The Living Theater

J & J in Jail

I just found out that Judith Malina died on April 10th. Malina and Julian Beck started The Living Theater in 1947, an iconic institution of the post war, anarchist avant-garde. They grew up in public. The personal, the aesthetic, the political were never separate in their work. He was a brilliant set designer. She was a brilliant director, paralyzed by stage fright. In the early days they were a force of radical creation. They knew and associated with the older generation of modernists, performing plays by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Picasso, Pirandello, Jarry and Jean Cocteau, as well as classics. They also created their own plays, most famously The Connection, The Brig, and Frankenstein. There was not  a major artist of the post war generation that was not influenced by them. They knew the Beats, the New York School, and Black Mountain writers and artists. Malina’s father was a German Rabbi assassinated by the Nazis. She was arrested many times protesting war. They broke laws, they went to jail and the lived in Exile. Like Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorp Julian Beck and Judith Malina met when they were young. The late forties was a moment before the explosion: the modern civil rights movement, the anti war movement, liberation politics, queer art, fueled the American counterculture. They were vital figures whose fearless exploration, Dionysian excess, rigorous thought, intellectual, political and aesthetic dissent warped the space around them and defined a world that now recedes in a rear view mirror. By the sixties they would seem old fashioned and unsophisticated by poets like Kenneth Koch, whose plays they performed. They remained young, eternally adolescent but from that fertile ground so much grew. American art would not be what it is today were it not for them, and much that it lacks it lacks because it has turned away from those archaic, explosive energies and towards abstraction, wit, intellect and academia. Malina could never be tamed. She was fierce and true.

John Tytell wrote a great book about them, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage.