Avant-garde theater functioned as a hub uniting radical political factions in 1968.

Evidence

The Living Theatre was one of several groups that Saul Gottlieb’s Radical Theatre Repertory engaged for an evening to benefit the Columbia Legal Defense Fund. In addition to the Living and the Performance Group, the show—which at Richard Schechner’s punning suggestion Gottlieb called “Up Against the Wall Theatre”—included the Open Theatre, the Pageant Players, the Sixth Street Theatre, the Bread and Puppet Theater, and a teenaged ensemble from the Soul & Latin Theater. The invited speakers, as advertised in Rat, were Beck, Malina, Juan Gonzalez of Columbia SDS, Ray Brown of the Columbia Afro-American Society, Bob Collier (Black Panthers), and, most ominously, Ben Morea (UAW/MF), short for “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker”. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1315

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the benefit event as a field map of 1968 political geography — who was in the room, who spoke, and what ‘Up Against the Wall’ signified as a pun bridging theater and armed rhetoric.