REPERTORY

Anarchists of the Anti-Word

The forefront of the U.S. dramatic avant-garde is in Europe--a band of strolling anarchist players who are emigrants from off-Broadway. When a failure to pay back taxes shuttered the Living Theater in 1963, Co-Founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina took their troupe to Europe. They have been there ever since, touring 95 cities in four Volkswagen buses. In addition to nondelivery of scenery, the company has had to cope with censorship in Spain, riots in France, and fistfights in several Italian towns. This sort of mishap scarcely fazes an outfit that is run like a permissive kindergarten, calls itself an "Intentional Community" and has learned to move around Europe on a per-person bill for food, drink and cigarettes of less than $4 a day.

What stimulates excitement and controversy about the Living Theater is that it uses audiences almost like guinea pigs, trying to incite them to active emotional responses rather than passive mental assent. Critics have called this assault on the senses "the drama of the anti-word" or "the theater of attrition." Dialogue and plot are reduced to a minimum and replaced by improvisation, ritual and a grotesquerie of violence and the macabre.

Horror & Dissent. Fun is not totally foreign to the Living Theater. In one playlet, for example, to a unison drumbeat of feet there is a rapid-fire recital of everything printed on a dollar bill. But the troupe is obviously happiest with horror, since that best expresses its dissent from contemporary society. Its tour de force is a 31-hour Grand Guignol saga called Frankenstein, which begins with eleven people being dragged screaming, pleading or fighting to the stage. There they are gassed, crucified, electrocuted, and garroted.

Through a grisly stage illusion, play-goers not only see a man guillotined but watch his head fall into a basket. To conclude this opening maelstrom of mayhem, Dr. Frankenstein opens the coffin of a dying girl for an operation to remove her beating heart and thus begin his monster. The spectacle is vivid enough to sicken some audiences, but Alan Brien, drama critic of London's Sunday Telegraph, insists that "the sequence is an eyeopener to those who believe the theater cannot match the cinema in projecting images of violence and pain."

Actually, pain and violence are anathema to the Intentional Community. Says Judith Malina: "We are a terrible lot of moralists. We are trying to live together in peace, not only saying that the U.S. should disarm, but that we should not scream at one another in rehearsals--or if we do it, to understand why." The collective ideal seems to fall between the Group Theater of the '30s and a 19th century Utopian experiment like Brook Farm. Actress Jenny Hecht, daughter of Ben Hecht, puts it this way: "I want to live with people close, in a state of joy and loving." This may explain the eight children who travel with the 32-member troupe, not all of whom are accounted for by the company's three married couples.

Warm & Affirmative. The Living Theater creates its works by pooling ideas, and rehearsals for new plays may last for months before a format is agreed upon. Julian Beck says that he and Judith Malina are trying to "wither away" as directors. Meanwhile, the troupe's fee ($1,000 a show) goes to Beck, who parcels it out communally for hotel and travel bills, all medical expenses and authorized clothing purchases. As a result of its modest, gypsy-like scale of living, the theater may be the only repertory group in the world operating on a pay-as-you-go basis and without subsidy. The euphoria of success is even beginning to soften the troupe's emphasis on violence. Their work in progress bears the title Paradise Now. "After three years of rip, tear, kill," says one actor, "we want it to be very warm and affirmative."

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