Karen Malpede’s new release Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths is many things. It’s a theatre memoir in the cultural avant-garde of downtown New York, a grief essay, a polemic about cancer treatment and a love story – of Karen and her actor/producer husband George Bartenieff. But when she first began writing it, she thought it had defeated her.
I wrote a draft of the first chapter soon after George died. It covers the story of my complex, violent yet compelling father and his excruciating death from cancer when he was 44 and I was 19. A few weeks later, I reread the chapter and realized it was awful. I remember lying on my couch, overwhelmed with grief as I was during almost the entire writing of this book, and, suddenly overwhelmed by the pedestrian quality of my writing. I had just lost my great love of 35 years, a brilliant actor/producer who starred in my last 11 plays. Had I also lost my writing voice? Was I truly bereft of everything I had and was?
In a fog, I got up, went to my computer and rewrote the chapter completely, in one sitting. I had found the voice of the book, and it was a passionate, poetic voice, much like the voice of my plays. I wrote myself through my grief. The book was not a cure for grief, but writing was the one thing I could do, other than walk my dog. I was barely eating. I wrote very close to the core; I could not have done otherwise. I was living in extremity.
How did you find the book’s throughline?
I knew the book’s arc before I began. It was to be a love story about the extraordinary artists I knew who died of cancer, but who lived with a blazing fierceness, creating art and ritual, stimulating community, and exemplifying nonviolent change from the American Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar and ecofeminist movements, to today. The book is both a record of a time gone by and a guidebook for the young actors, writers and activists I now work with. We need to remember our past as we resist the violence of today.
The book is full of sex, love, stories of the audacious things we did, of the rigors of artistic creations against great odds and the particular intimacies of the conscious deaths of three extraordinary people: Julian Beck, co-founder of the Living Theatre, Barbara Deming, lesbian feminist poet and activist, and George.
What I did not fully understand until I finished the book, and began emerging from the intensity of my grief, is how rich my life has been as an artist, and how many extraordinary people I came to know through my work, who inhabit the pages of this book. We had great adventures together. The play Us, whichI wrote after Julian Beck’s death and dedicated to him, is still a shocker, for its depiction of sexual violence and of Eros. When there is death there has to be sex and I tell that story in the book.
Us brought me to George. We fell in love during rehearsals and we made art together for the next 35 years. The play has just been republished in an anthology, 4 by Malpede plus an Intervention.
I’ve seen the term ‘narrative medicine‘ used about this book. What is narrative medicine? How does it apply to Last Radiance?
Narrative medicine is a practice of engaging with artistic expressions to help physicians become more aware of their patients’ feelings and of their own.
Dr Rita Charon founded the narrative medicine program at Columbia University’s School of Medicine. In the spring of 2023, she brought her physician students to see my short play Troy Too, which is about Covid, climate change and Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd on the street in Minneapolis (the city ICE agents are currently terrorizing). The repeated refrain linking these three crises is “I can’t breathe”.
Rita and the doctors were deeply moved because the play also dramatized the emotional challenges to the medical profession as they were overwhelmed by a pandemic of a disease they had never before heard of.
Illness is not just medical treatment; illness becomes a big part of the story of a life. Cancer treatments can last a long time. George and I became quite close to his doctor. We learned a lot about him and he learned a lot about us. I tell that complex story in the book. I intend my book to be of use to physicians and to everyone dealing with cancer.
What does drama let you do that prose doesn’t, and vice versa? And true events versus fictional stories?
I’ve always written nonfiction essays alongside my plays, often related to the research for a play. I wrote a series of articles about torture for the international Torture Magazine during 2011-2013, I staged four productions of Another Life, my surreal, satirical play about the US torture program. I worked with lawyers and journalists who had worked closely with torture victims. During the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, where my play Extreme Whether was performed after its first New York production, I wrote a series of online essays about climate change for the Kenyon Review. One was about reading Moby Dick to George. But I had never before written anything as personal as a memoir.
How was that, writing something so personal?
Until I began to work with Melissa Slayton, a talented developmental editor, I did not have much about my own young life in the book. It was about my characters. I came into focus and became one of the central characters during my work on revisions.
People have told me that my book “though it is about death is so alive” (a quote from a reader). I think the book’s “aliveness” comes from my work as a playwright. I know how to write characters that jump off the page. The character I had to learn how to write was myself.
Whether you’re writing prose or drama, what sends you to the page? What are your curiosities and crusades?
What sends me to the page is a sense of injustice and the stories of people hurt by violence who need to heal. Art and literature, whether Picasso’s Guernica or the classical Greek tragic theater, which has influenced me deeply, are ways to address violence and war, but also to suggest mediations or healing and to envision worlds that have not happened yet.
Greek tragedy was created as part of the healing process for combat veterans, who had to attend the annual theater festivals. Robert Jay Lifton, the noted psychiatrist of collective traumas from Vietnam soldiers’ PTSD to Hiroshima and the Holocaust, described my work as a Theatre of Witness.
My work addresses violence by paying attention to the victims of that violence–to how they are seen, heard, comforted and become, again, functioning members of society. My work takes place between characters as they learn and change. I am not interested in violence—violence is cheap and easy and all too prevalent. I am interested in the healing journey of people who have suffered.
In Last Radiance cancer is the great adversary, but my characters are all pacifist protestors who have taken part in the great nonviolent movements of the 20th and 21st centuries—against racism, sexism, violence and environmental degradation. It is in the communities we form that we find the strength and the joy to act against violence in all its forms, including illness, becoming more luminous even until death. These are stories I have told on the stage, which I now tell in personal fashion on the page.
Trawling your photos on Facebook I found your wedding photo which you shared last year. I was charmed by the caption – ‘Our wedding photo. I just found it. We were casting “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” for its first, and wonderful, performance in Lee Nagrin’s loft space on Bleeker St. And we ran down to City Hall during our lunch break. My daughter (centre) brought us sunflowers (because of our trips to Umbria, surrounded by sunflower fields) and she brought two friends. We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and went back to work. It was the first production of Theater Three Collaborative Inc’. This moment says so much about theatre as the intense centre of your life – you grabbed some friends at lunchtime, nipped out to marry, had a quick Chinese meal and, newly united, got back to the work.
Perhaps because theatre is a public ritual George and I did not feel the need to make our wedding one. My daughter, Carrie Sophia, who was 14, brought two of her friends along with sunflowers. Lee Nagrin, a great downtown performer, who was in the play, was our adult witness. That’s Lee with us at the back.
What do you do to unwind?
Whenever I am stuck, I walk my dog. The movement frees my unconscious and often the next sentence appears and I return to my desk. I live in Fort-Greene-Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, two adjoining neighborhoods that have been inter-racial artists’ communities for decades. There are off-leash hours before 9am. We hang out and begin our days with lots of dogs running about and the interesting people who accompany them. As I now live alone, mornings in the park can often be the most social part of my day. I also like to cook and give parties, though I stopped after George died except for two large Yahrzeit gatherings. Of course, I go to the theatre and films and I read.
I just saw a pic of you on a horse, and everyone who reads my blog knows I am a devoted horsewoman. So here’s a self-indulgent question to finish with. Tell me about you and horses.
I was a rider in my youth. When I have travelled to Egypt and England, I have ridden. (I don’t ride in New York, it’s an expensive and labour-intensive sport; and so is the theatre.) I rode in Ecuador last winter. Though I can still sit a horse, I would need serious lessons before my body could obey my instincts again. I do belong to a favorite facebook group called “Still In the Saddle over Seventy” and I relish all the photos of folks and their horses. One talent I have kept from my days of being tossed off of horses, is that I know how to fall. I go limp, and fortunately to date have never broken a bone.
Find Last Radiance, Radical Lives, Bright Deaths here. Find Karen on Facebook and on her website Theater Three Collaborative where you can find her plays, performances and videos. Top portrait pic by Salem Krieger. Reading pic by Jackie Rudin.
There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And I’m working on new material! Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you updates and two new pieces of life writing every month. Here’s my latest. You can subscribe to future updates here.
I first met Porter when I was finding my feet as a novelist. It was 2011. I was about to launch 
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