A bedraggled and bemused Judith Malina stumbled along the thickly fogged streets of Greenwich Village on New Year’s Day 1952. The “pleasingly mournful sound” of foghorns briefly interrupted her malaise. She felt her life to be in ruins—“like a room in great disorder.”
At twenty-five years of age, the exotically beautiful Malina was already a fixture in local avant-garde circles. An actress, writer, and director, blessed with nervous energy and enthusiasm, Malina, along with her husband, Julian Beck, had worked tirelessly for six years to create the Living Theatre, now housed in the Cherry Lane Theater. She was already considered something of a “taste bender” and a rebel. In 1949, Malina had confided to her journal, “My rebellion is all that I have.” Now even that seemed insufficient.1
On New Year’s Eve a disaster had occurred during the opening performance of Kenneth Rexroth’s four-act play Beyond the Mountains, a tedious, demanding three-hour production. Malina was to perform three roles, Iphigenia, Phaedra, and Berenike (Electra). Appearing as Phaedra, fairly early in the play, Malina had just finished her sensual “Minotaur dance,” with piano and cello accompaniment. She wore a flowing garment, complete with veil. Movement proceeded with Noh-like restraint. Sitting down and eyeing Hippolytus standing side stage, she recited the leaden dialogue: Hippolytus: “I have taken on the penance/ For a career of lust and blood.” Phaedra stunned, replied: “I am amazed. I cannot / Believe it is you speaking. / I have loved and hated you.” Then she proclaimed: “Someday they may discover the moon’s held in its orbit by the menstruation of women.”2
A young oboist in the orchestra pit “began to laugh uncontrollably.” The sparse audience joined in the merriment. Malina was not amused. She ripped off her veil and rushed offstage, stunning cast and audience alike. The stage manager, Martin Macklin, warned Malina, “Get back on stage or I’ll slap you.” While the laughter had subsided, Malina remained frozen. Macklin’s slap failed to return her to the stage. Instead, she fled into the dark of the streets and the blaring of New Year’s Eve horns.
First she rushed to the apartment house of Harald Brixel, a former boyfriend, but he was not home. She sagged, weeping in the corridor. From another apartment a sculptor named Janio emerged, full of sympathy. They entered his apartment and chatted about yoga, Buddhism, and more. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony played on the gramophone; in its fourth movement Malina could hear the words: “The angelic voices / gladden our senses / so that all awaken for joy.” She and Janio made love. But this awakened little joy.
Malina left the apartment before midnight, en route to her favorite hangout, the San Remo Cafe, on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets. “In the San Remo Café where the tiles grow dirty … we gather to meet our loves, in this part of heaven,” she wrote.3 Malina ached for camaraderie and happiness but found the crowded bar’s atmosphere forlorn. At midnight, she joined others to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” After drinking too much, she took to the streets anew, this time in search of another former lover, composer Lou Harrison. She finally ended up spending night’s fading hours at the house of a different friend, without sexual intercourse occurring.
The past few years had been both exciting and exasperating for Malina. Many of her days were spent hurrying to casting offices, auditioning for any available role. Rejection hurt, but so did the occasional commercial gig, which caused her to feel ashamed: “I’ve forgotten that I’m an artist,” she admitted. In one role, on the then-popular television series The Goldbergs, she played a professor’s wife, singing and faking it on the piano. She often found herself burdened with “stale, tenacious dreams” and felt anxious much of the time. Her life was supposed to be devoted to the goals of directing and acting in the theater—“I am intoxicated with the theater.”4 But she also busied herself with poetry (some of which was published) and wrote a play, libretto, and short stories. Her energy was as prodigious as her accomplishments were limited at this time.
She had been intoxicated with the theater from an early age. At eighteen, she had enrolled for classes at Erwin Piscator’s famed Dramatic Workshop. “Visions of Paradise,” she wrote, then “danced in my head.” In order to afford tuition, even with a half scholarship, Malina worked two jobs. When not attending school, she counted dirty clothing in a laundry for slim pay; evenings she was a “waitress, singer and hat-check girl in Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar.” At the Dramatic Workshop, Malina took classes in theater history, makeup application, voice, movement, acting, and directing. She was determined to direct plays but Piscator discouraged her, contending that women lacked force of character. But he relented after Malina confounded him by crying in his office. She respected Piscator mightily—after all, he had helped to develop the notion of “epic theater,” which emphasized the connection between politics and art, as well as an intense relationship between actor and audience. Moreover, he had collaborated with the great playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. Piscator seemed an incarnation of various European currents, ranging from Dada to Marxism. And the teenaged Malina soaked it all up.5
Malina felt blessed developing her life and art in “New York, city of wonders and joys.” A cultural omnivore, she could never get enough of it. In the first six months of 1951, she went to many plays, Jean Cocteau’s ballet Marriage on the Eiffel Tower, musical performances by John Cage and Virgil Thomson, art openings (at Grace Hartigan’s show Malina espied filmmaker Maya Deren entering “like a wild woman”), various foreign films, and wild parties galore.6 At such shindigs she chatted with the unworldly and handsome mythicist Joseph Campbell and his dancer wife, Jean Erdman; at another party she discussed experimental music and theater with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. At yet another venue she was transfixed listening to volatile poet Chester Kallman hold forth on the libretto that he had written, along with his lover W. H. Auden, for The Rake’s Progress, with music by Stravinsky.
Malina and Beck threw parties of their own. At one, she reported, pink champagne had been served and guests danced to the records of Marlene Dietrich and Lotte Lenya. The party proved an immense success, since “the police and the mad psychoanalysts from downstairs complained.” In the midst of all this, along with caring for her two-year-old son, Garrick, Malina carved out space for eclectic reading—Herodotus and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. The latter, she remarked, “can make changes in the reader … and I am vulnerable.”7 She would become her own myth, incorporating ancient and new myths into the strands of the sensibility woven into her plays.
Her relationship with her husband was complicated.8 They had been together for nearly ten years, since they had been teenagers worshipping culture and rebellion. But Julian refused to commit to her because of his homosexual orientation. A psychologist had for years been urging him to embrace women; Malina was, for him, certainly an object of love, if not of stormy desire. They married after Malina discovered that she was pregnant. Since Julian had a studio in their apartment—at the time he was pursuing a career in painting—he often minded Garrick. Beck and Malina’s relationship was intense, despite, or perhaps because of, sporadic sexual relations. They anchored each other and pushed one another to dream of possibilities. Julian, in Malina’s view, suffered from being too inward-oriented; he imagined the universe to be his for the taking. She, in contrast, found her passion sometimes ran too hot and effusive. Nonetheless, they had been journeying along the same path for years—toward creating a theater that would be experimental, marrying words and music, movement and art. She craved a Living Theatre that promised to “take us beyond our theatrical conventions.”9
Many times the dream had darkened. In January 1948, Malina wrote, “I refuse to say that the Living Theatre is dead.” A few months later, she was “overjoyed” at the prospect of restarting the theater project. That meant finding an affordable space, gaining rights to plays, and recruiting sponsors (who had either money or reputation—preferably both). Alas, at the end of 1949, the Living Theatre remained a distant reality—“entirely unfeasible,” she noted sadly. Month after month they dreamt, bustling with plans and Malina aching to return to the stage.
They first organized plays in spacious living rooms. Both Beck and Malina threw themselves excitedly into such productions while continuing to search for a real theater space. Finally, in the summer of 1951, they leased for two months the Cherry Lane Theater, with its “musty, stale odor.”10 In addition to Beyond the Mountains, they planned to perform their friend (and soon to be Malina’s psychotherapist) Paul Goodman’s Faustina and Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Perhaps John Cage, with whom Malina had a ripening friendship, might compose music for the Stein play? Carl Van Vechten, a versatile artist who had been a fixture during the great days of the Harlem Renaissance, controlled rights to Stein’s play. He dismissed the Cage idea quickly. Cage would, he avowed, ruin everything by having drums beating nonrhythmically the whole time. No matter; the play was the thing, and the Living Theatre had materialized.
The long struggle for a theater coexisted with Beck and Malina’s growing political consciousness. Both identified as nonviolent anarchists. They had become attached to similar souls at various meetings; some of these individuals had spent time in prison during the Second World War as conscientious objectors. Beck had avoided service in that conflict because of his professed homosexuality. Like nearly all avant-gardists, Beck and Malina wanted to bring art and life into closer proximity. This meant that they must dedicate themselves to protest at a time when the Cold War world had grown increasingly heated.
As early as 1950, they had trembled at the coming reality of hydrogen bombs—“Hell Bombs” was how Beck referred to them. Malina found it a time of “sweaty foreboding of calamity.” She slept fitfully: “All night I dream of war.” The outbreak of the Korean War threw them both deeper into politics and action, however futile and limited. They printed thousands of stickers with antiwar sentiments on them, sneaking around the city in quiet nighttime hours posting them on buildings and lampposts. They lucked out one night when a police officer let them go with merely a warning. But their fears about a potential nuclear holocaust had become deep dwelling. They imagined retreating to a communal life on an Indiana farm. Financial exigencies forced them to rely upon the largess of Julian’s parents. But lack of money did not hogtie them politically or artistically.11 Over time the Living Theatre would come to reflect a marriage of art and politics in the most renegade and excessive manner.
But this was still in the future. On New Year’s Day 1952—“this bright morning born out of my darkest night”—Malina was in agony.12 That afternoon she pulsed with “anger” and “shame” upon learning that she had been exiled from the cast for the remainder of the run of Beyond the Mountains. Despite her sadness, she scurried back to the Cherry Lane Theater to attend a concert that evening, which featured a new John Cage piece, along with experimental music from composers Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Pierre Boulez.
All day Cage had been ensconced in the box office merrily selling tickets. At age thirty-nine, he still emanated youthful vigor, enhanced by his crew cut and jovial smile. He greeted ticket buyers in a high-pitched, singsong voice. His gentle demeanor, however, masked an inner core of passion and intensity. Cage had a vision for music, art, and life that refused to be stilled.
The Cherry Lane seated a little over two hundred. Cage expected aficionados of avant-garde music to flock to the performance. Additional seats had been set up on the stage and orchestra pit to accommodate the overflow crowd. As anticipated, the place was packed for the concert.
Malina had known Cage less than a year, but she was captivated by the man and his music. In comparison with the neurotic artists whom she regularly encountered at the San Remo, Cage seemed to live in the present, with a courageous esprit. Malina admired too his refusal to draw distinctions between art and life. Even his apartment on Monroe Street, a center for artistic gatherings, bespoke the man. He made the drab space breathe by painting the walls startlingly white and punching holes in them allowing views of the East River and Empire State Building. He also hung from the ceiling mobiles that his pal Richard Lippold had created.13 Malina was thrilled a year later when Cage revealed to her the question and answer that powered his life: “Am I alive in my work and life?” Cage answered in the affirmative.14
At Malina’s behest, Cage prepared a “manifesto” for the program for the Cherry Lane concert. It was characteristically quirky, announcing that music must be “instantaneous” and “unpredictable.” Further, it insisted, “Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music” or by “hearing” or by “playing” “a piece of music.” Cage asserted in conclusion that “our ears are now in excellent condition.”15
After forty-five minutes spent listening to pianist David Tudor play Cage’s extremely intricate and difficult new work, Malina was enraptured and transformed. Her ears were now in excellent condition. The music had moved her as sensations rather than as thoughts. The composition announced itself with “a divine precision like a monstrous heart.”16
A monstrous heart beat within Malina. She soon returned to the Living Theatre, as an actress, director, and guiding light. Her embarrassment from the New Year’s Eve performance drifted away. She would grow ever more politically radical, getting arrested at anti-nuclear-bomb protests. She would continue as a life partner with Beck but would take on various lovers.17 By 1959, she would direct a play about heroin addicts, integrating improvisational jazz into the heart and soul of the play. The excessive realism of the play convinced some in the audience that the actors were shooting up real heroin; that might well have been the case. Another decade later, in 1968, Malina (with Beck) would stage Paradise Now, more a happening than a play. The members of the Living Theatre troupe ritualistically intoned, “To be free is to be free”; they shrieked as if in an Esalen therapy session, stripped naked, groped one another onstage (with audience participation encouraged), and denounced war, racism, capitalism, and repression. The musical score was orchestrated chaos, and the play was anarchic.18
Thanks to Paradise Now, Malina would have a permanent place at the feast of excess.
But the table had yet to be set. Change was in the offing, and the title of Cage’s piece that New Year’s Day was appropriate: Music of Changes. If Malina listened attentively, she might have heard in its odd resonances and clanking tones an early stirring of a New Sensibility in American culture. As she wrote that January, “The change must come now! / Even tomorrow will be too late.”19