Behind the Bars

Troubled that I don't remember dreams
I had a dream
About remembering dreams.

Judith Malina, "Remembering Dreams"

That the Living Theatre has returned to New York City, inaugurating a new theatre space—their first in NYC since 1993—with a production of The Brig evokes just such a "dream about remembering dreams." Indeed, the Living Theatre itself is like a half-remembered dream that niggles at the back of your head all day long and you know something really amazing/insightful/profound happened in your sleep, but you can't quite articulate what you have lost upon awakening.

Consider: The Living Theatre is one of America's oldest, continually operating theatre companies. Created by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in 1947, the company has performed throughout the world, created landmark moments of theatre history, and maintained a fierce ideology of love, justice, and pacifism. In the right—well, rather the wrong—hands, the Living could easily be turned into a cash cow, parlaying their artistic and cultural capital into a venerable, established company making slightly edgy, but ultimately empty theatre. For sixty years, however, the Living has resisted such a move, remaining on the fringes of the theatre world and kept alive by passion and spit, blood and tears, and the belief that theatre really and truly matters. That theatre can make a difference. That theatre can change the world. The Living Theatre is a dream of our better selves, lost in the recent decades of rabid capitalism, exploding media outlets, and the heat-death of theatre as a vital force for change in this country. Lost perhaps, but still there, still niggling, still living.

Consider: In 1963, Kenneth Brown's play The Brig appeared, staged to critical acclaim by the Living Theatre. In both text and staging, The Brig was unlike almost anything that came before or, with few exceptions, since. Less a play and more a description of action, The Brig offered little in the way of plot and next to nothing in the way of character development. Breaking any number of dramatic conventions, Brown created a text that was meant to shock and outrage the audience in a manner similar to the shock and outrage that was generated by the thirty days he spent within the military penal system. Loud, raw, and abusively violent, The Brig did not so much explore or analyze the injustices of military prisons as it screamed them; screamed them over and over and over and over again. This was not theatre as drama, or theatre as play, but theatre as brutal living machine; a kinetic sculpture put in motion and structured to use actors as nothing more than moving parts. The Brig presented the inner workings of a system that denied hope, mercy, humanity, and, ultimately, life. For Kenneth Brown and the Living Theatre, The Brig evoked the nightmare of military and political power as wielded by bloodthirsty American government.

Consider: Over four decades have passed since The Brig was first staged, since the Living's theatre on 14th Street was closed, since the infamous "play-in" was staged—an illegal performance of The Brig that landed most of the company members behind real bars—and since the Living went to Europe in what is often called their "exile." Paradise Now! may be the Living Theatre's most infamous production, but The Brig is the company's mythic act of resistance as the production spilled out of the theatre and into the legal system, and placed both Julian Beck and Judith Malina in actual jail cells. For forty-four years, The Brig has been seen as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the Living Theatre as they were closed down, forced out, exiled. In many ways, the events surrounding the 1963 production of The Brig have become deeply entangled with the production itself. Those events have bled into myth, facts have blurred, and we have been left with a dream memory—all hazy, slippery, and just on the edge of disintegration. These qualities make The Brig an excellent choice for the inaugural production of the Living Theatre's new space.

Waking...