Underground theater used actual violence against audiences to provoke reaction

Evidence

Actors were crazier and spectators more intimidated upstairs at Max’s Kansas City, where The Moke-Eater, a play by Kenneth Bernard—John Vaccaro’s first production since Conquest of the Universe—terrorized its post-midnight audience with the malicious spectacle of an obnoxious all-American gladhander trapped in a nightmare all-American town, tortured by a gibbering band of garishly made-up cannibal ghouls led by a mercurial dominatrix. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1287