The Living Theatre

In the 1950s, the group was among the first in the U.S. to produce the work of influential European playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht (In The Jungle of Cities in New York, 1960) and Jean Cocteau, as well as modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein.

[5] Based in a variety of small New York locations which were frequently closed due to financial problems or conflicts with city authorities, they helped to originate off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway as significant forces in U.S. theater.

In the early 1960s the Living Theatre was host to avant-garde minimalist performances by artists including Simone Forti and Robert Morris.

[6] The Brig (1963), an anti-authoritarian look at conditions in a Marine prison, was their last major production in New York before a tax dispute led to the closure of the theatre space and the brief imprisonment of Beck and Malina.

They produced more politically and formally radical work carrying an anarchist and pacifist message, with the company members creating plays collectively and often living together.

[8] Paradise Now, a semi-improvisational piece involving audience participation, was notorious for a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while disrobing; this led to multiple arrests for indecent exposure.

The company moved into the completed space in early 2007 and opened in April 2007 with a revival of The Brig by Kenneth H. Brown,[12] first presented at The Living Theatre at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in 1963.

In 2014, Judith Malina's play No Place to Hide premiered at the Clemente Soto Velez Center on the Lower East Side.

From its conception, The Living Theatre was dedicated to transforming the organization of power within society from a competitive, hierarchical structure to cooperative and communal expression.

They oppose the commercial orientation of Broadway productions and have contributed to the off-Broadway theater movement in New York City, staging poetic dramas.