Joseph Chaikin and the Classics

Though Joseph Chaikin is celebrated as a major visionary director in American experimental theatre, rarely acknowledged is his interest in and affection for “the classics” and their essential place in his artistic imagination as a source of forms, values, and possibilities. Chaikin’s interests in classics was extensive: in music, from Beethoven-Schubert-Wagner-Mahler to Billie Holiday; in philosophy, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and Sartre to Martin Buber; in modern poetry, from T.S. Eliot to Pablo Neruda to Muriel Rukeyser and W.S. Merwin; and in theatre from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, and to Chekhov, Brecht, and Beckett.

Productions of classic plays were not a primary focus in Chaikin’s career, yet the classics shaped a continuing theme in his choices of plays to direct and act in throughout his life, beginning with his greatest critical and artistic triumph as a young actor in The Living Theatre’s now-classic production of Bertolt Brecht’s Man Is Man. And after playing Hamm in The Open Theater’s version of Beckett’s Endgame, Chaikin went on to direct plays by Sophocles (Electra), Euripides (Medea), Molière (Don Juan), Chekhov (The Seagull ), many plays by Beckett, and at the time of his death in 2003 he was casting a production of Uncle Vanya, the title role of which he had played at La MaMa under the direction of Andrei Serban. And further: just prior to his stroke in 1984, he was discussing the possibility of playing King Lear for Joseph Papp in Central Park; later he even contemplated a move into opera to stage a version of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, where the world of commedia dell’arte collides with characters from tragedy.

While not “known” as a director of classics, Chaikin created productions of classics that were often widely admired, and response could be strong. In a New York Times review, Mel Gussow wrote about a Chaikin production of Beckett’s Endgame: “Mr. Chaikin is an experimental artist who is scrupulous when dealing with the classics. This is an authentic Endgame down to the last agitated pause.” Great international directors of classics were also wooed by Chaikin’s art. For example, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Jean-Louis Barrault invited him to collaborate in their international workshops, and Lee Strasberg asked Chaikin to participate in an Actors Studio symposium on the Grotowski troupe’s debut season of performances in New York.

Chaikin never promoted the classics—he even shied away from the term—yet their art and vision formed the dramaturgical ground upon which he stood as actor-director and from which he reached into the realm of the experimental. This background and most serious interest has not been documented, so I was astonished when in winter of 2004 Rhea Gaisner, the distinguished director, teacher, and long-time colleague of Chaikin’s, showed me a notebook she had just discovered that had been hidden away since 1974 in her personal library. I was thrilled (a favorite Chaikin word) to examine it and as I read its carefully written pages, I heard an authentic record of Chaikin’s unique, fragmented, and distilled voice as he spoke about his favorite dramatic classics before a personally selected group of theatrical collaborators.

As Gaisner tells us in greater depth in her remembrances below, she was an early and dedicated member of Chaikin’s Open Theater. When later she reached a major stumbling block in her artistic growth, Chaikin responded by creating a series of weekly workshop classes in the classics in winter–spring 1974 with a group of actors that included members of The Open Theater, other experimental theatre luminaries such as Ceil Smith, and a growing list of observers, including Susan Sontag.

While she participated in these workshop classes, Gaisner kept a careful record of the general remarks Chaikin addressed to the actors before the performance and critique of that day’s scenes. At the conclusion of the workshop, she put the notebook away until the day she discovered it several years ago and asked me to edit the manuscript, which I was most...