April 29, 2012
AN OPEN LETTER TO NEW YORK CITY
We’d like to report a crime in progress.
In 2012, Judith Malina lives under the threat of
eviction from her apartment and her theater on Clinton Street.
In 1947, she co-founded the Living Theater with
Julian Beck and it remains the oldest experimental political theater in the
United States and is arguably the only American political theater recognized
throughout the world.
65 years later, Judith Malina does not know where
she will be sleeping next week.
In 1959, Malina’s production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, designed by Beck, opened
in New York. The company had already
been among the first American theaters to present Brecht, Cocteau, T.S. Eliot
and Gertrude Stein, but The Connection
was a break-through event. It was
controversial, depicting drug addiction in a realistic, unromantic light and
was honored with three Obie awards and the Vernon Rice (now the Drama Desk)
Award for Gelber. The Living Theater
went on to perform the play 722 times around the world and the play has been
translated into five languages.
53 years later, Judith Malina wonders if tomorrow
will be the last time she showers at home for a while.
In 1963, Judith and Julian were convicted of
contempt of court due to tax problems and received a suspended five year
sentence. The charges were later proved
to be false. They left New York and
began a five-year European tour of creation and discovery which culminated in
their production of Paradise Now,
described at the time by Stefan Brecht in The Drama Review as “in content and
form outside the social system- not structured by it nor, except as outlet,
implementing it: liberated territory.”
49 years later, the papers are prepared, the lawyers
paid and the marshals are just waiting for the go-ahead. The property at 21 Clinton Street, in the
heart of the Lower East Side, the cradle and cauldron of both alternative
theater and political activism in New York City, will be cleared of Malina’s
possession and presence and it will be available for a new café/wine
bar/organic bakery entrepreneur to set up shop and join the bustling businesses
lining the block.
In 1971 the Living Theater toured Brazil, playing
mostly on the street. The company
members were arrested, charged with suspected revolutionary activity and
imprisoned for several months before being deported and sent back home.
Personal letters from Mayor John Lindsay, Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Yoko Ono
and Jean Paul Sartre were undoubtedly helpful in securing their release and
repatriation. Throughout the 70s the
company toured the U.S., taught countless workshops, created new work and
inspired the creation of such companies as the Open Theater, the Bread and
Puppet Theater and the Wooster Group.
This morning, Judith has to consider if she should
buy any frozen food at the store, since there’s a high probability she won’t
have access to a freezer during the period of her actual eviction and what’s
the point in wasting a perfectly good package of spinach?
In 1985 Julian Beck died and Judith buried her
husband and partner of forty years and continued to run the company. In 1989
she received her sixth Obie Award, a small grant in recognition of the
company’s legacy and influence on American theater. In 2008 she received the Artistic Achievement
Award from the New York Innovative Theater Foundation. In 2009 she received the Edwin Booth Award
from the City University of New York, and two months ago her new play History of the World was greeted with
universally respectful and positive reviews in the New York press, over half a century after some of the same papers
praised her production of The Connection.
And after 65 years of work, recognition,
controversy, mistakes, triumphs, obstacles, resistance, lessons learned,
friends made and lost, and always an unquestioned commitment to living her
principles on the stage and off, Judith Malina is going to be evicted.
Imagine, for a moment, if Pablo Picasso were being
evicted from his studio in Paris. How
would the painters and art world of France respond?
Imagine if Bertolt Brecht were being evicted from
his apartment in Berlin. Would the
theater world or the wider cultural world or the city of Berlin allow this?
There is no crime in a landlord charging a high rent
in a desirable neighborhood. There is no
crime in removing a tenant who has fallen behind on that rent. It does not matter if that tenant is 85 years
old, suffers from emphysema and has contributed a literally incalculable amount
of value and worth to the city’s cultural life. Capitalism is a cruel, strange,
beautiful belief system, but it is not a crime.
That is not the crime we’d like to report.
The crime is that we are doing nothing to help Judith
or the Living Theater.
The crime we are all about to be charged with is one
of the worst you can commit: willful negligence; failure to respect and support
an elder, failure to support our family.
Folks, it is not a crime we are willing to be
charged with, let alone commit.
This is not something we want on our conscience, not
now and certainly not in the highly unlikely outcome that we are blessed to
work in the New York and world theater for forty-five more years only to find
ourselves in Judith’s situation: back home where it all began, a shelf of
awards gathering dust on a shelf, stacks of glowing, yellowing reviews in a box
in the corner and wondering how to carry it all downstairs when the hard-working,
impersonal fellow citizens in uniform knock on the door and tell us we have to
leave, now.
We have no money to give to Judith or the Living
Theater. We honestly don’t know how we
can help. But we’re going to ask and
we’re going to figure it out and we’re asking every single one of you to do the
same.
And since this is an open letter to New York City,
we address our leader directly and ask him directly for his intervention.
Mayor Bloomberg, you are a known supporter of the
arts and a very, very rich man. We ask
you to personally end Judith and the Living Theater’s financial ordeal. Allow this women who came to our city in 1929
at the age of 3; this immigrant, who like all of the immigrants, built this
city; this New Yorker who stands as an exemplar of risk, conscience and
commitment; allow her to spend the end of her life working, teaching and inspiring, not
packing, worrying and wondering where the night will find her tomorrow. You can stop reading this sentence and make a
phone call, your Honor, and this shameful chapter of the history of the Living
Theater and the life of the New York theater will end.
If his Honor does not help, and even if he does, we
all must. Not just for Judith and the
Living Theater, but for our own honor.
Call the Living Theater. Ask how you can help. It’s not too late to get clean and do the
right thing.
John Clancy
Nancy Walsh
