Word: theater
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HIGGLETY PIGGLETY POP! by Maurice Sendak (Harper & Row; $4.95). The leading American children's writer has turned out another delightful story this one about Jennie, a discontented terrier who leaves the lap of luxury to become an actress with the World Mother Goose Theater...
...National Bank, which opened its doors in 1964 with an authentic black hero, Jackie Robinson, as chairman of the board, makes $25.2 million available for loans to Negroes, whom white-managed financial institutions systematically reject as bad risks. Economic status is only one of many new goals. The Negro theater, yesterday nothing more than a dream, is a flourishing reality today, with black companies and stages all over the U.S. and more than a dozen Negro dramatic groups in Harlem alone. The new, all-Negro Hello, Dolly!, with Pearl Bailey and Cab Galloway, is a smash hit on Broadway...
...forefront of the U.S. dramatic avant-garde is in Europe-a band of strolling anarchist players who are emigrants from off-Broadway. When a failure to pay back taxes shuttered the Living Theater in 1963, Co-Founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina took their troupe to Europe. They have been there ever since, touring 95 cities in four Volkswagen buses. In addition to nondelivery of scenery, the company has had to cope with censorship in Spain, riots in France, and fistfights in several Italian towns. This sort of mishap scarcely fazes an outfit that is run like a permissive kindergarten...
What stimulates excitement and controversy about the Living Theater is that it uses audiences almost like guinea pigs, trying to incite them to active emotional responses rather than passive mental assent. Critics have called this assault on the senses "the drama of the anti-word" or "the theater of attrition." Dialogue and plot are reduced to a minimum and replaced by improvisation, ritual and a grotesquerie of violence and the macabre...
Horror & Dissent. Fun is not totally foreign to the Living Theater. In one playlet, for example, to a unison drumbeat of feet there is a rapid-fire recital of everything printed on a dollar bill. But the troupe is obviously happiest with horror, since that best expresses its dissent from contemporary society. Its tour de force is a 31-hour Grand Guignol saga called Frankenstein, which begins with eleven people being dragged screaming, pleading or fighting to the stage. There they are gassed, crucified, electrocuted, and garroted...