Repertory: Shock Troops of the Avant-Garde

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A bearded man with a red scarf stands totally still at the front of the stage. He says nothing. He scarcely breathes. The audience waits. And waits. Gradually, a few titters break out. Sitting at the back of the house, an actress—who dishonestly announces that she is not an actress —chides the titterers for their embarrassment. Occasionally she addresses a question to the man on stage: "Are you asking? Are you telling? Do you need?"

Eventually, other actors begin storming through the aisles, their feet thumping in military double time. They compulsively mime cleaning the backs of orchestra seats. There is a cross fire of phrases as the actors recite everything printed on a dollar bill. The caustic commentary on money and the military builds to an insane close-order drill on stage. In the cacophonous din, a thundering common shout of "YES, SIR!" seems to blast out the house lights.

As Mysteries and Smaller Pieces mysteriously proves, the Living Theater is a shock-troop army of the avant-garde dedicated to overthrowing the Establishment and conventional drama. Founded and led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the company had a modest off-Broadway success until it was closed down by the Internal Revenue Service in a 1963 dispute over back taxes. The troupe has been touring Europe ever since (TIME, Dec. 1, 1967). Last week it reappeared at the Yale School of Drama.

Most of the Living Theater's pieces are exercises in the manipulation of crowd emotions. Whatever does not actively irritate is designed to produce a kind of mesmeric communal hysteria. One piece finds Julian Beck sitting cross-legged in the middle of the stage. In a voice of clerical monotony, he says "Stop the wars, now." Cast members in the aisles shout back in unison, "Stop the wars, now!" He repeats the phrase half a dozen times as the audience response grows in force. Then he switches to "Freedom—now," and on through a litany of total dissent: "Ban the bombs," "Abolish police," "Change the world," "Abolish the state." This goes on far too long. The Living Theater persistently confuses duration with intensity. As the shouted responses turn the house into a kind of cathedral of the absurd, the cast moves onstage, forms a circle, and utters a low, collective, unrelenting wail. At Yale, student after student, grave of mien and with Viet Nam in mind, climbed up onstage and joined the circle. In revival terms, it was rather like making a "decision for Christ."

In a more playful item, about half a dozen members of the cast do a kind of jungle gavotte. With kangaroo hops, lion growls and peacock flutterings, they imitate and invent animals. Each actor performs feats of remarkable physical agility. Quite possibly, the Living Theater's eventual fame may rest on throwing out Stanislavsky in favor of the R.C.A.F. manual.