I Think I’m Still Here—I Wonder Why: A Personal Memoir of the Living Theatre

FINDING THE THEATRE

I first heard about The Living Theatre in 1968 when I read an article by Saul Gottlieb in City Lights Journal. Home to the Beat poets, City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, regularly published collections of writings, poems, and essays. Gottlieb’s article fit right in, reporting on The Living Theatre’s production of Frankenstein in Berlin. There was also an article on happenings in Paris by Alejandro Jodorofsky. Both these articles caught my attention with their descriptions of wild theatrical staging and an intensely present theatre. At the time, I was involved in conventional theatre productions at Yale University, performing Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Biederman in Max Frisch’s The Fire Bugs. I was an acknowledged talent in the undergraduate theatre world.

This was a world of anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, civil rights struggles, and experimentation with marijuana and LSD. My sexual coming out was taking its time. But then I don’t feel I’ve ever really come to terms in that field: coming out, finding my real self. In those years, you became used to constant struggle and evolution. 1968 was a year of assassinations. You just lived through it. Some of my fellow theatre friends at Yale and I decided we would try to start a summer street theatre in San Francisco focused on racial issues. I admit we were naïve, naïve enough to try, at least. It was not a success, but it was a great summer. I did California; I did San Francisco. After all, it was the summer of 1968.

When I returned to the Yale campus that fall, I was pleasantly surprised to find The Living Theatre installed in nearby hotels, for a two-week residency to kick off their American tour—a tour organized by Saul Gottlieb. The article had come to life.

I wanted to be a hippy. I liked the communal politics. I liked the hope. Hip-pies were against the war; they were egalitarian. They were beautiful. They were young—or, if they were a bit older, they resembled sages, bards, and wise people. Middle Earth and the Hobbits were popular (although I never read The Lord of the Rings). I was passionate about the music and the dancing. I had already seen the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. I had felt the ritual winds and ecstasies of hallucinatory voyages. My academic studies seemed less and less relevant. For someone like me, already consumed by theatre, The Living Theatre was the right thing at the right time.

The Living Theatre actors had been on the road for four years, a mixture of New York hipsters and exotic European youth. Only Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and a very few others were in their early forties. Half the company was under thirty. They dressed in fringes, beads, and leather pants cut in strange ways; scarves were everywhere. There was lots of make-up, even on some of the men: kohl from Morocco. Patchouli oil was intense, along with the incense.

In retrospect, it was the perfect stereotype for that hippie generation. The movement had been germinating for years, among the Beats, among the New York and San Francisco avant-garde, among the anarchist leftists, among the pacifists, the ban-the-bombers. Two years earlier in San Francisco I had seen the tip of the iceberg when I went to Bill Graham’s Fillmore West music hall. Something was in the air, as the song went. The tremendous anti-war demos and the mixing of the races in the course of the civil rights struggles propelled youth to define and refine new style. It was sexy of course; youth gets sexy when it gets rebellious. And then there were the drugs. Tim Leary was touring the land with his “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” theme. I saw his slide show in an old movie theatre in Winstead, Connecticut, near Cornwall, my home town. I wasn...