Judith Malina’s never-before-published diaries describing a period of profound personal and professional transformation

The years 1969 to 1971 saw The Living Theatre’s greatest rupture, reckoning with its desire to leave its defining productions from the 1960s behind and move forward with new artistic works and practices. In these previously unpublished diaries, Judith Malina recounts these pivotal years, describing her transformative time in Brazil, including her experiences of daily life in jail while awaiting trial with her company members. This meticulously edited volume includes Kate Bredeson’s introduction, examining Malina’s life and work in this period, as well as additional historical context and never-before-published photographs. Living Theatre member Ilion Troya offers a foreword that provides new context for understanding the volume’s historical significance.

The Diaries of Judith Malina is a four-volume set that publishes for the first time together the edited diaries of radical theater director, actor, and activist Judith Malina from 1947 to 1971, the most influential period of her remarkable and storied career. A committed anarchist and pacifist, Malina made theater as a way to engage in revolutionary action. Her diaries showcase her political and social observations, cultural commentary, self-reflection, and wit. This expertly prepared set invites us to recognize Malina for her accomplishments not only as an artist and an activist but as one of the great literary diarists.
 

JUDITH MALINA (1926–2015) was cofounder, with collaborator and husband Julian Beck, of The Living Theatre, a radically experimental company that rose to social and cultural prominence in New York City and internationally in the 1950s and ’60s and which she led until her death. She was a lifelong activist, artist, and diarist.

KATE BREDESON is a theater historian, translator, director, and dramaturg. She is a professor of theater at Reed College. She is the author of Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 and cotranslator with Thalia Wolff of The Inheritor, by Théâtre de l’Aquarium, both from Northwestern University Press. 
 

Foreword
Ilion Troya
Introduction
Kate Bredeson
 
Chronology of Judith Malina and The Living Theatre, April 1969–September 1971
Kate Bredeson
 
The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1969–1971
1969
1970
1971
 
Chronology of Judith Malina and The Living Theatre, September 1971–April 2015
Acknowledgments
Kate Bredeson
Index
Images follow page XXXX