Obituary: Joseph Chaikin

American actor and director whose work helped trigger a revolution in western theatre

Joseph "Joe" Chaikin, who has died aged 67 of heart failure, was an actor, director and mould-breaker. He was a central player in the New York experimental theatre which began in the early 1960s, and led to a worldwide upheaval and reform of theatre.

In the United States there was Joe and his Open Theatre, Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, California's Teatro Campesino; in England there was the People Show and Welfare State; in Poland Jerzy Grotowski's Teatr Laboratorium. The director Peter Brook had departed from the mainstream, in London and in Paris. These theatre-makers swept like a gale through the theatre's conventions. Joe was one of the most inspired pioneers. He had a close relationship with another original, the playwright/actor Sam Shepard, directing his scripts and devising and often performing plays with him.

In 1975 Joe had open heart surgery, which was repeated in 1984. The second operation was accompanied by a stroke which resulted in aphasia - the severe impairment of his speech. His battle with this condition, especially devastating for an actor - indeed his theatrical use of it - was inspiring. He seemed to be straying across the border into death, but kept coming back again.

Joe was born in Brooklyn, with the sweet visage of an angelic choirboy - or rather young synagogue-cantor. The rheumatic fever he suffered as a small child left him with a weakened heart, and a deep solitude. When he was 10 he spent two years at a children's hospital in Florida - his religious, Russian-Jewish family was living in Iowa - which, he said, had a huge effect on his life. Later he enrolled at Drake University in Des Moines, but dropped out, acted in New York, and studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

In 1959 he joined the Living Theatre, and appeared in its production of the powerful, hyper-realist play about drug addicts The Connection by Jack Gelber (obituary May 12 2003). Joe won Obie awards - he was to win five during his career - with the leads in two Bertolt Brecht proto-Marxist plays with dehumanised heroes, In The Jungle Of Cities and Man Is Man.

By 1963, a bunch of ex-Living Theatre people started putting on disconcerting plays in cafes and cellars. In a loft on 24th Street, Joe called together a group of actors, playwrights and thinkers, including Susan Sontag and the anarchist political philosopher Paul Goodman. In the tradition of Harold Clurman's radical Group Theatre of the 1930s, the theatre people decided to create and maintain their own group. They called it the Open Theatre - open to all the currents and philosophies and politics which mainstream theatre shut out. As Peter Feldman, one of Joe's fellow actors, put it: "Our object was to make visible on stage those levels of reality which are usually not expressed in situations: the elusive, irrational, fragile, mysterious or monstrous lives within our lives, to break down the actor's reliance on mundane social realism and watered-down Freud."

Joe became the leader of the Open Theatre collective, based in Spring Street, in New York's Greenwich Village, using exercises and explorations gleaned from a wide range of teachers in New York's cosmopolis, both Stanislavskian and not, to release what he called "the astonishing power in the performance of an actor who is actually playing out an image which he himself introduced".

Open Theatre's first full-length ensemble piece The Serpent was a polyphony. It wove together the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy, a paradisal, erotic celebration of the Garden of Eden, Cain's chillingly quiet murder of Abel - breaking his bones one by one - and ending with an illustrated roll call of an Old Testament "X begat Y begat Z", orchestrated into an orgy of reproduction and continuance.

The group's physical and spiritual brilliance won them a worldwide reputation - which took in visits to London. They went on to make an even edgier piece, Terminal, based on the group's intimations of death, a subject which, inevitably, preoccupied Joe. Luciano Berio's work, Opera, and indeed the composer's concept of music theatre, was influenced by Terminal's look and sound.

Open Theatre's reputation brought Joe to Peter Brook's attention, and in 1966 he invited him to contribute to the Royal Shakespeare Company group which, in an Open Theatre spirit, was preparing US, a play about the Vietnam war. In rehearsal, he confronted some knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but without him, the show would have had less New York chutzpah and Dadaist confrontation - including an obscene episode of sometime beat poet Tuli Kupferberg's 1001 Ways To Avoid The Draft.

In 1973 the Open Theatre group disbanded, and Joe worked on, as an actor and director. In 1972 he had written a distilled book about performance, The Presence Of The Actor. In 1976 he set up another group, the Winter Project, which he dissolved in 1983. His creative relationship with Sam Shepard flourished. They collaborated on two plays, Tongues and Savage/Love in 1979 and in 1984, on The War In Heaven, a monologue for an angel who dies on the day he is born. Joe wrote to Samuel Beckett and obtained permission to perform his Texts For Nothing, together with a few tips on how to do so. He played these notations of near-nothingness widely, including at the Royal Court Theatre in 1981.

It was in May 1984, returning from running a workshop in Tel Aviv, Imagining The Other: The Arab And The Jew, that he suffered heart-failure, the stroke, and aphasia. Sam Shepard's mother -in-law had suffered from the same condition, and Sam gave Joe speaking exercises early in his recovery. Then they went back to work on The War In Heaven; Sam incorporated Joe's aphasic syntax into a revised monologue for the angel.

His involvement with Shepard expressed one part of Joe's character: the America of prairies, highways and open space. The other part of Joe was quintessential Jewish New York. He never lost the holy schlemihl's quizzical gaze at the world's cruel absurdities, and his theatre pieces, though dark, were often grotesque and comic.

In 1988, another playwright close to Joe, Jean-Claude van Itallie, collaborated with him on Struck Dumb, "a theatrical metaphor for the aphasic character's mind", about a California-based Arab-American, who suffers a stroke. Joe toured this and The War In Heaven internationally through the 1980s. He also found a new way to perform Beckett's texts - Beckett wrote him What Is The Word, a stuttering poem about an aphasic speaker - "afaint afar away over there what".

He was sought after as a teacher, leading workshops with actors and with aphasics. In 1984, he became the first living American director in the Cambridge University Press monograph series Directors In Perspective, alongside Ingmar Bergman and Peter Stein. He continued to direct plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Euripides, Beckett and Ionesco.

In 2001 he directed the New York premiere of Shepard's The Late Henry Moss and was then approached by Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theatre Company. He codirected Pig Iron's Shut Eye on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2002. This year he was directing Medea in California, Arthur Miller in Atlanta and was in Philadelphia last week auditioning for Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. He is survived by three sisters and a brother.

In 1994 he and Sam Shepard published Letters And Texts (1972-84) whose epigraph was the last line of one of Brecht's late poems: "You can make a fresh start with your final breath".

· Joseph Chaikin, actor and director, born September 16, 1935; died June 22 2003

The GuardianTramp

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