is the 'gos, so there aren't any pickets this time. No padlocks, no cops confiscating scenery, no sit-ins, no final defiant performances with spectators coming into the theatre by climbing a ladder and squeezing through a window. That was 1963, and the Living Theatre was being evicted from its I4th Street space for nonpayment of taxes. Quarantined in the theatre's office, Julian Beck, the LT's late codirector, watched IRS agents lumber through the theatre slapping Federal Property labels on everything in sight. It's like a Beat Cherry Orchard, he remarked. Soon after, the LT left the U.S. and didn't come back-save for a few performance tours-for 20 years. Now, io years after their return, LT codirectors Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov gaze at the debris piled up in their dank 3rd Street and Avenue C theatre as the company prepares to evacuate by the end of this month. This is more like the abandoned landscape of Beckett, Reznikov says; leaving this time like a low-budget Happy Days. fall the New York City fire and building departments cited the theatre for violations of the fire code and the company's failure to attain a certificate of occupancy. While Reznikov says the fire code violations are minor-the fire department, he says, responsibly checked us out after the Happy Land fire and said we were OK-the certificate problem seems unresolvable. Compliance would cost the company many tens of thousands of dollars-an impossible sum for the strapped collective, already debating whether it's right to put its resources into rent instead of actors' salaries. Add that the company spends several months a year on tour, and it just doesn't make sense anymore to try and maintain a year-round home. So is the Living Theatre-those revolutionary pacifist-anarchist rabblerousing avantgardists-just quietly closing up and moving on like everybody else who can't scrape by in the endless recession? You mean, they're not being evicted for political reasons? I'd have loved to be dragged out of 3rd Street kicking and screaming, Malina says, gleaming at the thought. But, she's quick to point out, the failure of a society to support and value culture, experimentation, anything that doesn't pay for itself, is, of course, a deeply political matter. When addressed by the LT, the question isn't just a matter of how artists can get their piece of the pie, but of whether the recipe is any good. Indeed, the company is currently beginning work on an adaptation of Fernand Braudel's epic study of the modern economic system, Material Civilization and Capitalism: I4oo-I800. They hope to develop it in France through the spring, and bring it to New York next winter. And certainly there are political efects of closing the 3rd Street theatre, as it became not only the center of almost nightly poetry, music and dance performances, but headquarters for local squatters, assorted peaceniks, and