He spent several weeks incarcerated in the Tombs before being released with a suspended sentence. Gelber put his familiarity with junkies into the play and brilliantly conjoined it with his appreciation for jazz improvisation.37
Malina’s enthusiasm for the play coincided roughly with the period when she had been introduced to Antonin Artaud’s revolutionary ideas about theater. As noted in chapter 1, M. C. Richards had preached about Artaud at Black Mountain College in 1952, and she had long been translating his key text, The Theater and Its Double. Malina was friends with Richards and probably began reading the translated work in the summer of 1958 while working on the theater. In March 1959, with the Living Theatre building imagined as a space not only for plays but for all sorts of performances (dance, poetry, discussion), Malina invited Richards to lecture on Artaud. The lecture by Richards, according to Malina, was “remarkably brave” for its dedication to the cause of a reformation in the status and function of the theater along Artaudian principles.38
While many of the plays presented in the past by the Living Theatre had an undercurrent of political content, they were generally allegorical in nature, rarely engaging with the contemporary moment. Gelber’s The Connection was hip with a vengeance, full of existential themes and with challenging music, staging, and happenings, of a sort. This fit the prescription of Artaud’s notion of the “theater of the cruelty,” of an assault on the complacency of the audience that might result in a shift in perception that would in time destroy the authoritarian social state—no small order while the finances of the Living Theatre plummeted and unfavorable initial reviews proliferated.39
The negative review by Calta in the New York Times was quickly joined by one in the New York Journal American, a lowbrow newspaper, which stated, “To call last night’s performance the work of amateurs would be an insult to amateurs.” The reviewer disdained the play’s four-letter-word usage and its criticisms of religion, morality, and patriotism. Judith Crist, reviewing The Connection in the New York Herald Tribune, was succinct in her condemnation: “The play deals with junk, and it is junk!”40
Malina had been pleased with the production. She had presented the play in a consciously crude fashion, demanding that the actors refrain from wearing makeup. And given the applause at the conclusion, she was certain that the audience appreciated what the Living Theatre had accomplished. It was even a victory in the Artaudian sense, because the audience, according to Malina, had “shook with terror and delight” at the content and staging of the play. She recalled a story from philosopher Martin Buber about a saint that had humbled himself by offering “his own excrement” to the Gods. Had she done this with her play? And had the gods, the critics, judged her sinful?41
What was to be done? Armed with a cause, Malina and Beck drew upon their connections with New York’s avant-garde, seeking influential endorsements for The Connection. Malina was a fan of Allen Ginsberg, considering Howl “a poem of vast significance.” In January 1959, she had cried during his reading of his poem “Kaddish.” Noticing her runny mascara, Ginsberg was delighted: “That’s always been my ambition—to make people cry by reading my poems.”42 In August, Ginsberg attended a performance of The Connection, and he promised Malina to write about the play for the Village Voice, which he did, finding the play “very down and accurate about people, played by great cats.” The play was “a real turn-on to a native American theatre.” Ginsberg concluded: “And therefore I declare that any drama critic who attacks this play is an out and out phony.”43 Other worthies were coaxed or cajoled by Malina to weigh in. Sometimes it proved easy; Malina had “boldly introduced” herself to Norman Mailer after he had seen the play, and got him to write something positive about it. He called The Connection “dangerous, true, artful, and alive.”44
On August 24, 1959, a tall and strikingly handsome man arrived at the Living Theatre, in response to Allen Ginsberg’s plea. This was Kenneth Tynan, the influential drama critic. During intermission, he proved to be enthusiastic about what he had seen. Every day following this, Malina wondered if a review would be forthcoming; after a week, she dropped him a reminder note. But no review. The theater’s financial situation grew more horrendous. Con Edison had given them twenty-four hours to cough up $176 or have their electricity cut. The landlord was threatening eviction, and the telephone bill remained unpaid. In October, Tynan, accompanied by “two blondes,” showed up again for the play to make sure that his initial impressions had not been in error. The next issue of the New Yorker proved that Malina’s wait had been worth it.45
Tynan raved about the set, staging, acting, direction, and authenticity of the production. Tynan proclaimed The Connection “the first really interesting new play to appear off-Broadway in a good long time.” While he went on at some length about how addiction was a tactical error in the battle against conformity, he remained impressed with how the addicts rang true to their own addictions. Gelber’s lines, which might appear “flat, lifeless” in print, onstage were “vibrant with implication”—marking him as a leading voice in the beat movement. Malina, wrote Tynan, had done a wonderful job directing the play, managing to have a bunch of characters onstage—including musicians who both played and acted—without any of them getting lost or confused in the shuffle of the drama.46 “The extravagant praise of the New Yorker’s review,” Malina reported, “astonishes me as much as the initial insulting reviews stunned me.” Alas, “our debts mount with our glory.”47
The glory continued to mount in early fall of 1959 with an avalanche of positive reviews. In perhaps the most erudite review, Robert Brustein, in “Junkies and Jazz,” acknowledged that the play was nontraditional and it “goes nowhere,” nor at the end is there any sense of moral enlightenment. Luckily, Brustein found this refreshing. The drama was truthful—in an existential sense that Brustein in a book a few years later would refer to as part of “the theatre of revolt”: revolt against artifice, pallid moralism, and the propriety of progress. The play itself was a hearty slap against inauthenticity and in favor of revolt. It spoke to the essentials of the human condition.48
Even the New York Times reconsidered The Connection. Its chief drama critic, Brooks Atkinson, understood how viewers of the play may have felt “mangled” by the sordidness of the play. And some might be dispirited by its refusal to condemn the use of narcotics, or by the “morbid languor” of its scenes, or by the fact that there was little “memorable” in the dialogue. Although the jazz music offered some “sizzling” numbers, its presence was tangential to the action taking place on the stage. After this recitation of demurrals, Atkinson admitted that The Connection was “an engrossing piece of theatre in an obsessive style.” Present in the play were some of the insignia of a new sensibility—improvisation, spontaneity, and refusal to adhere to traditional genre definitions. The drama was an “experience,” at once original and real. Malina’s direction, he announced, had “purged the play of artificiality,” ironically through artificial methods (the play within the play, the engagement of the actors with the audience, the self-consciousness by the actors about being in a play).49
The Living Theatre’s next production, perhaps appropriately, was Pirandello’s avant-garde classic Tonight We Improvise—another play designed to challenge the passive viewing habits of audiences. It was a middling success, running into the middle of 1960. But critical acclaim came to the Living Theatre when Gelber was awarded an Obie prize from the Village Voice for best play of the year. According to Living Theatre biographer John Tytell, Gelber and others in the company succumbed to what Beck called “Mammon’s revenge,” becoming prickly about profits.50 In defense of Gelber, he had a wife and child to support, and he never disdained making a living from his theater work. “I was always fighting with the Becks about money,” he recalled, but he found that he loved the fame and fortune (however fleeting it might be) and being part of the New York artistic scene.51 By the end of 1959, Malina was a leading light of the stage, accepted by mainstream theater critics and playwrights. As praise for her direction of The Connection accumulated, she began to worry about “being trapped” into the mainstream theater, in the manner of the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him.52
The attention garnered by The Connection translated into new opportunities. Malina and the Living Theatre went to Paris in June 1961 to perform the play. Kenneth Tynan’s sister-in-law, Shirley Clarke decided to make a film version of The Connection (leading to yet another court fight with authorities that wanted to censor the film for its depiction of drug culture).53
But the law was not finished yet with Malina and Beck. The Internal Revenue Service charged stiff interest fees on unpaid tax bills. In 1963, authorities seized the Living Theatre building for nonpayment of taxes. Malina and Beck, along with some of their actors, occupied their own building, refusing police orders to vacate. They even staged a performance, in the midst of this mania, of the play The Brig—a powerful play about the brutal treatment of marines imprisoned for various infractions of military rules.54 The excitement ended when Malina, Beck, and cast members and supporters were arrested and charged with a medley of crimes. They used the proceedings to signal their anarchist disdain for the court—infuriating the judge and alienating the jurors. The courtroom had been transformed into an absurdist play of sorts, but one with real consequences. Malina proudly refused to allow the prosecutor to refer to them as guilty: “I can assert my innocence at any time in my life … and you cannot stop me! The only way to stop me is by cutting out my tongue.” Beck announced that he cherished as a “moral obligation” his right “to demean the majesty of the court.” The jury, unsurprisingly, found the rebellious Malina and Beck guilty, and the judge also held them in contempt of court.55
Since restrictions had not been placed on their travel, they embarked by ship to Europe for a period of exile and experimentation, only returning to the United States in 1968. Malina and Beck became ever more devoted to a radical theater based on Artaudian principles. They wanted to produce plays that reshaped the consciousness of audiences, which refused to bow to theatrical conventions, and to build a company that would be an alternative community. Malina, too, was moving now with more assurance into new directions, coming more and more to appreciate the value of spontaneity and improvisation rather than adherence to fixed scripts. By the mid-1960s, productions of the Living Theatre had become famous or infamous, according to one’s tastes, for their barely controlled chaos, strong political content, and wild liberation. Malina wanted actors to engage in “exemplary actions” to banish barriers between them and the audience.56
In Paradise Now (1968), audience members were encouraged to come onstage to fondle (and to be fondled in turn) by seminude cast members. Certain phrases were repeated throughout the play: “I don’t know how to stop the wars”; “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”; “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off.” Political mantras, bedlam onstage, and sexually tinged interactions between actors and audience were intended by Beck and Malina to violate all Broadway taboos.
They certainly violated taboos in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 27, 1968. With Malina and Beck only recently returned from their four-year European exile, the performance of Paradise Now offended New Haven officials, who claimed that a sixteen-year-old had been participating in the onstage revelry, with only “a ribbon around his waist.” Beck was arrested wearing “only a loin cloth” and charged along with others in the cast with indecent exposure.
Robert Brustein, who eight years earlier had praised The Connection, and who was now dean of the Yale School of Drama, defended the production on civil liberty rather than aesthetic grounds. He called the performance “a controlled happening” that was “remarkably harmless and even gentle.” Yet, ever the critic, Brustein noted that he had “found the production tedious and without much theatrical value.” Beck, in contrast, seconded by Malina, announced with pride, “We’re breaking down the barriers that exist between art and life, barriers that keep most men outside the gates of paradise.”57
Other former supporters such as Eric Bentley by 1968 had parted company with the Living Theatre. As he put it, “The LT has taken leave of its senses,” not in an interesting, temporary sense but as a mode of being. He had grown tired of their political rhetoric and pose, their “various insults against the audience.” Other critics chimed in, accusing the Living Theatre of practicing a form of left-wing fascism, of sloganeering, of bad acting. Being arrested and criticized for their excesses became for Malina and Beck a badge of courage, proof that at least on the stage they had entered into some place of paradise.58