SOURCE: Gilman, Richard. “It's a Show.” New Republic 159, no. 19 (9 November 1968): 29ff.

In the following essay, Gilman criticizes The Living Theatre for bad acting, bad faith, and childishness.

When the Living Theatre left America for Europe four years ago I was among those who wished them well in their self-exile and, as it seemed to me, their opportunity to find out what they were really about. I'd always been troubled by them, having admired them more, I suspect, in theory than as an actuality. I defended them as often because of their detractors—most of whom represented everything sterile and commonplace in the theatre—as because of their own occasionally memorable productions—The Connection, The Brig.

Their regular (and belligerent) lapses of taste, intelligence, even simple skill never convinced me of some splendid amateurism full of redeeming spontaneity and unacademic prowess, nor were those lapses ever entirely offset by...