Malina and Beck dedicated the production to the memory of Thelma Gadsden “and all the other junkies dead or alive in the Women’s House of D.” A few months after she got out of prison, Thelma Gadsden died going cold turkey in a Salvation Army shelter, Malina explained. In the program, Malina and Beck reprinted Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theater and Culture,” which equates participants in theater with victims of the Inquisition who while being “burnt at the stake” were so intent on delivering their apocalyptic message that they were “signaling through the flames.”
When I told Jack Gelber I was writing about Judith Malina for Birth of the Cool, he snapped, “I can’t imagine anybody less cool than Judith Malina,” citing hassles he blamed on Malina and her husband’s overblown emotions during The Connection’s New York run that still rankled forty years later. But it was very cool to have produced The Connection and to have succeeded in flinging it into the face of the mass culture. Beck and Malina were cool, as consumed by their vision as the junkies were by their heroin, as the victims of the Inquisition were by the flames.
“I’m not a Catholic,” Judith Malina shrugged, “so I don’t know about saints. But as far as human sanctity goes, Dorothy went as far as one could go. She was good as one can be.” It was 1997, and we were seated on a couch in the Upper West Side apartment that once belonged to Julian Beck’s parents and now doubles as the Living Theatre’s office and Malina’s stateside residence. The Living Theatre now spends half the year in Europe, but when Malina’s in New York, she shares this place with her lover, Hanon Reznikov, her and Beck’s daughter Isha, and Isha’s son. Though Julian Beck’s been dead for ten years, the room is still dominated by racks of his canvases. There are suitcases everywhere. Most of the furniture is covered with sheets. It feels like everybody is about to hit the road.
At seventy, tiny and energetic, sporting big Mexican silver earrings and a peace sign on a chain around her neck, Malina tried to articulate what Dorothy Day meant to her. “People make her out now to be very somber and strict, but she was a woman of enormous humor and charm. Most of our conversations were either practical or long, narrative chapters out of our life stories,” Malina reflected. “It was by her actions and her restraints that she showed me what to do. I felt myself to be in the presence of someone in whom I could have complete faith, someone who does the right thing, even the holy thing, at every moment.”
Malina says that whatever she knows about “the theatricalization of politics,” she learned from Dorothy Day. “Whenever you organize mass demonstrations, whenever you have a public protest, it is likely to take its natural form, which is to end up in riot and battle. But the leap from confrontation to violence is cooled out by theatricalization.” Every time the Living Theatre is in Times Square giving the performance they stage whenever one of the three thousand men and women currently on a death row in America is executed, Malina says she thinks about Dorothy Day.
As part of the play, she and the other actors confront total strangers and try to get them to promise not to kill anybody. Malina says she starts by trying to persuade the cornered passerby to promise at least not to kill her. If they’re willing to go that far, she explains, the actor tries to get the pedestrian to promise he or she will never bomb a city, never shoot into a crowd. “If you confront someone,” she explains, “the problem becomes immediately to make it a loving relationship.” Suddenly Malina the actress is in the middle of a tense Times Square confrontation, rapping with an angry cop, cajoling him, seducing him with her voice and eyes, trying to cool him out. “Like, if he’s your arresting officer, how do you soften this guy up?” she asks. “How do you let him know it’s cool to be in my play?” She smiles at me as if I were a policeman and she were Dorothy Day. “It’s a cool play.”