The Brig

The Living Theatre — the legendary theater company founded in 1947 by the late Julian Beck and his wife Judith Malina, who remains as the company’s artistic director — opens its own permanent performance space. The Living Theatre will inaugurate its new permanent home with a new production of one of the company’s most renowned and controversial productions, The Brig by Kenneth H. Brown.

Written by a veteran who survived incarceration in a U.S. Marine Corps Brig during the Korean War, is a chilling portrait of the brutality of military prisons. Judith Malina directs the production, which offers a highly charged view of life among caged men.

The prominence of U.S. military prisons in various locations around the world at the beginning of the 21st century gives new relevance to this play. The perverse logic behind the treatment of prisoners within the martial system is made stunningly clear in Brown’s play, which was the first production staged by The Living Theatre after director Judith Malina read M.C. Richard’s as yet unpublished English translation of The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud, whose radical approach to articulating a theatrical relationship between cruelty and transcendence transformed The Brig into a physical experience of pain and release unlike any conventional drama.