January 10, 1970 in West Berlin, the last representation of "Paradise." After that, the Living Theater - such as it was known and has become famous for over 10 years - ceased to exist. They seem to be summed up an era: the theater as such ceased to exist, as it says "The Declaration of the Living Theater."
Reaffirming its continued commitment, which once led them to the theater, to promote the rapid destruction of the "bureaucratic military policy complex"; authors of the Declaration intended to go now to this goal in other ways. It was a premonition of acute political and social issues, which will be marked with the climate of 70-80-ies, as well as a sense of failure to change the world for ways to play at revolution, though, this game is being heralded, and other real and perceived as a magical ritual.

There was, finally, and a keen sense of very real, maturing over the whole of mankind and the threat of universal necessity of unity to counter it. However, these problems could not be formulated in the language of the counterculture, connecting themselves definitions of "drug", "rock", and «sex." For its expression are required in the transition region of other ethical and aesthetic ideals. This search was vividly embodied in the activities of two other troupes, inherent in the context of the era when the youth rebellion, having passed its peak and began to gravitate toward the sunset, and the new movement of social protest, which will mark the political life of the West in the 80s, not yet born, but groped his themes and style.
What experiences have to go through all people, surely? The experience of death. And if they no longer understand each other if the relationship between the reigns cold, not warm, it is primarily because of lost consciousness together a shared fate. This idea was central to most, perhaps, an American in its essence from the experimental theater, which was established in 1963 by actor Living Theater, did not follow him in his European travels. By this time, Joseph Chaikin was 26 years old and he already was, they say, "the actor with the demand", in other words, before it opened quite tempting prospect moving towards a professional career. From this career, he refused - none of the existing houses do not give him what he sought, including the Living Theatre. Despite the deep and sincere respect that Chaikin had for its leaders, their path and then have seemed alien to him, too subordinate topic of the day and unsuitable for the expression of what seemed to him more important. What was it?
To this should give an answer created Chaikin, Open Theatre, conceived it as a theater collective reflection of the eternal questions of human existence, among which took first place theme of human mortality.