Stephan Balint, 64, a Founder of the Squat Theater, Dies
Published: December 2, 2007
Stephan Balint, the underground Hungarian writer, actor and director who gained fame in New York with the above-ground Squat Theater in the late 1970s and ’80s, died on Oct. 11 in Budapest. He was 64.
The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, said Marcel DuClos, his son-in-law. The death was announced by the company on its Web site, squattheatre.com, but was not immediately reported in the American news media
Mr. Balint began his theatrical career in Budapest, where he was part of an experimental theater collective. The band of performers departed from the Socialist Realism formulas mandated in 1970s Hungary, raising the ire of the Communist cultural enforcers but winning the devotion of the country’s young artists. Banned from performing in public theaters, the group moved their shows to various apartments.
Hounded by the authorities, Mr. Balint and the rest of the troupe, which included the playwright Peter Halasz, left Hungary and ended up in New York City in 1977. They set up shop at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, a gathering place for avant-garde artists, before settling the Squat Theater into a permanent home on the same street.
Mr. Balint, who changed his first name from Istvan to Stephan after he moved to New York, would often write, act in and direct the company’s plays, which sometimes spilled from the storefront stage onto the street.
“On one amazing night they did this piece called ‘Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free,’ ” the director Jonathan Demme told The Guardian in 1998. “In New York City traffic they had this military jeep, with four soldiers in it, do a screaming U-turn in the middle of 23rd Street. The jeep goes up on the sidewalk while people are walking by, the soldiers jump out of the jeep, run into the theater, grab one of the characters in the play, put them in the jeep and then they’re gone. You never see them again, and that was the most amazing moment in live theater I’ve ever seen!”
In works like “Pig, Child, Fire!” and “Andy Warhol’s Last Love,” Mr. Balint and his group explored pop culture, consumerism, sex and violence. Like other experimental theater groups of the time, Squat mixed media and discarded conventional plot lines.
When the stage was dark, the theater turned into a nightclub that attracted filmmakers, artists and new musicians like Sun Ra, the Lounge Lizards, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Defunkt and DNA. Mr. Balint’s adolescent daughter, Eszter, who acted in nearly all the group’s plays, would serve as D.J.
Istvan Balint was born in Budapest on July 11, 1943, to the artist Endre Balint and his wife, Iren Richter, the descendant of a long line of intellectuals.
Besides his daughter, Eszter Balint of New York, his survivors include his son, Gaspar, of Budapest, and a grandchild.
After Squat split in two in 1985, Mr. Balint and the members who remained continued to perform.
Mr. Balint also worked in movies, writing and appearing in the photographer Robert Frank’s 1989 film, “Hunter.”
After Hungary’s Communist regime collapsed, Mr. Balint returned in 1991 to the country of his birth. His most recent book was a 2005 collection of prose poems with drawings by the artist Gabor Rosko.
Ms. Balint said in an e-mail message that her father was “an equal-opportunity enthusiast.”
“He succumbed to the joys of Archie Bunker with the same pure and hearty enthusiasm as to the novels of Franz Kafka,” she said.
