To call into question
who we are to each other in the social environment of the theatre,
to undo the knots that lead to misery,
to spread ourselves
across the public's table
like platters at a banquet,
to set ourselves in motion
like a vortex that pulls the spectator into action,
to fire the body's secret engines,
to pass through the prism
and come out a rainbow,
to insist that what happens in the jails matters,
to cry "Not in my name!"
at the hour of execution,
to move from the theater to the street
and from the street to the theater.
This is what The Living Theatre does today.
It is what it has always done.
JUDITH MALINA
Judith Malina emigrated to the U.S.A from Germany at the age of two. She trained as an actress and theatre director under Erwin Piscator at the New School's Dramatic Workshop, alongside luminaries including Marlon Brando, Elaine Stritch and Harry Belafonte.
Malina was the co-founder and artistic director of the world-renowned LIVING THEATRE, the longest producing theatre company in New York and the United States. Her work and that of The Living Theatre has, since its inception in 1947, continually challenged the forms, content and style of the theatre and its relationship to and with the audience.
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JULIAN BECK
Born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, Julian was the son of Irving, a businessman, and Mabel Lucille (Blum) Beck. Educated at the College of the City of New York, he briefly attended Yale University, but then abandoned it to pursue writing and art.
An abstract expressionist painter in the '40s, his life's destiny forever changed after meeting his future wife, actress/writer/director Judith Malina, in 1943. His passions swiftly centered around the likes of hers -- the theatre -- and together they co-founded The Living Theatre in 1947, which would base itself in New York City. Their subsequent contributions propelled the off-off-Broadway movement and the vision of performance art. Julian would continue to work with the Living Theater up until his death nearly forty years later.
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HANON REZNIKOV
Hanon Reznikov became co-director of The Living Theatre in 1985, after the passing of Julian Beck. He supported Julian and Judith for 15 years before that. He married Judith in 1988. Over four decades, he wrote eleven plays and performed thousands of times as an actor in the ensemble. With Hanon as the executive backbone, the company established Living Theatre eras on 3rd Street (NYC) in 1989, in Rochetta Ligure (Italy) in 1999 and on Clinton Street (NYC) in 2007.
His book “Living on 3rd Street” chronicles the 3rd Street Era, the plays done there and the company at the time.
He also composed the initial draft of The Piscator Notebook with Judith, the seminal work about her teacher and Brecht’s creative partner Erwin Piscator, eventually published in 2012. Just before he died in 2008, he executed a major sale of Living Theatre archives to The Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, the school both he and Julian attended…neither in the theatre program ;)
Illustration of gravesite at Cedar Park Cemetery, Paramus, New Jersey, where Judith, Julian, and Hanon are buried next to each other.