Piscator in America

Contemplate, if you dare, the life of Judith Malina — activist, theatre impresario, actress, writer, revolutionary, director, and, if you take the word of those she scandalized, sexual deviant.

Malina’s lifelong involvement with the eminent German director Erwin Piscator seems, in hindsight, all but inevitable. Born in Kiel, Germany, she immigrated with her parents to New York in 1929. As Malina recounts in her very readable and touchingly modest book, The Piscator Notebook, her mother had been an aspiring actress and dreamed of working with Piscator before she married a rabbi. It was considered unseemly for a rabbi’s wife to appear on the stage, however, and her mother left the theatre for good. Young Judith, once in America, took inspiration from her mother’s dreams and in effect has spent the rest of her life in a somewhat tortured, but deeply felt, dramaturgical love affair with Piscator.

Piscator, as is well known, profoundly influenced Brecht, who expressed unbounded admiration for the director: “Piscator is the greatest theatre man of our time.” Piscator’s orientation in theatre was unfailingly political. This is his legacy to Malina. The title of his 1929 book, Political Theatre, requires no explanation. For example, ex-Kaiser Wilhelm sued Piscator for defamation because of one of his Weimar-era shows, and Piscator lent his talents to agit-prop theatre in Germany and Russia in support of the Communist Revolution. Labeled a Jew by the Nazis, though his pedigree demonstrated hundreds of years of bona fide Protestantism in his family, Piscator fled Germany in 1931 for the Soviet Union, later spent three frustrating years in Paris, and in 1937 emigrated to New York, lured by the possibility of a Broadway production which was never realized. Instead, he founded the Drama Workshop in 1940 at what was then known as the New School for Social Research. He brought with him not only his politics, but also his erudition, experience, and the innovations of his “Epic Theatre,” such as his ground-breaking use of projected cinema in live theatre. As Malina concludes rightly at the end of her book, Piscator’s “twelve years in America were a Calvary of struggle and persistence, but also an unacknowledged influence on the entire course of modern theatre.”

One of the perverse “benefits” of Nazism was the flood of displaced intellectuals who came to New York. Piscator’s international reputation allowed him to gather a host of other talents to teach at the budding Workshop, many of them, like him, refugees from the Nazis. The Workshop’s faculty included the German actress Margrit Wyler, the Yiddish/Russian actor-teacher-director Raikin Ben-Ari, German set designer Leo Kerz, German lighting and stage technician Hans Sondheimer, and the German theatre historian Paul Zucker, among others. Without Hitler, the Drama Workshop would never have existed, nor would it have been staffed by this coterie of gifted, highly educated, progressive, European émigrés. The Europeans were joined by American teachers of no less renown: Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Herbert Berghof.

Equally dazzling, in retrospect, are Malina’s fellow students at the Workshop. George Bartenieff, Anna Bergner, Sylvia Miles, Elaine Stritch, Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, Walter Matthau, Ben Gazzara, Jerry Stiller, Tony Curtis (then known as Bernie Schwartz), Harry Belafonte, and Rod Steiger are just a few of those who studied under Piscator at the Drama Workshop during Malina’s time and who went on to become great teachers and respected actors in film, television, and theatre. Tennessee Williams took the playwriting course there. In another person’s memoirs, these names might be accompanied by salacious gossip and their celebrity exploited for commercial reasons, but Malina’s intent is, as one might expect from her, considerably more serious.

In light of Malina’s larger-than-life reputation as a theatre revolutionary and provocateur, it is rather sweet to consider her in her youth, as this book allows us to do. She came to the Drama Workshop in 1945, age eighteen, as World War II was coming to an end. Her father’s death from leukemia...