Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov in the new Lower East Side home of the
Living Theater, which opens with a revival of Kenneth H. Brown’s
now even more relevant 1963 shocker.
Judith Malina Reborn on Clinton Street
By Jerry Tallmer
On Clinton Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a woman is voicing – dramatically declaiming – the imperishable last stanza of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. She rises to her feet to do it. It is her way of saying hello to an old acquaintance.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, Judith bellows in my direction. It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken –
On tiptoes – she’s a quite short person, always has been – Judith with a shake of the head affirms that much has been taken but she doesn’t give a damn – Tho’ much is taken, much remains, and tho’ / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are – her eyes sparkle with furious agreement – One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
For emphasis, she repeats, forcefully, those ten final words: To strive, to seek, to find … AND NOT TO YIELD.
You and Robert Scott, I say to her. Scott of the Antarctic, who died trying to reach the South Pole. The last entry in his diary was those very words. But you’ve reached your South Pole, Judith, and here you are, alive and kicking.
“Have a seat, wait I’ll get you a chair,” says Judith Malina. “All the furniture is just arriving from West End Avenue. The last run-through of The Brig is tonight. What were you saying? I have a hearing aid in each ear, and neither of them work.”
Forty-four years ago this summer – on May 15, 1963 – a play by a young unknown Brooklyn-born ex-Marine named Kenneth H. Brown opened, like a sock in the belly, at Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s mega-unmainstream Living Theatre, then at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. The short harrowing drama (directed by Malina, mise-en-scène by Beck) yanked its audience viscerally right up there with the “maggots,” or nameless prisoners – ID’d only by shouts of “Number One,” “Number Two,” etc. – behind cement and chicken wire at a brutalitarian, dehumanizing Marine Corps correction center.
Sound familiar?
That production of The Brig came to an abrupt end a number of months later when the feds busted and padlocked the Living Theatre for ostensible IRS defaults.
There was one last “bootleg” performance, with cast, crew, audience, and press coming in by rope ladders and over the roof in what Judith today still glowingly speaks of as “Marine Corps methods.” As pure art-minded anarchists, Julian and Judith and their colleagues then did their best to disrupt a 13-day federal trial. “We were just naughty,” she says now. “Refusing lawyers, singing and all that. Not bad, just naughty.” The judge called it contempt of court. Not for the first time or the last – in this and several other countries – Judith and Julian went to jail, she for 30 days at the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, he for 60 days at Danbury. “Do you know that the man always does more time than the woman?” says Judith. “On the principle that the man is considered the leader, the instigator, the boss.”
If that’s an irony, just think of the last acting job of poet, painter, stage designer, aesthete, warrior intellectual Julian Beck – as a coldly sinister Jewish gangster in a dumb 1984 movie called The Cotton Club. Not for that reason, Julian left us the following year. He was 60. He and Judith had been together since they were 17. Three years after Julian’s death, Judith married a tall young Living Theater playwriting actor named Hanon Reznikov.
On April 26, 2007, a few weeks after that Ulysses moment in Judith and Hanon’s new digs up over the reborn Living Theatre on Clinton Street, The Brig would open in a new production scheduled to carry into Labor Day. The 15 young actors are, obviously, of a generation not yet among us in 1963. The director is Judith Malina, born June 4, 1926 (in Kiel, Germany, and we’ll get back to that).
“These young people,” says Judith, “have an even more rapid understanding that we did of the link between politics and art. A wonderful bunch, I’m very proud of them. This is a wonderful time but a terrible time; if you read the papers, a horrible time. I say to the kids: ‘1968 [year of trauma and revolt in this country, France, Czechoslovakia, Asia, everywhere] was wonderful, but ’68 is over. You’re too late.’ And the kids reply: ‘What do you mean, I’m too late? I want to change the world now.’”
She lets that rest a moment, then throws in: “Bush, joosh, moosh.”
To bring back The Brig to open the spanking new 130-seat Living Theater just below Houston on Clinton Street (the southward leg of Avenue B) had not been her starting thought. “My first impulse was to open with some new collective work, because we like to do that. But you know, the politics of our time — abuses of prisoners — torture — well, The Brig became the thing to do.”
Hanon Reznikov steps from the next room, where he’s been going over some papers. “I also thought it’s a neat trick,” he says, “to show that something Judith had directed 43 [actually 44] years ago is totally up to date.”
How Judith Malina, the rabbi’s daughter, and Julian Beck, the auto-parts supplier’s son, met and instantly fell in love as teenagers and did everything together thereafter as long as they both did live is a story that needs more space than we have here.
But what’s Hanon’s story?
The son of history teacher and UFT executive Bernard Reznick was born in Brooklyn, September 23, 1950, You can do the math. “I was in the audience at the Living Theatre’s first performance at Yale at the beginning of their famous 1968 tour of Paradise Lost,” says Hanon. “I was quite impressed. I was a physics major who didn’t know what to do with physics. Then I saw Peter Brooks’s Marat/Sade and Luca Ronconi’s Orlando Furioso and decided that theater was serious. I talked with Julian and Judith. They said they were preparing a project, The Legacy of Cain, theater in the streets – at factory gates – in mental hospitals – and I joined the company in 1977.”
Judith was 6 years old when, in 1932, she and her parents went back for a visit to the Germany from which they’d emigrated four years earlier. “I remember a lot, and I remember the Nazis. Then, back in New York, I would recite poetry at rallies in Madison Square Garden to make people learn what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.”
She stands up, leans in toward her listener, and – even more dramatically than before, passionately, word for word, in perfect German – delivers a sizable poem about a child who is driven out of a playground in Berlin by adults screaming: “Jude! Jude!”
Where Rabbi Max Malina and his wife and daughter first lived in New York City happened to be Yorkville. “Then, when it got too anti-Semitic, we moved to elsewhere on the East Side. And then to the Broadway Central Hotel, at 3rd Street, which is where I really grew up.”
By the time Judith and Julian got together, his parents were living in a big old apartment on one side of West End Avenue at 99th Street, and hers in a similar apartment on the opposite side of the avenue. It was there that she and Julian were living when their son Gary was born.
“Julian’s mother would call me up every morning. ‘Judith! I just saw four drunken people coming out of your house at 4 a.m.’ ‘Judith! I just saw Gary in his stroller without a hat. It’s January. You’re trying to kill that child.’
“Julian’s mother, Mabel Beck. It’s her furniture that’s piling in here. Your chair,” says Judith, “is sitting on her rug.”
Julian’s parents’ apartment was in fact where Julian and Judith would spend most of their own adult life -- the shelter to which from time to time they would return from all the Living Theatre’s adventures, misadventures, seed-sowings, and incarcerations abroad. It is also the very marketable premises which Judith sold a year or two ago to get the money to obtain and reconstruct what is now a beacon of the drama, Living Theatre style, at 21 Clinton Street.
“I spent my fortune to make this happen,” says Judith Malina. “You know, I spent 50 years on that [99th Street] corner. Fifty years! Jesus Christ, I’m so glad to get out. And after all the venues the Living Theatre has lost – the Cherry Lane, 100th Street, 14th Street, 3rd Street -- finally we’re down on the Lower East Side where we belong.”
Her lawyer thought it was “kind of cheeky” for an 80-year-old to sign a 10-year-lease, but she fully expects to be on the scene when it comes up again in 2017. “I’m so old and have had such a rich, full life,” says Judith. “I’ve experienced so much, been so lucky, been married to two wonderful men.”
Tho’ much is taken, much remains. A bonus with her new dwelling place is a large flat roof accessible from the living room. “Can’t wait to turn it into a garden,” Judith says. Well, an old acquaintance can’t wait for a summer evening’s Living Theatre party in that garden. The numbers 9 and 21 buses stop a half block away.
