The conflation of ‘art in the streets’ with ‘revolution in the streets’ was a characteristic feature of the anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties. Evidence of the many and varied ways in which the separation of art and politics was contested can not only be found in pageants like the ‘Death of Money and the Birth of Free’ – the public ritual orchestrated by the Diggers in the Haight- Ashbury on 16 December 1966 to reclaim the streets – or in different forms of theatrical protest at demonstrations, in folk and rock music, in festivals, in happenings, in poster art, and also in the writings of sixties radicals themselves: books, pamphlets, poems and manifestos. To the Diggers, theatre was a territory to create ‘life actors’, seeking ‘audiences that are created by issues’. Such political theatre, described in The Digger Papers as ‘a theatre of the underground that wants out’, aimed primarily to ‘create a cast of freed beings’, to ‘liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish a territory without walls’.

In the opinion of Abbie Hoffman, the use of art in general and theatre in particular was also one of the many ways in which the Yippies were distinguished from other less ‘subversive’, and disciplinary forms of Left radicalism.