In 1959, the last year of a famously complacent decade, Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th of the United States. Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba. Leon Uris’s “Exodus” bestrode the best-seller lists, while Charlton Heston and his chariot grabbed the best picture Oscar for “Ben-Hur.” “Gypsy” blazed into life for the first time on Broadway. Salvatore Quasimodo won the Nobel Prize in literature. (Really.)
From left, Anthony Sisco, Judith Malina and Brad Burgess in “The Connection.” Ms. Malina also directed the play.
And at the height of the summer, on West 14th Street in Greenwich Village, the Living Theater opened its production of a new play, “The Connection,” by Jack Gelber, which caused a sensation with its bold depiction of the squalid lives of heroin addicts.
The audience sat cloistered in a small theater with a band of ragged-looking men waiting for their next fix. An onstage jazz band broke into the addicts’ anxious boredom at random intervals. A man claiming to be the play’s producer lectured the audience and bickered with another man claiming to be its author. A team of filmmakers prowled around, cameras whirring as its members added their own exclamations to the show: “That’s the way it really is. That’s the way it is.” The air was thick with cigarette smoke and aesthetic daring, the heady incense of the avant-garde.
The production divided critics. Kenneth Tynan was a champion. Walter Kerr, in The New York Herald Tribune, raised a thoughtful eyebrow, questioning the abandonment of an artful text as a template for the dramatic experience. But “The Connection” was a downtown smash. It would become the Living Theater’s biggest success to date, and helped establish its international reputation as a fierce fighter on the forward front of experimental theater.
To celebrate the play’s 50th anniversary, the Living Theater has remounted the play, in a production directed by Judith Malina, the founder of the company (with her husband, Julian Beck) and still its artistic director. Ms. Malina also plays the role of the dotty Salvation Army sister who wanders into the play in the second act, providing some galvanizing humor. The good sister is continually mystified at the permanent occupation of the bathroom, where the guys are taking turns getting high.
“Do you know Harry McNulty?” she keeps asking innocently, expecting straight answers from men with glazed eyes and beatific smiles sliding off their faces.
A half-century is an eon in the life of the avant-garde, where newness is all. And yet “The Connection” remains a strange play. We are not in the realm of strict naturalism, clearly. The actors portraying the addicted mostly perform in a realistic style, but they break into languid or fervent confessional monologues that can also be poetic or polemical.
The presence of the band (the excellent Renè McLean Quartet), whose members both participate in the action and comment on it, helps stomp out the possibility that we are witnessing a slice of life. A jazz quartet would hardly be performing in the sordid living room of Leach (John Kohan), the addict who plays host to his antsy friends and fellow addicts as they await the arrival of their “connection.”
The abundance of conflicting commentary on the nature of the behavior we are watching is also confounding. If the play is improvised, as the producer announces at the beginning, why does the playwright, Jaybird (Eric Olson), keep storming onstage, berating the actors for forgetting the text entirely? And, incidentally, why is there a blue hula hoop affixed to the wall of this druggie rec room?
None of the devices Mr. Gelber used to distort the audience’s perspective feels particularly new today, but the combination of so many metatheatrical frames is still arresting, giving the play a funky, chaotic interest. With its ambling, unstructured structure, the long pauses for music and the absence of the usual building blocks of drama — an irritation to Jaybird — “The Connection” slows down the standard metabolism of theater.
The play makes you itch for something to happen, much like the strung-out fellows onstage waiting for their fix. It suggests that theater can be any random mixture of stuff that happens in a place where people collect to experience something together.
Mr. Gelber’s willingness to mix so many modes of performance still has its surprises. At one point a fellow enters the den with a portable record player, plugs it in and puts on a jazz 45. All talk stops as we listen to the record for a while. Then the actor unplugs it, shuts it up and walks off without saying a word. A hipster mime.
Unfortunately both the play’s language and its once incendiary subject matter provide an indelible date stamp. The addicts’ countercultural riffs can sound awfully stale, as when Sam (Eno Edet) rises from the bed on which he has been sacked out and justifies his habit.
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 16, 2009
A theater review on Saturday about a revival of
