176
HERBERT MARCUSE
The German writer Peter Handke blasted the "ekelhafte Un–
wahrheit von Ernsthaftigkeiten im Spielraum [the loathsome untruth
of seriousness in playJ."s This indictment is not an attempt to keep
politics out of the theater, but to indicate the form in which
it
can
find expression. The indictment cannot be upheld with respect to
Greek tragedy, to Shakespeare, Racine, Kleist, Ibsen, Brecht, Beckett:
there, by virtue of the aesthetic form, the "play" creates its own
universe of "seriousness" which is
not
that of the given reality, but
rather its negation. But the indictment holds for the guerrilla theater
of today:
it
is a
contradictio in adjecto;
altogether different from the
Chinese (regardless of whether it was played on or after the Long
March); there, the theater did not take place in a "universe of
play"; it was part of a revolution in actual process, and established,
as an episode, the identity between the players and the fighters: unity
of the space of the play and the space of the revolution.
The Living Theatre may serve as an example of self-defeating
purpose! It makes a systematic attempt to unite the theater and
the Revolution, the play and the battle, bodily and spiritual libera–
tion, individual internal and social external change. But this union
is shrouded in mysticism: "the Kabbalah, Tantric and Hasidic teach–
ing, the I Ching, and other sources." The mixture of Marxism and
mysticism, of Lenin and Dr. R. D. Laing does not work; it vitiates
the political impulse. The liberation of the body, the sexual revolu–
tion, becoming a ritual to be performed ("the rite of universal inter–
course" ), loses its place in the political revolution: if sex is a voyage
to God, it can be tolerated even in extreme forms. The revolution
of love, the nonviolent revolution, is no serious threat; the powers
that be have always been capable of coping with the forces of love.
The radical desublimation which takes place in the theater,
as
theater, is organized, arranged, performed desublimation - it is close
to turning into its opposite.
1I
3. Quoted in Yark Karsunke, "Die Strasse und das Theater," in
Kursbuch
20, 1969,
p.
67.
4.
See
Paradise Now: Collective Creation of the Living Theatre,
written
down by Judith Melina and Julian Beck (Random House) . '
5. In the summer of
1971,
the Living Theatre group that had been playing
before the wretched of the earth in Brazil was incarcerated by the fascist
government. There, in the midst of the terror which is the life of the people,
and which precluded any integration into the established order, even
the
mystified liberation play seemed a threat to the regimen. I wish to express
. my solidarity with Judith Malina and Jq1ian Beck and their group; my crit·
icism is fraternal, since we share the same struggle.
