Revival of The Brig Launches New Living Theatre

The Living Theatre -- the legendary theater company founded in the 1950's by the late Julian Beck and his wife Judith Malina, who remains as the company's artistic director -- will open its own permanent performance space, a 100-seat theatre called The Living Theatre, in a new building on the Lower East Side at 19-21 Clinton St. in Manhattan, it has been announced by Executive Director, Hanon Reznakov. The Living Theatre will inaugurate its new permanent home with a new production of one of the company's most renowned and controversial productions, THE BRIG by Kenneth H. Brown, beginning previews March 15 prior to its official opening March 29.

THE BRIG has not been presented in New York since The Living Theatre produced the play in 1963, when its won a Village Voice OBIE Award for Best Play.

Written by a veteran who survived incarceration in a U.S. Marine Corps Brig during the Korean War, is a chilling portrait of the brutality of military prisons. Judith Malina directs the production, which offers a highly charged view of life among caged men.

The original production won the 1963 OBIE Award for Best Play. Following a surge of critical acclaim, congressman John Lindsay and then Democratic Party district leader of Greenwich Village Ed Koch called for the U.S . Congress to investigate the conditions in Marine Corps prisons. The theater was subsequently seized by the Internal Revenue Service and shut down to the public.  During the ensuing trial, the court dismissed the tax charges against The Living  Theatre but sentenced Judith Malina and co-Founder/Director Julian Beck to 30 and 60 days respectively for contempt of court.

Jonas Mekas' extraordinary film of the production, THE BRIG, won the Leone D'Oro for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the following year.  The play had great impact in New York and then toured extensively in Europe until 1967.

The prominence of U.S. Military Prisons in various locations around the world  at the beginning of the 21st century gives new relevance to this play.  The perverse logic behind the treatment of prisoners within the martial system is made stunningly clear in Brown's play, which was the first production staged by  The Living Theatre after director Judith Malina read M.C. Richard's as yet unpublished English translation of The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud, whose radical approach to articulating a theatrical relationship between  cruelty and transcendence transformed THE BRIG into a physical experience of pain and release unlike any conventional drama.

Events around the world from Abu Ghraib to Guantanomo Bay convince us that THE BRIG once again provides insight into the sad reality of the current historical moment.

The cast features Johnson Anthony, Lewis Williams, Keshav Baggan, Gene Ardor, Antwan Ward, Jade Rothman, Satya Bhabha, Brad Burgess, Morteza Tavakoli, Albert Lamont, John Kohan, Jeff Nash, Bradford Rosenbloom, Brent Bradley and
Joshua Roberts.

Performances of THE BRIG are on Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. and will continue thru Sunday, June 3. Tickets are $30.  Thursdays are "Pay What You Can" night and seating is on a first come first serve  basis. For further information, visit www.livingtheatre.org.

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