SOURCE: Cutler, Bruce. “Two Plays of the Living Theatre: The Difficult Wisdom of Nothing.” Wichita State University Bulletin 53, no. 3 (August 1977): 3–21.

In the following essay, Cutler attempts to define the techniques of The Living Theatre through an anatomy of the technique of two of its experimental pieces.

It is not an easy task to give a single name to recent developments in American theater, for generalizations are usually most effective when they are made retrospectively, and certainly it is too early to make definitive judgments about American theater in the 1960's. Yet movements such as Julian Beck's Living Theatre, and playwrights such as Jack Gelber and Arnold Weinstein, helped give American theater in that period a definite character. What elements of that character we might observe as having been important is the first question to be taken up in this inquiry; the second is how two specific examples, the...