Judith
Malina, co-founder of The Living Theatre, died on April 10th at 88 years
of age. I had the privilege of meeting
her about seven years earlier, while renting an apartment on New York’s Clinton
Street, a few doors from the company’s performance space. On my way home one night, I asked a troupe-member
on a smoking break if Ms. Malina was still active. Yes, he said, she was directing their
upcoming play about Edgar Allan Poe.
When
I told him how deeply her work had affected me long before I ever thought about
working in the arts, he suggested I come inside to meet her. She was gracious, grand and generous,
ultimately inviting me to watch rehearsals whenever I liked.
Sitting in on that process was eye opening
for me because Ms. Malina’s brand of theatre was designed to seem spontaneous
and unrehearsed. Yet to make the play feel
as alive and in-the-moment as she wanted it to - to allow for alterations in tone
as audience responses varied from night to night - the core of the piece had to
be crystal clear to actors and rehearsed with rigor and precision.
Decades ago, when Judith Malina and her
husband, Julian Beck, made their biggest waves, a term like “spontaneity” would
have been too tame for them; “revolutionary” was more appropriate. Mr. Beck, Ms.Malina and their troupe were pioneers
in exploding conventions as basic as the imaginary fourth wall between
spectators and performers. As basic as
actors wearing costumes.
That’s right, costumes! The first time I saw Judith Malina, at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in a 1968 performance of Paradise Now, she was stark naked.
Naked and challenging onlookers with the chant, “To be free is to be
responsible.”
The production sent shock waves through
all of pop culture. Jim Morrison’s arrest for indecent exposure onstage
in Florida came shortly after he’d seen Paradise
Now. Ms. Malina and Mr. Beck were
his muses.
A sequence in Brian DePalma’s 1970 film HI
MOM, known as “Be Black, Baby,” depicts an underground theatre performance in
which bourgeois white patrons are brutalized by an acting troupe and love
it. DePalma’s brilliant faux cinema verite set piece ends with an
audience member declaring, “Clive Barnes was right!” Mr. Barnes, a New York Times reviewer, was
indeed an early supporter of Ms. Malina and Mr. Beck’s work.
Spurred by such critical support and a
modicum of commercial success, other theatre companies engaging in radical experimentation
began to reach wider audiences. Richard
Schechner’s Performance Group on New York’s Wooster Street triumphantly staged Dionysus in 69, a confrontational
approach to classical characters comparable to The Living Theatre’s Antigone. The San Francisco Mime Troupe
travelled the country with innovative outdoor productions of Brecht. And Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Lab Theatre
toured the U.S. with its aim of “encountering the spectator – intimately,
directly, not hiding behind… wardrobe mistresses, stage designers or make-up
artists.”
But Judith Malina’s late sixties success hardly came overnight; The Living Theatre was founded in 1947. At that time,
its focus was not on the fourth wall, but on dramatic language. Conventional playwrights simply didn’t capture
Ms. Malina’s vision of how to awaken audiences from their somnolence. So the
company staged productions by Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Pablo
Picasso and William Carlos Williams, among other non-traditional playwrights.
Later, they took on gritty subject matter
with dramas like Jack Gelber’s The
Connection (1959) – about heroin addicts - and Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig
(1963) – about a Marine prison. Both
were adapted into powerful films, the former by Shirley Clark in 1961, the
latter by Jonas Mekas in 1964. Mr. Mekas’s
made his movie to preserve Ms. Malina’s Obie Award-winning production after the
IRS shut down the company’s West Village space.
His cinema verite-style
filmmaking and the company’s acting were so intense that, according to critic
Jonathan Rosenbaum, European viewers thought they were watching a documentary.
Meanwhile, The Living Theatre’s tax
problem afforded Judith Malina an opportunity to merge life and art. Dressed as Portia from The Merchant of Venice, she defended Julian Beck at his tax evasion
hearing. But her performance was not
successful, at least from a legal standpoint.
So The Living Theatre spent the next few
years touring Europe, developing ever more radical form and content for their
work, returning to the U.S. in 1969 with bold productions of Frankenstein, Antigone and the infamous Paradise
Now. Like novelist/activist Emmett
Grogan (Ringolevio), they were reborn
during their decade of self-exile on the continent.
The fertile ground of 1960’s popular
culture, however, proved to be exceptional.
After the company’s 1968 tour, The Living Theatre remained intact and
innovative, but their cage rattling took place on the fringes. And in 1975, Judith Malina made an
unforgettable foray into the mainstream, playing Sonny’s (Al Pacino’s) mother
in DOG DAY AFTERNOON.
According to director Sydney Lumet,
casting Ms. Malina was Mr. Pacino’s idea. And it paid off in spades, much as
casting Lee Strasberg as THE GODFATHER PART II’s Hyman Roth had.
Director Milton Ginsberg pointed out to me
how generous and courageous it was for Mr. Strasberg to take the part: his reputation as a groundbreaking acting
teacher on a par even with Stanislavsky was secure regardless, but anything
less than greatness in Francis Coppola’s film might have tarnished him. The same was true for Ms. Malina. Her
achievements in avant-garde theatre were legendary, and run-of-the-mill work in
DOG DAY would have disappointed her admirers, myself included, and potentially
diminished her stature. But what she
delivered was awe-inspiring.
During the time I spent with The Living
Theatre in 2008 a company member shared a story about Al Pacino’s ongoing
support of its co-founder. When Julian Beck died in 1985, the multiple Academy Award-winning
actor paid for the funeral and burial, asking in return only that no one
mention his generosity to the press.
Ms. Malina couldn’t afford to pay herself;
avant-garde theatre simply doesn’t make money.
When she appeared in DOG DAY AFTERNOON, in fact, the production had to
cover her bus fare to New York from the Vermont commune on which she lived. And in 2013, even with considerable contributions
from Al Pacino and Yoko Ono, The Living Theatre was forced to close its Clinton
Street space.
The theatre shut its doors for good, and Judith
Malina went to live in the Lillian Booth Home for Retired Artists. She’d had a 66-year run. Not bad!
As
I write this piece, I reflect on how her life and work connect to filmmaking. Of course, there are the movies themselves –
THE CONNECTION, THE BRIG, DOG DAY AFTERNOON (along with ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY,
THE ADDAMS FAMILY, AWAKENINGS, LOOKING FOR RICHARD and even an episode of THE
SOPRANOS). There are the motion pictures
she influenced: HI MOM, THE DOORS and others.
And there’s the age-old bond between theatre and cinema per se.
But Judith Malina’s strongest link to
making movies is that her uncompromising nature and her vision continue to
inspire all of us who got to see her work.
She dared to be bold and authentic to a degree most of us forget we can. Her legacy makes us aim higher.
