The theater’s jack-of-all-trade’s Larry Kornfeld was given Jack Gelber’s script for The Connection and immediately fell for it, so he brought it to Malina. She directed the play, which centered on a group of men waiting for their drug connection named Cowboy (played by Carl Lee, who became Shirley Clarke’s longtime companion). “The Connection broke down the wall between the audience and the actors,” recalled Peter Crowley, who worked at the Living Theatre. “The realism of it was pretty radical at the time. They had junkies playing junkies. I mean, not that every actor there was a junkie, but some were. And then a real jazz band was part of the show.” The Connection was framed as a play within a play. A man who introduced himself as the show’s producer told the audience that he brought in actual heroin addicts to improvise on the playwright’s themes for a documentary they were shooting. In exchange for their cooperation, he explained, the men were promised a fix. The show’s first act consisted of the junkies waiting for the heroin, and during The Connection’s intermission the performers wandered into the crowd and bummed change. “It had the actors, still in character, haranguing the spectators for money during the intermission so convincingly that they left profound doubts in the audience as to whether or not they were the real thing,” recalled Elaine Dundy, whose sister Shirley Clarke directed the film adaptation of The Connection. “It was, to use a word just gaining favor, a Happening.”

From Chapter 2 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Experimental music composer John Cage is perhaps best known for 4’33”, a “composition” that instructed musicians to sit in silence for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It was a kind of art prank that also expanded the sonic possibilities of music-making by integrating ambient and environmental sounds into the performance. “Pretty soon you begin to hear chairs creaking, people coughing, rustling of clothes, then giggles,” said Cage’s future collaborator David Tudor, who attended the second performance at Carnegie Recital Hall. “Then I began to hear the elevator in the building. Then the air conditioning going through the ducts.” Eventually, as Tudor recalled, the audience began to realize, Oh. We get it. Ain’t no such thing as silence. If you just listen, you’ll hear a lot. 4’33” represented a clean break from the past. Painting, dance, theater, literature, and music were moving away from romanticism, realism, and sequential narrative into more abstract forms throughout the 1950s. Cage and his longtime partner, choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, were closely involved in the overlapping downtown arts scenes. The two rented a studio on the third floor of the Living Theatre, which accelerated the cross-fertilization of scenes. It wasn’t unusual for Cage to compose a musical piece for a Cunningham dance performance, with set pieces designed by their painter friend Robert Rauschenberg. “They became immersed with that world—the New York school of painters, the San Remo bar, the Cedar Tavern,” Larry Kornfeld said. “We’d go from our living rooms to the theater, from theater to bar. It was a triangle.”

From Chapter 2 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Off-Off-Broadway director Larry Kornfeld honed his skills at the Living Theatre before directing dozens of shows at the Judson Poets’ Theatre throughout the 1960s. “Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and I hit it off right from the beginning because we saw eye to eye about aesthetics,” he said. “We were breaking away from commercialism in New York theater and were influenced by Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble, and the new movements in avant-garde theater.” Since its founding, the Living Theatre remained itinerant. After its West Ninety-Ninth Street location was closed, Kornfeld joined Malina and Beck when they were preparing to open their final location on West Fourteenth Street, on the northern edge of Greenwich Village (where The Connection debuted). The Living Theatre was also part of the broader antiwar and civil rights struggles during this time. “We marched on the White House in the fifties to ban the bomb,” Kornfeld said. “So that kind of political reaction to the status quo fell in line with the artistic reactions—you can’t separate them. It all fit together by the end of the fifties into the sixties, when there was the beginnings of an anti-bomb, anti-war, anti-middlebrow movement. My experience at the Living Theatre was a five-year period in which every day I was stage managing, directing, acting, learning—soaking it all in. And also being part of the many artists, dancers, and people who came to the Living Theatre—like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and so many others.”

From Chapter 2 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

At the same time that these adventurous playwrights were presenting their work at Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa, an unlikely outlet opened its doors to Village artists of all kinds. “Judson Memorial Church was so pivotal to the foundation of downtown because they were so open to freedom of expression,” said Agosto Machado. “They encouraged expression and let so many people in all the art movements do their thing. They took away the pews. They had Happenings. There was dance, movement, song. Gender preferences did not matter to the church.” For example, Al Carmines, Judson’s openly gay minister (who was also a musician), staged material that could’ve gotten him arrested for obscenity elsewhere. “The painters, the sculptors, the actors, the playwrights,” director Larry Kornfeld said, “everybody at Judson were involved in exploring and extending mediums and the blending of them.” Kornfeld—who saw himself as “a sculptor of space”—was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham’s and John Cage’s spatial and temporal explorations. “Space was being explored by painters who were at the theater, people like Rauschenberg, who did sets for us. People were always at each other’s shows, recitals, performances. They were drinking together, screwing together. There was a vast interchange of information and activity. It was a community, an anarchic community.”

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Larry Kornfeld left the Living Theatre in 1961 to join Judson Poets’ Theatre. He had been hanging out at the Cedar Tavern, one of his regular Village haunts, when poet Joel Oppenheimer approached him about directing his play at Judson. Oppenheimer had attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the early 1950s, crossing paths with Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. Back in New York, the Black Mountain group grew closer while spending time at the Living Theatre—where the interdisciplinary Monday Night Series was held and Cage and Cunningham also had a studio. This environment inspired Oppenheimer to write a satirical play, The Great American Desert, which Kornfeld agreed to direct despite his concerns about censorship. (One character exclaims, “Damn this fuckin’ desert anyhow. All this sweat over water, goddamn when I was a boy back home in Illinois they used to talk about the plains.”) Kornfeld told him, “Joel, it’s a church. You’ve got ‘fuck’ all over the script, and ‘fuck’ is not even said in the theater these days.” Oppenheimer assured him, “Oh, no. The church board read it, and they approved. They gave me their word that they will not interfere.” The church did not interfere, even though the play contained the type of language that caused Lenny Bruce to be arrested for obscenity three years later when the comedian performed his material just two blocks away at Café Au Go Go, in 1964. “We were very ethical, and inevitably broke the law,” Kornfeld said. “There was a lot by cursing, nude performances, but nothing salacious—like Yvonne Rainer dancing with Bob Morris naked on stage at the church.”

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Happenings and other experimental performances had an impact on the plays that Larry Kornfeld staged at Judson Poets’ Theatre. What Happened wasn’t a play in the traditional sense. It was more of a poem uttered by different unnamed characters, which posed several challenges for director Larry Kornfeld, though he embraced the nonlinear narrative and wordplay. This Judson Poets’ Theatre production included five dancers and four actors—with Al Carmines onstage playing piano—and its use of the space and lighting was quite radical for the time. What Happened featured a protopsychedelic wash of light masterminded by Johnny Dodd, Caffe Cino’s resident lighting genius, who also worked at Judson and other venues. “The pews were taken out, folding chairs were put in, and so we played in every direction, in every corner, every possible way of using that space,” Kornfeld said, describing the upstairs choir loft that overlooked Judson’s open area of worship. “We sat audiences upstairs, they looked down, they sat downstairs, and looked up. Every kind of focus was explored—even two and three foci at the same time. It was an exploration of space.” Bibbe Hansen still treasures her vivid memory of seeing What Happened as an adolescent. “It was absolutely, for me, a turning point culturally, artistically, because it was by nature very experimental and nonlinear,” she said. “And yet it was lyrical and it was lovely and very winsome and captivating.” Hansen was even more surprised and delighted when the piano, which had remained in place throughout the performance, was swiftly moved from one end of the church to the other by the actors and dancers—all while Carmines continued playing. “At every performance from the first performance on,” Kornfeld recalled, “audiences just stood up and cheered at that moment, because they had never seen a piano move like that.”

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

A hypermasculine man with the build of a football player, Norman Marshall was the last person one would expect to be involved in Gorilla Queen, whose cast included a young George Harris III, soon to be Hibiscus. “I’m so butch that this reviewer said that I was ‘the male version of Nick Nolte.’ Anyway, here I am playing Queen Kong—in the middle of all this silliness, craziness—and I had a great time.” Like many Off-Off-Broadway actors, he had never been in a play or had any theatrical experience before he walked into Judson Church for an audition. “I just decided, ‘I think I’ll try acting.’ I had no idea what the hell it was all about.” Tony Zanetta—an Off- Off-Broadway actor who began working with David Bowie as his tour manager during his Ziggy Stardust period—recalled, “Gorilla Queen’s writing was so insane. Insane. It was really out there. Taharahnugi White Woman sent my twenty-year-old self into hysterics.” That character was played by a man dressed in a sarong, and during one gag he shocked another character by showing his hairy chest: “What’s the matter? Ain’t you never seen a white woman before?” Director Larry Kornfeld said of Gorilla Queen, “Campy, hell, It’s downright homosexual!” Musing on the ways that intellectuals and theorists have followed the lead of the downtown’s underground theater movement, Kornfeld observed, “Binaries were being used in those productions, and they were being torn apart, deconstructed. Deconstructing binaries—gender binaries, racial binaries—was starting way back then, through performance. Theorists always came second.”

From Chapter 13 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

After working with Andy Warhol on his early films, Ronald Tavel began staging his scripts with John Vaccaro’s theater company, Play-House of the Ridiculous. After another split—this time with Vaccaro—Larry Kornfeld agreed to stage Gorilla Queen at Judson Church. The show was about a tribe that worshipped an effeminate creature named Queen Kong; like Pomegranada, it was an entertaining comment on society. During the gorilla’s entrance, for example, Queen Kong swung on a rope and struck a swishy limp-wrist pose. “It was the funniest thing you could see,” Kornfeld said, “and it was high camp. A big gorilla suddenly doing a very fey limp wrist move? Only at Judson.” Gorilla Queen debuted in the spring of 1967, with George Harris Jr. playing the lead ape role, Brute, who served as a kind of narrator. His son George III was a member of the Glitz Iona tribe, a kind of Greek chorus that would fall silent during a scary scene, or move about and screech when something provocative was said. “What a sweet family,” said Norman Marshall, who played Queen Kong. “They were all lovely people. Hibiscus, or George Harris III, he was very, very young. I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he seemed like a child, sixteen or seventeen. His father and I, and Jimmy O’Bryant, we were the only straight guys in the play, and we became very good friends.”

From Chapter 13 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore