Avant-garde theater audiences could turn violently hostile and assault performers

Evidence

The final performance, October 21, was a nightmare. “It was a full house—full of hostility and bad humor,” Susan Cakars wrote in WIN, the War Resisters League’s quarterly journal, citing militants occupying other people’s seats, while intellectuals tossed wisecracks, spitballs, and paper airplanes. There were “fraternity boys, in costumes, with paddles, drunk, rushing—it must have been a requirement to get your Greek letters to ‘drop trow’ at the Living Theatre freak show … Before the Living Theatre even whispered, ‘I’m not allowed to travel without a passport,’ several frat boys had stripped.” During “The Rite of Universal Intercourse,” Malina was surrounded, held down, and raped. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1302

Categorization

• XREF: The scene’s hostility toward the Living Theatre suggests a crowd dynamic that complicates the ‘scene-as-community’ reading of Greenwich Village avant-garde.