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by Kenneth H. Brown
Directed by Judith Malina
Production Manager: Gary Brackett
Set and Lights by Gary Brackett
WINNER OBIE 2007 for Ensemble and Direction
The Brig, written by a veteran who survived incarceration in a U.S. Marine Corps Brig during the 1950's, is a chilling portrait of the brutality of military prisons. The original production was the winner of the OBIE Award for the Best Play of 1963 and Jonas Mekas' extraordinary film of the production, The Brig, won the Leone D'Oro for Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the following year. The play had great impact in New York and then toured extensively in Europe until 1967.
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which was the first production staged by The Living Theatre after director Judith Malina read M.C. Richard's as yet unpublished English translation of The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud, whose radical approach to articulating a theatrical relationship between cruelty and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.
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