The company’s most notorious show, “Paradise Now,” consisted of a jumble of nonlinear vignettes, theater games, ritualistic exercises, group embraces and volleys of incantatory anticapitalist slogans and other epithets, some encouraging sexual abandon and marijuana use, often culminating with members of the company and the audience taking off their clothes. The vehemence of the revolutionary message and its delivery joined the Living irrevocably to the more perfervid nonviolent strain of the 1960s counterculture.

“I demand everything — total love, an end to all forms of violence and cruelty such as money, hunger, prisons, people doing work they hate,” Ms. Malina explained in a 1968 interview with The New York Times Magazine about the sort off revolution her theater wanted to engender. “We can have tractors and food and joy. I demand it now!”

Performances of “Paradise Now” often generated chaos in the theater and controversy outside it. In Europe, where the Living became a collective (operating as, in one reporter’s words, “a tribe or an anarchist’s commune”) and commanded a large and youthful following that newspapers routinely described as hippies, the police were called to shut down or prevent performances of “Paradise Now” and other Living shows in Rome, Avignon and elsewhere. In 1968 the Living returned to the United States, where, after a performance at Yale, several members of the company and the audience were arrested for indecent exposure.

The Living subsequently appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where their performances engendered, in addition to the usual raucous reception, a critical war waged in print, including in The New York Times, where critics including Walter Kerr and Eric Bentley dismissed the Living as jejune and antitheatrical, and Clive Barnes, who approved of the company’s invention and physicality, saw in it a melding of theater and dance.

The critic Richard Gilman wrote of the Living’s “Antigone” in The Atlantic: “The play is nearly intolerable whenever it has to be acted, whenever lines have to be spoken and consciousness invoked,” adding, “It is evident from the beginning that whatever else it has become, the Living Theater has lost almost all its never more than marginal abilities for the rudimentary processes of acting: speech, characterization, the assumption of new invented life.”

Writing in Saturday Review, however, Henry Hewes declared, “What they have done with Brecht’s 1947 version of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ is incredible and enormous.” He added: “This ‘Antigone’ makes theatrical history with its fierce totality of commitment. It is beyond theater.”

Ms. Malina was born in Kiel, a port city in northern Germany, on June 4, 1926. Her mother, Rosel Zamojre, had been an aspiring actress before she married Max Malina, a rabbinical student who became a leading cleric after the family moved to New York City. There, according to John Tytell’s exhaustive book, “The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage” (1995), Ms. Malina met Mr. Beck in 1943, when she was just 17, and together they undertook a cultural education, attending the theater, visiting museums and reading modernist writers like Joyce, Pound and Cocteau. Ms. Malina worked as a singing waitress in a Greenwich Village bar and eventually enrolled in Piscator’s workshop at the New School for Social Research.