Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution, Where Are You?

For years I made first-year students in the conservatory where I teach read an excerpt from The Enormous Despair: The Diary of Judith Malina, August 1968 to April 1969. Malina, who died in 2015, recalls: 

September 8, 1968 

On the opening night of Antigone a Greek woman who had spoken several times in class came up on the stage during the confrontation scene. She was choked with feeling and spoke to the audience, incoherently, in a heavy accent. Something to the effect that we despoiled the Greek religion and the Greek theatre. She was full of speechless feeling.

I lay silently on top of Polyneikes’ body.

After a while she stopped and left the theatre.

I continued. 

Her Antigone was more impassioned than mine.

Sometime after the digital age began, I stopped assigning the brilliant diary-poem by this co-founder, with Julian Beck, of the Living Theatre. The actor who played the role of the ultimate female martyr hundreds of times perceiving a civilian enacting that role with more fire than she could ever muster onstage began to seem…anachronistic.

Or too fierce? A video of Antigone (Brecht’s, not Sophocles’s) begins with 20 minutes of humming, gyrating, and screaming before Malina (as Antigone) walks on with Ismene. Dressed in a uniform of black pants and shirt, she commands the stage. On the occasion of her death in 2015, Karen Malpede described the “intensity” of Malina as Antigone, her ability to bring Sophocles’ play “alive” in her moment.

Maybe Malina’s ferocity explains why, compared to some of her contemporaries (like Lee Breuer, whose Gospel at Colonus has been restaged by younger artists) , she remains a cult—as opposed to mainstream—figure. Neither Helen Shaw nor Christine Smallwood mentioned her in pieces discussing Antigone’s resonances earlier this year.

Or was it sexism? After spending the last few weeks reading The Diaries of Judith Malina, which Northwestern University Press is publishing in June in four volumes, I may return to the assignment. Not only because The Diaries reminded me that efforts to make political theatre in America go back farther than yesterday; handwringing about what those efforts can and can’t achieve does too. Malina embodies 20th century theatre’s ambition, mess, successes, and failures. We should celebrate her, which might mean pressing pause on our worship of 21st-century buzzwords and obsessions.

Malina’s story begins before these diaries. She was born in 1926 in Germany. In 1929, with her parents, a rabbi and an actress-turned-housewife, she fled encroaching Nazism and came to New York. After her father died when she was 14, she dropped out of school. As a young person, she began a theatregoing (and diary-writing) habit. In 1945, she started attending the Dramatic Workshop with Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, studying acting, then directing. At around the same time, she worked as a hat-check girl at Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar cabaret on Morton Street. Piscator taught her about Brecht, crowd scenes, and presentational theatre—theatre for social change. From Gert she learned Expressionism. 

The Northwestern Diaries begins in 1947, when Malina co-founded the Living Theatre with Julian Beck, a painter/set designer she had fallen in love with and married a few years before. One of the delightful things about them is how in love these two were with dramatic literature. They started out producing theatre by Stein, Lorca, Brecht, Pirandello, and poets like John Ashbery and T.S. Eliot.

Malina models her diaries after those of André Gide, which she reads alongside those of Kafka, Nin, and Tolstoy. Her voice shines in part because she measures herself against the great dramatic literature of the past. “Am I the one too small?” she asks, although she is also chasing la gloire. Humility, meet ferocity.

At more than 1,500 pages in four volumes, covering nearly a quarter century, from 1947 to 1971, these diaries have been years in the making. Technically, Northwestern is publishing two volumes for the first time—Volume Two, 1958-1968, and Volume Four, 1969-71—and reprinting Volume One, The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947 to 1957, originally published in 1983 by Random House, and Volume Three (The Enormous Despair) originally published by Grove Press in 1972. Each volume has a robust new introduction by Kate Bredeson, a scholar who teaches at Reed College and is the guiding spirit of this project. Volumes Two and Four have informative prefaces by Living Theatre company members.

“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents and lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal,” Susan Sontag once wrote. Are diaries by theatre people more or less susceptible to this furtiveness, or this cruel honesty? Is The Diaries of Judith Malina furtive? I don’t know. It may be the tension between those two extremes that draws me to pugilistic 20th-century Jewish women theatre lovers (Sontag, Malina, and, for that matter, Betty Friedan). Their truth-telling energy, supercharged by benzos and grievances, strode through the world with a pugnacity and grace that I don’t see much anymore. We need them now because we are in serious heroine deficit disorder.

Malina’s obsession in The Diaries is nothing less than how to transpose suffering into theatrical form. Her own suffering, that of others, she conjures into theatre—into her “beautiful, nonviolent anarchist revolution.” I write that phrase and I want to cry. It seems like such a long time since anyone believed in it.

The volumes swing through the decades. After European modernism and the American avant-garde, by the 1950s, the move is to Artaud-inflected verité realism: Kenneth Brown’s The Brig and The Connection, two plays about the oppressions of postwar America. Joe Chaikin joins the company. Next, the provocative (some might say overwrought) activist spectacles, Paradise Now, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Frankenstein, and Antigone.

The Diaries contain plenty about PN, as Malina nicknames the Living Theatre’s 1968 collective creation, their magnum opus—the engine through which they became famous, and which then blew them apart. Some of Malina’s entries document how much today’s immersive theatre and social justice theatre echo her hope and her practice. Yet what excited me more was the courage of even less well known choices. In a run-through of PN in Avignon (where they premiered it) in 1968, they put 50 spectators onstage. Talk about breaking the fourth wall!

It’s equally striking to read about Malina’s stoicism about the hatred the show began to incite, both from the authorities and from intellectual circles. The first part of PN, “The Rite of Guerrilla Theatre,” may be best known for the way its famous line, “I am not allowed to take my clothes off,” functioned as a prelude to the onstage love-ins. But quite quickly, overwhelmingly, in the U.S. anyway, the offstage response turned to hate and censure. Despite banning, arrests (for public indecency), and critical animosity, Malina never wavers in her belief in the work.

Other resonant entries include those Malina wrote from prison. Might the Living Theatre be the most imprisoned theatre company in the 20th century? Malina was first jailed in 1955 in New York for anti-war activism, and later in 1971 in Brazil on trumped up-charges of drug possession, and many times between those dates for such charges as public indecency. Confined, she made profound reflections on the theatre and the unjust world she lived in. But even before that she was thinking about confinement: “Pound, imprisoned, learns pity (like Wilde), becomes affectionate and human,” she writes in 1949, years before she was first arrested. “All the world’s a prison.”

You could read The Diaries of Judith Malina as a guide to thinking about how American theatre might push beyond where it is now. But you could also enjoy them as an important document of the American 20th century. They should take their place alongside Studs Terkel’s oral histories and John dos Passos’s USA trilogy. Each volume contains dozens of evocative black-and-white photographs from Malina’s life. Here she is with her father on the boardwalk. Here she is, a young ingénue, eyebrows plucked into thin lines, the style of the time. Here she is en famille. There are magnificent photos of the diaries themselves, of collages and scribbles, and of the company at the theatre, on the picket line. There are production stills. There are poems, production notebooks, jottings about analysis and love affairs, reports on the political and social zeitgeist. They are gorgeous.

Malina writes all the time. She writes in multiple languages. The word diarist is one of the words etched on her gravestone, Bredeson informs us. Diarist is a partial homonym for dialogue (!), the thing plays are composed of. Diaries are dialogue distilled, or maybe the primeval sludge of dialogue (creatively, I mean). Some of the diaries have the feeling of a Christopher Isherwood camera churning everyday observations into art.

In one of her introductions, Bredeson makes the point that Malina is often caught between diarizing and rehearsing. And you do get the sense of a graphomaniac (a word that Bredeson quotes the writer Alexandra Johnson as using in the introduction to Volume Two) wrestling with a theatremaker. Malina seems as addicted to taking notes on the world around her (and then to revising them for publication, a years-long process) as to staging it. Maybe this is what Sontag meant by furtive: Malina’s need to bear witness to her horrible time sometimes exceeds her desire to live on the ephemeral stage.

Another pleasure of the diaries is the Malinas’ many accounts of nights spent hanging out in New York (and elsewhere) with everyone: the Dalis, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Jim Morrison, Cage, Cunningham, Chaikin, Grotowski. Joseph Campbell. Anaïs Nin. Malina gives you glimpses of so many scenes, answers so many questions (i.e., why does Mark Rothko leave the theatre? Because he doesn’t want to conform to others).

The diaries also give glimpses of how her Jewishness evolves. She loves Jerusalem, but Zionism is not the thing that moves her. She borrows the phrase “the enormous despair” from Martin Buber, but when Israel is declared a state, she writes, “I have strong and divided feelings about this important news.”

She also writes frankly about the toll of constantly groveling for money for her theatre. In 1947, when they try to rent the Fifth Avenue Playhouse for two months, for a total of $16,000, she wonders, “Is there that much money on earth?” In 1958, trying for a different theatre on 14th Street, she writes: “We have no money for the theatre.” She weeps. In 1969, Jim Morrison bails them out. But if money woes continue to cause suffering, they don’t stop her or the company.

The Diaries provides a close-up look at the successes and failures of a rare species: the 20th-century avant-garde female director. Malina records many instances of misogyny. Piscator tells her he believes she will “get married and forget about the theatre.” The writer Paul Goodman, also her therapist, cruelly hit her at least once. Reading about these encounters, I wanted Malina to respond more angrily, as she did when two guys attacked her at night on the street in 1953 and she screamed at them. Later, she writes, “The raised fist didn’t work,” as if she were describing something she saw in the theatre.

When the diaries begin, Malina is 21, dreaming of her own theatre. By the end of Volume Four, she is 45, has two children, and her theatre has fallen apart. She starts in a rare moment of peace and concludes in a time of war, disappointment, and imprisonment. As it turns out, the latter time feels closer to our own. But we should pay attention to the theatre dream, the thing holding it all together, which she envisions as an alternative to Broadway’s “sugary realism.” 

These diaries also track the way Malina’s developing social conscience alongside her lust for theatre. In 1948, working as an orderly at an institution for mentally ill women in Connecticut, she witnesses doctors treating women with indifference and cruelty. Her accounts of this time precede Frederick Wiseman’s first film, Titicut Follies, by several years (though the place she works is quite a different institution). The mistreatment of these women breaks her heart. And galvanizes her: “The ability to socialize and to understand reality in its accepted perspective is considered a ‘cure.’ It seems like crediting a clever cosmetician with curing smallpox. Psychoanalysis is not one of the therapeutic procedures at the Institute.”

In Volume One, Malina sees all kinds of theatre. Dismissive about the mindlessness of commercial theatre and the nascent form of television, she nonetheless goes around to auditions. After she is cast in Molly Goldberg’s TV show about a Jewish family, The Goldbergs, she remarks upon how little work it is for the money.

The word diary connotes “tell all,” and these ones reveal a lot—though not everything—about Malina’s private life. Her love for Julian, who is bisexual, is never in doubt, though their best collaboration is the theatre they create. But the diaries also reveal the particulars of her love affairs (she and Julian were in an open marriage), including with James Agee, who dies in 1955. Reading her accounts of these affairs proved—to me, anyway—that she lived her life well. She never depicts herself as a victim. And throughout, she makes children as much part of the picture as her robust love life and artistic projects. Garrick Beck, born in 1949, and Isha Mann Beck, born in 1967, join of the story, and the company. And though there are some harrowing scenes of Isha getting caught up in the arrest in Brazil, in her way, Malina had it all before feminism made that a slogan.

There is no doubt that theatre is Malina’s most enduring love; longings for it punctuate The Diaries. Second to that is the fight against injustice. In 1957, at the end of Volume One, imprisoned for anti-war protesting, she shares a cell with Dorothy Day. “Someone who does the right thing, the holy thing, at every moment,” she writes of her new friend. The last word of this volume is “love.”

Around 1959, the Living Theatre’s first big hit, The Connection, Kenneth H. Brown’s bare-knuckled play-within-a-play about addicts, defines Malina, who is clear about what the mood should be onstage. “What I want is that high feeling of the mystical significance of all things,” she writes. She insists on this gritty realism. She does anything she can to help make it real. When a cast member comes in too high to perform, when someone overdoses in the bathroom, she does not look away. At the same time, she doesn’t exploit these moments. And she is hard on herself. “I had not done enough,” she writes after The Connection is a critical bomb.

Malina never fears the sacrifice that comes with a life in the theatre. I don’t know anyone today would tolerate the hardships she describes the company enduring when touring in Europe after fleeing America, having been convicted of tax evasion in 1964. They (children in tow) live in terrible hotels, one “infested with vermin.” Company members fall ill. The police and the municipal authorities harass them. But they spend years there and become beloved.

Once Paradise Now opens in America, things change. The authorities—and most of the press—are more interested in the Living Theatre’s apparent depravity than their art. Robert Brustein, then dean of the Yale School of Drama, comes to her dressing room after seeing Paradise Now to say: “Judith, I must tell you, I hate this play.” Eric Bentley, who supported their work in the 1950s, writes, for The New York Times, “I Reject the Living Theater.” Richard Gilman describes seeing them as “painful and embarrassing.” The charges are that PN offends bourgeois sensibilities, is amateurish, cultish.

Malina fact-checks the criticisms when that is warranted. But post #MeToo, her responses to the critical attacks on the Living’s work struck me as notably even-handed. It is hard to understand her reaction to being assaulted at BAM during a performance in 1968. Her courage only hit me in her recollection of a performance the following year in Italy, when one guy spits in her face and another threatens to violently defend her. She describes trying to transform the situation, trying to prove “that love is stronger than hate.” This might seem woo-woo, but Malina sees that piling violence on violence is too easy. “Persistence and resistance marked everything she did,” writes Bredeson, who overall does a laudable job celebrating Malina as a major artistic force and a 20th-century pioneer.

It is because of Bredeson’s overall sensitivity to Malina that the rare times she scolds her subject—mostly in her introduction to Volume Four, about the company’s disastrous residency in Brazil—stand out. The volume starts in 1969, when the Living Theatre, worn down from the backlash against their work, as well as the deaths of movement allies and friends, political backsliding, and violence, splinters into factions. Judith and Julian and a few others go to Brazil, where they work on new pieces, including The Legacy of Cain, based on the writings of Leopold Sacher Masoch and on ritual and trance. Their choice of a piece about an Austrian nobleman fascinated with punishment at a time when Brazil was terrorized by a military dictator could be said to be naïve, but then again, many theatre artists need naïveté to do the absurd pyrotechnics that they do. 

In love, as in work. While in Brazil, Malina begins a sadomasochistic affair with Osvaldo de la Vega, a younger man in the company. It turns ugly. In The Diaries, she describes the affair unflinchingly. Yet the impression I got is that her tolerance for Osvaldo’s sadism seems related to some apprehension of her own aging, her mortality, and despair. (Malina is 45; the woman he dumps her for is much younger.) She finally extracts herself from the relationship, and then she and Julian (and others) are arrested. They spend around two months in jail in Brazil, from which they finally escape with an airlift from American culturati, as well as the U.S. government.

Any 21st-century assessment of Malina and the Living Theatre should show the clay feet. But there are a few moments when Bredeson sounds like she wants to cancel the subject she has otherwise so valiantly championed. The Living Theatre “embrace[d] the false narrative of shared oppression,” she writes. Also: “This fundamental delusion marred their time in Brazil.” Further, about the affair, Bredeson writes, Malina is “distracted by a sadomasochistic—and not always consensual—relationship…in ways that were… distressing to other members in the company.” 

These constricted summas, so much of our era, don’t explain much about Malina. They are also uncharacteristic for Bredeson, whose take almost everywhere else is that Malina was a trailblazer, even in 1970 and 1971, when so much else—politically, globally—had disappointed. Malina’s last line, written as she fastens her seatbelt on the plane leaving the country that imprisoned her, resurrects her indefatigable romantic ebullience: “Ah, Brazil, I have not loved you in vain.”

Her dreams and daring, her bearing witness to suffering alongside of joy in life and in theatre, has much to teach us. Even if we have drifted further than ever from the beautiful non-violent anarchist revolution she imagined.

Rachel Shteir, a 2025-26 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of four books. She teaches at the Theatre School at DePaul University.