The Open Theatre [1963–1973] Looking Back

MUEEN BSISSU: PALESTINIAN PLAYWRIGHT ADMER GOURYH THE TRIAL OF THE BOOK: KALILA AND DUMNA MUEEN BSISSU 92 94 BOOKS AND COMPANY 100 Cover: From The Living Theatre's The Archaeology of Sleep Photo: Martha Swope CORRECTION: In Gordon Rogoff's contribution to "The Open Theatre: Looking Back" [PAJ 21], the second sentence of the closing paragraph should read: "The Living Theatre is evidence enough that American actors can't grow old comfortably together in America." Publication of Performing Arts Journal has been made possible in part by public funds received from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the New York State Council on the Arts. 5 THE OPEN THEATRE [1963 - 1973] LOOKING BACK "It is to the actor and to no one else that the theatre belongs. When I say this, I do not mean, of course, the professional actor alone. I mean, first and foremost, the actor as poet." -Max Reinhardt The American experimental theatre companies of the 1960s astonished their audiences with an unpredictable blend of fresh theatrical discoveries. Committed as they were to unvarnished theatricality, they looted tradition and set about inventing a dramatic order of their own. The shows they created were bold democratic assemblages, drawing on improvisation, pop culture, and the circus sideshow, as much as from political agit-prop and the continental avant-garde. If the playwright was unseated for a time by these young and spirited adventures, it was most often in the service of a fresh dramatic synthesis of image and scene, founded upon the creativity of the actor. In company after company, it was the life on stage, and not so much the writer's part in it, which signaled the value of a theatrical enterprise. The prophets of this decade of experimentation were, of course, Judith Malina and Julian Beck. It was their Living Theatre which inaugurated, in 1948, the New York experimental theatre prototype, staging modernist theatre intimately in their own apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and in spaces far downtown. With the bold creation of an independent theatrical institution, surviving along the margins of New York's theatre life, the company of Beck and Malina was emulating the loft performance idea and ideal that modern dancers had known for decades. Like the European symbolists before them, like Yeats, like the Provincetown Players, they all seemed to feel that it was within the boundaries of a smaller theatrical room that the flickerings of a new dramatic art might arise. 25 Among the actors of the Living Theatre, few stood out in the company as Joseph Chaikin did, beginning in 1959, with his engaged and sensuous performances in the plays of Gelber, Brecht, Pirandello, and others. Yet by virtue of his training and maybe even more by temperament, Chaikin grew restless within the Living Theatre, resigned and came back, and in his last year there he established his own study group to search for new styles of acting. Though deeply loyal to Beck and Malina, in the end his preoccupations led him away from the company's rising interest in a dramaturgy of political confrontation. In 1963, by the time the Living Theatre had bid farewell to America, Chaikin himself had taken final leave of the company and founded a loose collective that came to be known as the Open Theatre. Together with him in this new venture was a dedicated band of young actors, writers, and what we today call "dramaturgs," all dissatisfied with the commercial theatre and each willing to pay monthly dues for the maintenance of a communal workshop space. In the company of this ensemble, Chaikin now could independently set out for undiscovered territories of theatrical expression. He began to elaborate a theatre vision that was open, radical, and had no Way-in an aesthetic, moral, even political sense. It was his credo that the deepest possibilities of the theatre were still unknown, and a new expressiveness could be liberated upon the stage through the creative intervention of the performer. The fragile life of acting even could suffuse the spirit of the dramatic text and challenge its claim to finality. Chaikin had played in the Pirandello dramas for which the...