Journal, January 14, 1959

My father, Julian Beck, co-founder of The Living Theatre, kept workbooks—in which he made journal entries—starting in 1952, just after he and my mother, Judith Malina, began Living Theatre productions at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York's Greenwich Village. He continued these workbooks until his death in 1985, with a hiatus between 1965 and 1969, during which time he wrote the scripts for Paradise Now and Frankenstein as well as a number of poems in his "Songs of the Revolution" cycle, and his long poem Revolution and Counter Revolution. The sixty-plus original workbooks now reside in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

After the Cherry Lane Theatre was closed by the NYC Fire Department for no reason other than anti–Beat Culture prejudice, they opened in a loft uptown at 100th Street and Broadway. Following a two-year run there, which was cut short by the NYC Buildings Department, they banded together with numerous performers, painters, poets, and writers, and constructed a theatre in the shell of the old Hecht's department store on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue.

On January 13, 1959, the Living Theatre opened with William Carlos Williams's play Many Loves, directed by Julian, and the theatre itself was able to become a focal point for dancers, filmmakers, comedians, poets, and musicians to perform both in the company's productions and on the many "Monday Night" series that played out under their roof. Artists who later became identified with Fluxus, Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, and the downtown music and art scene performed at the theatre. The opening night in January 1959 signaled the beginning of a stretch of artistic valor that heralded the oncoming 1960s' cultural epiphanies. The journal entry published here is Julian's reckoning of that event.

Right after the opening itself, most of the cast, some of the audience, and a number of supporters adjourned to Julian and Judith's apartment on West End Avenue to await the reviews. All the accompanying photographs are from that wonderful opening night party.

Garrick Beck

Deus gratia, if I were no atheist; Deus gratia, although I am an atheist.

The theatre opened last night.

With splendor and humility and with emblems of success.

I am still thinking now of the applause and the embraces, the many curtain calls and flowers. The champagne party, the friends and strangers with their words of praise. It is like a blanket of comfort, warm, protective, all these things are a permit to rest, to breathe again. "At least we don't have the inconvenience of a flop," as Judith put it.

She was the heroine. She made the run, performed the difficult feat, defeated the opponents, like great athletes, she enacted the role, made us believe, transported us to another world, by the art she created, gave us, gave the audience, the vigorous feeling that we are all capable heroes.

The night, the OPENING—the emerging—night rose slowly and with never-changing time out of chaos, out of a tempo riled in intense hysteria. The time always insistently progressing, out of chaos and an atmosphere of terrible expectation, all nerves, all fright, all action animated by the love and fear of El Publico (Lorca), the people for whom one works and whom one wishes to please—I do not fear the displeasure of the people; I fear to disappoint them. The opening night rose inevitably into the light and in the noise of the applause, the shouts of bravo. I stood on the stage and at that remembered only and could hear only that other noise, the noise in the corridors, in the Tombs, that other deafening noise, a noise. Tho' I did not now nor then want to hear and could not get it out of my ears. I drained the noise of the applause. Judith and I kissed in full view of the public.

Try again.

The opening night, the night, night now, night itself rose through the darkness with magnificent inevitability. The night rose out of the darkness of chaos...