Audience members upstaged the Living Theatre’s taboo-breaking performance

Evidence

The actors lamenting, I’m not allowed to take my clothes off and I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana were undercut pretty hard by the longhair in briefs who strolled down left aisle puffing on a huge Columbian pot cigar. More clothes came off and a girl waved a pair of Levi’s from the stage. The actors stripped down to jock straps and bikinis in the middle of the crowded stage and people climbed up curtains, speakers, scaffolds, and ropes. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1322

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s thesis that avant-gardes are produced by conditions not genius — here the same audience conditions that sustain the Living Theatre simultaneously invalidate its radical claims. Connects to arguments about how cultural saturation accelerates obsolescence.
• SEED: Angle: avant-garde shock value has a built-in expiration date set by how fast the audience internalizes the transgression — the Living Theatre stripped nude while the crowd was already over it.