Shock Troops of the Avant-Garde

A bearded man with a red scarf stands totally still at the front of the stage. He says nothing. He scarcely breathes. The audience waits. And waits. Gradually, a few titters break out. Sitting at the back of the house, an actress--who dishonestly announces that she is not an actress --chides the titterers for their embarrassment. Occasionally she addresses a question to the man on stage: "Are you asking? Are you telling? Do you need?"

Eventually, other actors begin storming through the aisles, their feet thumping in military double time. They compulsively mime cleaning the backs of orchestra seats. There is a cross fire of phrases as the actors recite everything printed on a dollar bill. The caustic commentary on money and the military builds to an insane close-order drill on stage. In the cacophonous din, a thundering common shout of "YES, SIR!" seems to blast out the house lights.

As Mysteries and Smaller Pieces mysteriously proves, the Living Theater is a shock-troop army of the avant-garde dedicated to overthrowing the Establishment and conventional drama. Founded and led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the company had a modest off-Broadway success until it was closed down by the Internal Revenue Service in a 1963 dispute over back taxes. The troupe has been touring Europe ever since (TIME, Dec. 1, 1967). Last week it reappeared at the Yale School of Drama.

Most of the Living Theater's pieces are exercises in the manipulation of crowd emotions. Whatever does not actively irritate is designed to produce a kind of mesmeric communal hysteria. One piece finds Julian Beck sitting cross-legged in the middle of the stage. In a voice of clerical monotony, he says "Stop the wars, now." Cast members in the aisles shout back in unison, "Stop the wars, now!" He repeats the phrase half a dozen times as the audience response grows in force. Then he switches to "Freedom--now," and on through a litany of total dissent: "Ban the bombs," "Abolish police," "Change the world," "Abolish the state." This goes on far too long. The Living Theater persistently confuses duration with intensity. As the shouted responses turn the house into a kind of cathedral of the absurd, the cast moves onstage, forms a circle, and utters a low, collective, unrelenting wail. At Yale, student after student, grave of mien and with Viet Nam in mind, climbed up onstage and joined the circle. In revival terms, it was rather like making a "decision for Christ."

In a more playful item, about half a dozen members of the cast do a kind of jungle gavotte. With kangaroo hops, lion growls and peacock flutterings, they imitate and invent animals. Each actor performs feats of remarkable physical agility. Quite possibly, the Living Theater's eventual fame may rest on throwing out Stanislavsky in favor of the R.C.A.F. manual.

The last piece of Mysteries is called The Plague. All the actors are onstage. Each sickens and dies in his own way. Some froth at the mouth, others go into epileptic contortions. Some crawl into the audience and die in the aisles, writhing in agony. It is exhibitionistic, self-indulgent and chillingly convincing; some members of the audience become alarmed. When all are dead, a few men recover and begin to bury the bodies. First the boots, shoes and sandals of the dead are arrayed at the edge of the stage. Then the bodies, stiff as in rigor mortis, are stacked like cordwood in a pyramid at the center of the stage. The scene is somber, relentless and mutely evocative of 20th century holocausts.

In its commitment to total drama, the Living Theater is vital and admirable. Its approach to stagecraft gives actors the chance to talk with their bodies as well as their heads. It adds to dialogue the rich, strange vocabulary of yowls, screams and sighs. It lets the world break through the fourth wall. What is less admirable--and peculiarly ironic--about the Beck-Malina troupe is that it is a mirror image of so much that it claims to hate. It hates aggression, but its silences are aggressive. It professes nonviolence, but its pieces drip violence in attitude, content and expression. It preaches love, but it would rather rape an audience than woo it. It loathes uniformity and the uniform; yet the cast is drilled to such impersonal military precision that it most resembles a company of Green Berets.

To question the purposes and principles of a society is, within limits, a basic human right. But to pronounce the answers with the smug, messianic complacency of the Beck-Malina troupe is arrogant moral snobbery. As one student in the Yale audience put it: "Real fat cats were never so secure."

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