Janet Ward lost her brief battle with cancer on Wednesday, April 30th. I first met Janet when she entered the Joseph Chaikin Workshop. We became fast friends. Like Joe, Janet was obsessed with Samuel Beckett. She did many Beckett roles in the workshop, but I most remember her performance of Miss Fitt in the extraordinary production of All That Fall at the Cherry Lane Theater. Janet was also a member of New York's Tyna Collective where she played in Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolado directed by Eva Burgess at the Ohio Theater. I wrote an earlier entry about Janet's fight against cancer, but you can follow the whole story on the blog that has been maintained by her family. I will miss Janet very much.
Hanon Reznikov has for the past 24 years been the co-director of the Living Theatre. (He is pictured here with his wife and partner Judith Malina.) Hanon was in many ways the driving force behind the Living, though no doubt the legacy he has created will continue. Hanon is the author of many plays produced by the Living Theatre, most notably Utopia, Capital Changes, and Resistance. Hanon was my teacher when I took a class with the Living Theatre at NYU in 1986. He opened my imagination to the possibilities of theater. He taught me that all theater is political, and unless you have a political agenda, it's all an exercise in vanity.
I spent more than a few New Years Eves at their home on West End Avenue. I worked as an intern in their office, and had a nice reunion with Hanon and Judith when they attended the opening of The Glass Menagerie (in which I played the role of Tom) at Yale Rep directed by Joseph Chaikin.Hanon was an advocate for the pacifist-anarchist revolution, and a true philosopher and thinker. There is a wonderful interview with Hanon and Judith that you can look at here on YouTube.
