LIVING THEATRE EUROPA | Gary Brackett

Gary Edwin Brackett is a theatre director, actor, playwright, producer, and founder of Living Theatre Europa. A member of The Living Theatre since 1987, he worked for more than three decades alongside Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov as production manager, performer, technical director, designer, and later general manager. In New York and across Europe, he contributed to productions including The Tablets, I and I, The Body of God, Humanity, The Rules of Civility, The Zero Method, Resistenza, Resist Now!, The Brig, The Connection, and Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, which he co-directed with Judith Malina.

 

Following the closure of The Living Theatre’s European centre at Palazzo Spinola in Rocchetta Ligure, Brackett founded Living Theatre Europa, continuing the anarchist, pacifist, and collectively created theatre developed by Malina and Julian Beck. Through hundreds of workshops, international residencies, street actions, and performances, he has revived and reimagined historic works including Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism, Not in My Name, Six Public Acts, Paradise Now, and Julian Beck’s The Archaeology of Sleep. He also directed Mahloul, Voyage in Palestine, a documentary tracing Living Theatre Europa’s work alongside Palestinian and Israeli artists, activists, and social workers in the occupied Palestinian territories. These works are approached not as museum pieces, but as living structures through which contemporary bodies, conflicts, and communities may speak.

 

In recent years, a new intergenerational company has grown around Living Theatre Europa, bringing together performers, artists, pedagogues, activists, and cultural workers from different parts of Italy and Europe. A central expression of this renewal has been ROOTS: The Living Theatre from Its Origins to 1968, developed as part of the international 100th Revolution campaign commemorating the centenary of Judith Malina and Julian Beck. Through workshops, exhibitions, archival research, public demonstrations, and performances, ROOTS has re-entered the foundational language of The Living Theatre, connecting historical transmission with contemporary collective creation. From this process, the company created (A New) Six Public Acts and reconstructed Paradise Now in its entirety under the title Paradise Now, Now!, placing the revolutionary architecture of the original work in direct confrontation with the wars, authoritarianism, ecological emergency, and social fragmentation of the present. Living Theatre Europa today functions simultaneously as a living archive, a contemporary laboratory, and a collective reality in continuous transformation.

 

As a playwright and producer, Brackett has created an original body of work combining political theatre, poetry, ritual, spirituality, and historical memory. His works include Siddhartha – The River Smiles, Giovanna La Mariposita, Green Terror, Let My Brother Go, Girl Is a Gun, and Common Blood. Siddhartha – The River Smiles transforms the spiritual journey into a communal ceremony of listening and renewal. Green Terror confronts ecological catastrophe, political repression, and the language used to disguise violence as security or progress. Common Blood weaves documents, testimony, music, historical archives, and the memory of genocide into a ritual of remembrance, insisting that memory can survive only when it is embodied, spoken, and shared. His current project, SO’HAM: I Am That, That Am I, brings these earlier investigations together in a new encounter between human presence, collective ritual, artificial intelligence, mourning, intimacy, and transformation.

 

Brackett is also the artistic force behind Public Acts: A Journey to Non-Violence, an Erasmus+ collaboration between Living Theatre Europa and the Greek collective Facta Non Verba. The project brings a new generation of European participants together through theatre, civic action, nonviolence, and collective creation, with particular attention to young people experiencing social, cultural, economic, or geographical marginalisation.

 

Its 2026 residency, exhibition, public events, and performances mark the return of Living Theatre Europa to Rocchetta Ligure and Palazzo Spinola, reopening the historic relationship between The Living Theatre, the partisan memory of the Val Borbera, the Museo G.B. Lazagna, and the local community. This return is not an exercise in nostalgia, but the continuation of an unfinished act: transforming memory into presence, resistance into creation, and theatre into a living practice of collective freedom and nonviolence.