The Open Theater was founded in New York City by a group of former students of acting teacher Nola Chilton, together with director Joseph Chaikin (formerly of The Living Theatre), Peter Feldman, Megan Terry, and Sam Shepard.
Joseph Chaikin had just left the Living Theater, following the arrest of Julian Beck and Judith Malina for tax evasion.
The company, developing work through an improvisational process drawn from Chilton and Viola Spolin, created well-known exercises, such as "sound and movement" and "transformations", and originated radical forms and techniques that anticipated or were contemporaneous with Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theater" in Poland.
[3] According to playwright Megan Terry, the notion of a minimalist aesthetic was fueled by the company's quest to achieve narrative insight and political accountability through the body of the actor: During the sixties we were concerned with stripping away.
[5] In his book entitled The Presence of the Actor, Chaikin wrote "Traditional acting in America has become a blend of that same kind of synthetic 'feeling' and sentimentality which characterizes the Fourth of July parade, Muzak, church services, and political campaigns.
Though most of the piece is done in choreographed movement, mime, human sound-effects, hand-held instruments, there is text as well coming directly from the Bible along with a number of speeches written exclusively for the show.
This scene is run forward, backwards, and out of order to the point that it becomes so ritualized that there is now an element of comedy in play within this depiction of someone's untimely death.
There is a sense of realization of how the horror of the murder rushes over the ensemble as they break free from their rigid formation and become instead a group of individuals fleeing from the evil that has just occurred.
After being banished by God from the Garden, the actors then partake in a ritual enactment of the first true discovery of sexual love which takes place alongside a recitation of how the descendants of Adam begat the rest of mankind.
The Serpent aims to remind the audience of the idea that we are all caught in a neverending battle between the fact that we are neither as innocent nor as guilty as we may think we might be, having fallen victim to the at times foul planet that we reside on.
Some of the company's best known works include Terry's Viet Rock (1966) with musical compositions by Marianne de Pury, Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah (1966) and The Serpent (1969).
[9] The U.S. Justice Department later investigated the film questioning whether the orgy violated the Mann Act which criminalized the interstate transport of females for "immoral purposes".
[10] After the company's dissolution, its members formed The Talking Band, and Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble and Spiderwoman Theater.