The Living Theatre: Julian Beck and Judith Malina - Essay Example

Lecturer THE LIVING THEATRE- JULIAN BECK AND JUDITH MALINA The living theatre, an American theatre company, was founded in 1947 and based in New York City. It is the oldest experimental theatre group still existing today in the U.S. It was led by its founders, actress Judith Malina and painter/poet Julian Beck; After Beck’s death in 1985, the company member Reznikov became co-director with Malina (Takis 34). Judith Malina was born in 1926 in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Jewish parents. She migrated to New York City with her parents in 1929. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social Research in 1945 to study theatre under Erwin Piscator. Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism. Malina met her husband, Beck, in 1943 when he was a student at Yale University. Beck, a painter, came to share her interest in political theatre and in 1947 the couple founded The Living Theatre. Malina appeared occasionally in films, beginning in 1975. In 2008 she was honored with an annual Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards (Ruth et al, 15-17). In 2009, she was honored with the Edwin Booth Award from the Doctoral Theatre Students Association of the City University of New York. Other awards include an honorary doctorate from Lehman College among others. Julian Beck, an American actor, director, poet and painter, was born in New York City in 1925 and died in 1985. He briefly attended Yale University, but dropped out to pursue writing and art (Ruth et al, 41-42). He was an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1940s, but his career turned upon meeting his future wife. He met her in 1943 and quickly came to share her passion for theatre; they founded The Living Theatre in 1947. Beck’s philosophy of theatre carried over into his life. He once said, “We insisted on experimentation that was an image for a changing society. If one can experiment in theatre, one can experiment in life.” He was indicted a dozen times on three continents for charges such as disorderly conduct, indecent exposure, possession of narcotics, and failing to participate in a civil defense drill (Takis 44). Besides his theatre work, Beck published several volumes of poetry reflecting his anarchist beliefs, two nonfiction books and had several film appearances. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1983 and died two years later. The Living Theatre has staged nearly a hundred productions performed in eight languages in 28 countries on five continents. This is a unique body of work that has influenced theatre all over the world. During the 1950′s and early 1960′s in New York, The Living Theatre pioneered the unconventional staging of poetic drama – the plays of American writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery, as well as European writers rarely produced in America, including Cocteau, Lorca, Brecht and Pirandello. Best remembered among these productions, which marked the start of the Off-Broadway movement, were Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Tonight We Improvise, Many Loves, The Connection and The Brig The closing of all the Living Theatre’s New York venues by the authorities was brought about by the difficulty of operating a unique, experimental enterprise within a cultural establishment ill-equipped to accept it. The venues that were closed are: the Cherry Lane Theatre, The Living Theatre Studio on Broadway at 100th Street, The Living Theatre on 14th Street and The Living Theatre on Third Street. The company began a new life in the mid 1960’s as a nomadic touring ensemble (Ruth et al, 71-73). They evolved into a collective, living and working together toward the creation of a new form of nonfictional acting based on the actor’s political and physical commitment to using the theatre as a medium for furthering social change in Europe. Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Antigone, Frankenstein and Paradise Now are the landmark achievements of this period. The theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain in the 1970’s, a cycle for non-traditional venues. From the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York, and from the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, the company offered plays. These plays offered by the company included Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences (Herman et al, 34-36).The group returned to the theatre in the 1980’s. There they developed new participatory techniques that enable the audience to rehearse with the company then join them on stage. The plays included Prometheus at the Winter Palace, The Archaeology of Sleep and The Yellow Methuselah. After Beck’s death, Malina, and the new co director opened a new performing space in Manhattan, producing a steady stream of innovative works. The works included The Tablets, I and I, The Body of God, Humanity, Rules of Civility, Waste, Echoes of Justice, and The Zero Method. The Third Street space was closed in 1993, and the company went on to create Anarchia, Utopia and Capital Changes in other New York City venues. The European Union offered them funds in 1999 which they used to renovate a 1650 Palazzo Spinola in Rocchetta Ligure, Italy and reopened it as the Centro Living Europa, a residence and working place for the company’s European programs. They then created Resistenza, a dramatization the local inhabitants’ resistance to the German occupation way back in 1943-45. The company has also been performing a play for anti-globalization demonstrators both in USA and Europe (Ruth et al, 82-85). The play name is ‘Resist Now! The creation of a site-specific play about the abuse of political detainees in the notorious former prison at Khiam resulted from the month long collaboration with local theater artists in Lebanon in 2001.The company’s first permanent home since the closing of The Living Theatre on Third Street at Avenue C in 1993 is The Clinton Street Theatre (Takis 57-60). It reflects on the company’s continuing faith in the neighborhood as a vibrant center where the needs of some of the city’s poorer people confront the ideas of the experimenters in the art and politics from the neighborhood and those who have newly settled in the area. Reznikov, Malina’s co director passed away in May 2008 shortly after opening on Clinton Street. After writing most of the company’s new plays following Julian’s death, Reznikov left his final work unfinished; Eureka!, it was based on the poem by Poe. Judith completed it and opened the play later that year. The first line of the review on the New York Times said, “The Living Theatre wants nothing less than to rewrite the theatrical contract.” Judith and Julian’s son, Garrick Beck and Brad Burgess, Reznikov’s former assistant, now work with Judith as Executive and Administrative directors, and have assembled a vibrant company of several generations of The Living Theatre’s wonderful history and exciting future. The Living Theatre was dedicated to transforming the organization of power within the society from being competitive and hierarchical to a cooperative and communal expression. The troupe counteracts complacency in the audience through direct spectaclec (Herman et al, 55). They oppose the commercial orientation of Broadway productions and have contributed to the off-Broadway theater movement in New York, staging poetic dramas. The Theater and Its Double, an anthology of essays written by Antonin Artaud, the French playwright is the primary text for The Living Theatre. This work influenced Julian Beck deeply. The troupe reflects Artaud’s influence by staging multimedia plays designed to exhibit his metaphysical Theatre of Cruelty. The actors attempt to dissolve the “fourth wall” between them and the spectators in these performances. Jerry Goralnick has worked with The Living Theatre for twenty years. He has many credits and a dozen productions with the company. His credits include Ali Sayed of Capital Changes, Brick Blume in Anarchia which he co-directed, Einstein in Waste, Hitler in I and I, The Answerer in The Tablets, Zev in Poland 1931.Goralnick co founded and co directs The Living Theatre Workshops and has taught Living Theatre techniques around the world (Takis 82-85). Lois Kagan Mingus studied acting with Joseph Chaikin, Gene Frankel and Davey Marlin Jones and dance at the Harkness Dance center, The New Dance Group Studio and Boston Conservatory. She has been a member of The Living Theatre since 1988 and has appeared in dozens of productions both in New York and on tour in Europe and Latin America. She also co founded The Living Theatre Workshops in 2001. Ms. Mingus is listed in Who’s Who in Entertainment in America and along with Jerry, is a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Judge. The Living Theatre Workshops headed by Goralnick conducts workshops and performances in different colleges and universities. Their aim is to develop new forms of theatre and have an interest in the politics of our time and making theatre that addresses what’s going on around us in our lives. The company creates plays to address those kinds of issues that are going on in our world today. The workshops are for the students to help them act out what going on in their lives and what they would like to bring to light in the plays. They present the form and structure of the plays and all the performers have to do is to say what they want to perform about. They have an interest in pacifism and exploring the kind of ideas in how they can apply them to what’s going on in the world. They are also very interested in examining the political system and thinking about different alternatives or possibilities. This kind of theatre can be called a more ritualistic kind of theatre because they express themselves through poetry and movements and group activities. They have more dance and reciting in unison instead of drama.Ninety percent of the attendees are students so they are asked what themes they would like to express in their plays. They have discussions from local issues to personal issues to world issues and six or seven of the themes the students come up with are taken. Each student is allowed to work on whichever theme they want. They create the text and the staging while The Living Theatre organizers advise them and give them tools to work with to make the plays as theatrical as possible. The students are shown a lot of different techniques that have been developed over the years to give them a vocabulary to work with (Ruth et al, 103-105). The reaction that the students give is always very good, because they are able to sit down and focus and think of the issues affecting their communities or their personal lives and bring them out to stage as a new experience to them. The Living Theatre has toured extensively throughout the world, often in non-traditional venues such as streets and prisons. Other American experimental theatre companies have greatly been influenced, notably The Open Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre. Its productions have won four Obie Awards namely: The Connection, The Brig, and Frankenstein. The Living Theatre continues to produce new plays in New York, many with anti-war themes, though its prominence and resources have diminished considerably in recent decades (Herman et al, 81) The company opened a revival of Mysteries and Smaller Pieces in October 2006, the 1964 collective creation that defined the interactive and Artaudian style for which the company became famous.In late 2007, Judith Malina, the company founder performed in Maudie and Jane, a stage adaptation, directed by Reznikov, of the Doris Lessing novel, The Diary of Jane Somers. The company presented Red Noir in 2010, adapted and directed by Judith Malina. Work cited Fotopoulos, Takis, Towards an Inclusive Democracy: The Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New Liberatory Project London & NY: Cassell, 1997. Print Gerber, Elisabeth Ruth. The Populist Paradox: Interest Group Influence And The Promise Of Direct Legislation. Princeton University Press. 1999.Print Hansen, Mogens Herman The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology. University of Oklahoma, Norman 1999.print Read More