As founder of the Open Theater, “celebrated for shaking up the presentation of drama in the 1960’s, Mr. Chaikin collaborated with Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard and staged works in the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Yale Repertory, the Manhattan Theater Club, the Mark Taper Forum and many other theaters. He received five Obie awards, two Guggenheim fellowships and many other honors. …
“The Open Theater became America’s most storied performance group, an experiential retreat where actors and audiences tried out a new stage vocabulary blending mime, dance and storytelling, often to provocative effect.”
–Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, June 24, 2003