Living Theater: The Becks and Their Shock Troupe

In scene six of Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, one of four spectacles that the Living Theater presented on its recent cross-country tour, mainly before university audiences, six actors assumed the lotus position near the footlights and violently blew their noses without handkerchiefs. Some used their fingers, some used nothing. They made quite a mess of their faces. ("For God's sake," yelled a spectator at MIT, "take Dristan!") Presently, a seventh actor unrolled a roll of toilet paper, ripped off long strips, handed them around, and they all blew into these for a while.

The symbolism of this rheumy exercise has been interpreted in the Evergreen Review by Saul Gottlieb, the company's hippie-maned, hippie-bearded producer: "[They are] blowing out the shit of the polluted air of the city your nostrils collect every day; ritual cleansing prerequisite for entering the temple."

Few repertory companies ever aroused such fierce reactions pro and con. The pros consist chiefly of flower-power youth, campus anarchists and the New Left. There is also a sizable number of more mature intellectuals who credit the Living Theater with major theatrical breakthroughs. "Mysteries and Smaller Pieces," wrote The Nation's Robert Pasolli, "contains the most aesthetically daring things I have seen on the stage, as well as some of the most beautiful and moving." "A fiery furnace," commented the London Times during the company's four years of self-imposed exile, which ended temporarily last fall. In Rome, novelist Alberto Moravia defended the Living Theater with his fists against a fascist detractor. Moravia and other Italian supporters raised $5000 at a charity auction to enable the company to fulfill its following engagements.

No great mystery obscures the intent of any of the Living Theater's antics. They express the sociopolitical ideals of its cofounders, directors and leading performers, the Lunt and Fontanne of hip culture--Julian Beck and his wife, Judith Malina. These ideals embrace pacifism, anarchism, the abolition of money as a medium of exchange and of all national frontiers, vegetarianism, nudism, sexual freedom and the right to smoke pot. "I demand of each man everything," declares Judith Malina, a tiny, hot-eyed, black-haired woman of 42, who customarily wears a black pullover, black miniskirt or slacks and black panty hose. "I want total love as our standard." From a silver chain around her neck dangles a medallion with markings of double significance: They represent both semaphore letters N and D for "nuclear disarmament" and ancient runes for "man dying." The reverse emblematizes "universal disarmament" and "man living."

Julian Beck, a long, bony figure, appears equally grim, almost phantasmal in black slacks and tatty black work shirt (though on formal occasions he may substitute a quilted, silvery ski jacket). He smiles sparingly. His natural expression is remote, detached, serene. His voice has a languid, overcultivated cadence. Egg-bald on top of his head, he has trained a patch of graying hair to hang down between his shoulder blades. Long hair and bizarre garb, according to the hip-culture cliché, betokens liberation from the establishment, and the Becks clamor for the destruction of all present forms of society. "But within a nonviolent frame of action," Julian hastens to add. "We see the theater as a model for safe revolution."

In Paradise Now, the Living Theater's most outré production, the actors scatter through the audience and, each privately addressing an individual member, whisper, "I am not allowed to travel without a passport." They repeat this in crescendo, culminating in an ear-shattering howl of despair. The litany begins anew with, "I am not allowed to smoke marijuana." Then, "I cannot live without money.... I do not know how to stop wars.... I have no right to take off my clothes." At this final protest, they strip down to cache-sexes, encouraging the audience to imitate them. Audience participation, the abolition of all barriers between actor and spectator, is the quintessence of Living Theaterism, the Becks' notion of the major step toward revolution here and now. Some spectators happily comply. Allen Ginsberg did, expectedly. At the New York opening of Paradise Now last October, a tubby little man, having discarded every stitch of clothing, followed the actors back to the stage, squatted there awhile in the lotus position and suddenly broke into an improvised dance. A girl from the cast, also stark-naked, began to dance with him. When the lights dimmed before the next scene, the newly met couple, still in each other's embrace, sank to the floor.

The Becks' version of the Sophoclean tragedy Antigone begins with the cast gazing skyward horror-struck and droning, "Zzzzzzzzzz." Long before they stop, some 15 minutes later, the audience has got the point: bombers approaching. Again, lest the modern parallel in his mind elude anybody, Julian, as the tyrant Creon, lapses into a Texas drawl.

Conservative theater buffs and critics, the square and over-30, tend to fume at the mere sight of members of le Living, as the troupe has come to be known throughout Europe, with their lurid dress and hair styles. "Commies ... nigger lovers ... homosexuals ... drug addicts," the right-wing European press has called them. They have been censored, banned, beaten and jailed. In southern France, a homemade bomb exploded under one of their Microbuses. A regional newspaper editorial expressed regret that both persons and property had escaped harm. At last summer's Avignon festival, where le Living unveiled Paradise Now, the company became a major political issue. Following the spring general strike, De Gaulle had ordered new elections. The rival local candidates for the Chamber of Deputies were the mayor, Henri Duffaut, running on a Socialist-Communist coalition ticket, and Jean-Pierre Roux, a Gaullist. The latter's campaign posters attacked the mayor for opening the city gates to "filthy beatniks who are corrupting our youth." A group of right-wing hooligans stormed the company's lodgings, threatening the men with mayhem and the women with rape. They left only after realizing that there were young children present.

In their native land, the beleaguered couple had long been inured to such misadventures. Two decades of legal and political imbroglios had reached a climax in 1964, with the Government's claim of tax delinquency against the Living Theater, followed by the Becks' imprisonment for obstructing Federal officers in the performance of their duty. After prison, they chose expatriation. Their renewed presence here was transient. They arrived with return passage booked for the spring.

People who bring to the Living Theater any traditional aesthetic expectations are doomed to disappointment. What the company offers combines elements of a Happening, of ritual, religious revivalism and agitprop. The Becks themselves do not speak of plays. They term them "collective creations." Except for their version of Antigone, which may soon appear in book form, no publishable scripts of their creations exist, because they are largely improvisational and mimed, changing from performance to performance. Acting? Most of the company, the Becks included, have attained a technical competence barely above the amateur level. Language? They use it sparingly, conveying ideas--feelings, rather--nonverbally, through grunts, wheezes, shrieks, hisses, wails and body movements (the last executed with remarkable acrobatic prowess and precision). Scenery? Precious little, except in Frankenstein, the Becks' adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel, with its stunning lighting effects and vast scaffolding on which the actors, demonstrating man's inhumanity to man, hang, electrocute, garrote, guillotine and in every other imaginable way kill one another. Costumes? Whatever oddments the actors happen to come in off the street wearing that day.

Moreover, as the Becks themselves concede, the Living Theater can have but scant meaning for the spectator unable to lose himself in it; that is, to chant along with Julian ("Stop the war in Vietnam.... Ban the bomb.... Feed the poor"), to mingle with the actors on stage and shuck his clothes. Such a reticent spectator is likely to derive about as much uplift from the proceedings as an agnostic at a Holy Roller meeting. "Revolutionary theater," says Julian, "involves unlocking the feelings of audiences, opening up a new actor-audience relationship." When The New York Times' Walter Kerr and his wife Jean were watching Paradise Now, the cast taunted him for his obvious detachment. "Here's a critic who won't participate!" cried one sputtering, sweating, seminaked actor, addressing Kerr from the aisle. "How can you understand us if you don't take part?" Kerr, a diffident man, reddened and remained silent. "Well," said his wife cheerily, "we all have our problems."

Describing the evening in the Sunday Times, Kerr wrote: "You will not be interested in the players stripped to G strings, for their bodies are in the main ugly, the males scrawny, the girls undeveloped.... It is sometimes necessary to wipe the players' spittle from your face." He concluded: "The almost unbearable truth is that life and the theater have passed the Living Theater by."

• • •

Julian Beck was 18 and his future wife 17, both obsessed by the theater, when they first met in Manhattan 25 years ago. The younger son of a Jewish auto-parts dealer and a schoolteacher of Austro-Hungarian origins, he had graduated from Horace Mann high school and entered Yale. Judith Malina, born in Kiel, Germany, to a rabbi and a former actress, had endured a harsher childhood. Her father, foreseeing the rise of Nazism, brought his family to the U. S. when she was two. He died penniless ten years later, obliging mother and daughter to go on relief.

Shortly after Julian met Judith, he walked out of a Yale classroom in the middle of a lecture, never to return. "I felt it was time to get on with the things that were important to me," he recalls.

During their five-year courtship, Julian and Judith haunted the theaters on, off-and off-off-Broadway. Too poor to buy tickets, they would slip in among the standees after the intermission. They (continued on page 192) Living Theater (continued from page 122) grew to despise commercial Broadway fare. "Decadent, boring and useless," they found it. Determined to establish their own "living theater," they wrote for advice to such luminaries of the theatrical avant-garde as Jean Cocteau, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, E. E. Cummings and Robert Edmond Jones, and received encouraging answers. For two years, they attended the Dramatic Workshop conducted by the celebrated German-refugee director Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research. Piscator stressed political commitment in the theater, a line the Becks have passionately pursued throughout their careers.

Judith, meanwhile, earned meager money as a singing waitress, then a TV actress; Julian, as a designer of advertising displays--occupations they detested. They married in 1948 and produced a son, Garrick (named after the 18th Century tragedian David Garrick), who recently filled them with pride when, as a sophomore at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, the got himself arrested for anti-draft agitation. In 1967, during their European wanderings, a daughter was born--Isha Manna (loosely translated from the Hebrew as "heavenly female gift").

The Becks' first attempted theatrical collaboration, in 1948, was a series of Japanese no plays translated by Ezra Pound, which they proposed to stage before a subscription audience in a Lower East Side cellar. It never reached rehearsal. Off-Broadway theater was then far from commonplace and, to the vice squad of the New York City police department, basement theatricals suggested a camouflage for some sort of illicit sex, possibly a brothel. They padlocked the place. When Beck explained what had happened in an apologetic letter to Pound (who had been committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., following his trial for wartime treason), the poet replied with his characteristic affected illiteracy: "How else cd a serryus thee-ater support itself in N.Y.?"

Beck's mother occupied a modest apartment on West End Avenue and during the summer of 1951, the living room served as the couple's next theater. They presented avant-garde one-acters by Garcia Lorca, Bertold Brecht, Gertrude Stein and Paul Goodman. The Living Theater offered its first public performance, Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, on December 2, 1951, at the Cherry Lane Theater.

The Becks and their company's exasperating air of moral superiority, their occasional open contempt for their audience ("We want to drive you out of your wretched minds!" one actor recently shouted from the stage) are perhaps understandable, considering the misfortunes they have survived. After five experimental productions at the Cherry Lane, the fire department closed the theater because of safety violations. It took the Becks two years to reopen in a loft on upper Broadway. The initial presentation was W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, with a dodecaphonic score by Jackson MacLow. Seven productions later, the department of buildings ended that venture, when about 60 people a night were crowding into a space considered safe for only 18.

Another two years elapsed before the homeless troupe found a four-story building on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue and, with the aid of sympathetic artists and show folk (among them John Cage and Merce Cunningham), converted it into a drama workshop, rehearsal hall and walk-up 162-seat auditorium. There the Living Theater, struggling along in penury until 1963, brought the total number of its productions to 29. Judith directed and acted in more than half of them. Julian devoted himself mainly to administration, costumes and scenery.

Like Brecht and Piscator, the Becks have striven to use the theater as an instrument for social and political reform. ("Am hoping," Julian wrote to a friend after the European premiere of Paradise Now, "that it will be our really valuable contribution to the Revolution," and signed the letter "with Revolutionary love.") Authority, they contend, must wither away, leaving maximum scope for the expression of individuality; love combined with passive, Gandhilike resistance will eventually win even the police over to the revolutionary camp.

The Becks deplore their need of money. "Every time I accept a dollar or give somebody a franc," says Judith, "I'm resorting to that bloody, murderous system that men have adopted as their medium of exchange and I'm supporting it. We're all implicated.... My aim is an ultimate, idealistic Marxism--but not just to each according to his need. To each according to his desire. If some kook wants 20 pairs of shoes, he should have them. Everybody won't want that many, so there'll be enough left over. What happens to incentive? When work isn't compulsory, but performed for pleasure, then you don't need external rewards."

In defense of sexual freedom, Judith proclaims: "People should be free to live any way they want, whether they're homosexual or incestuous or whatever. A free society would tolerate a greater variation of life styles. A man and a woman should be able to live together in or out of marriage without social condemnation; and if they choose to marry, they shouldn't need the state's sanction." (Of the members of the Living Theater who bore children as they roamed Europe--eight children in all--only three couples were married.)

Judith once told a stupefied magistrate how lucky she considered herself to be married to a man who "stood by while six men beat me with clubs and did not move in my defense because he loves nonviolence more than he loves me." She was referring to an incident following John F. Kennedy's decision in 1962 to resume nuclear testing. The Becks' 14th Street building had become headquarters of the World-Wide General Strike for Peace and they marched forth to demonstrate in Times Square. Judith, among others, jumped a police barricade and sat down in the middle of the street. This prompted the cops to swing clubs and shove the sit-downers into a van. "Shame! Shame!" cried Julian, standing behind the barricade but, true to his pacifist principles, attempting no physical intervention. He nevertheless wound up in Bellevue Hospital with a battered head, a bloody nose, bruised ribs and a punctured lung.

Husband and wife were spared jail on that occasion. The year before, however, they had spent 30 clays behind bars for demonstrating against a Civil Defense air-raid drill. All together, they have been arrested 15 times.

The Living Theater's first major succés d'estime (financial success it has never known) was The Connection, a play about junkies by Jack Gelber, a young Chicagoan who had himself experienced an immense variety of drugs, from hash to heroin. So broke he couldn't afford the postage, Gelber delivered the manuscript personally to the Becks in 1958. They agreed to produce it after a single reading. The daily-newspaper critics blasted the play when it opened a year later (a "farrago of dirt," said The New York Times,) but there were enough prestigious dissenters to save it from extinction, notably the London Observer's Kenneth Tynan, who pronounced it "the most important American play since World War Two." The Beck's first and to this day only commercial success, it ran for almost three years.

The Connection marked one of their earliest efforts to destroy the traditional barriers separating actors and audience. In the play, a junkie pointing to a couple in the audience jeers: "There's other addicts--people who worry so much--aspirin addicts, chlorophyll addicts, hooked worse than me"; and an actor planted at the rear of the house mutters over and over: "That's the way it is, man. That's the way it really is."

The most controversial production by the pre-expatriate Living Theater, The Brig (1963) reflected the influence--and an indelible influence on the Becks it proved to be--of one of the strangest figures in theatrical annals, the French actor, director and aesthetic theorist Antonin Artaud. "My madman muse," Judith Malina calls him, speaking the truth; for toward the end of his life, Artaud spent nine years in insane asylums. He died, not long after his release, in 1948, a legendary hero of the international theatrical avant-garde. Ten years later, the Becks read the first English translation of his writings, embodying his famous concept of the "theater of cruelty," and they were transformed by it.

By cruelty, Artaud did not mean mere sadism and bloodshed depicted to titillate or thrill, but a kind of theatrical therapy, a catharsis, that would leave the spectators emotionally incapable of condoning, let alone committing, violence.

In the book that so impressed the Becks, The Theater and Its Double, Artaud wrote:

I propose a theater of cruelty....

I propose to bring back into the theater this elementary magical idea, taken up by modern psychoanalysis, which consists in effecting a patient's cure by making him assume the apparent and exterior attitudes of the desired condition....

A violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism: It summons up supernatural images, a blood stream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet's head and in the spectator's as well.

I defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have transferred their blood, who will have felt in himself the transit of a superior action, who will have seen the extraordinary and essential movements of his thought illuminated in extraordinary deeds--the violence and blood having been placed at the service of the violence of the thought--I defy the spectator to give himself up, once outside the theater, to ideas of war, riot and blatant murder....

I propose, then, a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces.

Kenneth H. Brown, the ex-Marine who wrote The Brig, documenting a day in a U.S. Marine prison, had never heard of Artaud; but the Becks immediately grasped the inherent possibilities of translating the Frenchman's theories into practice. Plotless, the characters scarcely distinguishable from one another, largely nonverbal, a hideous, grinding monotony of shouted mindless commands and "Yes, sirs!," of marching, beatings, tears, screams, The Brig was an almost intolerable physical and emotional torment to sit through. It moved The New York Times' Howard Taubman to demand a Presidential investigation if the conditions depicted were true, as scores of letters from ex-Marines assured him they were.

The Becks and their champions tend to ascribe the tribulations that ensued to harassment by an outraged politico-military establishment.

Internal Revenue fired the first shot. It claimed $28,435 due in withholding and excise taxes. Every cent the Becks had ever collected at the box office, however--and the total showed no profit--they plowed back into the theater. So tax agents seized and sealed the 14th Street building. Thereupon, the Becks began a sit-in. Pickets formed outside, shouting: "Save the Living Theater!" Crowds gathered. Judith threatened to jump out of a second-story window. Soon the area was swarming with reporters and cameramen.

After two days of near riots, the Becks determined to stage a bootleg performance of The Brig. They sneaked in customers, about 25 all told, through back doors and over the roof. The tax agents stripped the fuses from the stage switchboard, but television cameramen provided sufficient light. When the city police ordered the crowds in the street to disperse, Beck exhorted them: "The cops can't invent the law, they can only enforce it." To the unhappy tax men who pleaded that they were only obeying orders, Judith retorted: "After Eichmann, nobody should use that excuse." Trying to bar their way, she stuck her foot in a doorway, crying: "If you shut the door, you'll break my foot."

The show finally went on without further interference from the IRS men. "We're bending over backward not to create a scene," said its intelligence director. But when, after the play ended, the Becks declared their intention of giving additional performances inside the sealed building, he arrested them, along with 23 members of the cast and audience. A Federal grand jury indicted only the Becks, on 11 counts involving the obstruction of Federal officers in the performance of their duty. Convictions carried a maximum penalty of 31 years' imprisonment and a fine of $46,000 for Julian and 33 years and $35,000 for Judith.

Released pending trial, the Becks revived The Brig for a two-month run at an off-Broadway theater whose owner charged them no rent. The trial opened May 14, 1964, with the Becks serving, against the court's advice, as their own lawyers.

Few defendants ever faced a more sympathetic court. Federal Judge Edmund L. Palmieri is a cosmopolitan, liberal-minded man, a lover of the arts, especially the theater. He repeatedly assured the Becks that he had no inclination to send them to jail if convicted. "I feel," he observed at one point, "these two defendants are sincere and dedicated artists and terribly misguided people."

But apparently the Becks managed to alienate both judge and jury, and the behavior of their Living Theater cohorts who attended the trial did not exactly mollify the bench. Looking like gypsy campers in their sandals and boots, their beads, bangles and beards, they commented raucously throughout the proceedings, applauded every posture struck by the defendants, guffawed at the remarks of prosecuting U.S. Attorney Peter K. Leisure. Ten days later, after the Becks had each delivered a summation, the jury found Julian guilty on seven counts, Judith on three and the Living Theater Corporation on five.

"Innocent!" shrieked Judith, as Leisure enumerated the counts.

"Please, Mrs. Beck, please," said Judge Palmieri, head in hands. "You must stop this."

"I may assert my innocence at any time of my life. If you want to cut out my tongue, you can stop me."

Julian: "I have watched the majesty of the United States degraded and demeaned by trivia that is beyond belief. I have seen the law of this country lose all of its dignity."

Judith: "The horror that has been handed down here is such a disgrace to this country that the moves I will have to take in order to vindicate this country's honor are such that I cannot possibly grant this country any more privileges on my behalf."

She warned the court attendants: "Don't touch me. I will go limp on you." Two of the Becks' contingent present took the cue. A youth named Michael Itkin wearing clerical garb and an elf-haired girl, Jenny Hecht, the daughter of novelist Ben Hecht, slumped to the floor and stayed there until they were carried from the courtroom.

The judge's patience finally wore out. "I find you both guilty of contempt," he informed the defendants, but he rejected the prosecutor's request to hold them prisoners until he fixed sentence. "I am afraid that is precisely what they want me to do," he said, "and I am not going to accommodate them. I am not going to put them in jail at this time, because I don't think jail would do them any good, nor do I think they would do the jail any good."

"We cannot," said Judith, "stand another ten minutes of this, waiting to find out what is in your hard heart."

She found out a week later. Waiving the possible additional penalties for contempt of court, Judge Palmieri sentenced Judith to 30 days' imprisonment, Julian to 60 days' and the Living Theater Corporation to a $2500 fine.

The company had meanwhile been invited to do The Brig in London and Judge Palmieri freed the Becks under a combined bail of $1500. They returned the following winter to serve their sentences while the rest of the company holed up in a bleak Belgian farmhouse (rent-free from a wealthy pacifist) without heat, running water or much food. When the Becks rejoined them early in 1965, they embarked on the four Wanderjahre that led them zigzagging through 13 countries from the Netherlands to Yugoslavia and finally back to America.

Traveling in a caravan of decrepit Microbuses, they accumulated as they went a motley of British hippies, Dutch Provos, French enragés, German, Italian and Scandinavian New Leftists, hardly any with theatrical skills, but all anarchist-pacifists, all eager to share the Becks' experiences off stage and on. (What are the qualifications for acceptance by the Living Theater? "You have to be groovy and hard-working," says a charter member. "Once in, nobody ever gets fired.") There was Hans Schano, an Austrian youth with yellow hair hanging to his waist, styling himself Echnaton, a misspelling of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who introduced monotheism to Egyptian theology. Hans fancies himself a reincarnation of Ikhnaton. He joined the troupe in a small town in northern Italy, where he and his companion, a girl nicknamed Fire, were earning a few lire as sidewalk chalk artists. Asked recently what attracted him to the Living Theater, the Pharaoh redivivus explained: "The communal experience is absolutely necessary--a great energy source."

Recruited from the Roman streets were Mary Krapf of Brooklyn, or Mary Mary, as she prefers to bill herself, and her friend, Jerry Yanich, whose sole shelter at the time was their aged automobile. There was Pamela Badyk, Australian, a star of European underground movies; Birgit Knabe, a Berlin fashion designer; Gunter Pannewitz, orphaned in the bombing of Berlin and married to an Algerian orphan, Odile. A carpenter, he became the company's chief technician.

Of the original American members of the company to exile themselves, two are black--Jimmy Anderson, a pants presser by trade, and Rufus Collins, a sometime Trappist monk. The company's most gifted actor, endowed with a superb physique and speaking voice, Collins has turned down numerous offers from stage and film producers. He worries a good deal about the former black friends who now scorn him because he works with Whitey. In public, he often wears the hooded, flowing North African jellaba. Replying to critic Walter Kerr's warning that he risked injury to his voice by screaming so much on stage, lie declared: "I wish I could scream twenty-four hours a day against the horrors around me."

Perhaps the Living Theater's most curious figure is Jim Tiroff, Texan, graduate of a Methodist seminary, artist and irrepressible nudist. In Trieste, the prefect of police forbade further performances after Jim appeared stark-naked on stage because, so he later deposed, he had been suddenly "inspired to improvise something new." As an artist, he expresses himself through objets trouvés and hand-painted postcards, which are sold in the theater lobby, along with assorted creations by other members of the cast. A printed collection of poems, for example, costs two dollars. This tercet in memory of Martin Luther King by the company's Italian general manager, Gianfranco Mantegna, is fairly typical:

It's total crap: I don't wanna be apoet but rathera sonofabitchto be shot in Bolivia or Memphisor Berlin.

To celebrate another enthusiasm of his, the Texan carries around a rubber stamp that prints Jim Tiroff--free love. When not nude, he may wear Croatian sandals, a throw rug with a hole cut out for his head and a fur codpiece.

Jenny Hecht, who once earned $500 a week under a Hollywood contract and has also headed a little theatrical troupe of her own, dropped everything to follow le Living. With Bill Shari, its chief electrician, most physically agile performer and an oft-arrested pacifist, she served as the company's conscience, its great protester, ready at the faintest hint of what she considered an injustice to sit down, sit in or go limp. "Jenny's in a gypsy bag right now," a fellow actor reports. "Very adept at reading tarot cards."

Mysticism and the occult appeal to most members of the company. They variously practice yoga, Zen and Theosophy. The Becks themselves subscribe to both astrology and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination.

As the nomads moved across the Continent, 43 of them at one point (including newborn infants), playing in everything from town squares to municipal theaters, they shared and shared alike whatever money remained after expenses. It was never much. In Rome, performing to half-empty houses, they took in barely enough to provide each member with cigarettes and a daily dish of pasta. A Roman admirer lent them his modest villa near the city, which could accommodate eight people. Forty crowded into it, sleeping on sofas, chairs, the floor. Gunter Pannewitz slept out-of-doors--in a tree.

By the time the wanderers reached Berlin in the fall of 1965, their shoes were so worn that Helene Weigel, Brecht's widow and the actress-manager of the famed left-wing Berliner Ensemble, bought each of them a new pair. Frau Weigel failed, however, to obtain a license for them to perform in East Germany. "They dislike long hair," she told the Becks. With the sole exception of Yugoslavia, no Communist country has admitted le Living, the principal ideological objections being its dedication to anarchism and pacifism. In West Berlin, however, the Becks did find a theater. There the box-office receipts enabled them to pay each member of the company 25 cents a day. Nine cold, hungry, tattered members, several of them pregnant, had already quit to seek more profitable employment, and half a dozen more now departed. Later, in America, the company's advance man decamped with $900 earmarked for payment of a hotel bill. From his place of refuge, he wrote that he considered the money only his due--painful words for the Becks, who believe the monetary system should be eliminated.

But in France, despite a near-empty till, producer Saul Gottlieb, to whom an American tourist had handed 50 francs, leaped onto the stage, set fire to the bills and improvised a joyous "money dance." "A very ecstatic moment," Gottlieb recalls, "a very liberating thing."

The four collective creations that constitute the company's current repertoire evolved from their communal experiences. During the first harsh winter in Belgium, for example, one 18-year-old hippie suffered a severe mental collapse and became catatonic. "We didn't go official," Gottlieb recounts. "We didn't send him to an institution. That's always worse. We used community love. He's functioning perfectly now, our most disciplined member. He practices yoga." At every performance of both Frankenstein and Paradise Now, some actor flips out, goes into a trance--a quite genuine trance, the Becks maintain. "It's a psychophysical trip," Judith explains. "The whole company brings him back with love and he emerges glowing."

Before a collective creation takes shape, the community spends months talking in a kind of psychic exchange that has aspects of group therapy, psychodrama, encounter techniques, hallucinogenic insights and mystic revelation. After about the first two weeks, the Becks withdraw to filter the talk thus far and commit the major lines to paper. The community then tries out various physical and vocal ways of expressing the distillation. The Becks disappear again, reappear with a tighter schema, and so on, until the final form has been achieved. Rehearsals generally last several months.

It was under the auspices of the Radical Theater Repertory, a loose federation of American avant-garde groups, that the Living Theater returned to the U. S. last September to launch a country-wide tour, starting at Yale. (An agreement was under negotiation, meanwhile, whereby it could gradually pay the delinquent Federal taxes.) The wayfarers encountered, in roughly the same proportions as abroad, the cheers of the radical young and the boos of traditionalists, young and old alike. In both New Haven and Philadelphia, after Paradise Now, members of the cast and the audience, pouring into the streets nearly nude, were hauled into court on various charges of committing a public nuisance, breaching the peace, resisting police officers and indecent exposure. They incurred no penalties harsher than a scolding or a small fine.

New Haven townies waylaid the company's manager, John Harriman, who affects an Arab skullcap, and beat him with bicycle chains. Another band of street toughs tried to cut off Echnaton's hair, but he fought them off. At MIT, following the first performance of Paradise Now, the dean of students canceled die rest of the engagement, on the grounds that the crowds jamming the aisles and stage constituted a public danger.

In New York, where the Living Theater filled a three-week engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the manager of the first hotel it booked changed his mind. "You didn't tell me you were sending a bunch of hippies," he told Oda Gottlieb, the producer's pretty German wife. "This is a businessmen's hotel." "Oh," said she sweetly, "you mean people go there to screw." Brooklyn's St. George Hotel agreed to take them in, provided unmarried boys and girls occupied different floors and did not visit one another's rooms, an unacceptable condition. Less exacting hotels, plus friends with extra beds, finally solved the problem.

The Village Voice, the underground press in general, Newsweek and even the Times' Clive Barnes tossed lavish bouquets at the Living Theater. "The most coherent, concentrated and radically effective company in the world," raved Newsweek. "The overwhelming impression," said Barnes, "is of a new physical style of theater, raw, gutsy and vital." But the majority of establishment critics were downright venomous. Professor Jerome Lettvin of MIT in Variety: "Paradise Now is a fraud, a self-consciously phony attempt to break the boundaries of conventional theater, done as if by dirty schoolboys." The Boston Globe's Kevin Kelly: "The Living Theater is the Tiny Tim of the avant-garde, an ugly, charmless, untalented put-on." New York magazine headed John Simon's review: "Living Theater or Twitching Corpse?"

But the crudest blow was struck by Robert Brustein, dean of the Yale Drama School, who, after all, had invited the Living Theater to inaugurate its tour at the university. "I myself," he stated, "found the production [Paradise Now] tedious and without much theatrical value, an opinion generally shared by those who did not participate in the proceedings on the stage."

When the company concluded its U.S. tour last spring, it had lost $10,000. A few days later, it embarked for France, where it had been invited to tour as part of the French government's Maison de la culture program. Awaiting it, too, was impressive evidence of its influence on the young radical European theater. Scattered from Yugoslavia to England were no fewer than six imitations of le Living.