Malina and Julian Beck co-founded the Living Theatre in 1947 and they ran the influential pacifist, political theater company until Julian’s death in 1985. The Living was at the forefront of every social and artistic movement for the next three decades from the Beats and Ban the Bomb of the 1950s to the hippies and anti-War movement of the 60s, to the off-off-Broadway, post-colonial and identity politics movements of the 70s.
Judith Malina becomes a better diarist year by year. A daily practice over decades hones a writer. When in New York, she sat at her antique wooden desk crowded with talismans, a stack of small completed diaries, sometimes bound in Oriental fabric, to one side. She would be writing in her newest notebook in her tiny cursive script, always with a black-ink rapidograph pen. At the same time, she carried on her smartly funny conversation, with whomever she had invited in, one of her friends or several. Sometimes, she would flip through pages to read out loud a passage from another diary from another time to elucidate something about which we were speaking. She did not like to be alone, and seldom was.
Judith was a compulsive — always in a tizzy, always at the center of her universe. She was, also, always a committed pacifist, a revolutionary, the religious daughter of Rabbi Max Malina and Rose, the rabbi’s wife, who had given up acting on the promise they would raise their daughter for the stage. As a child, Judith recited poems in Madison Square Garden, in synagogues and gathering places where her father tried to warn assembled Jews about the Nazi nightmare. Few listened. There was a strict quota for Jewish refugees while most American Jews were busy assimilating.
Rabbi Malina died of heart failure as the war began, leaving Judith and her mother very poor. At 18, she began to study with the German theater director Erwin Piscator who, along with Brecht, created the Epic Theater between world wars. Piscator was in exile at the New School running the Actor’s Workshop, and his wife Maria Ley ran the children’s school, where George Bartenieff, also a refugee from Nazi Germany, was sent to study by his mother. Judith and young George would act together in Pinocchio and The Prince Who Learned Everything Out of Books. Judith was the only woman Piscator allowed to take his directing courses.
Judith was a brilliant visionary, a fearless artist and a dazzling conversationalist. She could not (would not) boil an egg, handle money, cross a street by herself. She required a male person to bring her to orgasm every night in order to calm what she called “the terrors.” She married Julian Beck, a homosexual Abstract Expressionist artist, because he truly was her soulmate, but she took a series of lovers. On May 28, 1951, shortly before her twenty-fifth birthday, she writes, “I am a figure fleeing in the night, running from the image of Lou [Harrison, the composer]. I think of a knife with which I want to end this night demon forever.”
About her brief affair with James Agee, she writes: “Then why do I say I do not love Jim Agee? He said to me, ‘Of course it is only natural that such lovemaking leads to love. In this large sense, I love you. But what we do not feel is the sharp cutting-edge of love.’” Agee was at the time married to his third wife.
One night, Julian walks out because Judith could not stop her hysterical shrieking nor her flood of tears. She fears he has left her. When he returns (he had gone to her mother’s house) Julian tells her, sternly, she must learn what “the rest of us learned six years old.” She says she cannot, her fits and tears have always come. They always would.
Judith and Julian begin creating The Living Theatre with no money. She is directing and acting (I cannot think of another woman doing the same, except Brecht’s widow Helena Weigel, in East Berlin, or Eva Le Gallienne a generation earlier, running the Civic Repertory Theatre. )
The Living Theatre was to be a poets’ theater. They began by staging plays for invited audiences in their living room. They moved downtown to the Cherry Lane, staging plays by Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Pound, Yeats and other poets. For a few months, they had a small loft theater on Broadway. Finally, they rented the second floor in a building on the corner of Sixth Ave and Fourteenth St., with a tiled lobby and a fountain built by themselves and friends. There Judith would direct, Julian design/ produce, Brecht’s Man Is Man, starring Joe Chakin, and Jungle of the Cities, starring Beck. Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) put them on the world theater map. Condemned by the daily New York critics, Kenneth Tynan’s rave review in the New Yorker turned the tide; dozens of significant artists came. Judith and Julian gained a reputation as fearless innovators both in Europe, where the Living began to tour, and in New York.
The Living Theatre instigated the experimental, post-war radical theater movement. Joe Chaikin left the Living to found his Open Theater. George Bartenieff was a Broadway actor when he saw The Connection and knew he had to give up the commercial theater to join the Living. In 1971, he founded Theater for the New City, where he produced Sam Shepard, Irene Fornes, Bloolips, a series of groundbreaking writers and companies. Neither Chaikin nor Bartenieff would have led their particular, consequential theater lives without having first fallen under the spell of Judith and Julian, nor would I, who came under the tutelage of all of them.
Julian had a preternatural calm, a kindness and strength, with a flashing temper. He had an uncanny ability to bring out the best in everyone. One seemed literally to rise when in his presence, and he gave his complete attention. He had a special bond with children, his own and others. Julian died of cancer at age 60 in 1985, but my daughter who was five-years old remembers him clearly. Judith was a bundle of kinetic, nervous energy, spewing brilliant thoughts and intense feelings, speaking with her hands from her tiny, barely fivefoot, body, and, with her sparking intellect, igniting fires in others. She had a voice inflected almost as if she were singing an aria at all times. She told me, “I decide what has to be done and Julian figures out how to do it.” Not entirely true but close enough to explain the essence of their collaboration.
Judith writes very little of how she directed. She never tells us how she created the never before seen, ultra-realism of her first two landmark works. Jack Gelber’s The Connection, with a live jazz score by Freddie Redd. The audience felt they had wandered into a drug den where these people were actually shooting up and nodding out. Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, was a day in the life of a marine prison camp. Judith, the only woman involved, directed with an iron fist, making her male actors adhere to the discipline in the Marine Prison Handbook. Actors were physically punished for any infraction — 50 pushups for arriving late. They could not speak except to say to stern, armed guards, “Prisoner Number __ requests permission to cross the white line, sir,” in order to get where they had been arbitrarily ordered to go. Julian’s set was a foursided cage, through which the audience looked.
When Prisoner #6, played by George Bartenieff, had a nervous breakdown and flung himself straight at the wire fence, he flattened there like a smashed bug. The Brig caused Congress to investigate the Marine prison system and it caused the U.S. government to charge the Living with nonpayment of payroll taxes so they could shut it down. Their theater was padlocked. Actors and audience climbed a ladder to the next-door roof and went in through a window to stage one final performance. The company was arrested. Judith and Julian were allowed to take The Brig on a European tour, already booked, but returned to serve prison sentences. The Living became nomadic, for decades, living out of Volkswagen buses, touring European festivals, picking up new members as they created new work.
Judith does not describe how she created the mesmerizing choral sounds and movements for her version of Antigone. She translated Brecht’s adaptation of Sophocles’ play into English. She played the title role for years on tour in Europe and the United States, even while very pregnant. (After Julian’s funeral, she told me that as she threw the first handful of dirt on to his coffin, all her hundreds of performances as Antigone flashed before her eyes.)
The Living Theater became world-famous for another generation, the sixties. They toured a series of four large-cast radical plays, Antigone, Frankenstein, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, and the audience participatory, Paradise Now, in which they stripped while shouting, “I am not allowed to take off my clothes”. They walked outside of the theater semi-naked with audience members riding on their shoulders, and often were busted.
Judith’s writing peaks in the last half of the fourth volume of these diaries, when she slows down her frantic pace and often cryptic prose to focus sequentially on a series of extreme events. The Living is reinventing itself once more by going to Brazil to create theater with and for the poor who live in shacks in the favelas. Creating theater for as Frantz Fanon named them, “the wretched of the earth” was Judith’s dream ever since her honeymoon with Julian in Mexico in 1947, when she encountered a blind beggar boy, puss running from his eyes. She dedicated her life in art to those who suffer most.
In Brazil, while Judith learns Portuguese, several significant experiences give shape and direction to the work. Judith had directed a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, played by men (as Genet asks) with Julian in the role of Solange. Genet, perhaps the greatest of 20th century playwrights brilliantly dramatizes post-colonial, sexually charged, sadomasochistic relationships between oppressors and oppressed. At the same time they met with Genet, Judith and Julian also became interested in the German writer Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the term masochist is derived. He had planned a series of novellas called The Legacy of Cain; Judith and Julian took the name for a series of plays they planned to perform in the favelas. In Brazil, too, Judith enters into a sadomasochistic sexual affair. In riveting detail, she documents being bound and cut. Her lover presses a sharp silver knife into her hand then pushes her bleeding palm hard into her breast, until “I almost come.” She fears she might die. She escapes with her life when her sadistic partner falls in love with someone younger and more beautiful.
Then, Judith creates a Mother’s Day play with children. “We use only their happy dreams,” she writes. The pre-teens are bound together with ribbons of crepe paper as they dance into the space. After sharing their dreams of devotion to their mothers, they break free and “fly” into young adulthood. This play transfixed the mothers; it was a gift that recognized their care, despite their poverty, for their young.
Then, outside in a favela, they create a play in which a series of masterslave domination and submission tableaux end with the Living actors tied and bound. Nothing more can happen until the audience enters the scene. Motivated by the forceful structure of the scenes they witnessed, the favela dwellers understand the task at hand.
They untie the actors and share in cake and laughter. The Living performers are “incredulous, at having actually done it”. Everyone, she writes, understands the bondageliberation metaphor. Then, they are busted, set-up, for possession of marijuana — a bag of which is found underneath a sign.
Judith Malina is a brilliant prison diarist. In jail, her attention to detail, her compassion for the suffering of others, her spiritually burn clear and bright. Her prison diaries are revelatory of her deep daily practice of nonviolence, her keen observations and her kindness to others, her reliance for her courage upon her ability to love. Qualities that marked her life.
The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947–1957, 1958–1968, 1968–1969, 1969–1971 Northwestern Press Kate Bredeson, General Editor 576, 552, 216, & 304 pages
Karen Malpede is author of the memoir Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths in which she also writes of Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
