For movie and television buffs, Ms. Malina was best known as a character actress. She appeared on “The Sopranos” (as Aunt Dottie, a dying nun who reveals to the gangster known as Paulie Walnuts that she is actually his mother) and in films including “The Addams Family,” Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” and, perhaps most memorably, “Dog Day Afternoon,” as the anguished and frantic mother of Sonny Wortzik, the misguided bank robber played by Al Pacino.

NEW YORK — Judith Malina, an actor and director who with her husband, Julian Beck, founded the Living Theater, a troupe of activists and provocateurs who advanced the idea of political theater in America, and in the name of art ran afoul of civic authorities on three continents, died on Friday in Englewood, N.J. She was 88.

But she steered a far more emphatic and influential course with the troupe sometimes known simply as the Living, which occupied the leading edge of stage experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s and both fed and fed on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.


It was perhaps the most prominent and persistent advocate for a “new theater,” one that sought to dissolve the accepted artifice of stage presentations, to conjoin art and political protest, and to shrink, if not eliminate, the divide between performers and the audience.

Ms. Malina studied acting and directing with Erwin Piscator, the German director and theorist who, like Bertolt Brecht, was a proponent of epic theater. She was tireless and passionate in advancing the idea that theater can be, and should be, a blunt force for cultural change.

She and Beck, an Expressionist painter as a young man who became renowned as a set designer, considered themselves anarchists and pacifists, and their productions were statements as much as performances. Idealistic and fervent, they began planning a new kind of theater company in 1947, when she was 21 and he a year older. The troupe’s first public production, Gertrude Stein’s “Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights,” was staged in 1951 at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village.


Their belief that the theater and real life are part of an experiential continuum drew them, at first, to present plays written in verse or otherwise abstract language — they produced work by Kenneth Rexroth, T. S. Eliot, Paul Goodman, Jean Cocteau, W.H. Auden, and William Carlos Williams, among others — and to involve their audiences in the action of their shows in defiance of the so-called fourth wall, the conventional presumption of separation of the actors from the audience.

The period of the couple’s greatest impact and notoriety began in the late 1950s with productions that included groundbreaking dramas like “The Connection” (1959), Jack Gelber’s harrowing depiction of a den of heroin addicts, and “The Brig” (1963), Kenneth H. Brown’s portrayal of a harsh day in the life of a Marine prison. (Both were made into films.)

It was during the run of “The Brig” that the Living was shut down by the Internal Revenue Service — an event that catalyzed demonstrations outside the company’s home at West 14th Street and Avenue of the Americas, with placards bearing slogans like “Art Before Taxes.”

Ms. Malina and Beck represented themselves at their trial, arguing that it was both wrong and unreasonable for the government to take away their theater without making a good-faith effort to help them save it, and that their nonviolent civil disobedience was a reaction against the unfair administration of the law. But they also turned the trial into a loopy spectacle that included rambling speechifying, outbursts of protest, and Ms. Malina’s recitation of her poems.


The jury convicted her, Beck, and the Living Theater on several counts surrounding the crime of impeding federal agents from seizing the assets of the tax delinquent theater.

Ms. Malina and Beck were fined and given brief jail sentences, though pending an appeal they were allowed to leave for Europe, where the Living had bookings, and they and the company went into self-imposed exile.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Living again spent much of its time out of the country, partly in Europe and partly in Brazil. Julian Beck died in 1985. Ms. Malina leaves their two children, Isha Manna and Garrick Maxwell Beck; and three grandchildren.