Prior to his career in social criticism, the American writer Paul Goodman had a prolific career in avant-garde literature, including some 16 works for the stage. His plays, mostly written in the 1940s, were typically experimental. Their professional productions were either unsuccessful or flopped, including the three productions staged with The Living Theatre in the 1950s and one with The American Place Theatre in 1966. His lack of recognition as a litterateur in the 1950s helped drive him to his successful career in social criticism in the 1960s.
Background
Paul Goodman's writing career was prolific and heterogeneous. Though primarily known for his 1960s works of social criticism, Goodman primarily thought of himself as an artist–humanist, or man of letters. Across all of his works, he said he had one subject, "the organism and the environment", and one common, pragmatic aim, that his writing should effect a change. Up to the 1950s, he wrote literary avant-garde fiction, poetry, and theater, typically experimental. While his fiction and poetry received some critical response, he was largely unrecognized as a litterateur, apart from a coterie of admirers. His difficult personality and unrefined style hindered his literary reputation. This dissatisfaction from lack of audience in the 1950s is what drew him to social criticism in the 1960s, where he found success, leaving behind his literary ambitions for the limelight.
Noh plays
In what he intended to be an American adaptation of the Japanese Noh art form, Goodman wrote five verse drama plays, or what Goodman called "dance poems": Dusk, The Birthday, The Three Disciplines, The Cyclist, and The Stop Light. In his adaptation, he portrayed the three Noh characters—the Waki, the Shite, and the Chorus—respectively as the "Audience", the "Object of Awareness", and the "Mind of the Poet Himself". Put another way, the plays each have three characters: a traveler (the audience), a spirit (the idea of the poem), and the chorus (that interprets both for each other).
His friend's small press, 5x8 Press, published the collection as Stop-Light in December 1941. It was Goodman's first book, and included an essay on the art form by Goodman and illustrations by his brother, Percival. Dusk had been published separately in a periodical two months prior to the book, and The Birthday would be revised and published in Michael Benedikt's 1967 anthology Theatre Experiment.
Dudley Fitts, contemporaneously reviewing the five American Noh plays in The Saturday Review of Literature, wrote that only The Three Disciplines and The Stop Light achieved the author's intentions but even then, the form did not adapt well outside of its original language and tradition. He also judged Goodman's diction as generally flat and humor as informal. The other three "failures", wrote Fitts, portrayed their protagonist (the Object of Awareness) as "either a dismal truism ... or a downright silliness". The Stop Light, however, moved Fitts, and in his opinion successfully integrated Goodman's idea, symbol, and diction. The New Republic considered Goodman's conceit clever and strategic but found that his themes did not neatly resolve.
The New York Poets' Theater produced Dusk and Stop Light in May 1948. Artist Mark Rothko designed Dusk set and Ned Rorem composed its music, while Costantino Nivola designed Stop Light set and Ben Weber composed its music. The Noh plays were later staged at New York's CHARAS Theater in 1990.
The Living Theatre
Goodman's interest in theater developed alongside Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and their Living Theatre. After being introduced by playwright Tennessee Williams, Goodman became a close and influential friend, introducing Malina and Beck to anarchism prior to their founding of their Living Theatre. Goodman described himself as "a kind of company psychiatrist" for the theater company, for which he also wrote plays that the theater considered among the American vanguard. In turn, Goodman wrote in defense of the Living Theatre. Director Lawrence Kornfeld said Goodman's plays were among the first to incorporate non-linguistic elements, such as screams and other sounds.
As Malina and Beck prepared to open The Living Theatre in New York's Cherry Lane Theatre, they held their first show in their living room over a week in late August 1951. Among their five-play program was Goodman's short farce Childish Jokes: Crying Backstage. The sets and invitations were primitive and the 20-person seating arrangements intimate. Attendees included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Carl Van Vechten.