Avant-garde theater performances drew police surveillance in 1968

Evidence

On October 2, the Living Theatre arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Frankenstein opened with forty policemen in the theater, three squad cars parked outside, and Allen Ginsberg in the audience. (That same night in Mexico City, the police massacred an estimated 250 to 300 students protesting on the eve of the Olympic Games.) The Living’s most elaborate production allegorized the creation and destruction of Mary Shelley’s monster with a series of disturbing rituals and pantomimes on a huge, three-tiered set meant to suggest a cross-section of a human head. The play begins with an attempt to levitate a member of the company which, once a miracle fails to occur, turns into a mock human sacrifice. The monster is then constructed out of corpses. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1296

Categorization

• XREF: The police presence at avant-garde events ties to the reader’s core question about illegality as a material condition enabling counterculture.