cover image The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage

The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage

John Tytell. Grove/Atlantic, $30 (434pp) ISBN 978-0-8021-1558-4

America's longest-lived radical theater is the subject of this matter-of-fact history. Tytell, an English professor at Queens College in New York City, opens with the 1943 meeting of 17-year-old Judith Malina and 18-year-old Julian Beck in Manhattan, whose unconventional marriage and bohemian ideals shaped the Living Theatre from its beginnings in the early 1950s through its work today. They were drawn together despite his homosexuality and her many affairs: theater was their bond, and the 1958 production of Jack Gelber's The Connection catapulted the Living Theatre into the limelight. Drugs, communal living, the couple's commitment to anarchist/pacifist principles and the idea that there should be no separation between art and life fueled the works that made it the most controversial theater of the 1960s: Mysteries, Paradise Now and Frankenstein were frequently performed with the police in attendance; the Becks and their followers served several jail sentences in the United States and abroad on charges ranging from indecent exposure to incitement to riot. Drawing on Malina's diaries (Beck died in 1985) and the Living Theatre archives, Tytell (Naked Angels) provides a detailed chronicle that fails to illuminate the complex Malina-Beck relationship and says little about the contributions made by other company members, a serious omission in a book about a theater based on collective creation. Although Tytell presents the couple's ideas adequately, he offers no analysis that would help readers understand when the Living Theatre met its goals and when it failed. (Feb.)