Joseph Chaikin
| Joseph Chaikin | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
16 September 1935 Brooklyn, New York, USA |
| Died | 22 June 2003 (aged 67) New York City, New York, USA |
| Occupation | Theatre director, actor, playwright, pedagogue |
Joseph Chaikin (September 16, 1935 – June 22, 2003) was an American theatre director, actor, playwright, and pedagogue.
The youngest of five children, Chaikin was born to a poor Jewish family living in the Borough Park residential area of Brooklyn. At the age of six, he was struck with rheumatic fever, and he continued to suffer from resulting heart complications throughout his life. At the age of ten, he was sent to the National Children's Cardiac Hospital in Florida. It was during this period of isolation he began to organize theater games with other children. After two years in Florida, his health improved, and he was returned to his family, who had moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where his father had taken a job teaching.
Chaikin briefly attended Drake University in Iowa, and then returned to New York to begin a career in theater, studying with various acting coaches, while struggling to survive working a variety of jobs. He appeared as a figurant at the Metropolitan Opera, and gradually began to be cast in legitimate stage roles, going on to work with The Living Theatre before founding in 1963 The Open Theater a theater co-operative that progressed from a closed experimental laboratory to a performance ensemble.
Open Theater allowed Chaikin and his colleagues the space to experiment with unconventional and organic drama techniques. They embraced dance and musical performance practices and encouraged actors to be more expressive in the body. When asked in a 1999 interview why he was compelled to start Open Theater, Chaikin responded, "I’m not crazy about naturalism on stage. An actor is an interpretive artist. They can take their talent further. I wanted them to stretch, be creative."
The Open Theatre's most famous and critically acclaimed production, The Serpent, was a unique creation developed largely from the actors' own experiences, using the Bible as text, but incorporating current events, such as the violence that plagued the 1960s. An Open Theatre exercise by Jean-Claude van Itallie, "Interview," became part of the play America Hurrah, and Chaikin directed the "Interview" section when the play opened at the Pocket Theatre in 1966. In 1969 Open Theatre performed Endgame by Samuel Beckett, with Chaikin playing the role of Hamm and Peter Maloney as Clov, at the Cite Universitaire, Paris, and in 1970 at the Grasslands Penitentiary, a fulfillment of Chaikin's desire to experiment with audiences who would be fundamentally and culturally different from cosmopolitan audiences.
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