An avant-garde performance troupe proposed staging real violence on audiences

Evidence

Tyler’s subterranean reputation was furthered by a page-one story in the April 6, 1960, Voice: “He is a printer, artist, editor, writer, Jungian thinker of sorts, and a businessman,” J. R. Goddard explained. The piece, pegged to Tyler’s exhibition of woodcuts at the Judson Gallery, referred to the Uranian Alchemy Players’ upcoming performance of Frog’s Shock Dream. According to Oldenburg, Tyler proposed to gather the church audience to witness a friend of his with a metal plate in his head tied up on stage and clobbered with a baseball bat. (Tyler deemed Oldenburg suitable for the active role.) At the piece’s climax bombs would be hurled into the space to panic an already alarmed audience. Unsurprisingly, the Judson nixed the idea although Oldenburg credited Tyler’s notions of theatricalized “suffering and cruelty” with influencing his Snapshots from the City. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Theater-of-cruelty-as-literal-practice foreshadows the ‘illegality’ condition for invention density.