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the end of a roll, so we had to replace those parts of sound with the separate recording, or resplice it practically frame by frame. There was a lot of that kind of subtle technical work, which my brother does very well.
As far as the play itself is concerned, I filmed the whole thing. There were parts, however, which worked on stage, but didn't work so well on film. As in real lifesome of it was just too boring to film. As documentary as the play is, towards the end it becomes more theatrical: acting and melodramatic lines I couldn't do anything with. I decided to cut those parts out. The people from the Living Theater were not too happy about this decision at first, but eventually they accepted the changes, and now they're very happy with the film. The play ran approximately ninety minutes. I cut out about twenty minutes.
MacDonald:
There's a weird dimension to the play: it has to be as rigorously unrelenting in its production as a real brig would be. The people who "play" the marines were, I assume, as demanding on themselves and each other as real marines would bemaybe more so, depending on how long the play ran.
Mekas:
I think the play ran for about a year. All those punches were real; they were rehearsed, but real. Every actor had to know the parts of all the other actors so that they could rotate roles. I'll be punched tonight, and you'll be punched tomorrow. They were incredibly dedicated to their theater.
MacDonald:
What's interesting to me is that it's the same performance as the real thing. It's just in a different context.
Mekas:
That's why I wanted to film it. It could be treated as reality, though actually the play was not as intense as the film. I intensified it by picking out certain details, by cutting out dead spaces, and by the movements of the camera. Still, for the theatergoer of that period,
The Brig
was a very intense experience. In 1967 or 1968 I was invited to the University of Delaware to see their production of
The Brig
. Kenneth Brown, the author of the play, was there too. The production, from all I remember, was pretty intense. But it didn't have the same impact on the audience as the original performances did. To have the same effect in 1968 you had to be two or three times more shocking. Society had become more brutalized.
I should add another footnote here. In the late sixties, a TV station in Berlin did their own version of the play. They planned it all very carefully, spent a lot of money on it, took a month to make itand it was a total dud. It didn't work.
MacDonald:
The sound in the film is somewhat rhythmic. Over and over it starts relatively quietly and then builds, finally going past the point of audibility. Was the distortion done on purpose?