Living on Third Street

From four years in the late 80s, here are plays of the Living Theatre, a ground-breaking internationally known theatre troupe. This time period was a cultural and political apex in the East Village in New York, where the Theatre was (and is) housed. Edited by Cindy Rosenthal, anarchist playwright, professor, and author, who says this about her book:

In addition to the five performance texts in this volume (available to scholars and practitioners for the first time), the photographs, song sheets, design sketches, interviews, essays and diary excerpts from associate artists and company members, as well as the book's appendix... provide a detailed multi-faceted record of the creativity and the diversity of forms, styles and artists inside the Third Street Theatre.

Judith Malina and Julian Beck founded the Living Theatre as an alternative to the commercial theater in 1947, and since then it has staged nearly a hundred productions performed in eight languages in 28 countries on five continents - a unique body of work that has influenced theater the world over.

From its conception, The Living Theatre was dedicated to transforming the organization of power within society from a competitive, hierarchical structure to cooperative and communal expression. The troupe attempts to do so by counteracting complacency in the audience through direct spectacle. They oppose the commercial orientation of Broadway productions and have contributed to the off-Broadway theater movement in New York City, staging poetic dramas written almost exclusively by playwrights not directly affiliated with the troupe.

The primordial text for The Living Theatre is The Theater and Its Double, an anthology of essays written by Antonin Artaud, the French playwright. It was published in France in 1937 and by the Grove Press in the U.S. in 1958. This work deeply influenced Julian Beck, a painter of abstract expressionist works. The troupe reflects Artaud's influence by staging multimedia plays designed to exhibit his metaphysical Theatre of Cruelty. In these performances, the actors attempt to dissolve the fourth wall between themselves and the spectators.

During the 1950s and early 1960s in New York, The Living Theatre pioneered the unconventional staging of poetic drama - the plays of American writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery, as well as Europeans rarely produced in America: Cocteau, Lorca, Brecht and Pirandello.

Currently the Theatre is struggling to maintain itself in the Lower East Side. If you're interested in helping - go to http://buildthelivingtheatre.org