 Here at the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown in Manhattan, a beautiful day in New York City. And the streets are empty, no tourists. So very few people go into their offices. It's almost like a small town. People are walking leisurely. People are sitting outside in improvised structures from all the restaurants. 30-second street where normally 300,000 people come out in the morning out of Penn Station. It's closed for traffic. And it's full of restaurants. And over Fifths Avenue, up to Madison. And it's a very different feeling in this city of uncertainty. And New York has changed dramatically as has the situation. Of course, we all know that and wonder what will happen with this country, with this government, with this president, but also, of course, with the arts. And we still don't perform that everything is closed compared to Europe. This country mismanaged so much. Miemann, France, England, Germany, theater people are back to work. Musicians are back to work in New York. It is not the case. Musicians cannot even perform in the boroughs because by law, you cannot sell alcohol or drinks alone. You have to sit down and eat because people are afraid that there are large groups gathering. So it's a disastrous situation still for all the artists involved. And we really have to think, what does it all mean? And now at the Segal Talk, after four months, walking every day of the week to theater artists, we opened it up. We opened it to curators, to producers, to dramaturgs, academics, and writers. And to see what is it what we should think about, what's of significance, and also highlighting a bit theater performance and the political, the political of our work, like the dramaturgy and all of it, this thinking part. This is something that always should be part of it. But perhaps now we have a bit more time to listen. Perhaps we can more carefully read and to talk about. With us today is the great Tom Walker, a New York-based actor, director, writer, and also a teacher. And he has been with a theater company that has done what very few companies have done. They revolutionized theater, actually. You know what I'm saying? They are the only company, the most significant ensemble in the 20th century that really changed how we think about theater, what we are concerned about in the world and how the arts can make a contribution to make us think in the Brechen way. But breaking that famous fourth wall, it's the living theater, the great, great living theater that, in a way, does not exist anymore. Like a great rock band that performed for almost 50 years. I think it was founded in 1947. The year Tom was born. And it was an incredible run with Judas and Molina, Julian Back, and Hanon afterwards. And Tom has been with them for a very long time. Many incarnations. He would spend time with them in jail in Brazil in his first job, a job with them in 71, and performed all around the world and in small, small spaces outside often. In New York, he was also a artistic collaborator with Theodora Skippedaris, the great, great puppeteer and artist, theater artist, the team, the assembly, Michael Mines, and many others. And now he is taking care of the archives of the living theater, his publishing project. We will talk a little bit about it, especially on Julian Back and Judas Molina, but also on his memoir. So he is someone who has seen a lot, who has worked a lot, who has been part of significant productions. And there's a great cookbook. It's called How to Cook an Egg, by the Rose Bakery. And so if you say, how to do theater, Tom is someone who knows. So Tom, I hope you forgive my long introduction. Really welcome, welcome, welcome to Segal Talks. Where are you? I'm in my little apartment on 10th Street and 2nd Avenue in the East Village, where I spend most of my time. I was spending a lot of time here already before COVID, but now it's a little more extreme. I go out every day to do a little shopping. I did get up to a friend's house in the Catskills for a couple of months at the end of August. But I went via another friend who drove up to Albany County and then my friend drove over from Delaware County. And so we went like in secrecy, you know, escaping the city and then slipping back on Metro North to get back. But I don't go very far away from 10th Street. I'd like to go out to Brooklyn to see some street theater. Some of our former artistic associates have formed a new group called Al Limite, which means to the limit in Spanish. And they're already doing a street theater play to support the protest against the North Brooklyn pipeline of all things. They want to build a pipeline across Brooklyn. Wouldn't you know? And Al Limite has been doing shows in Brownsville and Bushwick and Greenpoint and Williamsburg. And they're doing, you know, the great work. They all worked for the last few years with Judith Molina and they're carrying on, they're all half my age. And I'm not gonna get on the subway quite yet and go out and see them, but I'm glad that's happening. I was very lucky to do a couple of projects just before the COVID hit us. I did Theodora Scipitaris's last show, the transfiguration of Benjamin Bannaker about the 17th century, 18th century African-American astronomer and also about Ed Dwight, the first Afro-American astronaut. And we did it with the drum core from the Benjamin Bannaker High School in Brooklyn and the dance core. And it was a wonderful experience at La Mama in January. Just eight shows though, came and went. Incredible. We thought we might try to do it in June out of doors or a September, but that's not possible. And then I did one other project with Dennis Lee. I dramaturged his workshop performance of Caligula by Camus at New Ohio for just two performances and then it was gone. You know, one of the great things Judith Molina did in her last years, she threw all her money into the Clinton Street Theater for six years and she could always do her plays for two months. The revival of the brig ran for five months. The revival of the connection for two months. Her other plays, she did six plays after Hanan Resnikov's death and they all ran for two months apiece. So this was what she spent all her money on and at the end of it, she was indigent and we didn't know what to do. So we asked the actors fund and they said, Lillian Booth, she went off to live at Lillian Booth Actors Home, which is a wonderful place. They took great care of her. They let her smoke marijuana out of doors. And it was hard for us though. It was hard for us to get out there. We created a system where one of us would go out each day. Every day she had a visitor from one of us. I did Mondays and it was holy work. And you know, could have been worse. She was 88 when she passed. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I think that's the great contribution Brad made at the time to be there for her. Judas came very often to the Segal Center. She would say it's the only thing when she would come to New York often. She said, Frank, you have to do a bar, a restaurant, something. She said, I cannot go anywhere. I don't like the bars. And if I go to one, there's nobody I know. No, she often participated. We do also did the evening with her on the Pescador notebooks, the great, her great notes. So Tom, this time we live in, what would Judas say? What would Julian say? Well, they'd be locked down like everybody else. But like so many of your guests have said, do your thing. Get out there and speak the truth like the Alamite people are doing. Judith would have been one of the people most in danger. I think seven people back in April were recorded having died at Lillian Booth. She would have been in the midst of tragedy there. But in times of crisis, when I joined the Lillian Theater, when I first saw them, it was 1968. And we were certainly in a crazy crisis in the United States. The inner cities were burning. The Vietnam War was raging. I had already been involved in theater at Yale. Were you a theater student? I wasn't in the drama school. I was under a graduate. But I was very involved in theater activities. And when we saw the Lillian Theater, it just knocked my socks off. Because it was an amalgamation of all the feelings I was having about civil rights and anti-war and the wonderful music coming out of San Francisco and my own emergent sexual liberation feelings. And it was all wrapped up in that quartet of plays and mysteries and smaller pieces, Antigone, Frankenstein, and Paradise Now. And it was a real revelation for me. And I became a complete groupie. I followed the group to New York and Boston and had a lot of ups and downs. I saw them again in London in 1969. And when I think about the chaos of those times and the risks they were taking, not all of the New York intelligentsia thought very highly of Paradise Now. It was too much, too anarchic, too much shouting. Was she at with Paradise Now at Yale? Is it the piece you saw? Robert Bruce Dean invited Judith and Julian to begin their American tour of 1969 at Yale. It was Paradise Now? Yeah, yeah, Paradise Now was... Tell us a bit, how did it feel on campus? I mean, we are also at the university. How was that moment? Well, you know, racial politics were very hot. The anti-war movement was very hot. I hadn't been involved in the SDS people in the far left very much. I was concerned with a little bit with LSD and marijuana and sexual liberation. And I had a lot of frustration. I was kind of a slow bloomer as a gay man. And the Living Theater swept into town with silk and leather and patchouli oil and exotic, long-haired, beautiful people. And I remember we all had a little meeting, some of us alternative students, with Julian in a garden. And we said, Julian, what do we do? And he said, you have to figure that out for yourself. We were a little disappointed, but we took the lesson. And on the first night of Paradise Now, when people started to go out into the streets after four or five hours of the play, and the play actually was quite formally structured in spite of the chaotic image, Judith, the pupil of Piscotter, had created quite a structured anarchic pacifist procession towards an ideal meditation on Paradise. And people were taking other people on their shoulders and walking down York Street towards the next intersection. And I said to Judith, who was standing with Bob Brustin, would you like to get on my shoulders? And she said, sure. So I took her away from Bob Brustin that night. And we went down the street and two policemen, it was like a scene out of an Andy Griffiths show. They didn't know what they were seeing. All these people, semi-naked, walking down the street late at night on a June, September evening. And they crossed their two police cars and they arrested several people. And we sang America the Beautiful and then dispersed. And there was a short trial a week later in which the charges were thrown out. Brustin regretted the presence of the Living Theater. It was too much. He had a rebellion of students on his hands in the drama school after that. And one of the people who championed us, Gordon Rogoff, he let go from the faculty. And Brustin was a great man, but he's become kind of center left and he had that long debate with August Wilson about political correctness. And he was what he was. And the Living Theater just streamed through the United States that year with many arrests and chaos. And they got to the West Coast finally and ran out of money and who bailed them out. But Jim Morrison paid the hotel bill in Los Angeles. He had seen the group and was enthusiastic about them. And his biographers have blamed the Living Theater for the fact that two weeks later in Miami he exhibited mined fellatio, I think was all he did. I don't think he exposed himself, but that stopped the tour of the doors and ended the doors run, so to speak. They blamed the Living Theater for that, which I think is very unfair. But the result of the American tour with many of the actors was a feeling of frustration because it didn't really lead to the pacifist revolution that they were hoping for. There was too much yelling and screaming. And the work of the Living Theater of the time after that took a decided more mellow tone in the 70s with street theater and the work in Brazil and then in Brooklyn and America and Italy. We were much more gentle. We tried to be much more seductive with our entreaties to change. In some ways every Living Theater play is the same. There's always this effort to promote the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Once a person said to Julian, I understand the anarchism thing and I understand the nonviolent thing, but what about beautiful? What does that mean? He said, well, if it's not beautiful, I'm not interested. And Judith and Julian really dedicated their lives totally to these ideas, whether it was monetarily. And I think Julian died a little too soon, maybe not having, I always say, if he'd had a couple of colonoscopies in his 50s, he might have still been alive, but he died far too soon at the age of 60. And Judith carried on, but she threw every penny into that black hole of Clinton Street. It's like owning a yacht. But I don't have too many regrets. You know, I was invited by a festival in Spain last year, the great Bayo do Lid Festival of the Streets, Teatro de Arte a la Calhe, to receive an award on behalf of the Living Theater. And it said the most revolutionary theater of the 20th century, their words. And they had a newspaper that they gave out for the festival. And I was in the centerfold, and based on an interview, it said, you gave his life to the Living Theater and has no regrets. But if there is one regret, it's of course, I'm on Medicaid and food stamps now, and there's no pension and the Living Theater never paid into social security. But I never ended up in academe, you know, like with tenure or anything like that. So I'm a little in difficulty. I have a few assets that I throw over the side every once in a while, but in my sixth floor walk up, I'm a little worried about the future, but I do have this wonderful legacy. And as you said so much of the work now that I do, the Living Theater has done some projects in Brazil and Mexico recently. We created a big new show called Electric Awakening, sort of one-time events. And I did a co-production with a theater in Oslo, Norway, based on Judith's last notes called Venus and Mars with the Grussa Maitzens Theater, the great theater of Oslo. But most of my work now is archival with the Fundazione Marra in Naples, which has an enormous Living Theater archive and owns all of Julian Beck's paintings from the 40s and 50s. In fact, Judith selling all this material to Fundazione Marra was the major support for the Clinton Street years. And I've worked over there with them. They recently wanted me over there for eight months. And I couldn't leave New York for eight months. I'm like Gulliver here. I'm tied down by rent and utilities and credit card bills. And I can leave for maybe a month or a month and a half, but I couldn't leave for eight months. And we're also overseeing lots of publications. Shall I do the little book tour? Sure, why not? This is a brand new book. It's called How Happy We Were. And it's a diary that I found of Julian's month in prison in 1957 with the Catholic worker people, Dorothy Day, Amon Hennessy. And they were protesting the mandatory order to take cover during an anti-air raid drill, if you can imagine such a thing happening. There were several of these in the 50s and they were very much part of the Band the Bomb movement and pacifists and war resistors league. And this is a wonderful diary of Julian's month in prison because they went out and protested and were promptly arrested and adjudicated and all given a month in prison. And Julian writes lyrically for 100 pages about his time in the tombs and on Heart Island, which was the predecessor of Rikers Island. And he writes lyrically about his feelings about his fellow prisoners, about the racial situations, about all the propositions that he got all the time. He was 32 and a good looking young man. And he would never sent to these propositions because he was sort of worried about putting the reputation of the Catholic worker in jeopardy. But he said, am I being elite and ruling class by not accepting these propositions? And it's kind of cute. Anyway, Michael Smith with Fast Books Press has put out this, has a cover by Luba Lucova. Great of Michael to do it. Didn't she become a Catholic saint, aren't they? Am I wrong? Well, she's up for sainthood. Up for sainthood, right? Yeah, she should be made a saint. She had a very racy beginning with John Reed in the 20s and had an out of wedlock child. And then with Amon Hennessey and I think a guy named Peter Moran, they formed the Catholic worker movement which was really like St. Francis, living in almost near poverty and feeding the poor very much against war, against abortion too, but very pacifist. And she lived to be quite old. I remember seeing her once as a very elderly white haired lady when we did one of our plays in 1973. Yeah, she stayed for times. Part of also Catholic history of protest because we know in the times that reporters are well about, I think only 5% of the Catholic churchgoers are black and the Catholic church does not support Black Lives Matters as they should. They are questioning the motive, say, some of them are atheists and instead of saying one big truth that everybody agrees on, you shall not inflict suffering. You shall not kill black people. You shall not shoot them. If you are a policeman, if it's not the very, very last result to get out of a situation and they do say, there might be atheists, but if Catholic church does relays on whatever, they will not ask anybody, oh, are you also an atheist or not? They will have everybody for the new judge. They are supporting and the Supreme Court, they will of course get all the support, but it's disappointing and it's wrong. They've been wrong on the fight on the civil rights. They have been wrong when slavery was in the US and I think this is an important part of history that needs to be told. So it's great that Michael and you put that book out that there is a history. There was of course the movement of liberation theology, especially in South America and Central America, Archbishop Romero who was assassinated in El Salvador. When we were arrested in Oro Preto in Brazil in 1971, two people who signed the arrest warrant were Catholic priests. They were very much against our presence. They didn't know what we were doing, but the fact that they didn't know meant that it was bad. That it was bad. You just started, you went to Yale, you finished your studies, you joined a company and you end up two months in jail? Yeah, well, I had been very excited by the Living Theater all through 68, 69, saw them again at the Roundhouse in England and went back to Yale to finish up and it was a real season of politics at Yale that year and the spring, the university went out on strike on behalf of the Black Panthers and against the bombing of Cambodia when I was the student strike communication committee chief and I had a real season of activism and then I didn't really know what to do. I was still wanting to find my sexuality. I came down to New York a little bit and visited with Joe Chacon and wandered about and then I had a friend in Brazil who I could crash with and I knew the Living Theater was in Brazil. So I went down to Brazil and went to visit them in Oropreto, went up from São Paulo to Oropreto and Judith and Julian remembered me. I was really surprised and complimented that they all remembered me from the shows and they invited me to stay. Years later, Judith said, well, we thought you had money. Anyway, so I stayed there and it was a time of for me and I've written about it now in a little memoir, 1968 to 1971. I think I'm still here. I wonder why, which is a line I said for many years in the play Antigone as the guard after he arrests Antigone. But in Oropreto, I was a little out of my depth. I was living with a bunch of real hipsters. I can say that much. And I was in love with this young guy in the company and after a few days, it kind of mutated and I was crying in the corner and this kind of thing. And it was tough to adjust and I was trying to be creative about the plays. Judith showed me her diary to read so I showed her my diary to read. And one morning, I think she had got up on the wrong side of bed. She said, your diary is nothing but a bunch of junk of a self-centered spoiled boy. And I was in tears, totally wiped out. And Julian was in the background rattling the coffee cups saying nothing. And so I worked very hard in the remaining weeks that I spent with them to do something constructive and worthwhile. And I was beginning to reach a certain plateau of conscientiousness when the arrest happened. They came bombing in on the first day of this winter festival that we had applied to do a play for. And they arrested us all in a very hysterical way and took us into Belo Horizonte to the dops, headquarters DOPS, Departimento de Ordine Politica Social, which was the secret police of the era. And one night, I mean, it was one night in this detention center and one of the boys was tortured with electroshocks. And then we began a long period of incarceration. All the men were in a prison farm. The three women were in a women's prison in Belo Horizonte and Judith and Julian were kept in the secret police prison, which turned out to be a good thing because they could coordinate and plan our strategy. And the trial began after about a month and it wasn't really going anywhere and our great friend and producer Ruth Escobar from Sao Paulo, great woman of the theater, said, well, we've got to do something. We've got to get other lawyers. And with $10,000 that Julian's mother sent down to Brazil, which today would have been what, $50,000? Julian's parents had quite a bit of money. We got new lawyers who went to Brasilia and Steve Israel, who had slipped out of the clutches of the police at the beginning of the arrest, was back in New York organizing the campaign to free us and people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Miller and all the film people of Italy had written big protest statements against our arrest. And at the end, Steve did this wonderful thing. He sent down a list to the newspapers in Brazil, including Mayor Lindsey, Jane Fonda, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and an enormous list of other people and hit the newspapers like a bombshell, all these big pictures. And it was too much. The president of Brazil said, who are these people? I'm being besieged by them all the time. What's going on? Get rid of them. And so we were deported. Now that list that Steve sent was not, it was fake. He told everybody on the list that they had signed it afterwards and nobody ever complained. But it did its magic. And we were all deported. Finally, we were lucky. We met many people who were not so lucky. Yeah, yeah. We said to these people, you know, we don't have money. We can't get you out of prison. What do you want us to do to help you? And they said, go out and tell the story. Tell the story about what's happening here. And that was the genesis of the play Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism, which we performed for five years, over 300 performances for many, many years. Yeah, I mean, it is an incredible time to think. It's a time when also theater was in the center of cultural awareness, you know, perhaps in a way also as TV shows are now it's the time I think Julian Mack and just, you know, on the cover of Time Magazine, they were part of a discussion, part of a social conscious part of the idea that theater works through problems that society has reflects as offers some possibilities, perhaps even an answer, but so highlighting it and that this is important. And he knew as a student at the Yale, you know, said I'm gonna go to the Living Theater and often now one has a feeling in some American universities, they teach you how to get to Broadway, how to be successful, how to be your own brand, how to support the machine, how to be part of that big machine. Even so, I think Piscato, who was to his Miller's teacher said in his famous courses in the new school, he would say, go to Broadway. I want you all to go and see that and nobody understood. And he said, we have to know what the enemy is doing. That was his idea. Said, Heine Müller or Brecht or others at the apparatus of the theater itself also is a representation of a state or of a power in theater, even so you're inside it. But still you want to have the big theaters, but still you also have to be subversive. You have to show what's wrong. You have to be, as you say on the sides of people who are in prison, people who are wronged and the Living Theater has done that over such a long time. And then you have all our respect for that. As a question, Tom, you know, for almost 50 years or 49, 50 years in theater, was it worth it? Was that, we have lots of people listening also, young artists. Tell us, what do you think about it now in your room in COVID, you can go out, you say you have food stamps, you say, I can't even accept a grant because I'm going to lose support here if I leave the country. So of course it's graceful that there's no artists insurances like in Germany or France or other countries or great artists and people who made a real contribution and if you guys haven't, who else has? So was it worth it? What was the idea? What did you realize what you guys wanted to do and was it worth it? It certainly was worth it from a moral standpoint. I have no regrets on that score. We told the truth. We did the good work. We communicated with thousands of people. We inspired thousands of people. A book recently came out, put together by a French woman named Emily N'Jouvre about Avignon in 1968 in the Living Theater and it's interviews with about 30 people. It's only in French at this point and some of those people are still furious at the Living Theater for causing such a ruckus and they blame the tension that Jean Villard felt in those days and he actually did have a heart attack later that year and passed away. Some people blame the Living Theater for the strain upon him but there are many other people who write in that book about how the Living Theater changed their life for the better and put them on the path that they have been comfortable with since then and the family of Jean Villard a few years after that said to Judith, oh, we hold no bad feelings with you and so I don't think we feel guilty on that score. It was a crazy time. The government of Avignon that month had gone fascist and there was a lot of scare that fascist groups would beat up the Living Theater. We've been close to that, always holding up the mirror to the society, to its hypocrisy, Judith famously would never vote. I have always voted and Judith knew I voted and she never gave me trouble about that. She said, you must do what you feel you should do. Financially, sure, I could feel that there's some regret. It's always good to have a day job the way most of our young people who are doing the Alamite projects do have. That's important, you gotta get by. I have a few irons left in the fire. I'm not entirely in the street and I have some very good friends who help support me which is wonderful. But I certainly have no regrets about speaking the truth and trying to do new forms of theater. One of Judith's last experiments on Clinton Street was to develop, we've always had immersive theater since Paradise Now, the Living Theater has always been a pioneer with immersive theater which is so much the rage these days. But in Judith's last plays, she wanted to develop a forum called Freeflow and the Freeflow was kind of a improvisation with a point of view. She said, don't wave your arms, it's not dancing. It's moving through the space. Usually the audience was in the space with us without chairs and we would take themes from the play that we had been performing and move in a kind of collective movement with the audience into a kind of new reality of not dance, but movement with conscientiousness. And this was what Judith would call the Freeflow and it was still very experimental even by the last time we were working with it under Judith's direction in no place to hide. Yeah, I saw it. She was working up until the end to embrace the audience, to love the audience. Paradise Now had a lot of love, the audience, but it also had this anger about get out of your seats. I remember Jimmy Anderson, Afro-American actor of great charisma. He would say, be the American Indian. This kind of hectoring of the audience and not afraid of a little bit of cultural appropriation here and there. But we were always looking for the truest iteration of relationships with the audience and that I will always have with me and never forget, I do workshops. Sometimes I did a couple of them in Sardinia last year and it comes back. You bring it back with the people you're teaching and you encourage them to open the door to new possibilities. I tell you, if somebody offered me a role on Broadway I would do it in a flash. Julian was offered Broadway by Michael Butler, the producer of Hair in 1969 to do Paradise Now on Broadway. And he said, no. And sometimes when Julian was sick he accepted these movie roles in Cotton Club and Poltergeist 2 and some people said, you're working with the enemy. And he said, I need the money. He was with Pasolini, right, in the Oedipus. Yes, played Tiresias. One of the great films actually over the Oedipus. It's a beautiful, beautiful film. He had a very funny experience. I'll recount briefly on the set in Morocco with Tiresias and Pasolini. They put contact lenses in his eyes to make them blue and dust and sand got in between the contact lenses. And when that happens, you go blind for a while. So far, a while, Julian as Tiresias was actually blind. Incredible, incredible, yeah. Through that, what supposed to make him look blind. He became blind. Tom, they are really also artists listening. I think also students, we hear a lot also around the world. Your experience of 50 years, what can you say to young artists where you say, this is what we learned and perhaps in a time of COVID or after the TAC, the time after COVID, what do you think is of significance, what you guys found that worked? Well, it's always good to have a period of reflection. And if nothing is happening, something is always happening. Don't despair. We're all cooped up now. We're zooming this way and that way. There's a lot of communication going on. I'm doing a lot of reading. Thank you so much for that volume of Anna Akmatova. I read the whole thing. Yeah, wonderful. She is just a great, great. And her life, she went from struggle to struggle from contradiction to contradiction. It's certainly an inspiration to us today. I don't think any of us have been living in times as difficult as she went through, Stalin. But I remember after Brazil, Judith and Julian thought they would tour America and raise money and maybe take the group back to South America to continue the relationship with the third world. That didn't happen. And they embarked on a period of study. Judith and Julian were nothing, if not great, intellectual educators and researchers. They wrote books, Judith was always writing in her diary. They were always creating new projects. We worked for two years to create a thing we called the Red Book, which was kind of a directory of all kinds of plays that could be done for all kinds of different audiences, factory workers, poorest of the poor, people in insane asylums, in schools, the bourgeoisie, of course. And this was the genesis of the legacy of Cain, which we worked on throughout the 70s. But some people like Stephen Ben Israel at the time said, well, we should do a play. We should get working. We should go out and be busy. And Judith and Julian didn't want to do that quite yet. They wanted to reflect and to study. And that is certainly a period which we are experiencing now under COVID. And you know, you said I was a director. I'm not really a director or a playwright, not like Richard Foreman or Peter Schumann or Meredith Monk or Lee Brewer. I've always been basically a worker in the vineyards of the avant-garde, as I like to say. Whatever Julian asked me to do, I would do it. Whatever Judith asked me to do, I would do it. If they had a problem in a play about what to say, what to do, I would suggest ideas. If they needed a room cleaned out, I would clean out the room. If they needed a meal cooked, I would cook the meal. At one point, Julian, while we were waiting for trial in Brazil, said to me, well, if nothing else in the Living Theater, you'll learn how to cook and you'll learn a foreign language. And both became true, actually. I can cook pretty well, vegetarian, although I'm actually not a complete vegetarian. But whenever we lived together in group houses, we were always vegetarian. To this world, yeah. But you know, when you're young, you have your health, hopefully, and your energy. And that goes for a lot. I never worried too much about whether I was doing the right thing or not, aside from maybe sexual frustrations and things of that sort, personal worries. I always used to think that because I was in the Living Theater throughout the 70s and early 80s, which was sort of like a nuclear family and I was a bit timid sexually, that's why I didn't get AIDS. I think if I had stayed in New York and lived in New York, I would have gotten the dread taint as Jeff Weiss always used to call it, the dread taint. He's another great mentor for me, Jeff Weiss, great. That's how the rent gets paid, a wonderful performer and director. So I wouldn't be too depressed. I mean, we wonder when is this thing gonna be over? Now Brooklyn is exploding in little hotspots. It's resurging here and there and the president is off the charts. We're having the most hysterical election in my memory and I certainly hope he goes away. If he doesn't, we're in for it. So it's a perilous time. I would say stay in touch with your friends, talk, communicate, telephone, try to see each other safely. What more can you say? Carry on, I think. From the message you had, you talked a bit about it, going street theater or factories or what you said, or prison, insane and so on, whatever. So what a lot of people talked about from Emile O'Rourke to Oostermeyer to others on the program here, from Africa, from Asia, Indonesia, everywhere. So we have to get out of the big theaters. We have to engage. We have to be on streets. We have to be in places. We have to be on sites. We have to take the idea of community really serious. What forms did you guys experiment with? What forms worked? What can you tell us a little bit what you did, what was at that time unheard of? I remember Virginia Barba on this program said, listen, I survived in the beginning because I did a workshop. You don't, doesn't mean anything to you, but at the time there were no workshops or you were at an acting school or directly or even when you were rejected, that was it. He was actually rejected as, it's so many of part of his theaters. And he said, we built our own thing. It's incredible what he did. So, but how, what forms did you do at that time that we can learn from or should rethink about, you know, what is your advice? Well, at the beginning of the seventies when we started to work on the legacy of Kane, that was our real big outreach where we did street theater and went out into various communities, which of course- What did you do to tell us a bit? How did it- It can't be done until we get over the COVID, but for the future, we created, for example, a half hour biomechanics. We use very much the biomechanics of Meyerhold. He used the biomechanics as a way to train his actors. So in a play like the Magnificent Cuckold or Mystery Booth, you know, they would all be moving in a kind of hysterical choreography. And we took these exercises and actually used them as dramatic forms in our street theater, Stringing the Bow. We created a half hour play to support the United Farm Workers in the grape and lettuce boycott. And it was called the Strike Support Oratorio. And it had an oppression section and a work section and a struggle section. And it was a series of questions. What's a strike? What's a boycott? How can you? How can I? A tune written for us actually by Frederik Shevsky. And we combined this with biomechanical etudes of moving down the street block by block. And at the end of it, we formed a series of barricades in front of a local supermarket and we answered all the question. A strike is a, et cetera, et cetera. A boycott is all in song. It was all sung. And we were dressed in purple and green for grapes and lettuce. And we had little megaphones on our heads like the coxswans use in the boats, the rowing boats. So it would project our voices. We did the Money Tower, which was a five story high tower representing the social system. We performed it outside of factories and schools in Pittsburgh and then eventually in Italy. And it would take a long time to build it. It took about six hours to build it. So that would become a spectacle in and of itself. And let me get rid of this phone call. Sorry, I'll have to call him back. Maybe someone from the living complaining, you haven't mentioned them yet. It actually was our gallery that's a broker in archives. So I do have to call him back. So we were doing the Money Tower and we would go out from the Money Tower and have questions with the audience. We began to often in our plays go out and have stopped the action and have a question with the audience. We did a four or five hour play called Six Public Acts that went in a pilgrimage around a city. A house of the state would be a school. The house of property would be an insurance agency. The house of war would be a police station. The house of love would be a beautiful park. The house of death would be a church. The house of money would be a bank. And we would do these rituals in front of these various places. And then there would be a bell. We always had what we called a time shaman who throughout the rituals would be doing a biomechanical etude. You know a clap and a freeze and would tell the time, always telling the time. So we always knew what the time was. And after each ritual, we would say now is the time to discuss the destruction of the house of money exactly. Now is the time to talk with the audience exactly. I'm sort of improvising the lyrics here. And we would have a five minute discussion with the audience about what can you do? Not preaching, but very intimate conversations. And then there would be a bell rung. Now it is time to go to the house of the state exactly. And we'd go into a freeze. No matter if we were in the midst of a important discussion we would just go into a freeze and stop. And then we would begin a procession, a stop and start procession, a biomechanical procession with a theme. There was a money procession, there was a love procession, there was a state procession. So we would use and these archetypes, these almost like Jungian archetypes, we all took them from the work of Leopold von Sascha Mazok, who wrote Venus and Furs and actually wrote a big project of masters and slaves using these six archetypes. And Judith and Julian took that idea from Sascha Mazok. Sascha Mazok, so they did their homework and mixed it with biomechanics and with these direct approaches to the audience. That was a large part of our work in the legacy of Cain during the 70s. And we thought up an idea to do 150 plays. I think we did only about 40 of them. Some of them were a little short street plays. We did one play called Why Are We Afraid of Sexual Freedom, where we mimed sexual positions in a stop-start way, which was often quite scandalous to the audiences on the street in Italy. But it certainly made an impression and then after these mimed sexual positions, which were quite provocative, clothed, we were not naked by any means. The men and the women separated and the men would go up the steps of a church and do this rejection action against the women and the women would cower, but then turn around and start dialoguing with the audience at that point. And the men came down from the church steps. Church officials didn't like us using their churches as a background, but. Yeah, yeah, no, I think the living theater very openly and as a strategy went on streets, used the streets as we do not need the famous playwright. We do not need set decorations. We don't need the lights. We don't even need the theater. We can do it on the street. And it's all, you know, we know about it now, perhaps even slightly, you know, it's a little bit less prominent. Now all everybody talks about it again, but it is a most serious way of engaging as Peter Schumann said when he was in the Lower East and he got commissioned by Puerto Rican mothers whose sons came back or did not come back from the war. And they got these letters be like, we are sorry to inform you. And they commissioned him and he said, we did in Spanish and we did it on the streets where the people were. So how did it look like? Did you come in a car? Did you announce it? Were there flyers? How do you did it in front of a prison of an ensalement? No, they weren't. How does it work? We were all dressed in red, yellow and orange and we hardly had any props and we had a gathering scene for Six Public Acts which was a reversion of one of the choruses from Antigone. We often recycled from one play to another and it was a big crowd gatherer and then we were off. We just, we had a map of the city in which we worked out with our sponsors ahead of time and sometimes the map was given out as a program so that the audience knew where they were gonna be going and we had these processions. We usually would arrive in one of our little Volkswagen buses and park it off to the side and go back to it when the play was over. We didn't do too much announcement you know like with loudspeakers. We just showed up and started doing the play in the middle of the city and often it would stop traffic. Of course, many artists and intellectuals knew about it ahead of time. We did the plays in the middle of Genoa, in the middle of Naples, Bologna, Munich, cities in France, all over the place and it did create quite a bit of mayhem sometimes in certain Southern Italian cities little gangs of boys would start attacking us for fun kind of. We had to protect the women and so we just, we invaded the urban area in the urban space. Without permission, without selling tickets, people, some do, some not. So it was kind of a guerrilla action theater and... We usually had permission from the city fathers like the city of Bologna sponsored us or the city of Naples or the city of Genoa. We rarely did it without permission. Once in a while we'd do a small 15 minute play, maybe an anti-militarist play without permission. I think when we did the play in Porto, Portugal, one of the little plays, why are we afraid of sexual liberation? We did it without permission with a workshop and we did those mined sexual positions and we finished the play, we did it. But a lot of townspeople from the outline areas were scandalized. They said, something terrible has happened, something terrible has happened. And they told the police and the police didn't know what had happened but they knew something terrible had happened so they started arresting us all and we were rather identifiable because of our costumes and we were all arrested for four hours. And I remember being in the back of a paddy wagon and a nice young girl who was in the workshop looked up to me and she said, don't worry, my father is the culture minister of the city. We'll get out. You'll get out, yeah. Yeah, I also know you do it at 42nd Street on Times Square in front of the US Army. We did the play, not in my name, against the death penalty. Yes, we did. We did that play in the 90s for maybe 50 to 75 times. Whenever an execution was scheduled, we would go out and do it in honor of the victim. It was a pretty simple little agit prop play of about 15 minutes. And because we didn't have a sound system, we didn't need permission. I don't know what it would be like now with, well, of course, the COVID, but before the COVID, Times Square has become like a little Disneyland with all those cartoon characters. Right. The last time we did anything in Times Square was back in 2013 or 2014. We did a couple of scenes from Seven Meditations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it is quite stunning that history, that long history, and do this almost truly as a high priest in a way of theater or as a rabbi or whatever, what she created, how many people she touched, but also the contribution the living made as a symbol, as a real symbol, but also symbolic, but an imaginary representation of something that is possible, that is at least also for these moments and what art and theater and performance can do. Often, and you alluded to it, they looked at anarchists, so they looked at where we're smoking pot. I mean, I knew Judith a little bit, not a lot, but I visited also her and she came to the seago. She was also performer. We did the poets theater day. She performed in the Franco-Hara play. She was incredibly disciplined. I think this is something to perhaps also to talk about in the theater, what you did in one way, it was very open, very free, improvised. And then there was also, at least I have the feelings that was a mechanism behind it, like a bio-mechanic or whatever, the kind of philosophers that are there, it's like cold water and warm water, and that comes together as something happens, just the warm, just the cold, or cold and warm air, when it collides. So tell us a little bit about that discipline of the living theater and the craft. Judith and Julian were very disciplined. Julian worked very hard. He was the first one into the theater and the last one to leave. He formally gave up painting in 1958 to devote himself to opening the living theater on 59th Street, but 14th Street, I'm sorry. But he was always making sets. He was always designing. He was always working. He was always paying the bills. It's hard to imagine him running the theater before the age of computers and cell phones. He would often be down at the concierge in whatever hotel we were at, calling the next producer, planning the next trip. There are lots of notes that are in our archives of him crossing off the salaries for every day, every week for all the actors. And Judith was always at work with her desk. She would always have a desk in whatever hotel she was in where she would sit and write her diaries and make her plans. She always designed playbooks, directors books. She fought to become a director. She insisted on taking Piscata's directing class and he didn't wanna have her at first. He was a pretty conservative man in some ways. And he said, a woman cannot be a director. They have children and so forth. And she said, and then I did the most embarrassing thing I could think of, I cried. And he took pity on me. And he said, well, all right, you can come to the director's class. And she was always very disciplined. You know, it's not always realized that she was also very religious. She was the daughter of a rabbi, grew up in a shul. There were always ceremonies going on. It was a tiny shul in the bottom of central synagogue that Max Molina ran until he passed away in 1942. And he was always involved in trying to save Jewry from the Nazis, ringing the alarm bell before many other people did. And Judith grew up around ceremonies and religions and prayers and she was not Orthodox. She rewrote the Seder as an anti-patriarchal, vegetarian ceremony with heavy doses of Alan Ginsberg's poem, Howl, in the celebration. But she would always say the brooch on every... I think you might publish, by the way. It would be great to have that, you know? Seder. Yes, well, I have copies of it. We should put Judith's Seder, yes. But I'm sorry for interrupting. No, not at all. In fact, more books, Judith's Diaries are being edited by Kate Bredesen of Reed College. They may be out next year, a selection of all of her diaries. But she believed in a certain holiness and a certain positivity, a certain optimism. She always said to Julian, don't put yourself down, don't criticize yourself, which he does do in his diaries and journals. Julian was more an agnostic, really, than a... I mean, he observed the tradition of Judaism, of course. But he was more an agnostic, open spiritual person. But definitely they were both very, very disciplined. I once said to Carl Bissinger, the great photographer and peace activist, Judith smokes so much marijuana. And Carl said, well, maybe she needs it. You know, and that's the truth about marijuana. I have spent 70 years of my life under this terrible oppression of marijuana being illegal. And it's one of the biggest lies that has been foisted upon the American public and the world as a consequence since the 1930s. There's no reason. And we're beginning to realize it now with the legalization out West and Massachusetts and Vermont. It's gonna be on the ballot in New Jersey next month. But I'm afraid it's in the back seat right now in New York because of all these other problems. But it should be legal. CDB is very good for the body, THC a little bit, you know, in its moment, you know, to help you sleep or combat depression. And it's been used as a social oppression. You know, if you're an African-American man and you break a parole with one joint of marijuana, they can put you away for years. It's been used in a terribly oppressive way to increase the prison population. Yeah, yeah. No, it is, it is renecing. They have always been fighting also for use of land, but also, you know, as you said, for the human rights. It's stunning, I think. I don't know how many times Judith Melina got arrested, but on the other hand, she was a spiritual person, you know, on her friend, Therese's Day, who is, you know, up for St. Hood. She was a director, she was a writer and also a great actress, if she performed at one, one see her or so on. She did, you know, I think the last time she got arrested, we were doing a play called No Sir against the recruitment for the Iraq War with students from the new school at that recruitment station in Times Square. This was several years ago and some counter protesters showed up and were screaming at us. And we had done it before, but the police didn't like the chaotic situation that was developing. So they went up to Judith who was on the side and said, stop this. And she said, I don't know how to stop it. And they took her in, they took her into the kiosk. She was technically briefly under arrest and we managed to do the play a couple more times. It was conditioned on the film of the Jumbotron, the recruitment Jumbotron. We were doing scenes in relation to the Jumbotron. There's another form which we experimented with. And finally the policeman came up to me with, you know, the captain, he said, stop this now. And I said, all right, you know, we stopped it. And then we had to go to liberate Judith from the kiosk. And it took a little while. The policeman said to her, this man stopped when I told him to stop. And you didn't, no good, you know, but he let her go. He let her go, yeah, yeah. She must have been over a hundred times. I forget she once said she kept count of it, I think, how much. Well, 12 times. I don't know how many times in her life. No, it was quite a high number. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When she came in. So you have, I interrupted you earlier. You have other book projects, right? Other things that came out or you worked on. Tell us a little bit about, you know, how to keep up that legacy and how do we, you know, learn from that? How do we keep it with us? What is that book? Yeah. This is Daily Light, Daily Speech, Daily Life, a long poem Julian wrote, which has been put out again in Italy. It's, the publisher is Empiria. Info, Empiria, E-M-P-I-R-I-A dot com. They're in Rome. It's a wonderful poetic series that he wrote years ago. You've seen how happy we were. This is a book that's been put out by Casa de la Poesia dot org in Salerno, Italy. It's a long poem by Julian called Revolution and Counter-Revolution. And it has beautiful pictures by Julian inside it from the collection of the Fundazione Morra. Michael Smith is gonna bring out two of Julian's plays shortly at Fast Books Press. There will be Prometheus at the Winter Palace from 1978 and The Archaeology of Sleep from 1983. And this is a book that Derek Beck, Judith and Julian's son wrote recently an autobiography of his years up until 1972 and growing up in the living theater. It has beautiful pictures of the opening of the 14th Street Theater with Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and others. And so... Well, they actually got into a fight, right? The living theater always did poetry readings and there's one legendary fight here. Well, with Corso and Kerouac, they would get drunk and they would make fun of the people reading. And I think Frank O'Hara was doing one with Kerouac and Kerouac was drunk and Cat Colling and Frank finally said, well, Jack, why don't you get up and read? I've done enough, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, she was so close. William Collins Wilson wrote so beautiful about her. Williams, yeah. And so it was an incredible contribution, you know, that that theater made and we miss that. And it is, you know, I mean, we have the great Bob Wilson, you know, who kind of, you know, also brings New York theater around, but the living theater in a way, the Castellucci, the Mnushkins, the Ostermeyer, the Mila Rao's of this world, you know, this was the living theater was really an incredible force. We are slowly coming closer also, you know, to the end, but what do you think really is the essence? What would you say, what, you know, what is to keep in mind, you know, from the living, for the people who do work in theater? You know, what is the core of the core of the message, you know, that is still truth now and everybody should keep in mind? Well, I hope we get more of Julian's work out. I think it's inevitable that someone will write a biography of him. It does not, right? As far as I know. For 30 years, Thomas Oberender, thanks to your interview mentioned, he was interested in the work of Julian Beck. So we have corresponded and he may try to create some German translations of the Life of the Theater and Theandrik, which are out of print, but you can find them in libraries often on, you know, Craigslist or Amazon. I would say read the books, continue to be inspired by Judith and Julian's life. Hollywood is calling now. Somebody just got in touch with Garrick Beck and said they're very interested in exploring a mini series about Judith and Julian's life, which of course will be a young person and a young man playing Judith and Julian. And we old people may be called to be consultants in some way. I don't think they're gonna use Living Theater Actors or anything like that. But there's always something new happening. I get requests, you know, people on the archive address are asking for photographs or asking about what did you do when there are graduate students who are continuing to work very hard. The center in Naples is very busy with students and archivists and people researching. So the Living Theater is still living, to say the least. Yeah, and the message and the light, like light from stars, Thomas Mann said that, you know, there are many stars, galaxies far away who might not exist in physical form but the light travels still because it's such a long time. It takes a long time and the light reaches us. And this, I'm sure that the light of the Living Theater is beaming towards us and shining, truly shining in the sense of shining that will be for a long, long time. Is this Julian Beck's painting behind you? No, this is a painting by Jeff Nash, one of our great actors in the Brig and the Connection and he painted it around 2010 and I saved it. He's become a painter now, but I don't know if he does work like this. It's a little like Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of his heroes. He and I went to see Jean-Michel's grave in Greenwood Cemetery, a very haunting. It's funny, Greenwood has lots of monuments and Jean-Michel is in the cheapest section where there are these very small stones close to the ground in long serpentine rows. And his stands out because it's, there are candles and little statues and flowers and so forth. Yeah, so what do you read at the moment of what music do you listen to? What keeps your mind busy? What is inspiring you? Well, every once in a while I'll listen to Foray's Requiem or the Prelude to Das Rangold or the rock and roll that comes across the transom. Aside from the Akhmatova, for the second time I recently read this book, Finding Doromar, which is a very interesting book about Kipasso's. Kipasso's music. Mistress. Great foundation also. I read Walter Kampowski. Oh, really? All for nothing. And what's this other book? I'm surrounded by books, The Morrow and the Bone, by Kampowski, the German author. What else do I have here? I do read the New Yorker and New York Review books when I can get them. I have a nice Nin diary, which she speaks despairingly of the living theater. She didn't like some of the things they were doing. I've read this book recently, How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibra Max Kendi. He's an incredible Afro-American professor theorist. He also wrote a book called Stamped from the Beginning, History of Racism in America. I do a lot of work with St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. They're right down the street from me. And Janine Otis, the music director there drafted me and I do projects with her. We put on a play called Lamentations about the Episcopal Church's relationship to slavery in the 19th century. And I find, you know, I'm not that religious. I'm spiritual, but the Episcopal progressive wing is a good thing. And I meet a lot of people who I wouldn't otherwise meet professionals, a very wide mix of races and genders. And so it kind of keeps me on my toes a little bit. And I like that. That's great. Amazing. Amazing what you have done. Amazing what you're doing. Amazing what you're gonna do. Anybody listening and wants to invite Tom to teach a seminar, workshop, drama tour, publish, help him publish the books, get the things out of the living theater, all universities, you know, this is still a company that, you know, is alive in that sense and needs help and support. And I think also recognition is of importance to show the respect for one of the great, great companies in the history is going thousands back of years. You know, the living theater will be in there as the one that also made something change with them and after them. And so really, and I can't wait to hear that hope also your memoirs will come out and that, yeah, that TV series, maybe they'll have you as a consultant or you play the Brazilian president who didn't like the living theater or something. An upset WASP audience member. Yes, yes, here you go. Another person who influenced me so much and I never forget him is Reza Abdo. Yeah. With him at the end of his life. And of course, you know, after he died, he said, nobody does my plays anymore. It all ends with me. That was his decision. Merce Cunningham a little bit different. You know, they did some dances for two years and then now they're just a foundation. Pina Bausch, the Wuppertal dance theater goes on. So everybody's different. I can't imagine what the legacy of Peter Schumann will be. I'm sure it will go on. There's so many people who have been so moved by him. Yeah, and it is important, you know, that you are there also as a witness, as a collaborator and also as a living proof of the living theater and their ideas. And really thank you for taking the time and your energy to share and to be with us today. This is important. And of significance. So really, thank you for taking the time to be with us. Thank you, Frank. What you're doing with these interviews is just wonderful. As I joked earlier, it's like the MFA I never got. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you told me. I've been quite listening. I was surprised. It's a big, big, big compliment for us here at the Seacoal. Thank you, Tom. We're gonna have with us a Sevianna Stanescu tomorrow. She is a Romanian play, right? Based a lot also in New York, taught at NYU, collaborator was Richard Schachtner of us. And she is creating work around the theme of revolution. And so she will share us a little bit what's going on in Central Europe and what it means to do theater in Romania at the moment. We have Sadia Lyskot from the National Black Theater. She is the director, the executive or managing director of our company and also has to think what is needed, what is important, what should one focus on. So I really look forward to hearing from her why she does her work, what is motivating and also where she thinks we all should be going. I think we'll have Milo Rao and his Katja and his collaborators next week who did their book on why theater. They've just came out at the opening again. We're gonna have Florian Malzahar who wrote the book about games and the idea of what the living does, like interactions and where he feels this is something that all works out. We'll have Jay Wegman with us and who's gonna share what he thinks about, what is Lyskot going to do, what's important, what has to change, what can be different. So we hope you will join us and we are planning, as I said before, 2022 festival, the New York International Festival of the Arts where we invite everybody to participate and that will also be a lot of it outside in the parks and the parking lots and hopefully finding new forms of engagement but in the spirit, reinventing hopefully also and using what the Living Theater has pioneered. It's amazing the legacy of that company of those two artists who did change the world and also the world of theater. So it was a great privilege. Thanks for howl around, for hosting us, Thea and BJ and for you guys listening. I know there's a lot out there, so much more than when we started and when we did for four months every day. So it's a big compliment that we don't take that for granted and we hope also for you, whoever is listening, whether you are a student or an artist, who would theater lover or go on any event that's in Hungary or in South Africa or Indonesia in the US, this is for you. What Tom talked to is to reach you and to make a contribution and to be part of the change we want to see and this is of importance. We have to engage not only in theater but also in life and in politics. So this is the important lesson, I think at the moment in the time we live in. So Tom, thank you all the best and good luck with all the publishing work and the archiving and I hope you will be able to get to Italy at least for some amount of time. I hope so. Great of them to support you. Bye-bye.