Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed the dehumanization in a military prison during the Korean War, died Feb. 5 in a hospice in Queens. He was 85.
A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.
Growing up as a street punk in the 1950s in Brooklyn, Mr. Desirous of serving his country, Brown enlisted in the Marines at the age of 18. But stationed in Japan, he was startled by military life and thrown in jail. for insubordination.
There he said he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “made”; he was punched in the stomach for even minor offenses. The mornings started with garbage can lids banging on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog for hours through their claustrophobic quarters until they were out of breath.
“I was always in trouble with the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I’ve been to the brigade twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I was released, I was a complete pacifist.”
Back in New York, Mr. Brown as a bartender and attended Columbia University on the GI Bill. In his spare time, he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play about a grueling day in the lives of 10 captured Marines and the guards who make them cruel.
mr. Brown had no theater connections. But through a friend, his manuscript found its way to the Living Theatre, the respected avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were fascinated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.
“I was a local boy,” Mr. Brown said. “I’ve never met people like Julian and Judith.”
“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.
“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of the conditions in the cell, the president or his secretary of defense should order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for DailyExpertNews. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script spares no detail of the devastating indictment.”
The piece won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.
“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic final performance there. During the performance of the play, authorities closed the playhouse for back taxes, but the cast and audience broke into the padlocked theater for one last show.
“The piece has achieved what I wanted to achieve,” said Mr Brown. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly, not by commenting on it, but by doing it. Basically performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”
Kenneth Howard Brown was born on March 9, 1936 in Brooklyn to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank clerk, his father a police officer.
Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to argue with youngsters in the area. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.
After the success of ‘The Brig’, Mr. Brown on the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and trips to faraway places,” he wrote in DailyExpertNews Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could try it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”
But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”
He went back to the bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for downtown theater audiences. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he spoke wryly about the realities of a writer’s life in the city:
“That’s right, I’m the man who wrote ‘The Brig’. What am I doing here to run this restaurant? Well, I have to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get scholarships and grants. I’ve had them all and no one will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh yes, you have to do it over and over again.”
But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high school students growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a gloomy city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000. published.
mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, lived in a rented apartment that his parents gave him, and for years he moved to Manhattan to run a bar. He continued to write a sequel to “The Great Gatsby”, titled “Carraway”, based on the character narrating Fitzgerald’s novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)
In 2007, long after the Living Theater playhouse closed and years after the troupe began moving from place to place, it settled in a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Mrs. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the first production.
The play’s revival was widely publicized and Mr. Brown reveled in the triumph. But since Americans still reckoned with reports of torture on the… US military prison in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival came at the right time. The coincidence did not escape Mr. Brown.
“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in a 2010 interview. “I think as long as there is war and as long as there is an army and especially as long as the ethical right to wage war is questioned.”
“It will remain relevant,” he added, “until there is peace around the world.”