What Do We Want to Achieve?: A conversation among Judith Malina, Hanon Reznikov, and Tameron Josbeck

Judith Malina cofounded the Living Theatre in 1947 and is currently the coartistic director along with Hanon Reznikov, who met the company as a college student in the 1960s. Tameron Josbeck is an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Massachusetts and one of the Puppetistas who was arrested in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention in August 2000. He is Malina's grandson. Theater asked these theater activists from three generations to discuss the tactics and poetics of protest theater.

TAMERON JOSBECK Let's get at the issues by considering a specific project. Let's say we're preparing protest spectacle for the presidential inauguration.

JUDITH MALINA Good. So the first question is: what do we want to achieve?

JOSBECK Media.

MALINA Oh, sure. But what results do we get? Media is not a result. It is a medium. What do we think can lead to some change in people's feeling? I'm clear about what we want to achieve with our death-penalty play, Not in My Name [which the Living Theatre performs in New York's Times Square whenever there is an execution]. If we do our play, and ten thousand other people are doing other anti-death penalty things, and then a hundred thousand are, maybe we can get rid of the death penalty.

But what can we do here, in the inauguration? The most violent, radical people will say, "We should stop it! We should bomb the podium!" But even if that made them stop, they'd do another one. What is the mindset we're going to create in relation to the inauguration?

HANON REZNIKOV Just to let people know that there are a lot of people out there who don't think it was fair the way Bush became president isn't going to have much impact, because that's clear enough already.

JOSBECK Okay, so is the next step to create theater advocating new government?

MALINA I don't want to advocate new government. I won't participate in that.

JOSBECK Then let's work with an image. How about: Government itself is not holding up its end of the bargain. Some kind of big puppet or float using a scale or people crushed under the weight of things while the government doesn't carry anything--along the lines of the puppets in Seattle, in Washington, on April 16, and that we were making for the Republican Convention: the corporate loan sharks, showing the IMF as predatory and sleazy, the people with prison bars over their faces and bar codes on their chests, showing the profit motive of the prison industrial complex, someone collapsing under an enormous weight labeled "debt" . . .

MALINA That's good satire. But it's only satire. People see it and get the punch line and maybe have a chuckle and that's all. We need to make something that moves people more deeply. And we need to ask, first of all, "What do we want to say to which people?" Are we talking to the demonstrators, who are already on our side and know all about it?

REZNIKOV It seems to me the inauguration would be the ideal forum for bringing up this idea of doing away with the idea of majority rule, that we're ready for something more efficient and effective, decentralized, noncoercive, and anarchist in nature. So many people are disillusioned. Perhaps it's an opportunity to pick up on people saying, "This government isn't legitimate," to say, "No government is legitimate," certainly not one that relies on electoral majority as its fundamental claim to power.

JOSBECK The central theme has to trigger something in you, and if you're aware of what brings that out in you, you can bring it to others through theater.

REZNIKOV I was quite active in what's...