(Michael Feingold’s article appeared on Theatermania, 5/29.)
It happened in April, so its meaning didn't fully register with me. No New York theater journalist has time to register the meaning of anything in April. Increasingly every year, producers crowd the bulk of Broadway's openings, madly, into the month before the awards-nominations deadlines. Even those of us whose attention is mainly focused off-Broadway, where this city's true theatrical life occurs, find ourselves caught up in the whirlwind: The response to the big-scale uptown openings alters the framework in which we converse. And then off-Broadway adds to the bedlam by making its own major demands toward season's end. This year, the one brief letup in the gush of Broadway openings was filled by major revivals off-Broadway of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Ibsen's Ghosts — heavy artillery for a month mostly crammed with trivial diversions. (Both productions turned out, ironically, to be among the worst renderings I'd ever seen of these two beloved plays.)
Read The New York Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/theater/judith-malina-founder-of-the-living-theater-dies-at-88.html