Between Fiction and Reality: Squat Theatre

I was lucky enough to be taught theatre history at Rutgers by Eileen Blumenthal, who has written biographies of Julie Taymor and Joseph Chaiken.  One of the perks of studying at Rutgers was that it was “Forty fabulous miles from New York City,” as the head of the acting program used to say. Actually, he used to say, “Fawty fabulous miles…”

So Eileen took us all, in our best Sunday clothes, to see Squat Theatre, which was performing in Chelsea. Squat Theatre was not on my radar. And that is no surprise at all, as my radar had an extremely short beam at the time.

Squat Theatre was a theatre collective which formed in Hungary and performed from 1968 to 1991. In the early 1970s in Budapest, their theatrical performances were shut down and banned by the government based on charges of obscenity and subversive politics. Barred from public showings, they then performed secretly in the apartment of one of the company members. The audience would enter surreptitiously and remain silent during the performance – as any applause or audible reaction might alert the authorities.

Squat Theatre finally fled Hungary and settled in New York in 1977 where they performed out of a storefront on 23rd Street. The name “Squat” refers to their history of performing in any space available.

The Squat Company in 1980. Note the babies…
TOP: Anna Koos, Agnes Santha, Klara Palotai, Eszter Balint, Boris Major
MIDDLE: Peter Halasz, Eric Daillie, Peter Berg, Stephan Balint, Eva Buchmuller
BOTTOM:Rebecca Major, Galus Halasz, Simon Daillie, Cora Fisher
Photo courtesy of Squat Theatre

The company also was home to Eszter Balint, (top row, second from the right) who as a teenager starred in the classic indie comedy Stranger Than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch. Balint’s father Stefan was a founder of Squat and she grew up in the theatre.

So I saw “The Golden Age of Squat theatre,” a retrospective of three of their most famous plays. Pig! Child! Fire!, Andy Warhol’s Last Love and Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free.

Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free (which won the Obie Award for Best New Play in 1982) performed in a storefront which had been transformed into their permanent theatre space. The actors played inside the storefront, before a large store window overlooking 23rd Street. The actual New York street and its traffic and passers-by beyond the window became the backdrop for the play.

Photo courtesy of Squat Theatre

Frequently, the folks walking by on 23 street would come up to the window and watch the play through the glass. At those times, they became a part of the performances. But also, at those moments, they became the audience and we inside became the performance that they were watching. Such was the singular looking glass which Squat had created.

In the play of Pig! Child! Fire! there was an extended scene where actors pointed guns at each other. During one performance, a passerby looking through the window mistook this for a real confrontation and called the police. The cops came and handcuffed and arrested the actors.

Life incarcerates art.

The commanding image in Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free was a 12-foot sculpture of a cheerful, Gerber-style baby wearing headphones and with television sets for eyes. The baby was created by company member Éva Buchmüller.

Photo courtesy of Squat Theatre

Klara Palotai, a company member and in the original cast of the play, told me about their method of creation. “The play came together by sitting down and throwing out ideas. It was a very slow process, more than a few months.” And this process was 24/7 because the entire company shared living quarters. “It was easy because we lived in the same house,” she said. “We did not have to call a meeting, but would continue the conversation while watching TV or making coffee or having dinner. It all took place in organic time.” As ideas came to the fore they shaped the play.

Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free began with a film which was projected in the small theatre space. It contained various scenes set in New York, the relation of which were not apparent.

At the end of the film the curtains open to reveal the rest of the theatre space and the street beyond the storefront window.

Soon a jeep pulls up and screeches to a halt, right in front of the theatre. Military men get out, open the door, and rush into the performance area, carrying a wounded, bleeding soldier. These soldiers go about their business, caring for the wounded man, not taking in the audience in any way. Though these soldiers were clearly a part of the play, their invasion of the space, visibly from the outside world gave them a strange reality.

Photo courtesy of Squat Theatre

Only when one of the soldiers (Peter Halasz) picked up microphone and performed a proto-rap for the audience, along with a belly dancer (Sheryl Sutton), did they leave that reality and enter the world of the play.

In the film before the play, there were several scenes with two Hungarian teenage girls walking in dreary New York locations. They were engaging in the most graphic sexual talk, describing sex in detail, but in a completely deadpan way. The juxtaposition of what they were saying and their monotonous delivery made these scenes extremely funny. 

Later in the play, we suddenly see the same two girls – live – walk by on the sidewalk outside the storefront and continue their conversation. An outdoor microphone picks up their dialogue. One of them opens the door and steps into the space and enters the action of the play.

I cannot describe how extraordinarily surprising and jarring this moment was - as if Squat had transmogrified these celluloid girls into reality.

Cafe Scene / Klara Palotai as the waitress
Photo courtesy of Squat Theatre

In spite of the first scene, I also should mention that this is not a play about the military, per se. There was a sequence which was a Casablanca-inspired cafe scene, a live operatic performance of James Brown’s “Sex Machine” accompanied by classical violin, and a harakiri suicide with a flaming shish-kabob skewer.

Squat Theatre weaves together disparate, seeming anarchic components, which have been rigorously pieced into a cohesive, and sometimes non-cohesive whole. How can the whole be both cohesive, and non-cohesive? I don’t know.

“The play was very much influenced by our environment and whatever touched us intellectually,” Palotai said. “We used a lot of live music in our work because we were running a jazz and rock club in the space on weekends. It was a very exciting time to be in New York. We just absorbed that energy.”

This is the kind of art that is frequently called “Theatre of the Absurd” or “experimental.” But it is really a vision of the world by a group that had the courage to create and play by its own rules, and inhabit that strange place between fiction and reality.