20:2 Summer 1968

EUGENE WILDMAN

Reality Theatre in Chicago

As argument over the Vietnam War intensified on campuses during the late 1960s, Chicago Review began to take a broader interest in the public life of artistic culture. Eugene Wildman, who had edited the magazine in the mid-1960s, contributed the following piece on “Reality Theater in Chicago” for the Summer 1968 issue. Wildman, now a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the author of two experimental novels, recently discussed this moment in the Review’s history:

I was at the Review during a turbulent period: escalating war in Vietnam, Civil Rights struggle at home. The country forced to examine its soul. Hippies, heads, sit-ins, demonstrations; JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy assassinated. The city hosted the Democratic Convention, the police rioted, Nixon became president.

Of course, this upheaval was reflected in the arts, music notably, with the Beatles, the Stones, the Supremes, Aretha, Dylan, Hendrix, Morrison, Janis. In writing there was radical experimentation with voice and genre and narrative form. Change was the order of the day. I remember (with dismay now) sending back a smoothly crafted story with the comment, “No more well-wrought urns.” It was a call to arms. At the opposite pole, a certain professor of conservative bent, contemplating the new breed of student, was heard to remark, “A university is no place for creativity.”

The old usages seemed exhausted, inadequate. We wanted words to explode off the page, leap into consciousness and actuality. Expression had to be integral to life, embedded in experience and not merely descriptive of it. That was the motivation behind the Concretism issue, and forays into guerilla theater: to shatter the separation between art and life.

Street Theater would also be explored in the Summer 1971 issue. In Jeriann Badanes’s “Burning City Street Theater—An Analysis of a Theater Commune,” she notes the ground swell of interest in this form of political resistance: “And we are not alone. We are part of a vast net-work of life inciters, whose energy spectrum extends from the heavy, slow beat of survival to the quicker beat of revivals to the light, almost inaudible flutter of ecstasy. Its called hippy-political-tribal-communal-women’s liberational-people’s liberational-street theater.” We present here one of the scripts that accompanied Wildman’s piece along with most of his discussion of his group’s activities.

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