The Connection

Here’s a Zen question: Since Judith Malina directed and appeared in the historic 1959 Living Theatre production of The Connection, Jack Gelber’s complex play about drug addicts waiting for their fix and graphically getting it, how come the company’s 50th anniversary production — directed by and co-starring Malina — is not just a major disappointment, but an instance of irreparable damage done to a fragile classic? Anyone who only knows the work’s vaunted reputation and ventures to see this inadequate treatment is likely to leave wondering what the earlier huzzahing was about.

It’s possible now to consider the jolting piece an early example of site-specific theatrics. The play originally unfolded on the rundown second floor of a building at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Patrons climbed a narrow staircase to enter a room overlooking the avenue where several actors — including four jazz musicians — were playing drug addicts hired to play drug addicts in an improvised film.

The torment the inhabitants experienced by inconsequentially sniping at each other until their connection arrives and then the stupor into which they descended once he saw to them in a supposedly off-stage bathroom was the essence of harrowing. The jazz, into which the on-stage quartet of musicians burst at exciting intervals, underscored in its sense of improvisation the misguided cry for uninhibited expression the junkies represented.

Gelber’s seminal opus now occurs on a set that designer Gary Brackett has rigged to recall the previous space — including a fake window as stand-in for one that overlooked Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The closest other echoes to the original production are musicians Alan J. Palmer, Emanuel Harrold, Andy McCloud, and alto saxophonist Rene McLean, whose progressive jazz decidedly recalls the required sounds of influential Charlie Parker, who peers out of an upstage poster.

The cast, however, bears only a slight resemblance to the troupe Malina and partner-husband Julian Beck gathered 50 years ago (and which featured Joseph Chaikin, James Earl Jones, and an unbilled Martin Sheen). Whereas the original cast were so convincing at their assignments that audiences left debating whether to summon ambulances, this Connection collection, including Malina, never look like anything more than technique-challenged players hired to do justice to a throttling tragedy that sadly lies out of their limited grasp.