New York Free Theater

[Thirty-two years ago this month, a little band of pacifist theater artists in their early 20’s launched a street theater intended to combat racism and racist attitudes among the diverse population of New York City. It was a direct response to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., murdered 32 years ago today. The New York Free Theater only operated for a few years and toward the end, it expanded its mandate to accommodate other social ills, but its origins in April 1968 was single-minded. I’ve written several times about Leonardo Shapiro, who was one of the leaders of NYFT, and here is another episode from Leo’s early activism, a period that continued to influence and inform his life and art for the remainder of his life.]

In the spring of 1968, a circle of NYU schoolmates including Leonardo Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Larry Pine, and Margaret Rachlin Pine (plus former Brandeis University sociology major Chris Rohmann) co-founded the New York Free Theater, “a street and community theater of social and political involvement” which operated under the aegis of NYU’s School of the Arts. Following on the heels of Brother, You’re Next, an anti-Vietnam-war street musical which the NYU friends and Rohmann composed and staged on the streets of New York City, the Free Theater evolved (see ROT, 26 January 2010). (Though the Free Theater did not actually produce Brother, the performances of that play did continue after the founding of the troupe and the Brother company formed the core of NYFT.)

Chris Rohmann, the composer for Brother, recalled that the impetus for the founding of the troupe had been the assassination on 4 April 1968 of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the founders proposed the Free Theater that month, beginning street performances on Manhattan’s upper west side at 72nd Street and Broadway (its “Broadway opening”) on 15 July. Rohmann reported that the African-American artists in their circle began saying things like, “That’s it. We have to do black theater for black people,” and the white artists responded, “Yes, and we need to do theater about racism for white people.” One leader of the troupe said, “Our performances are directed toward white people,” and early proposals for the troupe cited The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly called the “Kerner Report”) which held, “White racism is responsible for the explosive mixture” that broke out into the race riots of summer 1967. “We are trying to engage and involve our audience, especially whites.” No less a journal than the Christian Science Monitor reported that “the New York Free Theater invades  the suburbs or mid-Manhattan streets and presents plays aimed at uncovering white racism and provoking discussion between actors and audience.”

The Free Theater eventually launched community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” but in 1968 and 1969, the company devoted itself to street performances. (The group lasted until about 1971, but its final months were only haphazardly productive due mostly to financial problems.) In New York Times listings of free events during the summer of 1969, the theater described itself as “street actors in ‘involvement’ theater and satire,” mounting performances in neighborhoods all over the city, on street corners, in parks, and on college campuses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The Free Theater performed on its own much of the time, under the official sponsorship of the city, but it also participated in organized programs such as the Mayor John Lindsay’s 1968 summer venture, Broadway in the Streets.

Though NYFT announced the broad goal of “democratizing the arts” so as to “help all of us develop our creative capacities,” a promotional brochure explained that the company’s mission was to help halt the racial, ethnic, and social fragmentation of New York society. In a testimonial in the pamphlet, Mayor Lindsay acknowledged the troupe’s efforts in the “all-important work” of “rebuild[ing] the sense of community and common cause” the city had lost, calling its method “unique, inventive, and unusually effective.” The brochure affirmed that NYFT was

an integrated ensemble of actors dramatizing social themes and using techniques of audience involvement which keep the spectators from dissociating themselves from the action and issues of the play. We also guide the audience toward alternatives and avenues of action, encouraging people into community-oriented projects.

“Our technique is one of improvisation and audience involvement,” declared a company member, “encouraging people to take steps toward unified community action. . . . . White people and black people and Puerto Rican people out there, . . . they’re directing their hostility toward each other instead of working together--if that’s still possible in a society like ours.” Rohmann, who described his function as “songwriter and one-man band,” looked back on the company’s origins and observed, “We invented a theater that involved people in current issues by combining the immediacy of guerrilla theater with audience participation.” Monsignor Robert J. Fox of the New York archdiocese attested that the young actors “present thought-provoking drama about society today, drawing crowds of people into intense involvement with . . . the issues . . . such as poverty, peace, and racism” and New York Shakespeare Festival founder Joseph Papp wrote, “The spectators become participants in the dramatic action, and develop a heightened understanding of the need to join together on positive social action.” An article on New York City radical performance groups observed that NYFT “stages dialogues and confrontations at meetings where they have not been invited.” “Our main goal,” explained Rohmann, “is to play for people who don’t agree with our themes.”

(On at least one occasion, the tables were turned on the New York Free Theater and they found themselves on the receiving end of an unplanned confrontation. NYFT had been slated to appear at Fillmore East, the East Village rock music venue, for an overnight benefit on 22-23 October 1968 for the legal defense fund for Columbia University students who had been arrested during the student strike there the previous spring. The benefit had been organized by Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, with Shapiro’s group and Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater among those scheduled to perform. After an audience-participation piece by the Living Theater--the first scene of Paradise Now--a group from Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an East Village radical anarchist hippie group, seized the stage and demanded the free use of the theater one night a week for the community, threatening to burn the theater if Bill Graham, the Fillmore’s owner, did not agree. After lengthy negotiations mediated by Beck, Graham conceded to the group’s demands--though he never actually complied with the agreement.)

At a rally on 10 April 1969 at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, an “open hearing” in support of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), an NYFT spokesman asserted other goals for the troupe, presenting a decidedly more radical and activist profile. (Before settling on the name New York Free Theater, and before that briefly the Free Theater of New York, the troupe dubbed itself a “theater of action.”) It “hop[ed] to decentralize, anarchize and democratize the arts,” in order to “destroy repressive arts institutions,” the speaker said, denouncing especially what he called “bureaucratized arts institutions.” “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” declared the speaker. To change “basic social institutions and processes,” the NYFT representative demanded “radical social transformation.”

The company asserted that they researched the communities where they performed and suited their texts to the concerns of each audience. In Flatbush, for instance, the material would reflect the conditions in Brooklyn; if the audience was largely teenaged, “we try to talk their language,” said a troupe leader. Though Free Theater promotional material said the actors “work closely with local groups” in business, politics, and civic affairs to get their advice on community problems, potential audience proclivities, performance locations, and so on, so that they “inspire” neighborhood organizations to take action for “community change,” a journalist who had been invited to attend an NYFT event in August 1969 depicted them in conflicting terms: conscientious and sincere in their beliefs but out of their element in some of the neighborhoods in which they operated. Made up of largely middle-class youths, the Free Theater seemed to confront conservative whites in working-class neighborhoods who reacted with hostility and aggression. Responding as if their hometown had been invaded by hippies, they scolded the actors: “Why don’t you do this where you live?” During a performance in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which included dancing to a rendition of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” singing a song called “Grass,” presenting a mock television commercial for “downers,” and performing a sketch about army training, one spectator yelled, “We’re gonna get some pipes and crack you people’s heads!” the article reported, accompanied by choruses of “Take a bath” and “Get a job” from others on the street.

The troupe made a point to travel to neighborhoods that had never seen street theater, and it sometimes seemed as though the material the Free Theater offered was outside the grasp of the audience: after the drug ad parody, one spectator muttered, “Disgusting,” as others looked perturbed, apparently believing the cast was really stoned. The army training skit fell afoul of a pair of Vietnam veterans, one of whom asked the crowd, “Are we going to stand for them using the flag for this?” The former Green Beret having commandeered the microphone, the NYFT sound technician turned it off, ending the performance. The actors asked the audience to vote on whether the show should continue. Almost no one did.

At Greenwich Village performances, by contrast, competing with traffic, noise, and crowded sidewalks, the troupe attracted curious and appreciative passersby, many of whom rushed across the street or paused their shopping to watch; some even joined in the singing or took up a dance beat. The performers invariably received what Rohmann called “Manhattan applause.” In Park Slope, where the Free Theater had its acrimonious confrontation with the residents, the shopkeepers wondered why the actors had to set up in front of their stores; in the Village, the sidewalk vendors moved closer to the performers to capitalize on the crowd they knew was about to form.

In black and Puerto Rican districts, the troupe was tolerated with bemusement. As Florynce Kennedy, an African-American civil- and women’s-rights activist-lawyer whom NYFT had invited to address them, admonished the troupe, “As long as you haven’t confronted your own oppressors, you have no business going into other people’s neighborhoods and telling them they’re oppressed.” Kennedy was referring to the support that the Free Theater received through NYU and the city. Troupe members paid themselves salaries of $90, and no less a counterculture figure than radical activist Abbie Hoffman scolded them when he learned they did not pass the hat for their funds. “Liberals,” he sneered, and added, “I really ought to send them a bill.”

NYFT was better appreciated, or at least drew less opprobrium, in the heart of middle-class New York, such as East 47th Street in Manhattan. In another testimonial in the promotional brochure, Carl Rachlin, legal director for the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (and father of NYFT founding member Margaret Rachlin Pine), confirmed that the Free Theater devoted its efforts “to bring[ing] the white middle class to a realistic confrontation of these problems [of racism and violence] and to involve the white middle class in the resolution of them.”

To be fair, many participants--and the officials of the supporting organizations--found the NYFT both effective and beneficial. “In the tradition of Shakespeare, another great street-player, the Free Theater examines the folly and tragedy of modern urban living, offering as an alternative to our plight a celebration of life and love,” wrote one neighborhood newspaper. “The Free Theater talks about what is relevant to all age groups.” The writer from the Village Voice who reviewed one of NYFT’s street performances concluded, “After most indoor productions my impulse is to join the rush for transportation. After street theatre I want to linger and continue the dialogue.” And the national magazine Life pronounced its verdict:

There are skeptics, of course, who call Mayor Lindsay’s project a sugary placebo that cannot cure any basic social ills. Nonsense. Lindsay’s pills are sweet, but effective, too. They help get at sources of social ills by offering concern, affection and a high value on individual worth. What’s more this new breed of theater is pushing culture out of the elaborate centers and museums into the places where people struggle and grow. And the ultimate reward will not be what culture can do for the people, but what they can do for culture.

A street performance on 22 July 1968 which dealt with “the disastrous state of civil rights” in the United States demonstrated NYFT’s aim “to improve intergroup relations throughout the metropolitan area.” Before an audience of about 300 at the Avenue of the Americas and 50th Street on that early Monday afternoon, a cast of ten NYFT members gave a performance of songs and playlets. While all of the plays were original, the songs, intended to attract a crowd, ranged from rock-and-roll standards (in one appearance, they opened with the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”) to original compositions (at a Queens performance, the cast sang “Summertime in New York”). At a late July performance, the cast sang “Summertime” to illustrate the hardships of New York’s poor in the summer heat. The Free Theater’s repertoire also included another original song called “Riot”--almost certainly a response to the race riots that wracked the country in the middle and late 1960s--the lyrics of which contained the repeated line “Are you afraid” and ended with the verse:

Please--talk to me.
We cannot be safe for long.
Can I be your hand to save our life?
Or am I the gun that kills you?

Rohmann recalled that people began to assemble on the sidewalk as soon as the group started setting up. A performance habitually began with cast members installing the sound equipment and then practicing their juggling and tuning the guitar as other actors put up the multi-colored NYFT banner. In the Rockefeller Center neighborhood on a summer Monday that first year, the performers played drums, tambourines, a trumpet, and a guitar and distributed castanets and sticks among the audience so that the mostly young executives and secretaries could keep the beat. In one scenario, two men, one white and one black, scuffled; suddenly the two men drew guns; the guns went off. At a Queens performance on a different Monday, 19 August 1968, at Main Street and Northern Boulevard in Flushing, some passersby started to call for police until they realized they were witnessing a performance--one which Mayor Lindsay, leaning against a lamppost, watched after arriving at a nearby airport by helicopter. At the end of the 15-minute Manhattan performance, the company polled the spectators, about 75 per cent white, to engage them in the effort to reshape the racial outlook of Caucasians and to motivate them to act against racism; eight of the spectators voted for the white man to die, two called for the black man’s death, everyone else abstained. In Queens, the entire audience of 50 or 60, including the mayor, agreed that neither man should die. When the cast went into the Manhattan audience for small-group discussions, many spectators objected that the choices had been too limited.

“People do get shook up from watching our performance,” a company leader reported of a Brooklyn appearance. Rohmann observed that in Manhattan, especially Greenwich Village, the audiences generally agreed with the points the Free Theater made and they were applauded; when they played Brooklyn, say, they got “less applause” but “Brooklyn is where the cast learns a lot more about the people they live with.”. “They got so shook up in Cypress Hills two weeks ago that people pelted us and our cars with eggs,” noted a Free Theater leader, speaking of a Brooklyn neighborhood. Rohmann contrasted two other performances: one at which employees of a large national company “sacrificed their lunch hour to see our show” and the other at which a spectator tossed a tomato at the actors. As Lindsay saw it, NYFT’s work made people pay attention: “It seems to get people involved, even if they don’t want to become involved.”

In other sketches, a young black woman was auctioned off to an African-American man in the audience for $1 million and the group sang a song which ridiculed white liberals in lyrics like this:

Love thy nigger as thyself.
Keep thy gun upon thy shelf.
Speed thy money all for welfare.
Give the black man all of thy pity.
And get thy children out of the city.

In a fourth scene, a young white woman told a black youth that African Americans are treated the same as whites: “You can go to war like anyone else,” said the woman. “The enemy doesn’t discriminate.”

“What about integration, housing and employment?” the man asked her.

“You can’t shove these things down the white man’s throat,” she responded.

By 1969, the Free Theater had begun to look at other social ills than racism, including economic ones such as what they called “credit buying.” In an hour-long playlet called I’ve Been Screwed, White by Rohmann and Wangh, the group presented a woman who was compelled to buy. After opening with several rock songs to gather the audience in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the cast shifted to the theme song, “Buy American,” and then the interracial crowd watched a woman from the ghetto try to purchase her way into mainstream American society on the installment plan. She bought a car she did not want, then went into debt to pay for it. After taking out loan after loan, she finally refused to get that last loan-to-pay-all-loans, whereupon she was declared un-American.

By 1970, the company members were recruited from area high schools students and the focus had shifted to their concerns: the generation gap, parental pressures, educational pabulum, and, still, Vietnam. Rohmann described an August 1970 performance on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn of one of the playlets focusing on the issues of teenagers:

It features 18-year-old Jacqueline Dupree as a well-meaning kid who keeps getting trapped between what she wants and what she’s told to be by parents, teachers, friends, employers. A group of self-styled gurus leads her from one misadventure to another: ‘We’re the Helpful Happies / And we’re here to help to make you happy, / Happy, happy, happy all the time!’ . . . . Jackie is surrounded by her ‘supporters’ who are chanting ‘You can make it! You can make it! Climb! Climb! Climb!’ Trying to get away, she follows their instructions by scaling a step-ladder. As she reaches the top the crowd’s hysterical chant changes to ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ Looking around wildly from her 12-foot perch, she screams and throws herself headlong to the ground. The audience gasps audibly, then applauds as the other actors catch her six inches from the sidewalk.

The troupe usually did two performances like these a day, five days a week. The plays were based on group improvisations around social issues in the daily news reports and shaped with the guidance of a director and a playwright. The company altered the scenes a bit as they moved from one neighborhood street corner to another and shifted their roles from scene to scene, sometimes espousing the position of the white liberal; other times, the black militant’s outlook; and in still other instances, the white racist point of view. “We aim . . . to irritate the bigot, to encourage the egalitarian and to dramatize to well-intentioned people who have done nothing while riots brew,” said one NYFT leader.

As the company itself described it: “By involving our audience in mutual experiences with a highly mobile, highly fluid, highly entertaining form of theater, we revive the original communal functions of the Greek and Medieval drama.” The NYFT casts set out to create “a highly intimate actor-audience relationship” that “actively involved them in the dramatic event and challenged them to respond” to the issue under exploration. Other aims of the company were its objective to “dissolve the boundaries between art and life” and its call for “a non-competitive coalition” to attain their ends. Steven Wangh, the Free Theater’s first director, also declared that the company was conceived as a way “for us--as artists in society--to become involved in the problems or the day.”

[Leo Shapiro led The Shaliko Company out of New York’s East Village from 1972 until he retired to New Mexico in 1992. He died there in 1997 just after he turned 51. In the brief time that I knew him, Leo was one of the most intriguing artists in any discipline whom I’d ever met. My contact with Leo in that short period still has repercussions in my life.]

'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.]