WHEN you’ve been arrested, jailed, ostracized – and played Paulie Walnuts’ aunt – get ting naked onstage is no big deal. Even at 81.
At a time of life when many people’s decisions revolve around the early-bird special, Judith Malina – actress and anarchist – is still stirring things up. These days she’s doffing her clothes in “Maudie & Jane,” at the Living Theatre.
At least the commute is easy.
“I live above the store,” she says from her living room above the theater she founded 60 years ago with Julian Beck, her late husband and partner in provocation.
“I take an elevator to work!”
The elevator’s new, but the work isn’t. The oldest experimental theater group in America became famous -infamous, really – not only for performing plays by Bertoldt Brecht and Gertrude Stein, but for semi-improvised pieces like “Paradise Now,” which, even in the Make Love, Not War era of the ’60s, was a little . . . out there.
“We burned money,
f – – – ed the audience, took our clothes off,” Malina recalls, matter-of-factly. If the order sounds askew, it wasn’t.
“You should have seen some of the things that went on in the aisles,” says this rabbi’s daughter. “You didn’t have time to get undressed!
“We tried to see, in order to reach the pure Edenic state, how far we could go without doing violent or harmful or ugly things. How we could liberate ourselves.”
Amid unpacked boxes, a stack of Grove Press’ “The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947-1957” (“It has a good gossipy index – all the lovers of my youth, in alphabetical order”) and the pungent smell of pot, she reflects on a life of performance and protest, and why she’ll never eat lunch in Hollywood again.
Her last film there was “The Addams Family,” 16 years ago. The first Gulf war was on, and Malina, when she wasn’t playing Grandmama, was urging co-stars Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia to sign antiwar ads. They declined.
Things worsened when a mischievous stagehand handed her a tiny American flag during a break on the set.
“I said, ‘Don’t give me that without a match to burn it,’ ” she recalls. “Nobody talked to me for three weeks.”
Nevertheless, ” ‘The Addams Family’ supported the Living Theatre for nearly three years. A one-shot on TV won’t buy me a vacation in Atlantic City.”
She did a few of those, including a turn as Paulie’s Aunt Dottie on “The Sopranos.”
“I never saw the show,” she says. “I understand it’s about criminals.” Umm, it was. “It’s over? I didn’t know that. This is not my world – it’s something I do to make a living.”
Her life, she says, is agitating for peace, via what she calls “the beautiful nonviolent anarchists’ revolution” – which once netted her 70 days in a Brazilian jail. Her life is also this theater, which she runs with her second, younger husband, Hanon Reznikov.
A shy, lanky presence in his 50s, he directed her in “Maudie & Jane,” in which she plays a bag lady in need of many things, including a bath. The play runs through Feb. 10, but Malina’s already onto the next, a collaborative effort titled “Eureka!”
“I have no ‘how to stay young’ advice, but I think it’s important for people to have something they passionately want to give their life to,” says Malina, a great-grandmother of two.
“I don’t have a young, gorgeous body, but I don’t mind showing it. We really should get over that s – – t!”