Dear Diary

In the summer of 2014, as reported by actors in her beloved Living Theatre, the experimental theater company Judith Malina founded with her late first husband Julian Beck, Malina was planning to attend Burning Man in the American desert. Not the place for a woman in her late 1980’s hooked up to oxygen, Burning Man was nevertheless a destination for theatrics of all kinds, and Judith Malina was not going to miss the chance.

That’s the spirit for life that dominates her Full Moon Stages: Notes from 50 Years of the Living Theatre, a compilation of monthly jottings from July 1964 through July 2014. Beginning with “At the full moon in ___,” each entry reads like a journey jotting; a memory trigger; a haiku of where, what, how; a monthly report of performance, protests, and Passovers. A small window into her organizational discipline, this book joins her day-by-day planner, daily diary, and hour-by-hour breakdown of what she intended to do. While another woman might record being more physical monthly, here is a personal history of a life fully lived.

February 1992, for example, reads “At the full moon in February we took the ferry Pascoli from Naples to Palermo.” You will need other volumes, her published diaries, or maybe John Tytell’s 1995 well-researched The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage, to find out more, like what exactly were they doing on that ferry, but taken alone, this is a cryptic moment of life among many such instances, and cumulatively taken, the 12 times 50 notations is a record of movement, of art, of energy, of political commitment.

Take this sequence, the entries for June, July, August, and September 1971:

At the Full Moon in June we were in Ouro Preto rehearsing the Direct Actions course and the Factory play for the Legacy of Cain.

At the Full Moon in July we were in prison in Belo Horizonte DOPS, and Julian’s mother came to take Isha out of Brazil.

At the Full Moon in August we were in DOPS prison in Belo Horizonte, preparing our trial.

At the Full Moon in September we arrived in New York, expulsed by the president of Brazil and met Carl Einhorn, and I made love on the roof with Abbie Hoffman.

Here is a juxtaposition of making art with activism, with parenting, with taking action, with a bit of gossip perhaps, or with a flat admission of extramarital sex. (She and Julian had an open marriage.) But prison and trial! An activist Jewish woman, barely five feet, what is Judith Malina doing in a place like this? We may experience some outrage, but her delivery is of life happening as it must.

Paradise Now was one of The Living Theatre’s iconic works. From 1968, the evolution of this signature piece becomes the subject of Malina’s monthly entries. Photographs mark each year: so, for 1969, the year of Paradise Now, a still shows the naked rumps in g-strings of actors Steve Ben Israel and Jim Anderson, a reminder of the play’s subversive themes, and the nudity that was revolutionary in Living Theater performances.

In 1984:

At the Full Moon in April Julian came out of Doctor’s Hospital after surgery for a cancer recurrence, in time to celebrate the Seder with family and sixty friends, at home.

At the Full Moon in June Julian was in the Medical Arts Hospital, gravely ill, where Allen Ginsberg visits him, is gloomy and takes pictures, while Hanon calls everywhere to find a hopeful therapy.

At the Full Moon in September Julian was at home, still very weak, but able to take a walk on Broadway and to receive visitors, including Ira Cohen and Timothy Baum and Joshua Lessing who talked of giving Julian’s paintings an exhibit.

The year is marked by the visissitudes of Julian’s illness, his chemotherapy, with Judith working, Hanon Reznikov, a Living...