Troubadours Against Oppression : THE LIVING THEATRE: Art, Exile and Outrage <i> By John Tytell</i> (<i> Grove Press: $23; 384 pp.)</i>

One hot New York afternoon circa 1969, I found myself taking a cab ride (don’t ask me where to or why, this was the ‘60s, you know) with Gypsy, one of the key members of the most radical theatrical ensemble of our time, the Living Theatre. A Swedish-born beauty with a grand, Isadora Duncan demeanor, Gypsy swept me into the cab with her, told the driver to head downtown, and then announced that, being a dedicated anarchist, she had absolutely no intention of paying the fare.

Any ordinary New York cabby would have hit the brakes at this point. But it was too late for that, as Gypsy (born Birgit Knabe) had already launched into a speech explaining not only why we should ride for free, but how money was an “oppressive illusion” depriving cabby and passenger of their basic humanity. Duly overwhelmed, the cabby let us ride for free.

You won’t find this cab ride mentioned in John Tytell’s critical biography, “The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage.” But you will find inside its pages the reasons why such a ride could be cited as a quintessential Living Theatre performance. Like all of the troupe’s players, Gypsy refused to recognize any difference between onstage and off. In fact, her speech to the driver was, by the Living Theatre’s radically politicized lights, far more important than anything she could say on an ordinary stage. The world was Gypsy’s stage, and her mission was to spread herself across as much of it as possible; making everyone she met a player in what the group’s co-founders, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, called “a revolution disguised as theater.”

Based on extensive interviews and research, “The Living Theatre” offers a solid overview of a performance group that in retrospect seems to embody all the bravery, idealism and folly that have come to characterize the 1960s. It’s hard to find those attitudes alive today, and yet the group’s influence can be seen in the styles of such current directors as Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, Patrice Chereau and Peter Sellars. The book’s sole shortcoming is Tytell’s curious reluctance to provide direct quotations from his primary subjects, Beck and Malina. When you’re dishing out intimate details--like recounting how Beck and Malina openly shared the affections of actor Hanon Reznikov--resorting to paraphrase seems oddly coy. Still, Tytell (the author of books on Ezra Pound and the Beats) can be commended for refusing to pollute his text with pop psychobabble by way of explanation.

When they first met in the early 1940s, neither Beck nor Malina seemed to have the makings of avant-garde commandos. She was a shy would-be actress. He was a brash, dandified painter. Beck was homosexual, and deeply conflicted about it. Yet they had an immediate emotional rapport and a shared set of artistic beliefs. As Tytell shows, the couple fit right into the cultural scene of New York in the ‘40s; crossing paths with Tennessee Williams, Joseph Campbell, Paul Goodman, Jackson Pollock (briefly a lover of Beck’s), James Agee (briefly a lover of Malina’s), John Cage, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, all at early stages in their careers.

Their first productions were typical esoteric Off-Broadway fare, but in 1959 with “The Connection,” Jack Gelber’s play about drug addiction, they found their feet. With its refusal to strike moral postures against narcotics use, actors who freely acknowledged the audience’s presence and a jazz ensemble onstage throughout, “The Connection” was unlike conventional theater in every way. Scorned by most reviewers but praised by intellectuals as diverse as Kenneth Tynan, Lillian Hellman and Lenny Bruce, it enjoyed a lengthy run. Their next production, “The Brig,” Kenneth H. Brown’s recreation of life inside a Marine prison, was even more iconoclastic. Drilling the players like a military unit, Malina transformed what could have been a simple protest play into a dramatic ritual in the style of Antonin Artaud, the French actor-director who believed that theater should assault audiences in a manner comparable to an outbreak of the plague.

Again, critics reacted coldly and the Internal Revenue Service moved to shut the theater down for tax evasion. Beck, Malina and their supporters felt they were being singled out in an act of de facto censorship. Locking themselves inside the theater until U.S. marshals arrested them, they staged the first of many protest actions around which their work would increasingly revolve.

Taking off for Europe, Beck and Malina reformed the company as a commune-like unit of 25 to 30 players and concentrated on text-less group efforts. Their “Frankenstein,” arguably the most important of all their works, used Mary Shelley’s novel as a starting point for a series of creation and destruction tableaux closer to dance theater than drama.

But it was the company’s most political pieces that caught the world’s attention: productions such as “Paradise Now,” the mother of all avant-garde spectaculars. Free of sets, costumes or structure of any discernible sort, this five-hour assault on the spectator began with actors complaining about worldwide political oppression, moved on to their exhorting spectators to join them in protest and climaxed with a frenzied actor/audience orgy, replete with marijuana and copious nudity.

While the authorities attempted to shut performances down, this was catnip to the group’s prime audience: student radicals eager to join in whatever “love-in” might come their way. As Tytell notes, by the time the company returned to the U.S. for a tour, “the students . . . seemed to misconstrue revolution as the right to smoke dope while listening to loud music.” “Paradise Now” was supposed to incite revolt. But, in the end, it flattered its hippie/activist audience the same way Neil Simon’s comedies soothed the middle-classes.

As the ‘70s trundled on, all forms of protest went out of fashion--and the company disbanded. In the 1980s Beck and Malina, the consummate outsiders, turned insiders of a sort. Beck had developed cancer and, in order to pay his mounting medical expenses, became a much-in-demand character actor in films such as “The Cotton Club” and “Poltergeist II.” After his death in 1985, Malina began to be employed more extensively in Hollywood as well.

When the Gulf War broke out Malina, who was playing Granny in “The Addams Family,” tried to get the crew to join her in an anti-war protest. They offered her an American flag. “Don’t give me that flag unless you give me a book of matches to go with it,” said Malina, a remark Tytell claims, “cost Judith a role in the (Addams Family) sequel.”

These days there’s no point in even trying to cop a free cab ride.