The Return of the Living Theatre: Paradise Lost

The Return of the Living Theatre: Paradise Lost Gerald Rabkin At the intermission of The Yellow Methuselah-one of the four offerings in the Living Theatre's truncated season at the Joyce Theatre last winter-I ran into a friend, a playwright who has been on the experimental theatre scene for almost two decades. We shared a silent glance of commiseration which testified to the enervating experience of the work we were witnessing . "You know," he quietly stated, "the Living Theatre never was any good." I said nothing, the energy of defense depleted, but inwardly I rebelled . No, I silently shouted, you forget too easily: for almost two decades the Living Theatre was American experimental theatre, the alternative to a theatre of realism and commercialism, the prophetic source of so much of the radical energy that emerged in the sixties, the energy that produced you. Can you deny that even at their mogst controversial their vitality was never in doubt? That for those of us who cared this was theatre as it should be: provocative, committed, unignorable? The flash of inward anger faded, replaced by a deep sadness. For the reasons I silently enumerated the Joyce season is so dispiriting. In essentials the work-themes, formal strategies-hasn't changed that much from the exile period. And yet everything has changed. Why? The theatre has always consciously assailed the "professional" theatre, but now their polyglot amateurism, rather than asserting the claims of life over art, suffocates all in its path. Provocation becomes boredom, living is dessicated. Yes, the most depressing reality is not incompetence but irrelevance. A disturbing thought: is my friend 7 right? Had all my previous faith been misplaced? Had the work of the Living Theatre always been fatally flawed, flaws ignored for political reasons: the Becks' undeniable history as the martyrs of American theatre, harassed, persecuted, exiled? Was the Living Theatre, made by history, now ambushed by it? I thought back to another time, another country-the America of Nixon, Vietman, Abbie Hoffman-to another return: the Living Theatre's last major tour in 1968-69 after half a decade of European exile. On one level, the return was a triumphant progression: from September 1968 to March 1969 the troupe travelled some 18,000 miles back and forth across the United States. Wherever it went-Kansas City, Berkeley, or Brooklyn-it filled auditoriums, gymnasiums, churches, theatres with audiences who responded passionately-even if oftentimes negatively-to what was clearly one of the major theatres of the time. And yet, despite the undeniable social importance of that tour, the Living's return was not greeted with unalloyed critical enthusiasm. One might have expected a stark division between traditional mainstream reviewers disturbed by the group's strategies of provocation, and more experimentally tolerant weekly and monthly critics (an opposition indeed observable in critical reactions to such earlier experiments as The Connection and The Brig). But in 1968, ironically, it was Clive Barnes (then the Times critic) who defended the group's affirmation of "man's need for ritual and involvement" against Eric Bentley's angry critique, "I reject the Living Theatre," which castigated the group's "cult of intimacy," its guruism, and its avoidance of any real political dialectic. Bentley's attack was echoed by such serious critics as Harold Clurman, who called the group "anti-art," and Robert Brustein, who asserted that the group contributed little of substance "beyond its athleticism and its exotic style of life." I remember my contemporary reaction to these attacks, strongly feeling when I saw the repertory that Bentley, Clurman, Brustein had missed the real point: that the work of the Living Theatre-at least the notorious Paradise Now-was indeed consciously anti-art, art, that is, as a passive, crafted artifact with at best indirect connection to the social imperatives of the convulsive world which it reflected'. I too had been furious at the provocative hostility of Paradise Now (forewarned, I had left my wallet at home), until the sheer power of the event forced me to conclude that it basically achieved exactly what it set out to achieve: a passionate obliteration of the distinction between perfomers and spectators, between actors and...