Julian Beck (1925-1985) and Judith Malina, both anarchist pacifists, founded the Living Theatre in New York in 1947. The Living Theatre was an experimental political theatre company that challenged artistic stage conventions, attempting to break down the barriers between writer and performers and performers and audience. Thefollowing excerpts are taken from Beck’s introduction to The Brig: A Concept for Theatre and Film (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), a play by Kenneth H. Brown, directed byJudith Malina, about a military prison during the Korean War. The Living Theatre was shut down during the production of the play when about 70 IRS agents and police seized the theatre and all its assets for alleged tax evasion. Beck and Molina were charged with “impeding a Federal Officer"’ when they broke into their own theatre to put on a protest performance of The Brig. At the time, the authorities were taking action against a variety of artists andperformers, prosecuting people like Lenny Bruce andJonas Mekas (for screening, among other things, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour) for obscenity, shutting down the New York Poets’ Theatre (run by the anarchist poet Diane de Prima and Alan Marlowe), and harassing other experimental theatre companies, such as the Hardware Poets’ Playhouse and Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre. Beck was eventually sentenced to 60 days in jail, andJudith Malina to 30. The Living Theatre went into exile, leaving the United States, firstfor Europe and later Latin America, eventually performing pioneering street theatre in some 28 countries spanning five continents. By 2007, the Living Theatre was back in New York, where they staged a new production of The Brig, emphasizing the parallels between that military prison and the new military prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
A PlAY ARRIVES IN THE MAIL. I OPEN IT AT random and read a line. If the line is good, I go on, maybe start from the beginning and read the whole thing. I will not submit myself to reading a play if the writing is not good. And for the same reason will not submit any audience to it. Who am I to judge? And in this hard and arrogant way. "I am but an erring mortal," writes Gandhi, progressing from blunder toward truth. And I, may my blunders not cause pain, not to playwrights, not to anyone, and, as for truth, may we all get there.
The work of any important playwright. Open at random. Ibsen, Marlowe, Strindberg, Cocteau. The language is always good, like light. Language is the key. It opens the doors that keep us locked in confining chambers, the HolyofHolies, the instrument of unification, communication, and from communication let us derive the word community. The community is love, impossible without it, and the syllogism affirms then that love, as we humans may supremely create it, rises and falls with language. Yes, the grunts of animals in the act of coitus—music for the ears of heaven. The proper sounds, the stresses, the silences, the grunts that rise from real feeling, satisfaction with food or with your body as I animally caress it; those sounds wrenched from my groin upward and out ofthe throat, they please you, because they are honest and near to God.
To see the human face, to hear the spoken word, the two maxima of experience. Eric Gutkind. But this is not easy. Not the face of corruption, not the abstracted face of the servile citizen ofthe abstract state, not the face grown expressionless through the fear of the dicta of a scared society, not the face that does not represent the climax of physical being, not the face that is a mask—mask of virtue, mask of preference, mask of distortion, falsehood, and failure—but the face the sight of which makes creation that much easier. And the spoken word must be the word we use when I speak to thee, not the language of deception, not the misuse of the word in order to dissemble, language that ultimately separates. The word must join us, else it is just another barricade. We kill one another when we do not speak the truth; it is the way to early death. But when you speak to me true I live, and you live a little longer. It is ourjoint struggle against death. The prolongation ofthis life depends on exaltation through exalted speech. Speech: the poet reading aloud, the actor speaking the word, not on the page, but in the ear. And that is why we crown with laurel those heroes who have strained to bring us knowledge oflanguage that vaults the degradations of the unloving ways of the world: Aeschylus, the Prophets, Lao-tse, Rilke, Shelley, Joyce, Dante, the lovers under the quilts, and the fine practical language of woodsmen building a bridge, another plank. The mirade happens when speech unites...
J don’t like to work alone, I adore collaboration, to join with someone and to do something; much more gratifying than working alone, because something else is happening; it’s very sexy, even when you are not really fucking; you are filling someone else, and someone else is filling or is filled by you. Not a substitution for the McCoy, but something else, and full of its own aromas...
There has been some theatre verse in the last twenty years that I respect, but not enough, and still too dependent on the verse spirit of other eras to speak directly, engagingly, to the audiences of our time. We wait and work, because when it happens it will happen because we are prepared for it. By “we” I mean everyone, not only needing it, but wanting it, craving it, because we want to take flight—poetry after all is flight—and then we will be flying, man, then, not now, beyond even yearning, but ready to take poetic action, that’s when...
“Poetry of the theatre,” says Cocteau, not meaning meter; the phrase turned on the line, that kind of thing, but something else, which in the work of Brown and Gelber emerges as the distillation, extraction, representation of exact words and action oflife as it is lived, honest, uncompromisingly honest, and by being life itself and not sham is some kind of poetry, something which flies, uplifts, probably because being very near to life itself, we are moved, as we are moved by poetry, because it is close to life, shows us life itself, and that is always the only encouraging thing. That is, nothing exceeds life itself, the human face, the spoken word, but it has then to be itself, not armor instead of flesh, not lies instead of speech...
What i s the difference between development and change? I call for change all the time nowadays. That’s what I reach for in these dark times as we all face annihilation, if not by bomb on the body then by clamp on the brain or by the fences of restriction that keep us from touching one another...
I am quick to state that I have never attended verse theatre anywhere done to my satisfaction. I would be satisfied by any verse theatre that aroused my better, not my baser, instincts.
What are these baser instincts? Fake notions of grandeur, bullshit beauty, intoxication with wigs instead of hair. Fetishes, when my sexual instincts are aroused by clothing instead of bodies, my mind by superimposed symbol glamour, legless ideas, bodiless creation. Simple arithmetic—the problem is to get closer to life. Paradox: nothing in the theatre can get closer to life than verse and nothing further away, nothing further away as when the verse strays into representing that kind of life which never ought to be.
At the beginning, in Beyond the Mountains and Faustina, we tried to bring formal elements into the theatre, counter attack on the prevalent theatre which knew only that Yeats wasn’t good box office. But what to do with this verse, this vaulting language, the piercing phrases which illuminate your life forever, the whole staggering jumble of harmony of all things poetry, yet which when divorced from the body, from movement, from action, from the confrontation which means this life here and now as well as all those other plateaus on which we are conscious and unconscious, becomes like dead tissue, the severed head of a beautiful woman, disgusting?
How to attach the head to the body? How to make this verse into a living thing? We don’t know what to do with the verse and the poets aren’t giving us theatre verse suited to our powers. It goes back and forth. Together is what I am saying, collaborate, in community, to find the answer...
How do we find out what the plays mean and how do we communicate that meaning, how do we make what happens to us in the library happen on the stage more forcefully—by “we” I mean actors and poets—more gloriously, more excellently well? How do we learn to write a language, speak that language, express and enact that passion, vault those concepts? Is there something missing in those plays? Is there something missing in ourselves? Is there something wrong with them, with us, with everything? Must you wait until one has the answers before working with these plays? Must you wait until, alone, contemplating, meditating, the answer is arrived at? Is that possible? Can the answer be found only through trial and error? Who sets the values? Is there a right and a wrong about anything? Why is the actor playing Hamlet always more interesting nowadays than the play? Was it ever different? Will it ever be? Ought it to be? Are we wrong in our assumptions about verse? Is Aeschylus a deadhead, verse a romantic notion, a longing for things we ought not to long for? Who are these kings and princes? Are their images sickening in themselves, doomed to decay, best buried, so they simply no longer speak to our time? Should we forget them, should we then thus cut off the past from our being? Are we the sum of civilization? Is the thesis of duty to eternity and to the lives that have been lived and the things men have created a false hypothesis? How can we leave these questions lying about discarded? What is the good of answers without the pleasure and the glory of the struggle in the seeking...
Clue. Laughter. Chaplin. To produce a physical reaction, make the belly shake, mix up the head and eyes with the ridiculous, cracks in the ice and armor, something happening Lo them. The verse tragedies which I’ve been talking about, with all their gorgeous language and the rotund passions, all the seething emotions, and the stark dramatic moments, caught, roped, garlanded with what we consider the attributes of splendor—don't pierce the shell. Real feeling is not touched, only attitudes offeel-ing, the outside. Maybe it’s the regality problem, no identification; we're outside. Thenwe must begin to concentrate on ways to get in there, or, just as good, a means to open the dam and let the insides flow out. Ifthe experiments fail—Ehrlich permitted himself 605 failures—we still will be asking the question, unless we have found a form of theatre that makes poetry obsolete. I expect that might happen, and Shakespeare would become obsolete.
Perhaps all that writing must be left behind, the printed word, the library forgotten. Artaud. Then a theatre in which language pours from the throats of the actors: the high art ofimprovisation, when the actor is like a great hero, the partner of God. A man's proper job and position, isn't it, to create, make life on the stage, there in our presence, doing whatever he is doing at maximum, like a great great lover, the new poetry flowing from his being, marvelous energy, a river in spring, fertilizing the banks? He is the actor I dream of, and his is the theatre 1 would like to go to, one worthy, as I have often said, of the life of each spectator...
I no longer make any designs for a play until I have heard the actors read it, not once but many times. I prefer not to make the costume designs until I have watched the staging and watched the actors move. I don’t like to impose concepts, but rather let the designs emerge from the play, be an integral part of the staging and the actors’ creative work. The system is not foolproof. Still heaps of mistakes, but the whole method is possibly moving in the direction of a creative ensemble. community. rather than a binding together offaggots, separate sticks; better a growing tree of course, something like that...
Somewhere along the line, around 1961 or 1962, Leo Lerman called us on the phone and said, “We’re printing a picture ofThe Living Theatre staff, and we’re trying to caption it. Can you give me twenty words summing up the purpose of The Living Theatre?”
I said, “Call me back in five minutes.” Quick consultation. He did call back in five minutes, not ten. I said, “To increase conscious awareness, to stress the sacredness of life, to break down the walls’ ’...
The advantages of doing plays with little or no money far surpass the disadvantages. First of all, second of all, and last of all, you are outside of the money system. Because money is a brig. Better the slave of poverty than the minion of money. At least you’re not being screwed all the time, distastefully, against your will, without love. The chief disadvantage is that, having to do everything yourself, it takes more time. The period of creativity preceding the opening of a production reaches its peak ofintensity during the few weeks immediately preceding the opening itself. Creative juices, time. They just don’t flow for long. The problem of working without money is that of sustaining thejuice time. The fear is thatyou will be all drained before the end of the work. Then you have to implore the muse. May she be kindly disposed. I have found that she usually is, happily enough, whenever there is less of Mammon’s largesse lying around...
Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise... made a direct attempt at involving the audience. Of course, that is the heart of the Pirandello play. This device, the play within the play, the play that presumably takes place in the theatre on the night of the performance for the first time, as if it were the first time on each successive night, is part of a large part of twentieth-century dramatic literature...
It is true that our message, if you want to call it that, or our mission, was to involve or touch or engage the audience, not just show them something; but we did realize that these play-within-the-play devices arose out of a crying need on the part of the authors, and of us, to reach the audience, to awaken them from their passive slumber, to provoke them into attention, shock them if necessary, and, this is also important, to involve the actors with what was happening in the audience. To aid the audience to become once more what it was destined to be when the first dramas formed themselves on the threshing floor: a congregation led by priests, a choral ecstasy of reading and response, dance, seeking transcendence, a way out and up, the vertical thrust, seeking a state of awareness that surpasses mere conscious being and brings you closer to God. By bringing the play into the theatre and mixing together spectator and performer, the intention was to equalize, unifY, and bring everyone closer to life. Joining as opposed to separation.
That there is no difference between actor and spectator. The Greeks used masks, and the Japanese, the Chinese, the commecija, and so many others, of course, but perhaps that is what we least need now. The mask has a function, but we had better learn that its purpose is not to conceal and symbolize, but to intensify, magnify, terrify, or seduce. I love masks but I love the human face more. I wonder about masks all the time...
People were often taken in by the play-within-the-play devices of Many Loves, The Connection, and Improvise. Not once, but often, people requested their money back at the box office because they had not come to see a bunch of people rehearsing; they wanted to see a show, the finished product. People theatricaIly unsophisticated, but to whom else are we speaking? Are we only addressing those in the know?
That part was good, that is, that people were disturbed and were learning. But the greater part of the spectators, the sophisticated spectators, were not content... But we finaIly disturbed ourselves by the device because it was, after all, basicaIly dishonest, and we were publicly crying out for honesty in the theatre. The plays were not being rehearsed that night yet we were pretending they were...
Deception was not the means we wanted to involve the audience. It fundamentally meant that we did not respect the people out there. You do not cheat when you respect, and when the audience found out, and it surely would find out, it would not respect us for having fooled them, no matter how weIl we had done it.
The climax of our work at the loft was Paul Goodman’s The Young Disciple, half in verse and half in prose. But Goodman knew what he was about, he always does, and in this play, among other things, he was confronting the problem of verse in the theatre, and in his brief preface to it he writes:
I have tried in this play to lay great emphasis on the preverbal elements of theatre, trembling, beating, breathing hard, and tantrum. I am well aware that the actors we have are quite unable both by character and training to open their throats to such sounds or loosen their limbs to such motions.
But this is also why they simply cannot read poetic lines. It would be worthwhile, to the renovation of our art, to make a number of plays ofjust these pre-verbal elements in abstraction, as the painters have returned to the elements of color and form.
Is the solution as plain as Goodman says? If so, then let us get to work at once. I know that if it is not all of the solution it is part, one of the wheels of the way. What happened when we did this play was exciting for us. Apparently also for the audience. They were disgusted, affronted, annoyed, terrified, awed, and excited. There is a scene in which a character vomits, and one in which someone creeps about on all fours in total darkness making night noises, strange husky grating and chirping sounds, and the audience panicked, and something was happening which whispered to us that it was important...
The ghost of Artaud became our mentor and the problem that we faced... was how to create that spectacle, that Aztec, convulsive, plague-ridden panorama that would so shake people up, so move them, so cause feeling to be felt, there in the body, that the steel world oflaw and order which civilization had forged to protect it-selffrom barbarism would melt. Why? Because that steel world oflaw and order did more than just protect us from barbarism; it also cut us off from real feeling. That is, in the process of protecting ourselves from the barbaric instincts and acts we feared, we simultaneously cut ourselves offfrom all impulsive sensation and made our selves the heartless monsters that wage wars, that burn and gas six million Jews, that enslave the blacks, that plan bacteriological weapons, that annihilate Carthage and Hiroshima, that humiliate and crush, that conduct inquisitions, that hang men in cages to die of starvation and exposure there in that great concourse of the Piazza San Marco, that wipe out the Indians, the buffalo, that exploit the peon, that lock men in prisons away from natural sex, that invent the gallows, the garrote, the block, the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad, that take young men in their prime and deliberately teach them to kill—I mean we actually teach people to kill—and that go about our daily business while one person every six seconds dies of starvation. Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel, really feel anything, then we might find all this suffering intolerable, the pain too great to bear, we might put an end to it, and then, being able to feel, we might truly feel thejoy, thejoy of everything else, ofloving, of creating, ofbeing at peace, and of being ourselves...
Insert. Repertory. I have nothing to say about repertory that has not been said before. There can be no creative, that is, growing, company of actors without it; the one-shot stuff is merely obeisance to Mammon’s dynasty, and so forth...
A resurgence of realism was needed: what had been passing for realism was not real. There had to be pauses. Directors had to learn to let actors sit still for a long time in one place as in life, and actors had to learn to adapt to this new idea. There had to be an end to sets with angled walls, the whole false perspective bit. There had to be real dirt, not simulations. There had to be slovenly speech. If there was to be jazz, then it had to be real jazz and not show-tune jazz. If there was to be real speech, then there had to be real profanity; the word “shit” would have to be said, not once but again and again and again until audience ears got used to it. Goodman has been using words like “shit,” “cock,” “cunt,” and “fuck” in his theatre pieces for more than a decade. The way had been prepared, and he had used the words not as expletives but as functional Anglo-Saxon words in context. Of course, that was intolerable. But Gelber’s unrelenting and uncompromising use of the word “shit” in its most ordinary usage would make it easier for the Goodman plays in the future. There had to be honesty, as much honesty as we could pull out. We had to risk embarrassment; we had to risk boring the audience, but it had to be done. We had to talk about the untalkable subjects; we had to talk about heroin and addicts. It was important, important to show that these people who, in 1959, were considered the lowest of the low—in fact a recent law had made selling heroin to minors a capital offense—we had to show that these, the dregs of society as they were regarded, were human, capable of deep and touching feelings and speech, worthy, of our interest and respect; we had to show that we were all in need of a fix, and that what the addicts had come to was not the result of an indigenous personality evil, but was symptomatic of the errors ofthe whole word...
The work ofJohn Cage. We first became acquainted with it around 1950. The first concern, the first special event ever presented by The Living Theatre, was arranged by him at the Cherry Lane. We presented the premiere of his Music of Changes. By using methods of chance and indeterminacy to construct his work, he was saying to us all, “Get rid of all this misdirected conscious dominion. Let the wind blow through. See what can happen without the government of sweet reason.” These methods produced remarkable effects in his music. We had all been long familiar with the effects of chance in painting: Arp’s “Pieces ‘of Paper Arranged According to the Laws of Chance,” Duchamp’s’ great glass which splintered so beautifully by accident, Kandinsky’s and Picasso’s and Pollack’s drips and splashes. In The ConnectionJu-dith had arranged an atmosphere in which the actors could improvise lines and actions, in the context of the play, never straying too far. This often led to terrible choices, largely because we are not well trained in this area, but often terrific moments emerged. Best of all, an atmosphere offreedom in the performance was established and encouraged, and this seemed to promote a truthfulness, startling in performance, which we had not so thoroughly produced before...
Uudith Malina] began to let the actors design their movements, creating a remarkable rehearsal atmosphere in which the company became more and more free to bring in its own ideas. Less and less puppetry, more and more the creative actor. The careful directing books we had used at the beginning were by now quite gone. She began to suggest rather than tell, and the company began to find a style that was not superimposed but rose out oftheir own sensitivities. The director was resigning from his authoritarian position. No more dictation.
Still searching for Artaud. We also talked publicly a good deal about the theatre being like a dream in which the spectator is the dreamer and from which he emerges remembering it with partial understanding. We had talked about this with Paul Williams, who designed the Fourteenth Street theatre for us. That is why the lobby was painted so brightly, the brick walls exposed, like the walls of a courtyard, the ceiling painted sky blue, a fountain running as in a public square, and kiosks standing in the center, one for coffee and one for books. The lobby was the day room, the theatre was painted black, narrower and narrower stripes converging toward the stage, concentrating the focus, as if one were inside an old-fashioned Kodak, looking out through the lens, the eye of the dreamer in the dark room. The seats were painted in hazy gray, lavender, and sand, with oversize circus numbers on them in bright orange, lemon and magenta—all this Williams’ attempt to aid us to achieve an atmosphere for the dreamers and their waking-up when they walked out into the lobby...
To break down the walls. How can you watch The Brig and not want to break down the walls of all the prisons? Free all prisoners. Destroy all white lines everywhere. All the barriers. But talking about this to people is not enough. To make people feel so that whenever the noise of triumph is heard, the noise of opening night applause, no other noise can be heard but the terrible noise in the resounding cement and steel corridors of prisons, let them hear the noise, let it cause them pain, let them feel the blows to the stomach, produce a horror and release real feeling, let this happen until there are no prisons anywhere.
The Brig is the Theatre of Cruelty. In that it is the distillation ofthe direction of The Living Theatre’s history. You cannot shut offfrom it, as from a dream. It is there, real, in the pit of your stomach. DefY the audience. Tell them you don't want to involve them. Don't run into the aisle to embrace them. Put up a barricade of barbed wire. Separate until the pain of separation is felt, until they want to tear it down, to be united. Storm the barricades.
When we were arrested for insisting on putting on our play, Judith, myself, Ken Brown, so many members of the cast and staff, and when we were brought to trial, one of the charges in the indictment was that we had yelled, “Storm the barricades!” from a window to the crowd in the street below waiting to be let in to see the last performance of The Brig. We were acquitted of that charge. Rightly so: we never said it. Never said it because we are simply too familiar with public demonstrations and the responsibility of leaders of demonstrations, too committed to the Gandhiian concept of nonviolence ever to incite a crowd in this manner, but when the suggestion of this charge first confronted me at a grand jury hearing, I went through a twisting moment of deja vu or deja entendu. Where did this accusation come from? The Assistant U. S. Attorney was asking me, “Mr. Beck, did you or did you not shout ‘Storm the barricades!'?”
“No,” I stumbled a reply, “no.”
At the trial no one could testify that either of us, Judith or I, had said this, though someone who was on our side said thatthe words might have passed his lips; so maybe that's the explanation. But all that night I felt we were confronting the barricades. Yes, we want to get rid of all the barricades, even our own and any that we might ever setup.
The Brig and Artaud. Artaud's mistake was that he imagined you could create a horror out of the fantastic. Brown's gleaming discovery is that horror is not in what we imagine but is in what is real.
New York City, July 1964
World History
