Julian Beck

The group strongly reflected the ideals of another theatre revolutionary, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who embraced the Theatre of Cruelty and sought to jar its audiences out of their own complacency. The plays were presented in various venues, chiefly in the couple's own home when it couldn't financial keep up a theatre space. The Living Theatre also spread its philosophy throughout the world, performing extensively in non-traditional places such as street corners and prisons. In one performance piece, from Jack Gelbert's "The Connection," the drama about drug addiction had its actors playing junkies and wandering about the audience shouting expletives while demanding money for a fix. They were among the first to import the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Jean Cocteau, as well as modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Their productions could be undeniably repelling or imaginative and often involved collective improvisation. It took on an anarcho-pacifist point of view while celebrating the uninhibited use of drugs, hallucinogens, crude language and anything else under the kitchen sink in order to send home its political intent or shock effect.

An abstract expressionist painter in the 1940s, his life's destiny was forever changed after meeting his future wife, actress/writer/director Judith Malina, in 1943.

His passions swiftly centered around the likes of hers -- the theatre -- and together they co-founded The Living Theatre in 1947, which would base itself in New York City. Their subsequent contributions propelled the off-off-Broadway movement and the vision of performance art. Julian would continue to work with the Living Theater up until his death nearly forty years later.

A bold, innovative, avant-garde figure in theatre who helped revolutionized the style of playwriting and acting in the 1950s and 1960s, actor/writer/producer/directer Julian Beck was certainly a odd-looking sort with his baleful, hollow eyes, stark and skullish features and near-bald dome capped by long fringes of stringy hair along the side. He could have easily given inspiration to the creepy look Richard O'Brien gave his bizarre character in "The Rocky Horror Show. "Born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, Julian was the son of Irving, a businessman, and Mabel Lucille (Blum) Beck. Educated at the College of the City of New York, he briefly attended Yale University, but then abandoned it to pursue writing and art.

Among his many awards were the Lola D'Annunzio in 1959, the Obie in 1960, the Grand Prix of the Theatre des Nations in 1961, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1961, and the New England Theatre Conference Award in 1962.

The 30-strong Living Theater troupe was amongst the most bold and innovative of the theatrical avant-gard that revolutionized stage performance during the 1960s. In addition to nudity and directly accosting and challenging the audience, Living Theater performances included rituals of love, affirmation, nonviolence, and communality drawn from various mystical and contemporary sources, including Artaud and the cabala. Cast members also frequently, if not continuously, used narcotics and other drugs such as LSD, even during performances. Julian Beck and the other members of the Living Theater frequently tripped together and often performed while high on LSD.

Other productions include "The Brig" (1963), "In the Jungle of the Cities" (1960), The Brig (1963), "Frankenstein" (1968) and Antigone (1968). Their work often led to their frequent arrests for anything from indecent exposure to drug possession.

One of their their most controversial works was "Paradise Now" (1968), a free-form denouncement of American life that involved nudity and audience participation.

The Living Theater moved out of New York for a time in 1974 due to tax problems and a sensationalistic trial that Beck and Malina lost. Besides his theatre work, Beck published several volumes of poetry reflecting his left-wing, anarchist beliefs, two non-fiction books and a handful of experimental and mainstream films.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981- 1985, pages 56-57. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.

His intense, imposing acting style was captured vividly in films, such as his sadistic gangster in The Cotton Club (1984) and his creepy, spectral stranger in Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986), a rare major role that ended up becoming his final movie.

Died during the filming of Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986).

In 2006, The Living Theatre signed a 10-year lease on the 3500 square foot basement of a new residential building under construction at 21 Clinton Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Clinton Street theater is the company's first permanent home since the closing of The Living Theatre on Third Street at Avenue C in 1993. The company moved into the completed space in early 2007 and opened in April 2007 with a production of "The Brig" by Kenneth H. Brown, first presented at The Living Theatre at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in 1963. The re-staging, directed by Judith Malina won Obie Awards for Direction and Ensemble Performance.