The Theatre for Peace (1966-1972)

[For a long time, I’ve been trying to gather enough material to write an article on the Theatre for Peace, an anti-war organization that existed during the Vietnam era.  So far—and I’ve been searching on and off for information on the TFP since the mid- and late 1990s—I haven’t had a lot of success.  

[Part of the problem has been that the TFP was in operation long before there was an Internet—and so far, no one has posted a memoir or history of the organization.  It only seems to have existed for about six years and its press coverage included mostly reviews of the productions it supported and occasional announcements of its programs and workshops.

[Another difficulty with this research is that during the Vietnam-protest period, there were hundreds of groups with the same or analogous aims and agendas, many of which had higher profiles than the Theatre for Peace.

[There are, unfortunately, also dozens of modern-day organizations with names similar to the Theatre for Peace, most of them abroad.  When there’s a pertinent site that might provide facts about the TFP which I’m researching, it gets buried in the pile of like-named programs than can number in the hundreds.

[Nonetheless, I’m going to put down what I’ve learned.  Maybe some reader will have some pertinent facts or a lead I can follow.]

The Theatre for Peace was an anti-Vietnam war activist group that operated in New York City from about 1966 to the end of U.S. combat in Southeast Asia in 1972.  Comprised mostly of theater and performing artists, TFP produced plays and other theatrical events and participated in or organized other activities whose aim was to protest—by theatrical means—United States policy in Southeast Asia.

A project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, which was founded in 1965 by New York psychiatrist Oscar Sachs, who served as chairman, as a political and social action organization (it actively supported the 1968 candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68] for president as early as 1966—before the New York senator even declared), the TFP produced plays in and around the city and the Tri-State area, often in union halls and on university campuses.

The Committee of the Professions, as it was commonly known, ran many advertisements, usually signed statements, opposing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (and then President Richard M. Nixon’s) policies in Vietnam, most vociferously, the military involvement in the war that started under the French in 1940 (First Indochina War); the United States took over in 1955.

On 5 June 1966, for example, the Committee of the Professions co-sponsored a three-page ad in the New York Times at a cost of $20,880 (equivalent to just under $195,000 today).  There were 6,400 signatories to the ad from the faculties of such colleges and universities as Columbia, Harvard, City College of New York, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The organization also held rallies, “speak-outs,” and demonstrations.  By 1966, the Committee of the Professions had about 750 “affiliates,” according to the New York Times.

The founder of the Theatre for Peace was Gary Pogrow (1941-2010), a graduate of New York’s City College, a teacher of theater, a writer and publisher, and a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights Movement.  He served as artistic director of the TFP. 

Other founding members included such luminaries in the arts and letters as Swedish-American stage, film, and television actor Viveca Lindfors (1920-95); theater director, actor, playwright, and theater theoretician Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003); theater critic, playwright, editor, and translator Eric Bentley (1916-2020); and actor and director Alvin Epstein (1925-2018), among others. 

The TFP declared that its aim was to develop and stage theater pieces whose purpose was to end the Vietnam war.  (One of these productions was 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, the street musical co-created by Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde director about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater; see my post on 26 January 2010.)

The Theatre for Peace espoused a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”  In a casting notice in Back Stage, the theatrical trade paper in New York, the TPF explained that their productions were “a dramatic way that committed professional theatre people may express opposition to [the] Vietnam war.”

In addition to providing opportunities for artists dissenting from the war in Vietnam “through their own medium,” the TFP’s self-declared mission included reaching “new audiences by performing in churches, community centers, homes, parks, and on the streets,” seeking out, especially, “bookings in universities and in areas of cities which rarely see live theatre.”

Like Brother, You’re Next, which was composed by Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Chris Rohmann, and Robert Reiser based on Bertolt Brecht’s anti-military play Man Is Man, some of TRP’s offerings were presented in theaters or spaces like auditoriums and meeting halls and had a published schedule. 

Other shows were street theater, as Brother was outside its one indoor mounting, and were guerilla performances, popping up on sidewalks and in parks unannounced, playing for whoever stopped to watch or were attracted to the spectacle.

The scheduled theater performances catered to a paying audience who bought tickets, though the cost was minimal, and the street shows were free, though the performers probably passed a hat before departing for the next venue. 

A third form for TFP shows, as suggested above, was bookings by organizations, such as the schools mentioned or anti-war groups, for their members and those to whom they reached out.  For those performances, TFP charged a fee to cover the cost of transportation and room and board.

The Theatre for Peace (some publications spelled the troupe’s name “Theater for Peace” or called it “Theatre of Peace,” making it hard to locate all the coverage of TFP in databases) also participated in festivals relating to their philosophy.  In 1967, for instance, the theater was part of Angry Arts Week in New York City, 26 January to 5 February. 

The full, official title of the event was Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam (though some publications and archives referred to this event as the Week of the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam), and The Militant, an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party, labeled it “a unique antiwar project.”  The New York City-based paper described the event thus:

There will be protests against the war by members of all the arts—music, painting, theater, poetry, dance, film and combined forms.

The participating artists have slated a multitude of activity to express their revulsion for this war.  Among the programs scheduled are four evenings of theater, two dance concerts, a folk music concert and five film showings.

In addition, caravans of poets and musicians will present 20-minute performances on street corners throughout the city.  Other street protests will take the form of “play-ins” in lobbies of public buildings and dramatic presentations in supermarkets and laundromats.

The New York Times quoted Robert Reitz, a greeting-card designer who was chairman of the Angry Arts organization—which mounted similar events all around the Tri-State region and the Theatre for Peace appeared at many of them as well—that “many artists have wanted to voice their dissent nonviolently and nonpolitically against the war in Vietnam.”

Among the artists and literati who appeared at Angry Arts’ first event were actor Alan Alda, actor Ruby Dee, storyteller and radio show host John Henry Faulk, cartoonist and author/playwright Jules Feiffer, actor Diana Sands, and Hungarian-born writer and theatre director George Tabori (husband of Viveca Lindfors).

At the time of Angry Arts Week, the Theatre for Peace was presenting Happy Hunting, a satirical musical by Academy Award-winning songwriter Lewis Allen about the effects of the Vietnam war and draft on family life.  It was the play TFP performed at the protest event (and several other incarnations of Angry Arts, such as one in Philadelphia in January 1968. 

“It is becoming more difficult to speak and more painful to be silent,” lamented actress Anne Allen (wife of Lewis Allen) at the opening of the play at a subsequent protest event at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, a performance on 19 August 1967.  As characterized by Robert A. Horwitz in the Hartford Courant, these lines

were said without any of the difficulty to which Mrs. Allen referred.  They were said with compassion, with conviction, with love, by experienced, highly professional New York actors who had volunteered an evening without pay to present the Hartford audience a message which they believe deeply: that war is wrong, that the present war is especially senseless, that the official statements which try to justify that war are empty, meaningless words, that man must strive with all his being to achieve peace.”

Horwitz described the performance:

The production which the Theatre for Peace actors staged is called “Happy Hunting.”  It consists of three parts: a dramatic reading of anti-war poetry compiled by the poet Walter Lowenfels [1897-1976; poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA]; a selection of witty nursery rhymes by Lewis All[e]n . . . called “Light Verse, Not to Be Taken Lightly”; and a short playlet with satirical songs, also by Lewis Allen, called “Happy Hunting: A Primer for Primates.”

The message the actors present is not a new one.  War has been decried by writers and artists for centuries; love has been celebrated since the beginning of time.  But the script and the acting is unusually touching in this production.  And the old message takes on a new vitality.

The anti-war poems which began the production are touching because they concern the people, the individual, suffering people involved in war, not merely the politics of it all.

There is the mother who pines for her son in the army: “When will my son return?  He was always a man of peace, and he played baseball in the sun.”

There is the little girl, seven years old, who speaks from her grave in Hiroshima: “I’m a little girl that’s dead.  I’m knocking at your door.  Please hear me and give me just one gift, that you won’t kill any more babies.”

The light verses, short and clever, offered some pithy comments on the current American scene: “The Grand Canyon on a political map/Would be renamed the credibility gap,” and a little ditty about poor old Humphrey Dumphrey [an allusion to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey] who fell all to pieces and couldn’t be put back together again, even by “all Johnson’s horses, all Johnson’s men.”

But it is the playlet “Happy Hunting” which really touches the soul, for here, in a few dramatic minutes, are presented all the ingredients of America suffering in war: the young boy who is drafted, the mother who doesn’t understand why he has to go and cries “Why, why, why” when his casket is later brought in, the “voice of authority” which rationalizes all the horror with rhetoric about the nation’s “commitment to a commitment to a commitment.”

Reporter and reviewer Horwitz remarked, “There are many anti-war plays which, for lack of subtlety, sophistication, or directness, simply fail to convey their intended message.  But ‘Happy Hunting’ . . . is a superior anti-war production.  Its message comes across with poignancy.”

Along with Happy Hunting, the earliest TFP production for which I found a record, the protest troupe produced Near the Wall of Lion Shadows, a “choreodrama” composed of slides, poems, and dances choreographed by Ann Wilson based on poems by Ruth Lisa Schechter; Brother, You’re Next; The Ballad of Joe Smith by Thomas Donlon and directed by Robert Kya-Hill, depicting several levels of army life; Brecht on War, directed by Lindfors; Lysistrata directed by Lenard Rosen, an ancient Greek anti-war comedy by Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BCE), originally performed in Athens in 411 BCE; and Childermas, a choreodrama based on the biblical Slaughter of the Innocents, with a book by Robert Summers and music by Harold Boatright, choreographed by Joan Kerr.

The TFP’s basic plan included “to create, prepare, and present theatrical works aimed at ending the war in Vietnam.”  It also held workshops (one weekly session was conducted by Joe Chaikin) and developed improvisational playlets on Vietnam, welfare, and racism.

One planned workshop, headed by Lindfors with Canadian-born actor Dino Narrizzano, Chaikin, stage director Gladys Vaughan, songwriter and theater director Jacques Levy, Eric Bentley, historian and teacher Stan Steiner, conceptual artist David Rothenberg, and Alvin Epstein, was intended to develop scripts for distribution to student and peace groups around the U.S. and to make films or tapes of well-known artists performing or otherwise demonstrating their feelings about the war in Southeast Asia.

The program was also intended to develop mobile troupes of performers to travel the country to play wherever there was a demand.  There were also plans for a writers’ workshop.    

The troupe’s overall aim, in addition to providing “an artistic forum for opposition to the war in Vietnam,” was to perform for people who ordinarily might not “come to grips with the issues” of the conflict by presenting their work in neighborhood spaces and open venues. 

Jane Speiser, the review-writer for West Side News, who attended the 1968 indoor production of Brother, You’re Next, asserted that TFP had carved out “a difficult job, [but] has attacked it with an uncompromising sense of what makes for dramatic excitement as well as what makes for political commitment.”

[When I first wrote about Brother. You’re Next, years before I created the ROT post of 2010, I saw it only as Leonardo Shapiro’s first public New York effort and the earliest step in the evolution of what would be his life’s principal endeavor, The Shaliko Company (1972-93).

[Later, when I researched Shapiro’s next out-of-school project, the New York Free Theater (1968-71; see my post on 4 April 2010), I saw it as an outgrowth of Brother and Shapiro’s next step toward Shaliko.

[Compiling this profile of the Theatre for Peace, I now see something that I may not have spotted because I hadn’t looked into the work of the TFP beyond the fact that it produced Brother—a one-off, discrete association with Shapiro and his Brother/NYFT colleagues and collaborators.

[Here’s the hypothesis: I think there’s a good chance that the TFP influenced the founders of NYFT when they came up with their agenda for the new street-theater troupe.  Here’s why I suspect this:

[First, look at what the TFP proclaimed as their mission and philosophy.  In addition to their central emphasis, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Theatre for Peace also focused their efforts on fighting racism, specifically, and, more generally, other societal ills, such as poverty.

[Next, the leaders of the organization made a point of performing their shows in accessible places, including the streets and parks of the cities where the TFP appeared, and bringing their performances to people who didn’t often (or ever) get to see live theater.

[The troupe offered workshops to teach others with similar agendas how to promote their ideas all across the country.  It also gave its performances and provided their developmental classes at minimal or no cost because the message and the information was more important than raising money.

[Now, Brother, You’re Next was already developed when Shapiro and his collaborators, who, except for Chris Rohmann, were all NYU undergrad theater students, came together with the Theatre for Peace and the Committee of the Professions.  But the fit was nearly perfect. 

[I think what happened was that once on board with the TFP, working with Lindfors, Tabori, Chaikin (with whom Shapiro was already acquainted from his pre-NYU teen experience with the Living Theatre—see “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2,” 19 April 2023)—et al., their nascent leanings and proclivities coalesced and gelled into mandates.

[Brother was adamantly anti-war, and the collaborators/creators of the street musical were committed to dissent and opposition.  That wasn’t especially unusual for college students in the mid- and late ’60s; I had the same tendencies down south in central Virginia.  But when those same young actors and directors morphed into the founders of the New York Free Theater, after the encounter with the TFP, ad hoc ideas that they’d applied to Brother, You’re Next evolved into a framework for an activist street troupe.

[Racism was at the top of NYFT’s list of targets, having formed the group because of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1968, but they soon spread out to treat other societal ills such as poverty and consumerism.

[Performance was the main medium for the troupe’s messaging, but they soon added community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” as additional ways to reach out to New Yorkers. 

[NYFT was conceived as a street theater, setting up on sidewalks and in parks, but a spokesperson for the troupe emphasized: “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” just as the TFP did.”

[The pattern of operation for the two organizations is nearly identical.  Now, I suppose that this kind of organizational model was fairly common in the ’60s, with the proliferation of street theaters in New York City and elsewhere, but the close contact between the team that created Brother, You’re Next and then went on to found the New York Free Theater and the artists who formed the Theatre for Peace, even for a short time—especially so close to the emergence of NYFT—leads me to suspect very strongly that there was cross-pollination.]

'Brother, You’re Next'

[Late in 1967, Leonardo Shapiro, then an NYU theater student, and classmate Stephen Wangh produced Brother, You’re Next, a Vietnam-war street musical Shapiro and Wangh wrote with Chris Rohmann and Robert Reiser. Brother, a 25-minute adaptation of Brecht’s anti-militarist Man Is Man reset to the Vietnam war, came out of the mounting Greenwich Village trend of performing free on the streets. “The center of gravity in advanced theater activity is again shifting,” wrote a contemporaneous observer of the scene. “Forms are changing and so are the locations: the new ones are the streets, the parks and the college campuses . . . .” Many small troupes had taken to the streets to agitate not so much for artistic and theatrical audacity, but political and intellectual liberties. While Shapiro and his friends usually presented Brother on the sidewalks and in the parks of New York City as guerrilla theater, on one occasion the itinerant troupe did a series of performances indoors as part of an anti-Vietnam war event organized on 26-29 January 1968 by the Theatre for Peace, a project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam. On the 42nd anniversary of that presentation, I publish this account.] 

Brother, You’re Next was developed, mostly through improvisation, by a group of friends from the NYU undergraduate theater program. Rohmann, whom his friend Stephen Wangh had invited to join the effort specifically to write the music, came to New York City from Ohio where he had been living; he was the only member of the company not connected to New York University. The play evolved, maintained actor Larry Pine, one of the original participants, because the band of friends and, save Rohmann, classmates, were simply frightened by the prospect of being drafted and sent to die in Vietnam. “There was lots and lots of dead people coming back and we were all scared shitless,” Pine said. They were all facing the ends of their student draft deferments, too: Pine, himself, had already been called for military service, as had Rohmann. “I was sitting in my hometown in Ohio waiting to be drafted,” Rohmann recalled. “I’d been drafted and I was appealing, and Steve [Wangh] called me up and said, ‘Come to New York and use whatever liberty time you’ve got left to good advantage.’” Their goal, according to Wangh, was to stimulate those who saw Brother to emulate their efforts with “similar things.” It was a frankly youthful impulse of personal commitment. 

Like Man Is Man, a play which had come to have special meaning for Shapiro after he saw the Living Theatre’s 1962 production starring Shapiro’s friend (and later collaborator) Joseph Chaikin, Brother, You’re Next showed how a man could be turned into a fighting machine against his will, his personality manipulated at the whims of others--in Man, the soldiers of the detachment and in Brother, the draftee’s friends and family. It calls to mind the first part of Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 film directed and co-written by an inspiration of Shapiro’s, Stanley Kubrick. The film follows a group of Marine recruits through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, where the drill instructor, a contemporary and perhaps more realistic rendering of Man Is Man’s Bloody Five and Brother’s Sergeant, abuses, brutalizes, and humiliates them into becoming mindless, soulless “killing machines.” In Brother, for instance, the Sergeant tells the Inductees that in the army, “We make all the decisions for you. You never have to think at all.” Later, in the song “Uncle Sam’s Grand Army,” the young soldiers are ordered, “Just leave your brains” at the induction center and that Uncle Sam will “cut out your heart and then throw it away” as the new soldiers will no longer need to think or feel. Symbolically, they, like Kubrick’s Marines, are encased in a “full metal jacket,” the hard copper casing that covers the soft lead slug of the 7.62-millimeter ammunition U.S. forces were issued for their M-16 rifles. 

Like Brother and Man Is Man, Full Metal Jacket probes what turns people into killers as they are dehumanized by the system and posits that while the American establishment thought it was helping the Vietnamese cleanse their country of communism--“We gas, we torture, we napalm to civilize the Reds,” sing the soldiers in Brother, You’re Next in “War Is Fun”--it was actually contaminating its own populace by turning them into robotic murderers. When Michael, the young draftee in Brother, hesitates to shoot a defenseless woman, the Sergeant commands him, “Listen, soldier, in the Army you see with your ears as well as your eyes. I’m telling you that’s a Viet Cong guerrilla. Now kill it!” As Crazy Earl, one of the Marines of Full Metal Jacket, muses in the second part of the film when the unit is fighting in Southeast Asia: “These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we’re gonna miss not having anyone around that’s worth shooting.” This is not far from the lines Michael utters near the end of Brother, You’re Next while he is being celebrated for participating in a massacre of civilians that seems to predict the events at My Lai where a U.S. Army unit slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese women, children, and old men and then burned the hamlet. The returning hero asks wryly, “What did I do to deserve this praise? I only killed a few people, raped a few women, burned a few villages--nothing that any red-blooded American boy wouldn’t do if he had the chance.” (The massacre at My Lai happened in 1968, but the military kept the incident secret. The atrocity was revealed by the press in 1969.) 

(The mirror image of the world of Full Metal Jacket is perhaps seen in Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, a depiction of a world so dehumanized that its citizens are programmed to behave acceptably through Skinnerian conditioning. In this dystopia, Kubrick suggested, the sole outlet for actual human action is violence, since it is the only behavior a person remains free to select. Conditioned behavior, he said, is not truly human: “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” Clockwork is Kubrick’s vision of a future in which Galy Gay and Michael, clothed in their own full metal jackets woven by military training and fitted by war, “rotate back to the world” with the attitude expressed by Crazy Earl. If 2001: A Space Odyssey is about machines becoming human, Clockwork is about humans becoming machines. The title phrase is a Cockney expression that describes something which appears normal on the surface but is artificial and unnatural beneath.) 

Brother, You’re Next, whose script, Chris Rohmann recalled, had not been written down until after several improvised performances--though Wangh noted that the songs were set--was presented in unscheduled, unannounced outdoor performances around New York City starting in July 1967. Only one indoor presentation of Brother, at the Cooper Square Arts Theatre in the East Village, departed from this practice; all others, almost exclusively during the warm-weather months, were set up, presented, and struck while pedestrians gathered and watched. Wangh noted that the company avoided performing before anti-war rallies, though they were often invited to do so, because they “didn’t want to preach to the converted”; however, the Brother troupe did go to Washington and performed on the steps of the Pentagon during the demonstration there on 21 October 1967. Pine burned his draft card in front of the headquarters of the Department of Defense. 

The group was also invited by Abbie Hoffman, the legendary anti-Vietnam revolutionary who was a leader of the Pentagon protest, to take the show to Woodstock in 1969, Christopher Rohmann recalled, but they decided they preferred working in the streets. The troupe, which numbered about 20, all of whom knew the script well enough so that as few as five could pick up at a moment’s notice and mount a performance by simply shuffling roles, made a “conscious decision” to go where they could perform for “ordinary people who didn’t see Washington Square type of street theater.” They frequently traveled to all the boroughs of New York City, often setting up in locations like the sidewalk in front of military recruiting stations, but regularly returned to perform in Washington Square Park, New York University’s unofficial campus quadrangle and a center of counterculture life in New York City. Rohmann remembered that some spectators, especially young men but some young women as well, reacted very strongly to the piece. Recognizing themselves or loved ones in the character of Michael, struggling with the notion of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, they would approach and thank the performers for helping them to understand some of their concerns and fears. Some told Rohmann that the play had helped them make decisions about their draft status and Wangh recalled that some men asked to be put in touch with organizations that did draft counseling. Shapiro remembered hearing about performances of Brother by other groups in Chicago and cities in California and Minnesota and requests by distant groups, Rohmann suspected, was the reason that the text was eventually written down. 

Originally composed in the year Martin Luther King. Jr., led a march in New York against the war in Vietnam where nearly half a million U.S. soldiers were then fighting and some 50,000 protesters demonstrated against it at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Brother tells the tale of a draftee at first determined to escape military service--a plot device shared with the musical Hair, which opened Off-Broadway that same year--but who eventually learns that “war is so much fun” and readily participates in it “to help the boys back home who manufacture guns.” Perhaps Shapiro still had lodged in his mind the final lines, not dissimilar to those of Full Metal Jacket’s Crazy Earl or Brother’s Michael, from the Living Theatre’s Man Is Man which he had seen five years earlier: 

For already I feel within me 

The desire to dig my teeth 

Into the throat of the enemy 

The instinct to kill 

Providers of families, 

To carry out the orders of 

The conquerers [sic]. 

History had converged with art during the years Shapiro and his co-creators were working on Brother, You’re Next. Around the time of the Cooper Square performances in January 1968, the U.S. Navy spy ship Pueblo had been captured in North Korean waters and the Tet offensive was underway in South Vietnam. By the end of 1968, when further performances of Brother were being planned or presented, both King and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated; “Red” Rudi Dutschke, the radical German student leader, had been shot in West Berlin; students and workers in Paris had engaged in a strike and those in Mexico City rose up in protest on the eve of the Olympic Games; the Prague Spring had collapsed under the weight of Soviet tanks; and Richard M. Nixon had been elected President of the United States. The next year saw both the Woodstock celebration, which Shapiro attended, and the disclosure of the My Lai massacre. 

In a 1967 statement, the founders of the Theatre for Peace, who included Viveca Lindfors, Joe Chaikin, Eric Bentley, and Alvin Epstein, among others, averred that the project’s aim was to develop and stage theater pieces whose purpose was to end the Vietnam war. One of four pieces in various styles, Brother was part of a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.” These performances of Brother were the only ones formally “produced” by an outside organization or offered in an indoor space--and the only ones reviewed; a local critic astutely described it as “an event rather than a play . . . planned to take place almost spontaneously in the street or a park.” Directed by Wangh, Brother made use of direct contact between the performers and the audience; in the street performances, the actors played scenes among the spectators. At the start of the play, for instance, the actors watched the audience from the stage while preparing whipped-cream pies. The spectators were clearly expected to wonder if they were about to become the targets of a bombardment, and were surely relieved when they were not. As serious as their anti-war stance was, Shapiro and Wangh, like Brecht, were not above using farce and slapstick. “The play is funny and entertaining,” wrote two of the participants, “yet people have approached us after performances to tell us we had changed their thinking about the draft.” “Irresponsibility” and “lightheartedness,” Peter Brook observed, are necessary parts of this kind of theater and George Bernard Shaw argued that in the theater “the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good fellowship without mawkishness.” 

Brother, as Shapiro acknowledged, was an agit-prop play but, crediting the performance’s reliance on theatrical effect rather than polemics, the West Side News, a neighborhood paper, declared that it provided a “sardonic, gung-ho quality which is almost ambiguous enough to speak to people who are not yet actively against the war.” In addition to playing among the spectators on the sidewalks of the city, the company engaged the audience in the progress of the plot, even to asking them to help torture one of the characters. “Our constant effort is to never allow the audience to dissociate itself from the action and the issues of the play,” wrote the creators. The troupe even allowed hecklers to become part of the performance text. At Cooper Square, Show Business, the theater trade weekly, judged that the “spirited” cast “held its own” with songs in the folk-rock protest vein, typical of the period, accompanied by a lone guitar and somewhat reflecting the style of Bob Dylan (who was Shapiro’s cousin). 

Brother, You’re Next had music by Chris Rohmann and lyrics by Rohmann and Wangh. The cover page of the script bears the following annotation: 

The authors and copyright holders hereby grant permission to perform BROTHER, YOU’RE NEXT royalty-free under the [condition that] no profit is to be made from such production . . . . 

The creators explicitly intended the show to be produced in varying venues, for diverse audiences, and under changing circumstances. (An existing text shows elements of such changes: original references to “Lyndon” have been altered to reflect Nixon’s election in November 1968.) They expressly permitted alteration of the text and even the lyrics to suit the needs of the producing organization. This was all in conformance with the goals of the Theatre for Peace to create material to be disseminated to like-minded protest groups around the country and establish traveling troupes to carry its convictions to other cities and towns. 

[As a sidelight, the cast of Brother, You’re Next became the kernel of a street troupe, the New York Free Theater, which performed anti-racist, anti-war, and social-protest songs and sketches all over the five boroughs of New York City from 1968 until the mid-1970s. Shapiro left New York for points west in the summer of 1969, spending two years leading the Appleseed Circus, a guerrilla-performance troupe in the area near Taos, New Mexico. (I’ve written some about this latter endeavor--“Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos)” and “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 5 August and 31 October 2009, respectively--and the New York Free Theater may be the subject of a future post on ROT.) Steven Wangh, who served for some years as the dramaturg of Moíses Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre Project, is on the faculty of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and, as a project for one of his classes, assembled many of the surviving members of the Brother company and made a tape of a reconstructed performance (ca. 1991). Some of the cast also recalled their experiences with the street performances and I’ve quoted some of those remarks above.]