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On Aggro Performance: Audience Participation and the Dystopian Response

to the Living Theatre’s Paradise NowJames Penner

During the 1960s, rock performance sometimes included volatile confrontations with the audience. In some cases, performers stopped

singing and attempted to taunt and provoke the crowd. One of the most famous examples of confrontation involved Jim Morrison of the Doors. During a concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami on March 1, 1969, Morrison abruptly stopped singing “Five to One” and began mocking the audience and their ingrained passivity: “You’re all a bunch of…idiots. You’re a bunch of slaves, man. How long you think its gonna last? How long you gonna let it last? How long you gonna let them push you around?”1 Later in the performance, he exhorted them to come up on the stage: “I wanna see you people come up here and have some fun! Come on now, let’s get on up here! No limits! No laws! Come on. Come on! Let’s do it.”2 After the stage was cleared, the lead vocalist began to enact a mock striptease; he took off his shirt and dangled it like a matador’s cape in front of his crotch. Although no evidence suggests that Morrison disrobed while performing in Miami, a Florida jury found him guilty of misdemeanor counts of “indecent exposure” and “open profanity” in October of 1970.3 Although many people are familiar with Morrison’s 1970 trial, few are aware that his controversial performance in Coconut Grove was actually inspired by the Living Theatre’s production of Paradise Now. On February 28, the night before the Miami concert, the Doors’ lead vocalist had witnessed a performance of Paradise Now at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Hall. Morrison, a former theater arts major at Florida

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State University and UCLA, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Living Theatre.4 The rock vocalist was intrigued by their confrontational tactics, especially the radical troupe’s willingness to verbally assault the audience and thereby dismantle the “fourth wall” that separates the audience from the performers.5 Morrison’s invocation “come on now, let’s get on up here! No limits! No Laws!” was taken directly from “The Rite of Guerilla Theatre” (Rung 1) of Paradise Now. This is the moment when the Living Theatre actors invite the spectators to join the performance and create “paradise now” throughout the performance space. In their respective memoirs about the Doors, John Densmore and Ray Manzarek describe how Morrison invited all of the band members to a performance of Paradise Now. Densmore and Morrison’s accounts of Paradise Now highlight an important trend in the avant-garde theater of the 1960s: the desire to involve the audience in the performance event. In a traditional theatrical performance, the audience sits in the dark and acts as a voyeur for the actor’s performance onstage. Although audience members may laugh or applaud during certain moments of the performance, their participation in the theatrical event is firmly circumscribed by their role as spectators. Their primary function is to observe the performance, even from a safe and comfortable distance. For this reason, audience members are typically described as “passive.” Morrison was enthusiastic about Paradise Now precisely because it rejected the voyeur mode of spectatorship. Most ex post facto scholarly accounts of Paradise Now focus on the utopian aspects of the production and the company’s subversive political message (anti-war, anti-repression, and anti-establishment); these accounts suggest that audience participation within the production of Paradise Now was generally peaceful and liberating. Their readings of Paradise Now tend to emphasize the spectator’s transformative experience on the stage.6 This essay acknowledges the Living Theatre’s utopian intentions, but is primarily interested in what might be described as non-utopian responses to Paradise Now—specifically, how the Living Theatre’s confrontational tactics also engendered hostile responses from the audience.

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Aggro Performance

Paradise Now was a groundbreaking production precisely because it could not be easily digested by the audience. It pushed them to react in some way. The Living Theatre’s desire for radical confrontation implies the notion of “aggro performance.” I use this phrase to separate the Living Theatre from other theater artists who encourage polite and innocuous forms of audience participation (e.g., singing and clapping to music that is being performed on the stage). During an aggro performance, the notion of pleasing or entertaining the audience is no longer necessary or desirable. Hence, in many cases, the performer assumes a hostile position vis-à-vis the audience. In some situations, the performer attempts to antagonize the spectators in order to make them aware of their own political and moral delusions. In this sense, aggro performance stems from a didactic impulse; however, in some extreme cases, the line between didacticism and outright contempt for the audience may become blurred.7 Ideally, aggro performance produces a moral catharsis in the spectator, who is converted to the cause. Morrison’s epiphanic experience at Bovard Hall is a good example of this response. It is also important to realize that aggro performance, though it contains highly confrontational tactics, also includes a gesture of reconciliation: a moment when the audience are invited to liberate themselves and participate in an activity or social ritual that reconciles them with the performer who was aggressively confronting them at the beginning. However, any serious analysis of aggro performance must also consider the sector of the audience alienated by the shock tactics that are employed by the performers.8 Paradise Now is striking because it often had a polarizing effect on the spectators; the production tended to push them into two distinct groups: those who were passionately converted to the cause and those who were offended by the verbal assaults of the performers. This essay will examine how the Living Theatre’s confrontational tactics are based on a radical reading of Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double; however, it will also attempt to assess the role of psychedelic drugs in the creation of Paradise Now. I am interested in how psychedelic drugs can inspire the actor/performer to reject the traditional barriers

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(the fourth wall) and to participate in a more inclusive and less structured performance/creative event. An important part of aggro performance, hallucinogenic drugs are relevant in that they enable the performer to become less inhibited and to experiment with new modes of expression. I will focus on the three sections of Paradise Now that directly involved the audience: “The Rite of Guerilla Theatre,” “The Rite of Universal Intercourse,” and “The Rite of I and Thou.”9 These three sections are crucial because they highlight the company’s utopian sensibility and its participatory ethos. Aggro performance should also be viewed in a sociohistorical context; it was very much a product of its political and cultural moment in the late 1960s. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the spring of 1968, many political activists and revolutionary artists became increasingly disenchanted with the mainstream political establishment. After the May 1968 rebellion in Paris, revolution was in the air and leftists in Western countries believed that a world revolution was just around the corner. Thus, radical artists and performers began to experiment with new ways of politicizing the audience and expressing their disenchantment with the status quo.

The Artaudian Legacy

When Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double was first translated into English in the late 1950s, Julian Beck and Judith Malina read it with great enthusiasm. The founders of the Living Theatre were attracted to Artaud’s radical vision of theater, and especially his rejection of the playwright and text-based drama: “renounce the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer.”10 For Beck and Malina, a key insight was Artaud’s desire to create ritualistic theater that removed the “fourth wall” that traditionally separated the actor from the audience. The Living Theatre began experimenting with improvised performance in the late 1950s (Jack Gelber’s The Connection) and coming up with new ways to engage the traditionally “passive” theatrical spectator. Before Paradise Now (1968), the Living Theatre mounted several Artaudian-inspired productions. The most important of these, Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, attempted to enact Artaud’s notion of the Theatre of Cruelty. The Brig featured an all-male cast and dramatized the hyper-masculine rituals of the Marines. Judith Malina’s director’s notes document

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how the play’s dramatic action revolves around the male body’s experience of pain: “when the first blow is delivered in the darkened Brig before dawn the prisoner winces and topples from his superbly rigid attention position, the contraction of his body is repeated inside the spectator.”11 Thus, the production is Artaudian in the sense that the soldier’s experience of pain creates a theater of somatic affect—a theatrical experience that is viscerally felt and experienced by the audience: “I defy any spectator to whom such violent scenes will have transferred their blood...—the violence of blood having been placed at the service of the violence of the thought—I defy that spectator to give himself up, once outside the theater, to ideas of war, riot, and blatant murder.”12 In this passage Malina emphasizes Artaud’s notion of moral transformation: witnessing a simulated act of brutality produces a compassionate and altruistic spectator. Artaud’s notion of moral catharsis would be a foundational concept for the Living Theatre’s future productions.

Figure 1. The set for the Living Theatre’s The Brig (1964). Photo by Gianfranco Mantegna; used by permission of John Giorno; courtesy of

University of California Davis Special Collections.

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The set design, which featured a chain-link fence that separated the audience from the performers, created a visible barrier between the stage and the audience. In the period after The Brig, the Living Theatre became fascinated with creating works that had no barriers between the performance space and the audience. As the Living Theatre sought this latter goal, they moved towards ritualistic performance. The aim was to enact a political and cultural revolution: a performance with no pre-established text. The LT’s next production would encourage the audience to take the stage and participate in the creation of a contemporary secular ritual.

Creating A Modern Ritual for the Counter Culture: Psychedelic Drugs and the Making of Paradise Now

In February of 1968, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and the Living Theatre took up residence for three months at the Villagio Magico in Cefalu, Sicily. While living rent-free at the resort hotel, the thirty-odd members of the avant-garde theater troupe experimented with LSD and attempted to create their most ambitious production to date, Paradise Now. The testimony of several LT members suggests that LSD was an important part of the theater company’s revolutionary lifestyle.13 They used it during the rehearsal process and also in some performances. Julian Beck, the founder of the Living Theatre, described the company’s attraction to the drug: “We were willing to experiment with anything that would set the mind free.”14 Beck also remarked: “We were practicing anarchists, and we were talking about freedom in whatever zones it could be acquired. If [LSD] drug trips were a way of unbinding the mind, we were eager to experiment.”15 Beck also uses religious metaphors to describe the importance of LSD and how it influenced the making of Paradise Now: “LSD carried with it a certain messianic vision, a certain understanding of the meaning of freedom, of the meaning of the as yet unattainable but nevertheless to be obtained erotic fantasy, political fantasy, social fantasy—a sense of oneness, a sense of goodness, a marvelous return to the Garden of Eden morality.”16 In other interviews, Beck stresses the notion that psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, can reverse the socialization process. He emphasizes the need to decondition the human brain: “the brain is a biological entity, it’s

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existing, living matter, and it’s been very badly programmed. The brain is a great computer beyond computers, and yet it’s fed totally with false information.”17 Beck also makes the case for expanding consciousness: “We really don’t feel; we are a feelingless people. We don’t see. Our perception is limited. Our hearing is limited; we don’t hear.”18 For Beck, LSD has a utopian restorative function; it reinvigorates the nervous system and stimulates the user’s affective capacity. If Beck’s comments on the “messianic vision” of LSD suggest that the drug played an important role in the vision of Paradise Now,19 LSD was also important because it inspired an anti-textual rebellion. The traditional approach to theater—performing a play written by a playwright—seemed hopelessly passé and retrograde. For the LT and several other artists in the 1960s, the text was obsolete because primary experience, devoid of imitation, was perceived as more immediate and vital. LSD inspired the desire to “live in the moment” and stage performances that were creative collaborations with the spectators. Paradise Now also mirrors the LSD experience in the sense that it can be read as an extended assault on rational consciousness. It attempts to break down the way an audience watches a theatrical event. In lieu of a traditional dramatic text, Paradise Now fosters audience participation and utilizes elements of chance to create a loosely structured theatrical happening. The production—we cannot really call it a play—consisted of eight revolutionary rungs: performance situations that dialectically move toward a specific thematic concept and form of praxis. The ladder of eight rungs implies a “vertical ascent towards nonviolent revolution.” Each rung consists of a rite, a vision, and an action. The rites and visions were performed by the Living Theatre actors, and the actions were “performed by the spectators with the help of the actors.”20 Paradise Now mirrors the drug trip in the sense that it attempts to reimagine the conventions that typically govern the theatrical experience and the relationship between the performers and the audience. The confrontational aspect of Paradise Now was built into the first rite of the production (“The Rite of Guerilla Theatre”). Renfreu Neff, a member of the Living Theatre and author of The Living Theatre: USA, describes how the LT attempted to establish a new relationship with the spectators as they entered the theater space: “The audience is almost completely assembled

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when the actors enter the theatre and mingle with the spectators, in the aisles, on stage, in the lobby.” Neff also notes that the Living Theatre performers attempted to invade a spectator’s personal space: “Each actor approaches a spectator and addresses him individually in a voice that is very quiet, urgent, but personal in feeling. The actor speaks the first of five phrases: ‘I’m not allowed to travel without a passport.’ Going from spectator to spectator…[the LT actor] repeats this phrase and only this phrase, each repetition expressing greater urgency and frustration.”21 Eventually, the LT actor slowly raises his/her voice in a frenzy: “shouting the words with anguish and frustration, the energies surge to a point of near-hysteria as the actors go beyond words and into a collective scream.” The LT actors repeat the same routine, but with four different phrases: “I don’t know how to stop the wars,” “You can’t live if you don’t have money,” “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana,” and “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off.”22 The actors resemble an alienated Greek chorus who are forced to walk among the audience. The repetition of the fifth phrase—“I’m not allowed to take my clothes off ”—reaches a crescendo of frustration and anguish, but the actors do not scream. Instead, they remove their clothing and strip to the legal limit—g-strings, loincloths, and bikinis; the act of stripping is intended as an assault on culture and established norms and a dialectical progression toward praxis (i.e., “the revolution of cultures”).23 “The Rite of Guerrilla Theatre” also loosely resembles an LSD experience that Stanislav Grof identifies as “verbigeration.” Grof, a medical doctor and expert on LSD psychotherapy, identifies the latter as “repetitive verbal or motor behavior” that is acted out during a high-dosage LSD trip. Grof notes that “verbigeration” can last for minutes or hours. During this situation, the individual on LSD “behaves like a robot whose mechanism has been broken.… Subjects in this state keep repeating the same movements, sentences, words.”24 Grof also notes that “there is no meaningful contact” with the subject who is in a state of verbigration and “no external intervention of any kind that can break automaton-like behavior.”25

During the first rite of Paradise Now, the Living Theatre simulates this experience of verbigeration and employs it to transform the performer’s relationship to the spectator. The act of addressing the spectator directly has a jarring effect on the audience. Nothing the audience says or does can take the performer out of the “broken record” mode of presentation.

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When the Living Theatre actor finally begins disrobing, the audience is relieved because it is no longer being addressed directly. The performer’s interaction with the spectator is now the content of the performance. The audience must react in some way to the LT’s provocations. Although “The Rite of Guerilla Theatre” occurs at the beginning of Paradise Now, the performer’s act of disrobing prepares the audience for the most controversial rung of the production: “The Rite of Universal Intercourse,” which generally happened in the middle of the performance. With echoes of “The Rite of Guerilla Theatre” (“I’m not allowed to take my clothes off ”), the audience is invited to take the stage and form large “body piles” throughout the theater space: “The actors lie down together in the center of the playing area, their bodies forming a pile, caressing, undulating, each performer reaching out toward any or all bodies that touch him: breaking the touch barrier.”26 This photo from LT member Gianfranco Mantegna documents how the body piles included LT actors and audience members. The LT actors wore g-string underwear (center left) so they would not be charged with indecent exposure.

Figure 2. Confronting the audience: Julian Beck stripping down during a performance of Paradise Now. Photo by Gianfranco Mantegna; with permission

of John Giorno and courtesy of University of California Davis Special Collections.

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“The Rite of Universal Intercourse” was designed to dismantle the traditional separation between the audience and the performers; it was also intended as a form of praxis: the unity of thought and action. However, for the Living Theatre praxis was a nonverbal experience that liberated the body from repressive mores. It also implied the acting out of the sexual revolution. “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” also conveys the Living Theatre’s attempt to enact Artaud’s dramatic theory. It created a modern ritual that privileged the body over the mind by disavowing the theater’s reliance on poetic language. The audience was encouraged to participate in “body piles” that signified the ephemeral triumph of somatic consciousness. The influence of psychedelic drugs is echoed in the effort to break pre-established taboos (“the touch barrier”) and the enactment of the polymorphous perverse (“the body pile”). “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” is linked to aggro performance because it functions as a gesture of reconciliation. “The Rite of Guerilla

Figure 3. The Rite of Universal Intercourse, Rung IV. Photo by Gianfranco Mantegna; used by permission of John Giorno; courtesy of University of

California Davis Special Collections.

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Theatre” was an expression of alienation. “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” provides a rejoinder to the former’s social alienation. However, it is significant that many audience members chose not to participate in this second rung.27

The final rung of the production, “The Rite of I and Thou/The Vision of the Undoing of the Myth of Eden” was also directed at the audience. Like the “Rite of Universal Intercourse,” it was a gesture of unity and revolutionary praxis. The LT actors construct “a tree of knowledge” that becomes “the Tree of Life.” As the tree is disassembled, the actors “move among the public, leaving the stage and moving towards the exits of the theatre.” Neff also notes that the actors “carry members of the audience on their shoulders or are carried on the shoulders of the spectators.”28 As the actors leave the theater space, they chant “the street…Free the theatre…the theatre of the street…free the street. How the Rite of I and Thou and the Vision of Paradise, of the Undoing of the Myth of Eden, can lead to the permanent revolution…the theatre is in the street…. the street belongs to the people.… free the theatre.… free the street.… Begin.”29

Neal Weaver, a theater critic for After Dark, a New York dance publication, describes how Paradise Now inspired the reversal of assigned gender roles: “Exhausted by dancing, I seek out the men’s room in search of a drink of water. I see a woman going in. But I realize that this barrier, too, has broken down. Men and women are sharing the same facilities, without self-consciousness, or embarrassment. Each goes about his business, ignoring the others.”30 Weaver’s account highlights Paradise Now’s transformative power and the utopian ethos of the production: “The whole atmosphere has changed now. It’s no longer a theatre, but a party, a village fair, a debate, a ballgame, a salon, a happening.”31 His review resembles many of the historical accounts of Paradise Now reviewers; historians tend to emphasize the production’s benevolent side and the notion of creating a utopian space within the performance space.32

However, it is important to realize that on other occasions Paradise Now engendered conflict and hostility with certain audiences. The first-hand accounts of Renfreu Neff, John Lahr, and Leslie Epstein paint a very different picture of Paradise Now.33 For them, Paradise Now created a hostile situation within the performance space.

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In some cases, the Living Theatre’s confrontational tactics morphed into assaults on the spectator. One of the most notorious examples of aggro performance is probably Julian Beck’s self-styled gonzo attack on a female audience member wearing a fur stole. This example of aggro performance transpired at a theater event entitled “The Theatre of Ideas” in the spring of 1969.34 While in the foyer of a theater in New York City, Beck confronted a female spectator and ripped the fur stole off her back, threw it on the floor, and shrieked at her: “‘The weight of your furs makes it impossible for the needs of the people to touch you!’ I threw things all over the room, put human relationship in a crisis.”35 Beck’s shrieking could be heard throughout the theater. On the surface, his actions can be read as a critique of bourgeois consumerism. However, his desire to put “human relationship in crisis” also expresses the attempt to abolish the separation between life and art. The “passive” spectator unwillingly becomes the center of the dramatic conflict. Beck uses one spectator to make a political statement to the audience in the rest of the room. However, the moral efficacy of his actions is certainly debatable. Many people in the audience threatened to call the police. On other occasions, the Living Theatre’s enthusiasm for audience participation inspired spectators to insert themselves into the performance at inopportune moments. Mysteries, a Living Theatre production that was often performed alongside Paradise Now, begins with an actor standing motionless for five to ten minutes, and is intended as a provocation for the audience to respond to the unfolding non-performance: “We paid to be entertained,” “Louder…we can’t hear you!” The hostile responses also generated counter-responses (“Go home and watch television!”).36 However, on some occasions, the response to Mysteries went beyond verbal abuse. Neff describes an unforeseen conflict that quickly emerged at the beginning of Mysteries when it was performed at the Brooklyn Academy: “a girl had come onstage to goose-around with Gene Gordon [an LT actor] as he stood motionless in the spotlight at the beginning of the show. She had poked and groped and pulled his hair, and finally, unable to dislodge him, she rammed against him and knocked him off balance. Regaining his balance, he then slapped her and returned to his immobile position. Startled, the girl turned to the audience and cried, ‘Isn’t

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anyone going to help a lady?’”37 Beck and Malina were accepting of most audience responses because the radical theater troupe was theoretically committed to abolishing the separation between life and art. In theory, the LT discouraged all forms of containment. However, Gordon’s decision to slap the spectator reveals an uncomfortable ethical blind spot in the LT’s advocacy of audience participation. For Beck, audience participation ensured that each performance would be unique and unpredictable: “We said in preparing Paradise Now that we wanted to make a play which would no longer be enactment [i.e. staging a play written by a playwright] but would be the act itself[,] that we would not reproduce something but we would try to create an event in which we would always ourselves be experiencing it, not anew at all but something else each time.”38 On many occasions, Paradise Now created a peaceful and harmonious atmosphere within the performance space. However, on some occasions aggression and chaos prevailed. Al Pacino, a supporter of the Living Theatre, attended a performance of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy in October of 1968. Although he greatly admired the Living Theatre’s work, especially The Connection and The Brig, he was terrified when he witnessed the beginning of Paradise Now: “There was an explosion of emotion from the audience. The actors were taking their clothes off and at the same time doing this play. It was frightening; you didn’t want to be there. I felt, Something’s going to happen to me here; this is going to turn into a riot. So I went outside and had a smoke.”39 After smoking in the foyer, Pacino became curious and decided to return to the theater. He was amazed by the complete transformation of the performance space when he returned to his seat: “The people in the audience were now on the stage. They were up screaming, pontificating, naked people. The atmosphere had changed and there was a collective now going on. The audience was the theater. They were the event. It was orchestrated, the whole thing. And on one side of the theater was Judith Malina and on the other was Julian Beck. And they were corralling us there. They were controlling it on either side. They were orchestrating it.”40 Pacino ends his account with the theme of transformation and moral renewal: “it was literally the most exciting, vibrant thing…I can only describe it as changing my life.”41 Pacino’s recollections of Paradise Now

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convey the inherent sense of danger implicit in collective productions that are predicated on the principle of audience participation. However, he is also mesmerized by the display of anarchic possibility (“the most exciting, vibrant thing”) that he encounters. Although Pacino did not participate in the celebration on the stage, he was awed by the production’s transformative power. The Living Theatre’s aggro theater—provoking the audience to respond and abandon its “passive” role within the performance space—was rooted in anarchist political theory. Beck and Malina are committed anarchist revolutionaries who believe in the principle of self-autonomy. Audience participation affirmed anarchist principles in the sense that the audience was assuming a position of authority and self-autonomy within the performance space. Taking over the stage symbolized the negation of hierarchical relationships and the abolishment of centralized forms of authority within the performance space and within society. As one might expect, Beck’s radical doctrine of “Free Theatre”—“Do whatever you want to.... Free Theatre means that anybody can do anything he wants to. It means that anything that anyone does is perfect”—created an unsafe environment for various LT company members.42 During some anomalous performances, all-out bedlam prevailed on the stage. During one performance of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy on October 21, 1968, Malina was raped by a group of “short-haired males.” Some observers have suggested that the unidentified assailants were “fraternity brothers,” but no one knows for sure. The event is documented in Malina’s memoir, The Enormous Despair:

In the Paradise performance, during the first rung, I am attacked on stage by a hostile group of men. It was during the chanting of “If I Could Turn You On”; the stage was very crowded; there was hardly any room to dance; when this group grabbed me in the middle of the crowd, I chanted to them and accepted their mocking advances with as graceful/ as paradisial [sic] / responses as I was able to muster. But it was soon out of my hands. Beyond a certain point, I saw it happen: that they were no longer compassionate. Then they begin to fight among each other, and in fighting to get at me they hurt me beyond my capacity to either yield or resist. Hundreds of people surround us but the crowd is oblivious. I was no longer addressing them. They were only addressing each other and I was their quarry. They lost all sense of my existence. “Hold her!” one said to the other, as if I weren’t there.43

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In a 1975 interview with the Ross Wetzsteon of the Village Voice, Malina discussed her response to the horrific event: “I’m still trying to understand what mistakes I made to provoke such a response…what did I do wrong? Why didn’t I provoke love instead? They came at me with lusty anger and I addressed them with love. But their culture, their education told them what to do.”44 Malina also argues that she would handle the situation differently if it happened again: “Any number of people are angry at me for not being angry…I’m not blaming myself. I’m just pushing myself further. What could I have done? I still re-live that night, I still have fantasies about it, about what I might have said or done. The next time something like that happens, I’ll be ready, I’ll succeed, I’ve learned new possibilities. I’m more sure now I could bring out the real possibility of a loving relationship.”45 Malina also suggests that experience has made her reexamine the philosophical foundation of nonviolence and pacifism: “It’s the whole question of non-violence, the essential problem of pacifism, the incessant argument. Should we give up because of one failure, one horrible example? Can we change the vision of our entire life on the basis of one failure?”46

Malina’s response is surprising in the sense that she does not critique or renounce the notion of audience participation within the performance event. Instead, she reaffirms her commitment to nonviolence and pacifism (“Should we give up because of one failure? One horrible example?”). Although Malina condemns the actions of her assailants, she still has faith in the transformative power of Artaudian performance and the notion of empowering the audience to participate in the performance event. For Malina and the Living Theatre, radical forms of audience participation remained a viable political concept and aesthetic technique. More than any other American theater company of the 1960s, the Living Theatre embodies the attempt to reconceptualize the traditional relationship between the performer and the audience. Prior to Paradise Now, audience participation was generally limited and circumscribed by civility and the boundaries of the performance event. For the Living Theatre, audience participation becomes a protean concept. During Paradise Now, the performer’s relationship with the spectator is reconfigured: the spectator becomes the center of the performance event. In theory, the goal of aggro performance was to push the audience to a

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tipping point. Liberation occurs when the spectator chooses to leave his/her seat and decides to participate in the collective rituals within the production. However, the various hostile and violent responses that I have discussed suggest that the issue of audience participation cannot be reduced to one particular narrative. Although the LT promoted nonviolence and anti-war sentiments, the audience that participated in the LT’s liberation rituals could not always be steered in a benevolent direction. Non-participation, outright rejection, and sexual assault were also part of the Paradise Now experience. For the audience of Paradise Now, passive consumption of the theatrical event was no longer an option. By the same token, audience participation was not simply a matter of benign reciprocity. Paradise Now demonstrates that audience participation is never fully contained and circumscribed by the performance event itself.

University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Notes1 Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (New York: Gotham Books, 2004), 318.2 Ibid., 320.3 Morrison was acquitted of public drunkenness, and of the felony charge of “lewd and

lascivious behavior.” Although Morrison was drunk during the Miami concert, there was no evidence to corroborate the charge of indecent exposure. Some thirty-eight witnesses who attended the concert testified that Morrison had not actually exposed himself during the performance in Miami. Moreover, concert photographs taken during the performance also indicate that he did not actually expose his genitals. Morrison fled to France in March of 1971 to avoid serving a lengthy sentence in a Florida prison. Paris was a logical destination because France had a no extradition treaty with the United States with regard to so-called sexual offenses.

4 John Tytell states that Morrison donated $2,500 to the company when he learned they were broke and stranded in San Francisco in March of 1969; see The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 257. Judith Malina also documents Morrison’s financial support for the radical theater troupe in 1969; see Malina’s memoir, The Enormous Despair (New York: Random House, 1972).

5 In an interview, Bill Siddons, the tour manager of the Doors, described Morrison’s fascination with Paradise Now: “[The Living Theatre] was a theater of confrontations, and Jim was profoundly affected by how real this made people become, because, in fact, it probably best reflected what Jim was really all about. He did things to provoke people because he felt you got the person down to their nitty-gritty, and you dealt with it.” See John Desmore’s memoir, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (New York: Delacourte Press, 1990), 215–216.

6 See Marianne Dekoven, The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 143–160; Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) and American Alternative Theatre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (1995). These

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scholarly accounts of the Living Theatre tend to downplay or elide cases of sexual assault that occurred during performances of Paradise Now. For example, Tytell briefly mentions that Malina was assaulted by “a group of short-haired young men” (244). The brevity of Tytell’s account—one sentence in a 434-page historical study—conveys the general attempt to deemphasize the unpleasant and dystopian responses to Paradise Now.

7 When using the phrase “aggro performance,” I do not intend to imply that the Living Theatre is the only performance group that employs the “aggro” techniques that I have described in this article. There are other theater companies from the 1970s and 1980s that employ similar techniques (cf. Fura del Baus of Catalonia and Britain’s Portable Theatre Company and Forced Entertainment).

8 Densmore, the percussionist for the Doors, was less enthusiastic about the Living Theatre: “They [the Living Theatre] were a confrontational performance group that got Jim’s creative juices flowing again and scared the shit out of me.… [The] actors wore a minimal amount of clothing, g-strings and the like, and climbed up the aisles and over the audience shouting ‘No passports! No borders! Paradise now!’ I was intimidated. Jim was elated” (215–216).

9 For the sake of brevity and focus, this article will discuss only three of the eight rungs. The best synopsis of the entire production can be found in Renfreu Neff ’s The Living Theatre: USA (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 207–217. Neff provides a detailed description of the overall structure of the production and of each rung. Although each performance varied according to the audience and venue, Neff ’s description is the most detailed account of Paradise Now as it was performed in the United States during the fall of 1968 and the spring of 1969.

10 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 124.

11 Malina’s director’s notes appear in Kenneth Brown, The Brig: A Concept for Film or Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 98.

12 Artaud, 98.13 Tytell reports that LT members often used LSD during the rehearsal process and during

the performances of Paradise Now (259).14 Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain, Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA,

The Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 212.15 Ibid., 212.16 Ibid., 213.17 Neff, 235.18 Ibid. This excerpt is taken from an interview with Julian Beck (“Julian’s Tape: The Last Word”).19 C. W. E. Bigsby and Tytell also reference the Living Theatre’s use of psychedelic drugs in

performance and in rehearsal. In A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Bigsby notes that “drugs were to be used [by the Living Theatre] not to shock society, but as a sign that they refused any of the petty constraints which limited self-perception” (3: 65).

20 Neff, 206.21 Ibid., 207.22 Ibid.23 Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Paradise Now: Collective Creation of the Living Theatre (New

York: Random House, 1971), 27.24 Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotheraphy (Ben Lomand, CA: MAPS, 2008), 159.

92 Comparative Drama

25 Ibid.26 Neff, 211.27 The most famous nonparticipant was the Marxist theater critic Eric Bentley. Bentley’s

objections to Paradise Now are expressed in his article, “I Reject the Living Theatre,” New York Times, October 20, 1968.

28 Neff, 217.29 Ibid.30 Neil Weaver, “Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall, Who’s The Avant Gard of All” After Dark,

December 1968, 56.31 Ibid.32 For an extended analysis of the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, see my article, “The Living

Theatre and Its Discontents: Excavating the Somatic Utopia of Paradise Now” Ecumenica 2, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 17–36. I also discuss Paradise Now in Pinks, Punks, and Pansies: The Rhetoric of American Masculinity in American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 193–211.

33 See Neff; John Lahr, “The Living Theatre: The Return to Eden,” in Up Against the Fourth Wall (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 259–264; Leslie Epstein, “Walking Wounded, Living Dead,” New American Review (April 1969): 230–251.

34 Paul Goodman, Robert Brustein and Nick Hentoff were speakers at the event, which was held at the Friends Meeting House near Gramercy Park. Julian Beck’s account of the confrontation appears in Life in the Theatre (San Francisco: Limelight, 1986), 168. Judith Malina also discusses the event in The Enormous Despair, 221–225.

35 Beck, 168.36 Neff, 47. Mysteries was performed during the Living Theatre’s American tour of 1968–1969.

The Living Theatre also performed Antigone, Frankenstein, and Paradise Now.37 Neff, 111. Neff unpersuasively argues that Gordon’s actions were wholly justified: “That

chick had no business on stage at that point in Mysteries; she was just another wise-ass in search of attention, and Gordon had done what any normal, red-blooded freak would have done under those circumstances” (111–112).

38 Julian Beck and Judith Malina, interview by Richard Schechner, “Containment is the Enemy,” TDR 13, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 24–25.

39 Lawrence Grobel and Al Pacino, Al Pacino In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel (New York: Gallery Books, 2008), 145.

40 Pacino is interviewed in Love and Politics, directed by Azad Jafarian (Amazon Instant Video, 2013).

41 Ibid.42 Beck’s “Free Theatre Manifesto” appears in The Life of the Theatre, 82.43 Malina, 94–95.44 Judith Malina, interview by Ross Wetzsteon, “The Living Theatre at Pittsburgh Station,”

Village Voice, April 21, 1975, 74–76 (75).45 Ibid.46 Ibid.