Judith Malina’s Diaries: Anarchy, Theater, and a Life of Passionate Observation

Judith Malina in "Antigone." (Photo by Bernd Uhlig)

Book Reviews

June 15, 2026 Rachel Shteir Leave a comment

Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution, Where Are You?

Thoughts on reading the vibrant diaries of Living Theatre pioneer Judith Malina, whose passion for observation and commentary vied with her theatrical impulses.

By Rachel Shteir

For years I made first-year students in the conservatory where I teach read an excerpt from The Enormous Despair: The Diary of Judith Malina , August 1968 to April 1969 . Malina , who died in 2015, recalls:

September 8, 1968

On the opening night of Antigone a Greek woman who had spoken several times in class came up on the stage during the confrontation scene. She was choked with feeling and spoke to the audience, incoherently, in a heavy accent. Something to the effect that we despoiled the Greek religion and the Greek theatre. She was full of speechless feeling.

I lay silently on top of Polyneikes’ body.

After a while she stopped and left the theatre.

I continued.

Her Antigone was more impassioned than mine.

Sometime after the digital age began, I stopped assigning the brilliant diary-poem by this co-founder, with Julian Beck , of the Living Theatre. The actor who played the role of the ultimate female martyr hundreds of times perceiving a civilian enacting that role with more fire than she could ever muster onstage began to seem…anachronistic.

Or too fierce? A video of Antigone (Brecht’s, not Sophocles’s) begins with 20 minutes of humming, gyrating, and screaming before Malina (as Antigone) walks on with Ismene. Dressed in a uniform of black pants and shirt, she commands the stage. On the occasion of her death in 2015, Karen Malpede described the “intensity” of Malina as Antigone, her ability to bring Sophocles’ play “alive” in her moment.

Maybe Malina’s ferocity explains why, compared to some of her contemporaries (like Lee Breuer, whose Gospel at Colonus has been restaged by younger artists) , she remains a cult—as opposed to mainstream—figure. Neither Helen Shaw nor Christine Smallwood mentioned her in pieces discussing Antigone ’s resonances earlier this year.

Or was it sexism? After spending the last few weeks reading The Diaries of Judith Malina , which Northwestern University Press is publishing in June in four volumes, I may return to the assignment. Not only because The Diaries reminded me that efforts to make political theatre in America go back farther than yesterday; handwringing about what those efforts can and can’t achieve does too. Malina embodies 20th century theatre’s ambition, mess, successes, and failures. We should celebrate her, which might mean pressing pause on our worship of 21st-century buzzwords and obsessions.

Malina’s story begins before these diaries. She was born in 1926 in Germany. In 1929, with her parents, a rabbi and an actress-turned-housewife, she fled encroaching Nazism and came to New York. After her father died when she was 14, she dropped out of school. As a young person, she began a theatregoing (and diary-writing) habit. In 1945, she started attending the Dramatic Workshop with Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, studying acting, then directing. At around the same time, she worked as a hat-check girl at Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar cabaret on Morton Street. Piscator taught her about Brecht, crowd scenes, and presentational theatre—theatre for social change. From Gert she learned Expressionism.

The Northwestern Diaries begins in 1947, when Malina co-founded the Living Theatre with Julian Beck, a painter/set designer she had fallen in love with and married a few years before. One of the delightful things about them is how in love these two were with dramatic literature. They started out producing theatre by Stein, Lorca, Brecht, Pirandello, and poets like John Ashbery and T.S. Eliot.

Malina models her diaries after those of André Gide, which she reads alongside those of Kafka, Nin, and Tolstoy. Her voice shines in part because she measures herself against the great dramatic literature of the past. “Am I the one too small?” she asks, although she is also chasing la gloire. Humility, meet ferocity.

At more than 1,500 pages in four volumes, covering nearly a quarter century, from 1947 to 1971, these diaries have been years in the making. Technically, Northwestern is publishing two volumes for the first time—Volume Two, 1958-1968, and Volume Four, 1969-71—and reprinting Volume One, The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947 to 1957 , originally published in 1983 by Random House, and Volume Three ( The Enormous Despair ) originally published by Grove Press in 1972. Each volume has a robust new introduction by Kate Bredeson , a scholar who teaches at Reed College and is the guiding spirit of this project. Volumes Two and Four have informative prefaces by Living Theatre company members.

“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents and lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal,” Susan Sontag once wrote. Are diaries by theatre people more or less susceptible to this furtiveness, or this cruel honesty? Is The Diaries of Judith Malina furtive? I don’t know. It may be the tension between those two extremes that draws me to pugilistic 20th-century Jewish women theatre lovers (Sontag, Malina, and, for that matter, Betty Friedan ). Their truth-telling energy, supercharged by benzos and grievances, strode through the world with a pugnacity and grace that I don’t see much anymore. We need them now because we are in serious heroine deficit disorder.

Malina’s obsession in The Diaries is nothing less than how to transpose suffering into theatrical form. Her own suffering, that of others, she conjures into theatre—into her “beautiful, nonviolent anarchist revolution.” I write that phrase and I want to cry. It seems like such a long time since anyone believed in it.

The volumes swing through the decades. After European modernism and the American avant-garde, by the 1950s, the move is to Artaud-inflected verité realism: Jack Gelber’s The Brig and The Connection, two plays about the oppressions of postwar America. Joe Chaikin joins the company. Next, the provocative (some might say overwrought) activist spectacles, Paradise Now , Mysteries and Smaller Pieces , Frankenstein , and Antigone .

The Diaries contain plenty about PN , as Malina nicknames the Living Theatre’s 1968 collective creation, their magnum opus—the engine through which they became famous, and which then blew them apart. Some of Malina’s entries document how much today’s immersive theatre and social justice theatre echo her hope and her practice. Yet what excited me more was the courage of even less well known choices. In a run-through of PN in Avignon (where they premiered it) in 1968, they put 50 spectators onstage. Talk about breaking the fourth wall!

It’s equally striking to read about Malina’s stoicism about the hatred the show began to incite, both from the authorities and from intellectual circles. The first part of PN , “The Rite of Guerrilla Theatre,” may be best known for the way its famous line, “I am not allowed to take my clothes off,” functioned as a prelude to the onstage love-ins. But quite quickly, overwhelmingly, in the U.S. anyway, the offstage response turned to hate and censure. Despite banning, arrests (for public indecency), and critical animosity, Malina never wavers in her belief in the work.

Other resonant entries include those Malina wrote from prison. Might the Living Theatre be the most imprisoned theatre company in the 20th century? Malina was first jailed in 1955 in New York for anti-war activism, and later in 1971 in Brazil on trumped up-charges of drug possession, and many times between those dates for such charges as public indecency. Confined, she made profound reflections on the theatre and the unjust world she lived in. But even before that she was thinking about confinement: “Pound, imprisoned, learns pity (like Wilde), becomes affectionate and human,” she writes in 1949, years before she was first arrested. “All the world’s a prison.”

You could read The Diaries of Judith Malina as a guide to thinking about how American theatre might push beyond where it is now. But you could also enjoy them as an important document of the American 20th century. They should take their place alongside Studs Terkel’s oral histories and John dos Passos’s USA trilogy. Each volume contains dozens of evocative black-and-white photographs from Malina’s life. Here she is with her father on the boardwalk. Here she is, a young ingénue, eyebrows plucked into thin lines, the style of the time. Here she is en famille. There are magnificent photos of the diaries themselves, of collages and scribbles, and of the company at the theatre, on the picket line. There are production stills. There are poems, production notebooks, jottings about analysis and love affairs, reports on the political and social zeitgeist. They are gorgeous.

Malina writes all the time. She writes in multiple languages. The word diarist is one of the words etched on her gravestone, Bredeson informs us. Diarist is a partial homonym for dialogue (!), the thing plays are composed of. Diaries are dialogue distilled, or maybe the primeval sludge of dialogue (creatively, I mean). Some of the diaries have the feeling of a Christopher Isherwood camera churning everyday observations into art.

In one of her introductions, Bredeson makes the point that Malina is often caught between diarizing and rehearsing. And you do get the sense of a graphomaniac ( a word that Bredeson quotes the writer Alexandra Johnson as using in the introduction to Volume Two ) wrestling with a theatremaker. Malina seems as addicted to taking notes on the world around her (and then to revising them for publication, a years-long process) as to staging it. Maybe this is what Sontag meant by furtive: Malina’s need to bear witness to her horrible time sometimes exceeds her desire to live on the ephemeral stage.

Another pleasure of the diaries is the Malinas’ many accounts of nights spent hanging out in New York (and elsewhere) with everyone: the Dalis, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Jim Morrison, Cage, Cunningham, Chaikin, Grotowski. Joseph Campbell. Anaïs Nin. Malina gives you glimpses of so many scenes, answers so many questions (i.e., why does Mark Rothko leave the theatre? Because he doesn’t want to conform to others).

The diaries also give glimpses of how her Jewishness evolves. She loves Jerusalem, but Zionism is not the thing that moves her. She borrows the phrase “the enormous despair” from Martin Buber, but when Israel is declared a state, she writes, “I have strong and divided feelings about this important news.”

She also writes frankly about the toll of constantly groveling for money for her theatre. In 1947, when they try to rent the Fifth Avenue Playhouse for two months, for a total of $16,000, she wonders, “Is there that much money on earth?” In 1958, trying for a different theatre on 14th Street, she writes: “We have no money for the theatre.” She weeps. In 1969, Jim Morrison bails them out. But if money woes continue to cause suffering, they don’t stop her or the company.

The Diaries provides a close-up look at the successes and failures of a rare species: the 20th-century avant-garde female director. Malina records many instances of misogyny. Piscator tells her he believes she will “get married and forget about the theatre.” The writer Paul Goodman, also her therapist, cruelly hit her at least once. Reading about these encounters, I wanted Malina to respond more angrily, as she did when two guys attacked her at night on the street in 1953 and she screamed at them. Later, she writes, “The raised fist didn’t work,” as if she were describing something she saw in the theatre.

When the diaries begin, Malina is 21, dreaming of her own theatre.

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/06/15/beautiful-non-violent-anarchist-revolution-where-are-you/)._