Police arrested the Living Theatre’s nudity-led audiences under indecent-exposure laws.

Evidence

The performance ended around midnight with the exuberant cast clad in G-strings and bikinis, leading a happily chanting audience out of the Yale theater and onto the street. Half a block away five police cars were waiting. As a group of onlookers sarcastically sang “America the Beautiful,” the New Haven police arrested the Becks, three members of the company, and four individuals from the audience including a Yale undergraduate and the poet Ira Cohen, who was tripping on LSD. The actors were charged with indecent exposure, the others with disturbing the peace. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1295

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s gentrification/eviction tension and the broader theme of avant-garde illegality as a condition of production — the legal risk that made the scene what it was.