Agit-Prop and Political Purpose: the Becks, Holden, Valdez, Nelson

Abstract

In 1968, the Year of the Radical, a new KKK threatened the land in the Killing of King and Kennedy. One of the year’s less violent events was the birth of the Radical Theatre Repertory, which proclaimed,

The member groups, and dozens of others in this country and abroad, are in the vanguard of a new phenomenon in theatrical and social history — the spontaneous generation of communal playing troupes, sharing voluntary poverty, making experimental collective creations and exploring space, time, minds, and bodies in manifold new ways to meet the demands of our explosive period.

With the exception of the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis (but soon thereafter in San Francisco), the nineteen radical groups of the Repertory were located on the two coasts of the United States, thirteen in New York. Although the members agreed on opposition to the war in Vietnam, over half of them were not overtly political. A decade afterwards, six of the nineteen groups were still playing, and only three were politically radical — the Living Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino.