THE LIVING THEATRE & SYMBOLIC CAPITAL By
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OVERTURNING MAMMON: THE LIVING THEATRE & SYMBOLIC CAPITAL by Peter Wood BA, Rhode Island College, 2000 MA, University of Maryland, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Te Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences in partial fulfllment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2016 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH THE DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES Tis dissertation was presented by Peter Wood It was defended on March 3, 2016 and approved by Peter Karsten, Professor, History Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Assistant Professor, Teatre Arts Dissertation Co-Advisor: Michelle Granshaw, Assistant Professor, Teatre Arts Dissertation Co-Advisor: Bruce McConachie, Professor Emeritus, Teatre Arts ii Copyright © by Peter Wood 2016 iii OVERTURNING MAMMON: THE LIVING THEATRE & SYMBOLIC CAPITAL Peter Wood, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2016 Abstract: Overturning Mammon: Te Living Teatre and Symbolic Capital focuses on the frst thirteen years of the Living Teatre, founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck. Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production provide the theoretical tools to approach the company as a cultural producer and not only as theatre artists. Te Living Teatre has produced largely unpopular avant-garde and political theatre for seventy years. I argue that the company’s early years demonstrate a growing reserve of symbolic capital that helps explain the company’s longevity. Furthermore, the manner in which certain events in the company’s history have been mythologized, by company members, critics, and scholars, has led to some historically inaccurate accounts. In particular, accounts of the closing of the company’s production of Te Brig in 1963 and the subsequent trial of Beck and Malina in 1964 have often been infuenced by an acceptance of company member’s anecdotal, “tall tales” approach to history rather than historical evidence and archival documents. Tis project redresses this lack of historical inquiry using a variety of primary and archival sources to argue that the material and historical exigencies of the Living Teatre offer theatre scholars an example of how symbolic capital can overturn economic “reality.” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface...........................................................................................................................xii 1.0 Introduction ...........................................................................................................1 2.0 Cultural Production & Myth as Symbolic Currency .............................................23 3.0 Building a Teatre ................................................................................................54 4.0 Te Taxman Cometh ..........................................................................................137 5.0 Te Trial .............................................................................................................186 6.0 Conclusion: Winning the War............................................................................217 Appendix: Living Teatre Productions 1951 - 1963.....................................................224 Bibliography ................................................................................................................248 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Homologous Bone Structures .........................................................................41 vi PREFACE My academic path has been a long and winding one and I have had the opportunity to work with a number of remarkable and supportive people over the years. From my time at Rhode Island College, I would especially like to thank Claudia Springer, Richard Feldstein, Joan Dagle, and Kay Kalinak for introducing me to the complexities and joys of theory and for allowing me to engage, however clumsily, with the works of Marx, Lacan, Mulvey, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, and Irigaray. My advisor at University of Maryland, Carol Burbank, shared not only her knowledge, but a warmth of spirit and kindness that remains deeply appreciated. My colleague, Jeff Jacoby, was brilliant as both a friend and a sounding board. While at UMD, I also had the fortune of taking the frst graduate class taught there by Faedra Chatard Carpenter and her friendship and support over the years is a blessing. Tanks also to Noreen Barnes at Virginia Commonwealth University for encouraging my frst research into the Living Teatre and to Pamela Sheingorn at Te Graduate Center for taking those beginnings and teaching me the joys of archival work. Given my unsettled history throughout various graduate schools, I am exceedingly thankful for the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Teatre Arts and its willingness to support me over the past six vii years. In particular, my advisor, Bruce McConachie has continually challenged me in constructive ways to make me a better scholar, and Lisa Jackson-Schebetta has always expected, and hopefully received, better work than I expected of myself. She is also a pedagogical hero, and if I can be half as committed, rigorous, and thoughtful a teacher as she is, I will consider that an accomplishment. I would also like to thank the department’s Graduate Student Services Administrator, Connie Markiw. Her assistance in navigating the administrative side of graduate school was invaluable. Finally, Kellen Hoxworth, Elizabeth Mozer, and Michael Mueller deserve my unending gratitude for their friendship and the joy they brought to my time in Pittsburgh. I dedicate this dissertation to my grandparents, Don and Betty Williams, and my parents Steve and Judi Wood. Without their love and support I could never have accomplished this work. viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION We were only traveling actors Moving across the geographies Of countries that now have other names. —Judith Malina, “Te Bridge: Te Living Teatre at Mostar” On April 10, 2015 Judith Malina passed away. Only two years earlier, at the age of 87, she had stepped down as Artistic Director from the theatre she co-founded, along with Julian Beck, sixty-six years previously. Anyone who had the opportunity to meet her will testify to her humor, intensity, passion, and intelligence. Soon after her death, theatre critic Michael Feingold described her as “a surviving spirit—a pixieish, quick-witted, fervent little bundle of vitalizing energy, directing, writing, and planning new productions until virtually her last moments.”1 In the days that followed her death, many wrote about her passion for theatre, her political commitments, the long history of the Living Teatre, and of Malina’s particular gifts as a director, actor, poet, and political thinker. Tis attention was long overdue, especially considering that the Living Teatre’s work has too often been seen as simply amateurish and didactic. 1. Michael Feingold, “Judith Malina and the Award-Season Rush, Part 1,” TeaterMania.com (2015). 1 In her obituary on Malina for Te Nation, Alisa Solomon noted that in “mainstream coverage, the Living is often recalled with a clichéd reference to naked bodies groping and writhing on the ground (an image from the troupe’s infamously hectoring 1968 piece, Paradise Now) as if that sums up the oeuvre, but in fact the Living was constantly evolving.”2 But that evolution was often at odds with the aesthetic currents of experimental theatre, especially from the 1980s onward. Solomon continued: One of my favorite Living Teater productions over the decades was a surprisingly witty 1995 piece called Utopia, an exploration of the concept through movement, chanting, and spoken text that was at once fervent and self-consciously goofy. I’d seen it in New York among a jaded, withdrawn audience, and then again in a centro so- ciale—one of Italy’s squatted community spaces—in an industrial town just outside Venice. Tere, it was like going to a giant rock concert. Hundreds of people, most of them young, focked to the show with excitement, and I newly understood some- thing about the Living’s role: it speaks best to audiences looking for alternatives, open to the bald assertion of basic truths, unembarrassed to hope in public.3 Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and the members of the Living Teatre have never been embarrassed to hope in public, to put everything on the line for their understanding of theatre and their political ideologies. Regardless of how one might feel about their performance style or their unabashed advocacy for the anarchist-pacifst revolution, and regardless of how one might criticize a show like Paradise Now as “deeply reactionary and… authoritarian,”4 the Living Teatre’s commitment to theatre as a vital, philosophical, and political art-form has had a profound, if often unremarked, impact upon experimental and 2. Alisa Solomon, “Te ‘Immortal’ Judith Malina, 1926-2015,” Te Nation (April 13, 2015), http:/ /www.thenation.com/article/immortal-judith-malina-1926-2015/ (accessed July 17, 2015). 3. Ibid. 4. Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 14. 2 political theatre, both in the United States and internationally, for over sixty years. Te life span of this company is astonishing enough, but is all the more remarkable when one realizes just how economically poor the Living Teatre was throughout much of its history. Judith Malina and Julian Beck conceived of their theatre as early as 1946, settled on the name “Te Living Teatre” on January 9 1947 and incorporated the company on April 26 1948.5 Yet despite the clarity of artistic vision and their desire to build a theatre, they were unable to stage a production until