Judith Malina & Julian Beck – The Living Theatre

New York City, 1963. It’s a sweltering August evening on West 14th Street, and inside a small, dimly lit theatre, hell is breaking loose on stage. The play is The Brig, a searing depiction of a day in a U.S. Marine Corps military prison. Under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights, young men in khaki uniforms bark orders at other men who scramble, heads shaved, chins dripping sweat, performing endless punitive exercises. “Move, move, move, you maggots!” a guard shrieks as prisoners jump at top speed in place. The sound of boots hitting the floor in unison—thump, thump, thump—creates a brutal rhythm. The audience is wedged on benches almost within arm’s reach of the action, flinching as each abuse is hurled and enacted. In the front row sit Judith Malina and Julian Beck, co-directors of The Living Theatre and the midwives of this harrowing production. Judith, a petite woman with intense eyes and long dark hair, clenches her hands; Julian, tall and gaunt with a mane of wild hair and paint-splattered jeans, bites his lip. They know this performance is special—and possibly the last in this space. Because outside the theatre’s double doors, city marshals and police officers have gathered. The Living Theatre, they claim, owes back taxes and fines; tonight, they intend to shut it down.

Richard Schechner – Performance theory

Heiner Müller – Fragmented drama

East Berlin, 1961. The auditorium of the Volksbühne theatre is packed to the rafters on a damp autumn night. A new play called Die Umsiedlerin (“The Resettler Woman”) is making its debut, and whispers have spread that this piece might be controversial. Behind the curtain, the playwright Heiner Müller paces, a slender 32-year-old with a mop of dark hair, chain-smoking even as he steels himself for what’s to come. On stage, the final scene is reaching its peak: actors portray peasants forced to relocate under a government program, their bitterness and confusion palpable. A stern Party official character in the play extols the glorious future of collective farms—but his speech is undercut by the silent stare of a tired old woman cradling a suitcase, representing those left disillusioned. When the curtain falls, there’s a beat of heavy silence. Then, scattered applause. Some in the audience are moved; they recognize the truth in the play’s portrayal of upheaval in their lives. Others remain quiet. In the second row, a cultural functionary in a gray suit leans over to his comrade and mutters, “This will never see another performance.” Müller peeks out from the wings and senses the unease. His jaw tightens. By the next morning, the verdict from the authorities comes swiftly: Die Umsiedlerin is banned, shut down after that single performance. The young playwright has been branded a troublemaker. Heiner Müller exhales a stream of cigarette smoke and understands that an official shadow has fallen over him—one that will follow him for decades.

Robert Wilson – Slow time, visual theatre

Avignon, 1976. Late on a July evening in the cobbled courtyard of the Théâtre Municipal, hundreds of festival-goers sit on wooden benches beneath a darkening sky. On stage, a strange and hypnotic tableau unfolds. A line of figures in unison slow-motion crosses from left to right, their movements deliberate and dreamlike. A young woman in a white dress steps forward, raises her arm at an impossibly languid pace, and points toward a bright halo of light. From the orchestra pit, an electric organ sustains a pulsating chord that seems to suspend time itself. In the front row, a man wipes sweat from his brow; it’s been four hours, and yet the performance of Einstein on the Beach is still in full flow, no intermission in sight. Some audience members quietly slip out for a break, then wander back in—a courtesy the director has encouraged. Up in the lighting booth stands Robert Wilson, tall and still at age thirty-four, his eyes taking in every detail. He wears all black, silver hair pulled into a tight ponytail, the very picture of calm control. As a gentle chorus of “do-re-mi” syllables echoes onstage in an endless loop, Wilson allows a rare, slight smile. This is his world: a theatre where time stretches, images speak louder than words, and the spectators’ sense of reality is slowly, inexorably being transformed.

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Federico García Lorca’s theatre unfolds like a folk song that turns into a scream. He was a Spanish poet-playwright who infused the real stories of rural Spain with surreal imagery and lyrical symbolism, creating a style often called poetic realism. In Lorca’s plays, the setting might be a humble village or a family home bound by tradition, but the language and emotion soar to passionate heights, and fate itself feels like a character hovering just offstage.

Lorca grew up in Andalusia, in southern Spain – a land of flamenco music, gypsy lore, intense religious fervor, and codified honor codes. He loved the traditional forms (folk ballads, flamenco “deep song”), and he once said he tried to “resurrect and revitalize the most basic strains of Spanish poetry and theatre” . His major plays certainly do that. Often grouped as the “rural trilogy,” Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) dig into the soil of Spanish society – examining passion, oppression, and the collision between individual desire and societal mores – with a mix of earthy realism and flights of poetry.

Augusto Boal enters the story of modern theatre the way a spark enters dry grass: not politely, not quietly, and not with any respect for the comfortable boundaries that keep “art” safely separated from “life.” If you look at the twentieth century’s theatre revolution as a long argument about what theatre is for, Boal is the figure who steps forward and says: it is for people who are not in the room yet. It is for people who don’t have tickets, who don’t have time, who don’t have training, who don’t have permission. It is for the ones who live under rules they did not write. And because of that, he becomes one of the crucial bridges between the rehearsal room and the street.

Boal was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1931, into a Brazil that was simultaneously urbanizing and stratifying, modernizing and brutalizing, a society where wealth and power lived beside poverty with a kind of daily indifference. He studied engineering at first, which matters more than it seems. Engineering trains your mind to see systems: inputs and outputs, pressure points, hidden structures, feedback loops. Later, when Boal began to think of theatre not as a museum of masterpieces but as a technology of human encounter, you can almost feel the engineer underneath the poet. What happens if you change one variable in a social scene? What happens if you interrupt the pattern? What happens if the “audience” becomes part of the mechanism?

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

In a Harold Pinter play, what isn’t said often matters more than what is. A pause can last an eternity; a simple phrase like “Come in” can carry a threat. Pinter’s dramatic world is one of everyday banality pierced by sudden menace. He had a word for the peculiar blend of humor and dread in his early plays: “comedy of menace.” Critics noticed that while you might chuckle at two characters chatting about the weather, you also felt an undefinable tension – as if at any moment, violence might erupt. It’s the theatrical equivalent of seeing a shadow move behind a pleasant conversation.

Pinter’s style is unmistakable. He writes dialogue that mimics how people actually speak: fragmented, repetitive, full of understatement and small talk. His characters say things like “Not much happening today” when clearly something enormous is looming. They dodge direct answers. And famously, they fall into silences – those “Pinter pauses” that actors and directors find both daunting and thrilling . In those silences, the audience’s imagination rushes in to fill the gap. Is the character afraid? Scheming? On the brink of attack? Pinter once described his dialogue as a way to expose the layers beneath speech: “the speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear.” And indeed his plays are noted for their use of “reticence—and even silence—to convey the substance of a character’s thought, which often lies several layers beneath…and contradicts his speech.” . This makes watching Pinter a bit like being a detective – you’re always picking up clues, sensing the subtext roiling under the mundane words.

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Tennessee Williams brings us into the steamy, gothic heart of American life, especially life in the old South, and he does it with a poet’s touch and a truth-teller’s grit. His plays are lush with desire – sexual longing, yearning for love or escape – and at the same time they seethe with violence, both physical and emotional. He once described his work as depicting “a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility” . That sentence is a perfect encapsulation. In Williams’ universe, genteel manners and soft drawls overlay passions as hot and dangerous as summer lightning.

Consider A Streetcar Named Desire, perhaps his most famous play. On the surface, it’s the story of a fallen Southern belle (Blanche DuBois) visiting her sister in a rough New Orleans neighborhood. Blanche speaks with flowery refinement and clings to notions of femininity and romance. But she’s arrived at the Kowalski apartment, a cramped, loud space dominated by her brother-in-law Stanley – a man of blunt words, animal energy, and no patience for Blanche’s illusions. The play becomes a collision between illusion and reality, desire and brutality. Blanche’s longing for magic (“I don’t want realism, I want magic!” she pleads) leads her into a dangerous dance with Stanley, who ultimately shatters her—raping her in a scene that is never shown explicitly but whose violence reverberates through the final act . The “romantic gentility” Blanche represents is no match for Stanley’s “harsh realities” . The ending is one of the most haunting in theatre: a broken Blanche led away, muttering about kindness from strangers, as Stella (her sister) and the newborn baby remain with Stanley – the new order of things, unvarnished and cruel.

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Tennessee Williams brings us into the steamy, gothic heart of American life, especially life in the old South, and he does it with a poet’s touch and a truth-teller’s grit. His plays are lush with desire – sexual longing, yearning for love or escape – and at the same time they seethe with violence, both physical and emotional. He once described his work as depicting “a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility” . That sentence is a perfect encapsulation. In Williams’ universe, genteel manners and soft drawls overlay passions as hot and dangerous as summer lightning.

Consider A Streetcar Named Desire, perhaps his most famous play. On the surface, it’s the story of a fallen Southern belle (Blanche DuBois) visiting her sister in a rough New Orleans neighborhood. Blanche speaks with flowery refinement and clings to notions of femininity and romance. But she’s arrived at the Kowalski apartment, a cramped, loud space dominated by her brother-in-law Stanley – a man of blunt words, animal energy, and no patience for Blanche’s illusions. The play becomes a collision between illusion and reality, desire and brutality. Blanche’s longing for magic (“I don’t want realism, I want magic!” she pleads) leads her into a dangerous dance with Stanley, who ultimately shatters her—raping her in a scene that is never shown explicitly but whose violence reverberates through the final act . The “romantic gentility” Blanche represents is no match for Stanley’s “harsh realities” . The ending is one of the most haunting in theatre: a broken Blanche led away, muttering about kindness from strangers, as Stella (her sister) and the newborn baby remain with Stanley – the new order of things, unvarnished and cruel.

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Eugène Ionesco found the absurdity of life not in grand philosophical statements but in the petty routines of everyday people. A man and woman sit in armchairs, trading banal phrases about the weather and grocery prices – until, to their amazement, they realize they’re husband and wife. This iconic scene from Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano (1949), is typical of his approach . He loved to expose how empty and automatic our social dialogues can be. In his hands, the clichés and small talk of bourgeois life become hilariously meaningless, and then, suddenly, menacingly alien.

Romanian-born but writing in French, Ionesco was a founding figure of what Martin Esslin later called the Theatre of the Absurd . He didn’t set out to write “Absurdism” as a doctrine – in fact, he disliked the label – but he did dramatize the absurdity of the human condition in ways that audiences found both comic and unsettling . While Beckett (his contemporary) tackled existential dread in a bleak, minimalist way, Ionesco brought a playful, satirical energy. He once said he wasn’t attacking the existence of meaning per se, but mocking our pretensions and the collapse of communication. He preferred the term “theatre of derision” – deriding the absurdities he saw in society.