[In the following review, Siegal argues The Living Theatre's revival of Mysteries and Smaller Pieces revealed the work to be outdated and the company to be over serious and focused only on political generalizations.]

It took a minute to conquer flashbacks—group hugs, spirituality circles and sweat lodges—before I could relinquish my stalwart independence and cooperate with the chant/harmony circle staged by the Living Theater Company. After that minute, separatist skepticism gave way to the soothing effect of 30 voices rising and falling in unison. It had been a long week and a long drive from Connecticut to the East Village in the rain.

But the bliss was only momentary. As abruptly as it began, the circle ended and I was back in the risers observing the completion of the Living Theater's performance like an anthropologist at a square dance. The group chant was the only portion of the their two-hour-and-ten-minute Mysteries and Smaller Pieces that was, as the New York Times misleadingly cautioned, not suited for people who shun audience participation. The greater portion of Mysteries showcased plain-clothed performers in a series of short rituals exploring movement techniques and emotive processes. And like most rituals, these were most exciting for those at the center.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to take part in a resurrection of sorts; Mysteries and Smaller Pieces was originally created at the American Center in Paris in 1964, and was exhumed in September for a 30-year anniversary production at New York's Theater for the New City. Artistic director and company founder Judith Malina, who performed in the original production, co-directed the piece with Steve Ben Israel, another triple-decade company alumnus. They approached it with an eye towards contemporary relevance, faltering only because much of the material is intractably time-bound.

Mysteries and Smaller Pieces opens with an actor standing in perfect military posture in a tight spotlight center stage. He remains rigid and speechless for almost ten minutes. The audience members watch, shift in their chairs, and cough, until they begin to notice the rest of the performers (nearly outnumbering them) amongst their ranks. The male actors break into a military jog and pantomime daily chores in an army barracks, while the women on the sidelines recite text from a dollar bill. This activity falls into darkness as an Indian raga begins in a blackout; a procession of solemn vigilants bearing sticks of incense moves towards the audience until the room fills with sweet smoke.

Then a segment entitled “Street Songs” begins: Malina chants bumper-sticker political slogans like “Stop the War,” “Freedom Now,” and “Ban the Death Penalty,” accompanied by the intonations of her fellow performers. Registering as the most naïve section of an otherwise interpretable evening, it is an unfortunate moment to require the audience's sympathy and participation. Malina leads a call-and-response while actors gather the viewers into a circle for harmonics. Polemically impotent and emotionally tepid even for its day, “Street Songs” is a reminder of two sad realities: that war doesn't go away, and neither do ineffectual artsy idealists.

I was not the only skeptical artsy idealist in the audience on this particular rainy Thursday night. One woman dared to step outside of our circle, standing against the stage wall during the chant, keeping a safe distance. She seemed neither offended nor excited by the goings-on, but singularly disaffected by the ritual.

This woman was next to me at the concessions counter during intermission when director Steve Ben Israel accosted her: “You don't seem to appreciate that we are trying to do a theater piece here,” he stormed, as she gently shook her head in disagreement. “We're trying to do serious work,” he growled again, “and you better take it seriously.” After he charged off, I turned to the woman. She smiled when I asked her if she was a member of the troupe. “Sort of,” she answered quirkily, suggesting that her tenuous membership might be curtailed momentarily.

I can only project what might have been happening behind the scenes with this company of anarchic anachronists as its run was grinding to a halt. But I was surprised to learn that the members were taking themselves so seriously. Even more dubious was the director's aggression. Does a love-in really require such regimentation?

Questions like this cloud my beatific vision of the political/experimental arts movements of the 60s. And I suspect similar inconsistencies cause many people of my generation to doubt their predecessors' righteousness. It should be a maxim for all time: aggression and incense make poor bedfellows.

Returning to the performance space for the second half, I had a substantial deficit of benefit-of-the-doubt. Fortunately, part two opened with “The Tableaux Vivants.” At the top of this “small piece,” four adjacent boxes are arranged on stage and each houses one actor. In darkness, the performers find poses independently of each other so that when the lights come up, the boxes showcase accidental relationships between them. Sometimes the interplay is so surprising that one can read stories from the tableaux. As the production's most cogent achievement, the “play” transcends traditional barriers between audience and participant because revelation is possible on both sides of the (now firmly reinforced) fourth wall.

The two Joseph Chaikin- and Antonin Artaud-inspired pieces that summed up the evening sent me back to my philosophical meandering. “Lee's Piece” (an imitation game in which one performer copies the movements of another and then adds new movement) so revolutionized performance theory and practice that it is now de rigeur in dance and acting classes. As such, it makes for better doing than watching—a fact that the performers, who were having a lot of fun with each other, neglected to consider.

The final work, “The Plague,” is a Jim Jones-esque death carnival staged (in part) at the feet of the audience. Dubbed “theater of cruelty,” because of its Artaudian influence, this piece is supposed to evince a type of anticatharsis in the audience. But, because the guy at my feet was clamorously breathing even when he was supposed to be dead, and because the solemnity was so labored, the piece had an almost self-parodying effect.

I know that Mysteries is a landmark production in the history of Western theater practice. Its effects, and the work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, have always been held up as one of the groundbreaking achievements of experimental drama. But, seeing the work of the Living Theater Company for the first time—as represented by a piece that is basically hooked into a respirator—I felt somehow cheated by this heritage. Only in the first piece (the military activity) could I interpolate the type of effect that this work might have had on audiences in 1964. Much of the other material seemed like exercises—valuable exercises, perhaps—for preparing for performance.

Form spoke volumes when these experiments first entered the laboratories; today, meaning has drained from the forms, leaving a hollow shell to be infused with questions. Mysteries and Smaller Pieces is a virtually wordless two-hours-plus, performed by old and new members whose abilities range from artless to technique-driven. Unless we find significance in the generalized (war in general, violence in general, death in general, and ritual in general) there are few threads that can be wheeled out of the work. In addition, the wind was knocked out of my sails by the “seriousness” of the piece. The performers seemed to have only a secondary interest in engaging their audience, provided that the audience was willing to play by their terms. “Serious” game-playing is like professional ice skating: it is easy to distort its import disproportionately.

The full turn of a wheel is called a revolution. In that sense, a revolution signals the completion of a process of change. It was important for the Living Theater to bring back Mysteries, if only to help those of us in the younger generation clarify our understanding of the past—and what is still left to be accomplished. This is the equivocal optimism that I was able muster, leaving the Theater for the New City at midnight as the cats and dogs fell from the sky. Now, we can move on.