One of the world’s leading experimental theater companies, the Living Theatre mounted its first formal production in NewYork City in 1951. The company contributed decisively to contemporary theater by challenging popular conceptions of what constitutes a theatrical event, by exploring ways to operate outside the financial constraints of conventional theater, by pioneering techniques for involving the audience, and by infusing its theatrical innovations with the politics of anarchism and pacifism. Along the way, the company angered and frustrated its audiences, inspired the hostility of theater critics and academicians, and encountered the wrath of police and other government authorities. Charles Mee Jr., a contributing editor for Tulane Drama Review, once described the Living Theatre as “the brat-child we love to see hit by a car—until we realize that for all its damnable qualities, it had life; for all its silliness and irresponsibility and selfishness and egotism, it was so often right.” Despite such visceral reactions, the Living Theatre has enjoyed the greatest longevity of any American theater company.
Infusing theater with serious political thought constitutes the Living Theatre’s most significant achievement. Though a tradition of political commentary existed in American drama, epitomized by the Group Theatre in the thirties, the Living Theatre along with a handful of other collectives that emerged during the sixties, such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, Bread and Puppet Theater, and the Open Theater (founded by former Living Theatre member Joseph Chaiken), revitalized theater’s capacity to address political issues directly after the eclipse of obviously topical material during the McCarthy era. Among these groups, the Living Theatre particularly incorporated audiences into performances as a device to broach political issues. By the late sixties, the Living Theatre’s notion of politics had expanded from its original emphasis on anarchism and pacifism to include matters previously regarded as lifestyle choices, such as diet, sexuality, and drug use. The Living Theatre shared this expansive conception of politics with the New Left, the counterculture, and the women’s liberation movement.
As an anarchist company, the Living Theatre proposes initiatives to combat social problems that reside outside of electoral politics. “Don’t vote for the next king,” remains a favorite company motto. A strong strain of anticapitalism underlies the company’s work, and avoiding the “money system” and the “strictures of Mammon” recur among its themes. Although the Living Theatre’s anticapitalism appears to contrast with the aims of the freedom singers, whose songs merely called for blacks’ integration and inclusion as first-class citizens rather than for dismantling the society’s economic system, it is important to remember that the individuals who were freedom singers and the civil rights movement itself were not static in their development, and that in the mid-sixties the movement’s radical wing began to call for more fundamental change in American society, including economic justice, black nationalism, and cultural pluralism. Many individuals who were freedom singers were moving toward increasingly radical positions by the mid-1960s. By the same token, although individual members of the Living Theatre may have subscribed to radical political positions as early as the fifties, it wasn’t until the mid-sixties that their theatrical work began to reflect an overt critique of capitalism. This progression suggests an expanding climate of radicalism and experimentation in the cultural realm during the mid-sixties. Like the Diggers, the Living Theatre agitated for radical social change in both personal behavior and political institutions, pointing out the many connections between the two. Both groups objected to the role of the “money system” in supporting a range of authoritarian social and cultural controls.
The Theater Is in the Street
Politics and Performance in Sixties America
Bradford D. Martin
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