Guerrilla theater converted the Kent State massacre into participatory street art within days

Evidence

Far beyond David McReynolds’s dreams a decade earlier, a nationwide university strike was declared on May 5. At NYU, Richard Schechner, Joan MacIntosh, and Ralph Ortiz had already organized a guerrilla theater piece, restaging the massacre at several locations around Washington Square Park. Some students played National Guardsmen, others represented their victims (animal organs concealed beneath their clothes in anticipation of a bloody demise), harangued, brutalized, and marched around until they were executed. According to Schechner, laughing bystanders were incorporated into the piece, treated as students. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1592

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis that density of invention came from young artists treating real political trauma as raw material — parallels later chapters on the counterculture absorbing the war into performance.