A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 4

 

[Part 4 of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” below, starts with the theater director’s return to New York City after his two-year sojourn in New Mexico and the Four Corners.  Having formed his second performing group, the Appleseed Circus, the first he launched on his own, Shapiro assembled a group of actors to initiate his second and most significant troupe, the Shaliko Company, whose name was a product of his New Mexico experience. 

[All of his previous experiences and influences coalesced to guide Shapiro’s experimentation in founding Shaliko.  As you’ll see, the company’s earliest productions were manifestations of what he’d learned up to this point.  

[You’ll also see that many of Shapiro’s childhood experiences and interests began to show up in his artistic work, as they would continue to do for the rest of his life.  Unhappily, the same was true of his problems, faults, and obsessions.

[Furthermore, this section of the bio looks at Shapiro’s contentious relationship with the press, a development which had profound effects on the theater artist’s work and life.

[As I have, starting with the second installment of the bio post, I strongly suggest to all readers who haven’t been following along since Part 1, that they go back and pick up the earlier segments of “A Biography” (16, 19, and 22 April) before reading this segment.  As with any chronological narrative, later parts will make more sense if you know what went before.]

Returning to New York in 1971 after the dissolution of the Appleseed Circus, Shapiro sought out the actors he’d known in the 1960s at New York University’s theater program.  Among Shapiro’s other acquaintances at NYU had been director André Gregory (b. 1934), founder of the Manhattan Project; Omar Shapli, who started the improvisational group Section 10; and director-teacher Richard Schechner, who launched the Performance Group (forerunner of the Wooster Group).  They’d all started their companies after studying with Grotowski and employed, in one way or another, the techniques Grotowski taught.  

Filled with ideas by Kass, Carl Weber, and Grotowski, and inspired by the examples of his predecessors—certainly because of the Becks’ influence, and Theater Genesis’s example—Shapiro put Shaliko together in January 1972 using former NYU students, including Candace Tovar, who was now his wife; Margaret Pine; Tom Crawley; and Linda Putnam.

The first Shaliko (Shapiro would re-form the troupe twice over its existence) was a group of young actors committed to exploring together the possibilities of performance as an expression of personal, artistic, and social concerns.  The overarching aim of this ensemble was “a new synthesis of theatrical forms that is directly rooted in our belief in the importance of learning to speak the truth in public to a public that has been conditioned since childhood by euphemism, packaging and illusion.”

From its formation, Shaliko was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary ensemble of American performers and collaborators of European, African, and Hispanic descent as well as artists from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, drawing on the traditions of Native American cultures, European experimentalism, and Asian classical arts. 

In the early months of its formation starting in late January 1972, The Shaliko Company spent time getting to know one another through games and exercises.  They devoted 30 hours a week—outside their bread-and-butter jobs—to physical training (10-15 hours) and work on texts (15-20 hours). 

Actor Christopher McCann (b. 1952), an early member of the ensemble, recalled that exercises like “blind combat,” in which the actors wear blindfolds and circle one another wielding wooden swords and out of which eventually grew the troupe’s first project, produced “a kind of physicality that ensued with people searching each other out—that enlivened your senses to what was happening in the room even though you couldn’t see anything.” 

Shapiro described the process of arriving at Shaliko’s first production:

We spent two months exploring our range.  Seeing what we could do and how far we could push ourselves.  Developing techniques that could use the new possibilities we were discovering.  By March [1972], we became more text-oriented and started trying out material.  We went through texts rather quickly, using them as tools to further our own growth, pushing them to their limits, then moving on to richer material. . . .  We were looking for a script that spoke directly to the needs we felt we shared with our audience, a script strong enough to take all we could put of ourselves into it and still maintain its own integrity.  By June, we had discovered the Greeks.

Not surprisingly, considering Shapiro’s early literary aspirations, among the earliest texts with which Shaliko experimented were poetry.  After testing Kenneth Koch’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1962), “a grade school skit, celebrating the American myth,” in February 1972 and discovering that it was “too thin” and “would not bear our weight,” the nascent Shaliko took up W. H. Auden’s (British-American; 1907-73) ballad “Victor,” a 1937 narrative of how modern society produces lost souls—elements of which sentiment found their way into Strangers in 1990.

Company literature stated that “Victor,” in its rendition of the story of a man who is so conditioned by his father’s rigid moral upbringing that he is alienated from society, “reflects our interest in making theatrical sense out of narrative material.” 

(The theme of parents sacrificing their children was a constant of Shapiro’s artistic work.  It appeared both literally and figuratively in many Shaliko works over the years.)

In May came Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-97) “September on Jessore Road” (1971), a long lyric poem describing the devastating 1968 floods and famine in India and chastising the U.S. for using its wealth to bomb Southeast Asians instead of sending humanitarian assistance to desperate Indians. 

At the same time that Shapiro and his new troupe were planning to work on Ginsberg’s poem, they also intended to begin work on another poetic theater piece, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe, a celebration of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik establishment of the Soviet Union.  This is significant, even though the planned “street show” adaptation never occurred, because a decade-and-a-half later, Shaliko would develop a modern version of this play about revolution (see “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018). 

During the planned rehearsals of Mystery-Bouffe, the company wanted to develop an adaptation of William Golding’s The Inheritors, a 1955 novel which relates the destruction of the primitive Neanderthals by the more advanced Homo sapiens, but ultimately couldn’t secure the rights.  Then, after a year, the demand to produce became “pretty intense” and, “blind combat” having evolved into the Trojan War, Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis, premièred in February 1973 at Philip Arnoult’s (b. 1941) Theatre Project in Baltimore.  (See my post, “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021.)

In May, Shaliko presented it in New York as part of an NYU Ensemble Theatre Project festival, a venture intended as a showcase for the work of small performing troupes spawned by the School of the Arts.  Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, a friend from the NYU days who followed Shapiro’s work from the beginning, pronounced Children “incredibly exciting.” 

The inaugural production also began Shaliko’s work on some of Shapiro’s most fundamental techniques and theatrical principals.  His employment of circus arts was fully in evidence in Children, which led inevitably to the work on the real-time event (see my post on 6 July 2021), which is dependent on the audience-performer relationship. 

The connection is straightforward.  Theater artists create illusions, Hovey Burgess, the NYU circus-arts teacher, believed.  “Circus is more real” because, he insisted, “[e]verything that happens in the circus should really be happening.”  What the audience sees, Burgess pointed out, is what is happening at that moment.  These notions formed the foundation of Shaliko productions for the rest of Shapiro’s career.

Also starting with Children, Shapiro developed an actor-audience contract that made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” under the influence of Russian and Soviet master filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and theater experimentalist Vsevolod Meyerhold (Russian; 1874-1940). 

As New Leader critic Albert Bermel (1927-2013) noted, “Around and above the playing area . . . stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses.  Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers,” with, as Shapiro put it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.”

A similar relationship between the performers and the spectators was established in almost all of Shaliko’s productions throughout its existence.  Shapiro frequently affirmed: “What I want to do is to make passionate art involved with the audience.”

In the earliest shows, such as Children of the Gods, it was made clear to the audience what its role was.  As Shaliko and Shapiro matured, the specific audience-performer relationship became less explicit—but it was always part of Shapiro’s production plan.

The explorations of the real-time experience, the theater as thought-provoker, and the involvement of the audience in the performance event all had their most undiluted expression in Shaliko’s second production, Brecht’s The Measures Taken. 

The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project and on 30 September at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, introduced Shaliko to Joseph Papp (1921-91) who saw a performance at NYU and offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as their home.  (Under Dickinson’s sponsorship, Shaliko toured Pennsylvania, including several union halls and prisons.)

The production, described as “a vigorous American adaptation,” moved into the Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Measures, one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “teaching plays,” was written in 1930.  The play’s first English translation had been commissioned in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it questioned Brecht, but the play’s apparent defense of Communist Party actions found little sympathy at either HUAC or, evidently, many theater groups. 

(Ironically, the socialist Guardian, New York City’s weekly newspaper of the Communist Party USA, dubbed Shaliko’s production “anticommunist” and declared, “In the guise of ‘honoring’ Brecht it is actually a stab in the back.”)

Shapiro, in fact, saw in the play’s investigation of the murder of a Young Comrade by a detachment of Soviet Agitators sent to China to foment revolution, a debate on political terrorism, a way to study “the paradoxes of radical committment [sic].”

Shaliko selected Measures almost by accident.  Following Children of the Gods, the company had begun work on a stage version of H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) The Time Machine, one of several “fantasy projects” Shapiro developed over the years because of his continuing interest in science fiction and utopian visions.  The production never materialized, and the company began tossing about for another project. 

Shapiro had earlier suggested The Measures Taken, but the company rejected it as too “hard-edged,” not to mention that, as a learning play, it was considered boring.  (Brecht’s Lehrstücke were meant as indoctrination for young communist party members; they weren’t intended for performances before the general public.)

While Shapiro was away from New York in Saint Paul “sitting shiva” for his father (who had died on 15 January 1974), the company reconsidered the Brecht play.  When the director returned from Minnesota in late January 1974, he found the actors reading Measures. 

After Children, a number of the original company members had left Shaliko, including Tovar; Shapiro was in the throes of reorganizing the company; his marriage was dissolving, and he’d just left his hometown after Irving’s death.  He threw himself into the rehearsals for Measures, which he began to see not as a staged lecture, but “as a rip-roaring kind of . . . kung-fu Western.” 

In Measures, the role of the audience was the most specific of any Shaliko production.  Shapiro used direct address between the Control Council and the spectators and at the outset, the Chief Commissioner states: “[W]e are asking you to represent students.” 

Because the Control Council questioned the theatergoers about what was going on in the play, the real-time event was also most obvious, and the play was different every night.  “Every night the audience went out arguing with each other,” which, of course, was what Shapiro had formed Shaliko to provoke.  These techniques were never as blatant again.

Measures was well received by audiences, eventually playing over 300 performances, joining in repertory Shaliko’s April 1975 offering at the Public, an environmental production of Ibsen’s Ghosts (see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (shaliko’s ghosts, 1975), 6 September 2014). 

Shapiro’s model for Ghosts was a séance with “the actors haunting the audience, as if spirits of the past; the audience haunting the characters, spirits of the future,” so designer Jerry Rojo (1935-2018) created for the Public’s small (99 seats) Susan Stein Shiva Theater, a former movie theater, “an environment of lush Victoriana, where the audience pockets function as walls separating the rooms of this Victorian environment” which he thought of as “womb-like.”  Shapiro was most pleased with the lighting:

To encourage an historical environmental reality for audience/performer there was an authentic use of props and light.  The lighting was created by using period practical electric light fixtures (1910) to achieve a natural incandescent light.  And the performers were directed to actually control the illumination for the play.

Shapiro’s point with the Shaliko production of Ghosts was that the past haunts the present; he evoked it in the program with an allusion to the Norwegian playwright: “We sail,” Shapiro quoted Ibsen (from the 1875 poem “A Letter In Rhyme”), “[w]ith a corpse in the cargo.”

Set designer Jerry Rojo noted that the “actors . . . really use their own private worlds as catalysts for the roles,” which is a fine thumbnail definition of basic Stanislavskian acting. 

The description also suggests the seeds of what would become “testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013), though Shapiro pointed out that Ghosts was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience.

In Children and Measures, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children and students being indoctrinated in party practice in Measures—but in Ghosts, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors.

This form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, a direct parallel to Grotowski’s practice, though sometimes the spectators of both Grotowski’s performances and Shapiro’s didn’t recognize their roles. 

In The Yellow House, for instance, the audience was supposed to stand in for Theo van Gogh (Dutch; 1857-91), the painter’s brother, but the relationship was never acknowledged.  (In the first version, in fact, an actor portrayed Theo from a microphone behind the audience, who never saw him.) 

In Ghosts, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro’s séance paradigm helps explain his interest in scenes which weren’t so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some reviewers.

Shaliko’s third production, or its critical reception, revealed something else about Shapiro’s theatrical world.  Shapiro was developing a fraught relationship with the press. 

Shapiro insisted that most audiences responded with “eagerness and enthusiasm.”  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), critic and longtime editor of the Best Plays annuals, called the production “distinguished” and Richard Schechner proclaimed, “The show is very good, and important.  People should see it[.  Y]ears from now they may lie and pretend they did.”  

Peter Kass, Shapiro’s former acting teacher at NYU, even went to the length of sending Joseph Papp a telegram asking, “Do you know that the most extraordinary production of Ghosts is being given by the Shaliko Company at the Public Theater.”

In the New York-area press, only Barbara Ettorre of Women’s Wear Daily and Emory Lewis of The Record in New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County praised the production, with Lewis writing that Shapiro “has staged this probing play with extraordinary finesse.  He choreographed every movement.  The work becomes a dance of life.”  (Readers should note that in years past, both Women’s Wear Daily and the Bergen Record were considered significant critical voices in New York theater.)

In St. Louis, according to Judy Newmark, Shapiro “endowed Henrik Ibsen’s classic with the vitality and strength that may have characterized its original performance before the turn of the century.”  Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post that Shapiro’s “inventive staging . . . produces the immediacy that can draw the audience into the world of the play” and that Shaliko’s “most original conception of the play . . . never falls back on standard interpretations.” 

Many critics, however, including Clive Barnes of the Times, Marilyn Stasio of Cue, Julius Novick of the Village Voice, Martin Gottfried and Richard Watts of the New York Post, Edith Oliver of the New Yorker, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News, didn’t appreciate Shapiro’s concept of the production.

(It’s notable that the New York Post ran two reviews, one by Martin Gottfried and one by Richard Watts, both negative, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News felt strongly enough that he published two negative reviews himself, one in the daily paper and one in the Sunday edition.  The Times also ran a daily notice by Clive Barnes and then Walter Kerr published his Sunday column.)

Calling the production “thoroughly mindless,” Timesman Kerr (1913-96), who carried a lot of weight in the New York theater world, gave an entirely negative appraisal of the performance in his Sunday “Arts and Leisure” column of 13 April 1975.  It was so dismissive that it compelled Shapiro to write a rebuttal, which ran on 11 May. 

The Shaliko director wrote:

Are we going to allow these guardians of public taste to stand between us and fresh experience, or can we somehow restore criticism to its proper role as a stimulant to discussion and invention, rather than a limit imposed by a select few on what artists and audiences are allowed to say, feel, do, dare?

Noting that “the pattern of rejection . . . finally became clear,”  Shapiro and the New York Shakespeare Festival (later renamed the Public Theater) published an announcement for Ghosts in the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News which juxtaposed the critical response in 1891, the play’s London début, with that in New York in 1975.  

Later that same year, Shapiro spoke at “a colloquium of critics”—a regular meeting of the New York City membership of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA)—at La MaMa “and made the mistake of saying exactly what I thought.”

In a 1991 Village Voice column, Shapiro wrote a broadside in which he alleged, “After 25 years in the theater, I know what everybody knows.  The critics hate the theater [and] the artists hate the critics . . . .”

(The Voice appended to the column as an epigraph the famous quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!” just to be certain no one missed Shapiro’s point.  The author affirmed that he hadn’t used this quotation; the paper’s editors inserted it.  Indeed, Shapiro’s typescript of the essay doesn’t include the quotation.)

Pretty much from Ghosts on, Shapiro and most of the New York City theater writers had an adversarial relationship—and Shapiro was mostly on the losing side.

[Part 4 is the mid-point in this eight-part biographical sketch of the experimental theater-maker Leonardo Shapiro.  Part 5, which I’ll be posting on Friday, 28 April, takes up the continuation of his history with The Shaliko Company, which he disbanded and restarted twice before closing it for good after 20 years.

[You’ll read about Shapiro’s brief stint as a freelance director and the end of his association with Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  This led to his relationship with Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

[Please come back to Rick On Theater for the next installment of my biography of Leonardo Shapiro.  I’m sure you will find it revealing, for both those who knew the director and those who didn’t.]