Sara Krulwich/NY Times (2007)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JUDITH MALINA
(June 4, 1926 - April 10, 2015)

Founder of the Living Theater, actor and director

(Excerpted from New York Times obituary, Bruce Weber,
April 10, 2015)

The most prominent and persistent advocate for a "new theater," one that sought to dissolve the accepted artifice of stage presentations, to connect art and political protest and to shrink, if not eliminate, the divide between performers and the audience, The Living (as it was sometimes called) produced work by T. S. Eliot, Paul Goodman, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams.

       Her husband and partner, Julian Beck wrote in The New York Times in 1959: "We believe in the theater as a place of intense experience, half-dream, half-ritual, in which the spectator approaches something of a vision of self-understanding, going past conscious to unconscious, to an understanding of the nature of all things...only the language of poetry can accomplish this, only poetry or a language laden with symbols and far removed from our daily speech can take us beyond the ignorant present toward these realms."

          This diminutive powerhouse of a woman studied acting and directing with Erwin Piscator, the German director and theorist who, like Brecht, was a proponent of epic theater. She was tireless and passionate in advancing the idea that theater can be, and should be, a blunt force for cultural change.
Ms. Malina’s published books include a compilation of her diaries and a memoir of sorts called “The Piscator Notebook.” In his foreword to that volume, the theater scholar Richard Schechner wrote:

“The thing about Judith Malina is that she is indefatigable, unstoppable, erupting with ideas. Malina is long-living, long-working, optimistic, and by the second decade of the 21st century girlish and old womanish at the same time. She survives and she bubbles, both.”