European premiere
by Kenneth H. Brown
direction: Judith Malina
set and lights: Gary Brackett
production: Claire Lebowitz,
Hanon Reznikov, Thomas Walker
with: Gary Brackett, Gene Ardor, Kesh Baggan, Enoch Wu, Andrew Greer,
John Kohan, Tommy McGinn, Jeff Nash, Johanny Paulino,
Christopher OŽBrien Spicer, Bradford Rosenbloom, Evan True, Antwan Ward,
David Copley, David Markham, Morteza Tavakoli
Devastating. (Howard Taubman, The New York Times)
Grim, relentless, supercharged. (The New Yorker)
Unforgettable. (Variety)
A drill, a fist in the guts, a hangover, a nightmare.
(The Sunday Telegraph, London)
Shocking. (New York Post)
A nightmare ballet. (Life)
The Brig, written by a veteran who survived incarceration in a U.S. Marine Corps Brig during the 1950's, is a chilling portrait of the brutality of military prisons. The original production was the winner of the OBIE Award for the Best Play of 1963 and Jonas Mekas' extraordinary film of the production, The Brig, won the Leone D'Oro for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the following year. The play had great impact in New York and then toured extensively in Europe until 1967.
The prominence of U.S. Military Prisons in various locations around the world at the beginning of the 21st century gives new relevance to this play. The perverse logic behind the treatment of prisoners within the martial system is made stunningly clear in Brown's play, which was the first production staged by The Living Theatre after director Judith Malina read M.C. Richard's as yet unpublished English translation of The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud, whose radical approach to articulating a theatrical relationship between cruelty and transcendence transformed The Brig into a physical experience of pain and release unlike any conventional drama.
Founded in 1947 as an imaginative alternative to the commercial theatre by Judith Malina, the German-born student of Erwin Piscator, and Julian Beck, an abstract expressionist painter of the New York School, The Living Theatre has staged nearly a hundred productions performed in eight languages in 28 countries on five continents - a unique body of work that has influenced theatre the world over. During the 1950's and early 1960's in New York, The Living Theatre pioneered the unconventional staging of poetic drama - the plays of American writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery, as well as European writers rarely produced in America, including Cocteau, Lorca, Brecht and Pirandello. Best remembered among these productions, which marked the start of the Off-Broadway movement, were Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Tonight We Improvise, Many Loves, The Connection and The Brig.
In the mid-1960's, the company began a new life as a nomadic touring ensemble. In Europe, they evolved into a collective, living and working together toward the creation of a new form of nonfictional acting based on the actor's political and physical commitment to using the theater as a medium for furthering social change. The landmark achievements of this period include Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Antigone, Frankenstein and Paradise Now.
In the 1970's, The Living Theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of plays for non-traditional venues. From the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and from the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York City, the company offered these plays, which include Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences.The 1980's saw the group return to the theatre, where they developed new participatory techniques that enable the audience to first rehearse with the company and then join them on stage as fellow performers. These plays include Prometheus at the Winter Palace, The Yellow Methuselah and The Archaeology of Sleep.
Following the death of Julian Beck in 1985, cofounder Judith Malina and the company's new director, veteran Hanon Reznikov, opened a new performing space in Manhattan's Lower East Side, producing a steady stream of innovative works including The Tablets, I and I, The Body of God, Humanity, Rules of Civility, Waste, Echoes of Justice, and The Zero Method. After the closing of the Third Street space in 1993, the company went on to create Anarchia, Utopia and Capital Changes in other New York City venues.
In 1999, with funds from the European Union, they renovated a 1650 Palazzo Spinola in Rocchetta Ligure, Italy and reopened it as the Centro Living Europa, a residence and working space for the company's European programs. There they created Resistenza, a dramatization of the local inhabitants' historical resistance to the German occupation of 1943-45. In recent years, the company has also been performing Resist Now!, a play for anti-globalisation demonstrations both in Europe and the U.S.A. month-long collaboration with local theatre artists in Lebanon in 2001 resulted in the creation of a site-specific play about the abuse of political detainees in the notorious former prison at Khiam.
The Clinton Street theatre is the company's first permanent home since the closing of The Living Theatre on Third Street in 1993. The decision to return to the Lower East Side reflects the company's continuing faith in the neighbourhood as a vibrant centre where the needs of some of the city's poorer people confront the ideas of the experimenters in art and politics who have settled in the area.
