A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 8

 

[This is the last entry in the Leonardo Shapiro biographical series.  Shapiro’s return to the New Mexico terrain where he roamed with the Appleseed Circus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where he got married, and where his son was born, initiated a period of nostalgic contemplation. 

[Out of this reflection came a focus on the children of Vallecito, the little collection of homes where he and Spartacus built his retirement house in the sacred Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and generated three plays (two of which were meant for children).  It also produced a long poem about his father, mother, and grandfather, and the start of a libretto of a planned opera about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose marriage he saw as a contrast with that of his own parents.

[This final period of Shapiro’s life also brought about the last production of his career, the staging of Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to Shapiro.  To close the circle of his life, the director arranged for the young Riverside Repertory Theatre Company to tour the show to Baltimore and perform there at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project, the space where The Shaliko Company made its début 23 years before.  Poignantly, Shapiro was too sick at the end to make the fateful trip east with his troupe.

[I hope ROTters have been reading along with the narrative of Leo Shapiro’s life and work.  If you haven’t and are just joining the thread, I heartily recommend that you go back to the beginning and pick up the first seven parts of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro.”  Parts 1 through 7 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 and 4 May.]

In conjunction with his work with neighborhood children, Shapiro experimented with radio drama (Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun: Radioromance, 1993), a play for children (Who Stole Summer?, 1994), and a television script (Runaway Sam in the Promised Land: an after school fairy tale for television, 1994).  The author had sent me copies of all these scripts, which I read with great interest—especially the last one.

His concern for ecology and the environment, and especially his focus on nuclear pollution, are openly reflected in these plays, as are several of his philosophic interests.  Nothing Is Ever Lost, which is not a children’s script, is based on Doctor Faustus; it actually begins as a radio broadcast of Marlowe’s play (which The Shaliko Company produced in 1988) and transforms into a search for a missing shipment of radioactive waste from the “Los Alamos National Weapons Complex.” 

In Who Stole Summer?, the play he presented at his home with the local children, Shapiro used an actual event in the valley—the infestation of grasshoppers—to develop a fable of toxic pollution and government collusion with commercial interests. 

Though this is a children’s play, Shapiro employs language and allusions that are almost certainly too sophisticated or obscure for most of the preteenagers and young adolescents with whom he was working: What 11-year-old in 1994, for instance, would know Leonard Peltier (b. 1944), the jailed American Indian activist, or recognize a character called “Dead Nixon,” the embodiment of the evil government conspirators?  (His television script also includes language and images that no broadcaster would likely accept for its airwaves, and he even wrote of his radio play that it “seems unproduc[e]able.”)

Perhaps the most personally revealing of Shapiro’s three New Mexico scripts is his teleplay, which he dedicated to his son, Spartacus.  Runaway Sam in the Promised Land, set in New York (the other two take place in New Mexico and the Four Corners), is the magical tale of a 10-year-old boy who goes off in search of a mythical Jerusalem because he thinks finding it will prevent the break-up of his parents’ marriage. 

While Shapiro makes comments along the way regarding homelessness, AIDS, and police overzealousness, what he seems to be doing is retelling—from his point of view, assuredly—the dissolution of his own marriage to Candace Tovar in 1973 (when Spartacus was only two; by 10, he was already living with his mother, away from his father). 

Back in the immediate locale of his idyllic wedding to Tovar and the birth of his son, a time on which he clearly looked back with nostalgic fondness, and engaging in considerable introspection, he revisited this episode in his life.  From his letters, it’s obvious that Shapiro was, indeed, reflecting at length on his first stay in Taos, his life then, and, specifically, his wedding to Tovar. 

He’d also been thinking about his mother, who’d died of lung cancer on 12 February 1994—Shapiro returned to Saint Paul in December of 1993 to nurse her—but he was conscientiously trying to “erase the tapes” of his past: “I want to escape from my painful memories and I want to explore them,” he wrote, “I want to make something happen, but I want to stay comfortable, I want to act but I don’t want to do it YET.  I drift.”

Nonetheless, he obviously found himself dwelling not only on his own marriage, but that of his parents as well.  Rosalía Triana thought that in the Julius and Ethel libretto, Shapiro “romanticized [the Rosenberg’s] love as being the opposite of his awful memories of his own parents.”

(In brief, Julius [1918-53] and Ethel [1915-53] Rosenberg were arrested for having passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War.  They were tried for espionage in 1951 and executed on 19 July 1953, but the case generated a great deal of controversy which continued until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

(Despite evidence from Soviet files showing that the couple were probably guilty, some Americans continued to feel that the trial, in the midst of the so-called “Red Scare” of the 1950s, could not have been fair, that the secrets the Rosenbergs stole were of little value since the Soviet scientists certainly already possessed them, and that the death penalty was too severe a punishment were it not politically motivated.

(As might be guessed, the Rosenbergs were an enduring symbol for Shapiro and he had begun planning the opera based on their marriage even before he left New York for retirement.)

Shapiro had had a great deal of trouble writing the book for this opera—the existing text is only a little over five pages—because, Triana felt, he had conflicted feelings about the material.  In Shapiro’s script, Julius Rosenberg says of the time he met Ethel: “I knew she was for me if she’d have me, and I’ve loved her ever since that night. . . .  I know they can never part us.  Nothing will.”

In contrast with this sentiment, in a poem Shapiro also began composing before he left New York, he wrote in brutal and disturbing phrases of the dissolution of his parents’ marriage in 1951—right around the time of the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others for the theft of the United States’ nuclear secrets.  He started the poem with the lines, “When my Father dumped my Mother, / . . . / When their marriage split asunder,” and continued near the end:

Daddy, Daddy, why’d you do it?

Why’d you hit me, why’d you leave us?

(Did you steal our Money too?)  Daddy, Daddy, why’d you die?

The poem, which is untitled, also focuses on his father’s infidelity and, plainly, his physical brutality and his death. 

Working on both of these texts and the script of Runaway Sam at the same time, Shapiro was clearly going over and over the parts of his life that concerned family, marriage, and children.  In addition to the poem about the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and the idealized contrast to it in the libretto, Shapiro was transcribing and editing a recording that he’d asked his mother to make of recollections of her family’s history, which includes her father’s criminal activities, but also many descriptions of the pain and harmful consequences, particularly for her younger son, of her divorce from Shapiro’s father.     

Shapiro was also working on his own memoir at the time of his final illness and while most of what he’d sketched out by the time he died covered the positive aspects of his life—his time at the Windsor Mountain School and the period of the Appleseed Circus in New Mexico are most thoroughly discussed—he does mention incidents and occasions that were clearly painful and unpleasant.

In Runaway Sam, Max and Sally live in Brooklyn (where Shapiro had lived when he ran Shaliko) and Max drives “an ancient green V.W. van” (the very vehicle in which Shapiro arrived in Taos in 1969).  Sam’s father is a sculptor who “makes weird statues” which he displays on the streets, refusing to make anything saleable despite his wife urging.

Sally’s a dancer with commercial prospects who no longer wants to continue the bohemian existence they’ve been living.  The parallels between Max/Sally and Leo/Candy are too close to miss, and there’s even a character late in the script called Rosalie, the name Shapiro’s last romantic partner used before she returned to her home state of New Mexico. 

Among the causes of the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Tovar, for instance, was her devotion to a career in the commercial musical theater.  As we’ve seen, Tovar’d begun in this arena at NYU and in her summer employment in musical theater companies.  Shaliko’s work, reflecting Shapiro’s vision, was certainly not in this popular-entertainment vein.

What the play reveals about the real Shapiro, however, is how he saw himself—or thought others saw him.  Sally/Candy accuses Max/Leo of living a “red diaper fantasy” and asks him, “Why keep fighting a battle that’s already lost?  You can say what you want and get paid for it,” pointing out that people on the streets where Max puts his art “just trash it or take it away.  People don’t want to see that stuff in their neighborhood.” 

When Sally boasts, “People know my name now, they know who I am.  They like me,” and tells Max that New York magazine plans a feature article on her, he calls it all “[s]terile empty New York new speak” and declares it a “scam success” that doesn’t mean anything to him. 

(“Newspeak” is the fictional language of the totalitarian state invented by George Orwell [1903-50] in 1984, designed to restrict the words, and therefore the thoughts, of the citizens.  In contemporary usage, it refers to the language of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words used by politicians and officials—and Shapiro would add advertisers—to deceive the listener.)

Throughout the script, Shapiro has Sally characterize Max as a disengaged, judgmental solipsist who refuses to live in the real world; he, in turn, considers her a sell-out.  In the end, however, after Sam has failed to find Jerusalem and his father and mother confirm they can no longer live together, Max acknowledges, “I got caught by an idea about our life, now I don’t know . . . .”

In July 1995, Shapiro was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer and the doctors had expected him to die within six months of the diagnosis.  Triana recorded that Shapiro quipped at the time, “What do you get when you’ve been pissed off all your life?”

In August 1996, Shapiro returned to professional stage work, directing the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque in Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play he acknowledged as deeply meaningful to him, with Triana, as Arkadina. 

Shapiro’d been introduced to the Riverside company when he spoke to a theater class at the University of New Mexico in which Joe Pesce (not to be confused with the popular New Jersey-born film actor and comedian Joe Pesci), a company member, was a student. 

Pesce, who’d go on to play Konstantine in Seagull, shared Shapiro’s focus on Grotowski and Chaikin and was impressed with the director’s associations with them.  Pesce apprenticed himself to Shapiro—in exactly the way the director envisioned theater should be learned, as a “creative oral transmission of the secrets of the theater.” 

Later, Shapiro approached Riverside, Pesce recorded, and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  The company worked for over a year on The Seagull from rehearsal through performances. 

It was the final year of Shapiro’s life and for the five months of rehearsals, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro’d built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantine’s play—and nights watching Shapiro’s videotapes or talking with him.  (It was the same stage the director had built for Snow White and Who Stole Summer?)  It was a demonstration of the oral transmission of his theatrical lore.

The Riverside Rep production of Seagull, which used the Jean-Claude van Itallie (1936-2021) translation from the 1970s (published in 1995), was presented in Albuquerque from 22 August to 14 September 1996 (Tres Amigos Theatre; KiMo Theatre).  The set was designed by Shapiro, himself, and Spartacus designed the seagull prop used in the play-within-the-play.   

Ann L. Ryan of the Albuquerque Journal, dubbed the show “splendid” and labeled it “a vivid, heartfelt production.”  The reviewer added: “There’s an immediacy to this ‘Seagull’ that makes it feel like a long, late summer evening: haunting, lovely and ephemeral.”

In the Weekly Alibi, Sharon Kayne reported that “Riverside Repertory Theatre has that depth [required for Chekhov], and in this production of The Seagull, they show it.”

Ryan went on to compliment the company and, by implication, its director: “I’ve seen almost all of the actors in this show before in other productions, and I’ve never seen any of them better.”  Kayne observed: “The ensemble as a whole suffers from no weak links, which gives the production a sort of seamless quality. . . .  [T]he performances are excellent.  Director Leonardo Shapiro has done well.”

The director arranged for the company to tour the show to Baltimore, where it was mounted on 6-17 November at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project where Shaliko had begun with the première of Children of the Gods in 1973, but Shapiro was unable to make the trip east to oversee the performances.  Though he’d been seeking experimental and alternative treatment for the illness, he was too weak by November 1996 to travel. 

The ”brash young troupe,” as Brennen Jensen characterized Riverside Rep in Baltimore’s City Paper, “serves up a sparkling version of The Seagull.  It’s a rakish retooling that brings Chekhov’s comedic touches to the fore . . . .”  The reviewer continued, “The performances are exemplary all around,” and concluded that “laughter, not glumness, marks this successful staging.”

In the Baltimore Sun, J. Wynn Rousuck, who’d reviewed Shaliko’s Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in 1986 and reminded Baltimoreans how breathtaking he’d found it, observed that “the director draws the audience into the work by occasional direct address, by having the actors enter and exit through the audience, and by setting the stage so we become part of the audience for the play-within-a-play.”  “The result,” the review-writer continued, “is a ‘Seagull’ with definite Shapiro touches (including the type of ensemble work derived from an extended rehearsal period . . .).” 

On the website Aisle Say, Richard Gist wrote of Riverside Rep’s visit to Charm City “under Leonardo Shapiro’s inspired direction,” that ”it so appealingly captured” the “’looking-on,’ almost voyeuristic, quality . . . in this richly wrought production of Chekhov’s difficult classic.” 

Gist ended his review by affirming that “when the final curtain of this refined, handsomely atmospheric production rang down, and this zealous, gutsy, highly talented troupe . . . came out for its call, I could not keep from being inspired by stirrings . . . for it is an undertaking well worth experiencing.”  And The Sun’s Rousuck concluded his notice with “what ‘The Seagull’ has to say about the struggles of the serious artist makes it a logical swan song for this long-embattled director.”

Despite the doctors’ prognosis, Shapiro continued for a year-and-a-half, often rehearsing The Seagull at his home in Vallecito—sometimes from his sickbed—in the afternoon after returning from morning chemotherapy treatments in Albuquerque, about a 100-mile drive one way. 

He only decided to undergo chemotherapy in June 1996, after he started rehearsals in March, and company member Kerry Weddle (b. 1973?), who played Nina, believed that the director did so in order to give him more time with Riverside and Seagull. 

He was afraid to die, Weddle said, but knew that no treatment would effect a cure; Seagull, she felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.”  As the troupe attested, Shapiro demonstrated what he meant by “theater is a healing art.”

Shapiro’s discomfort was considerable at the end.  The cancer left the director weak and easily fatigued.  In the midst of his notes for his planned memoir, he wrote, “Now what?  Pain seems worse . . ., worse each day.  New lumps and hard bumps have [broken] out here in the pain, pain, pain.” 

In November, he wrote, “Doing The Seagull was good.  Pain is bad”—though he added optimistically that he was looking for something easy to work on for two to three weeks.  Members of the Riverside Repertory also noted the toll the cancer was taking on Shapiro, remarking both on the precipitous deterioration in his condition between the auditions and the end of the rehearsals and on the hardship he was having while he was working. 

The end of Seagull’s run, wrote T. D. Mobley-Martinez, who’d reported for the Albuquerque Tribune and attended some final Seagull rehearsals, wasn’t a happy prospect for Shapiro because that meant confronting the inevitable future.  “I’d rather do something beautiful,” he told another reporter, “than dwell on my symptoms.”

When Riverside Rep members visited Shapiro on his 51st birthday in January 1997, he was so confused he spoke about preparing them for the tour to Baltimore which had already taken place two months earlier. 

Seagull was Shapiro’s last project.  I don’t even know that he was able to do any writing. 

In late 1995 or early 1996, Philip C. Kolin (b. 1945), a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi for whom I had done some work, was putting together a collection of essays on Death of a Salesman in anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 1999.  He asked me if I knew anyone who’d be interested in writing about a special connection to the play, and I told him about Shapiro.

Kolin asked me to approach Shapiro, who said he’d be interested.  He died before he could write the piece.  Leonardo Shapiro died of the cancer on 22 January 1997, fifteen days after his 51st birthday.  He was buried in New Mexico. 

(I learned of Shapiro’s passing when I had called him a day or so after he died, unbeknownst to me, to check on the Salesman essay.  Sparticus answered the phone and told me his dad had just died.  On 1 April, Elena Prischepenko wrote to all Shapiro’s friends and colleagues to announce his death and let us know about a memorial service in his honor at the La MaMa Annex in New York City on the 16th.  I delivered the chronology of his career, having accidentally become his Boswell.)

The New York director’d had a profound effect on this young troupe.  (Aside from most of the actors’ youth, the company’d only formed in 1993.)  At a rehearsal about a week before Seagull opened in Albuquerque, a journalist in attendance recorded one of the members declaring: “We’re watching a master at work.”

At another rehearsal, a different reporter observed this exchange:

“You know what he’s doing,” [Richard] Van Schouwen [who played Trigorin] says.  “He’s painting a picture.  Only he’s not just using one brush or one color.  He’s, like, putting a dab of yellow here or a spot of light there.”

You start working with him, [Cynthia] Sousa [Seagull’s Paulina] says, and you see his great ability.  You see him bring out things that you never realized you had.

He’s a perfectionist, [Sandra] Timmerman [stage manager] says.  And through his perfectionism, the standards of the company have risen.

“We can never go back,” Pesce says.  “We really love him.”

When they returned from the tour to Baltimore, the Riverside Rep took a six-month break.  “We’re going into a small hiatus,” explained company artistic director Michael Najjar, who played Semyon in Baltimore but didn’t perform in Albuquerque, “to work on our acting and directing skills in a workshop setting.”

In a letter about a year-and-a-half after the production, Kerry Weddle said that the company’s year with Shapiro had quite shaken them up.  It took them some months to come to grips with the experience, but then the taste for the stage welled up and they all went back to work.  As far as I can tell, they’re still working.

[Thank you, readers, for delving into this history of one whom I consider a fascinating theater artist.  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my account of Leonardo Shapiro’s life and work and have gotten something of an idea why I think Leo is worth knowing about. 

[Back in 2011, my friend and a frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, wrote an homage to two theater artists he’d known whom he felt were remarkable.  He called the post “Saints of the Theater.”  Well, Leo Shapiro was certainly no saint—but I daresay he was well worth having known.  I’m grateful I got a chance to.

[I knew Leo for only a brief part of his life, from June 1986, when I met and interviewed him in Baltimore during the Theatre of Nations, through the end of his life—a little under 11 years.   After seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore—a show that left me awed and thrilled, I confess—I began casually to follow the work of The Shaliko Company, becoming more and more intrigued with Leo’s art.  

[My interest in Leo and the company, however, was predicated on the work, not vice versa.  During the time I knew Leo, he and I weren’t really friends, though we were something more than merely professional acquaintances.  We never really collaborated on any of his projects, though I helped superficially with his war-protest collage, Collateral Damage, in 1992 and began to help him with the abortive 1991 revival of Strangers on which he’d asked me to serve as dramaturg.  Since that production never materialized, our work together didn’t get very far, either. 

[In preparation for the Drama Review profile of Shapiro and Shaliko, I regularly attended rehearsals of Kafka, Blue Heaven, and Collateral Damage; watched several Trinity/La MaMa classes; and, at Leo’s invitation, attended occasional performances to which he took his students. 

[I spoke to him often, of course, including many hours of formal, taped interviews; read all his scripts and the many articles he’d written—not to mention the sometimes angry letters-to-the-editor he sent—watched videotapes of past performances and looked through scores of still photographs; and read most, if not all, of the reviews and articles about his productions.  I plowed through the files and records of The Shaliko Company and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and spoke to dozens of Leo’s friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, students, and board members. 

[By the time I wrote “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” at the end of 1992, I probably knew more about Shaliko than any other single person except Leo—but I knew it only as a researcher knows something; I didn’t know Leonardo Shapiro as a man.  We never had a drink together, or a meal.  We never chatted about anything aside from his work—he seldom asked me about my work (except, of course, the TDR article)—and I never saw him except when he was working or I was.  At his La MaMa memorial, I was charged with delivering a survey of Leo’s work; personal remembrances were left to the others who knew him longer and better. 

[Despite the distance, I’ve been profoundly affected by my association with Leo Shapiro.  Kirk, who never met Leo but knows Jane Mandel, one of Shaliko’s original members, had mentioned to her my continuing occupation with the life and work of her old colleague and friend.  Even six years after his death—and more than 20 since she stopped working with him—Mandel acknowledged that she still missed him and thought about him every day. 

[A member of the Riverside Repertory evaluated Shapiro’s effect on the company, as I reported above: “We can never go back.”  Andrea Lord, who’d known Shapiro briefly in Taos in 1969 and 1970, wrote, “Leonardo was a kind and generous man. . . .  I still see him and am grateful for the memories.”  Nina Martin, whose path diverged from Shapiro’s more than a decade before his death, remembered him as “a very generous person and a committed artist that I was privileged to work with.” 

[My association with Leo wasn’t nearly as intimate as Mandel’s or as intense as Lord’s, yet I find that I now evaluate things the way I think Leo would have.  I’ve found I constantly wonder how Leo would appraise a performance I’m seeing, appreciate an exhibit at a gallery I’m visiting, view a book or story I’m reading—or, perhaps most frequently, react to a political event or statement that’s being reported in the day’s news. 

[If I pass a place I associate with Leo—the home of a former colleague, the East Village neighborhood of the Shaliko office, the territory around Taos and Chamisal, New Mexico—he reappears in my thoughts; if I see or read about some writer, artist, movement, or artwork linked to him—a production of Ghosts somewhere, Joe Chaikin’s, Jerzy Grotowski’s, Murray Bookchin’s, or Max Roach’s death, a passing mention of the Situationists, a lithograph by Pudlo Pudlat in a gallery—it causes me to conjure him again.  My own father died not quite a year before Leo, but I think of Leo almost as frequently. 

[I’ve reported that he was displeased at first when “Techniques of Testimony” was published because he thought some of what I related was uncomplimentary.  After moving to New Mexico, Leo wrote that he’d “bought out the press run” of the TDR issue and passed the article out to his new colleagues in the Riverside Rep. 

[Since Leo’s early death, I see this effort as a kind of record of the work of this relatively unknown theater artist.  Obviously, I admired—admire—Leo.  Why else would I have followed his career after seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore?  Why agree to write the profile for TDR?  It’s probably clear that I think he was underappreciated in his lifetime. 

[I hope I’ve made at least an attempt to show that my judgment is based on something more than emotion and sentiment, however.  But that other part—the sense that I owe it to his memory to get this right—I can’t dismiss as objective or intellectual incentive.  As little as I knew him in life, or got to know him afterwards, Leo’s in me now.  And though I know his ego wouldn’t let him like everything I’ve reported here, I fervently hope I’ve done him proud.  Somehow, that’s important.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 7

 

[The seventh installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” picks up with The Shaliko Company’s last company-built piece, 1989’s Strangers.  As you’ll read, Shapiro never completed the work on this play, and it was only performed in workshops; nevertheless, it was a significant achievement for the company. 

[The following spring, the theater artist traveled again to Russia, this time to stage Mark Rosovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son in Russian for the playwright’s own company.  He also organized three political theater events involving world-renowned actress Vanessa Redgrave, one of them in London.

[While directing his last New York show, Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, Shapiro got himself arrested—for the last time, I believe—during a pro-environment demonstration, soon after which he disbanded Shaliko for the final time and retired to New Mexico.

[As I have all along, I urge readers of this biographical series to go back and start with Part 1 if you haven’t been following along chronologically from the start.  Parts 1 through 6 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 May.]

Following Whirligig, Shaliko began work on its last collaborative production, Strangers, a performance piece assembled from reports—all the dialogue was quoted material—of several unrelated incidents (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014; also “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg’s View,” 8, 11, 14, and 17 January 2023). 

The story of Strangers was based on reports of two junk dealers in Goiania, Brazil, who found an abandoned nuclear-medicine machine and spread the radioactive core around their family and neighborhood, eventually leaving four family members dead, hundreds of neighbors contaminated, and parts of their city quarantined for radiation exposure.  (I posted an account of this incident in “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987,” 9 August 2020.)

Shapiro combined the Goiania tale, told mostly without words, with newspaper headlines from the day of each performance and first-person accounts of events such as Jim Jones’s (1931-78) last sermon at the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978; Hedda Nussbaum’s (b. 1942) 1988 testimony in the trial of Joel Steinberg (b. 1941) for the 1987 murder of Lisa (1981-87), their illegally adopted daughter; statements by the mothers of the dead and missing Atlanta children in the early 1980s; reports by people claiming to have been kidnapped by UFO’s; and pornographic dialogue from 970-JAIL, a phone-sex recording.  

To this bricolage of “public sources,” Shapiro added Gustav Mahler’s (Austro-Bohemian; 1860-1911) 1904 Kindertotenlieder (songs of the death of children), a cycle of songs on the loss of children set to music of intense sadness evoking enormous grief, and stanzas from Rainer Maria Rilke’s (Austrian; 1875-1926) Duino Elegies (published 1923), which “talks about the balance between the angels and people.”

Strangers was a study of “the contradictions involved in the meeting of traditional and technological cultures,” conjuring up the “dark Satanic mills” William Blake (English; 1757-1827), who was an influence on Shapiro, cited as symbols of the mechanized society of the Industrial Revolution which bowed to the hegemony of Newtonian science and Lockean reason over native intelligence and spirituality. 

Strangers ended with a litany of the dead of Atlanta, Jonestown, and Goiania, and trance songs from various versions of the Native American Ghost Dance from this nineteenth-century rite that Plains Indians believed would resurrect their dead ancestors (see “The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians,” 5 July 2014).  Along with raising dead Indians, the practice was believed to have the power to annihilate by supernatural means the intruding white people—and their insidious technological culture—and return the land to an aboriginal paradise.

It is also in keeping with Shapiro’s animus for the establishment: the middle-aged Leonardo Shapiro recalled the eight-year-old Leo Richard Shapiro who, readers will remember, “danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily ever after.”

Shapiro built Strangers out of four distinct layers which he called “tracks,” an analogy to the recording industry in which each instrument and voice is recorded separately then assembled into an integrated performance.  The director deliberately elected not to mix the four elements of Strangers, leaving them “independent but inter-related.”

The four tracks, operating independently and contrapuntally at the same time, were the action track, the almost wordless enactment of the Goiania story; visual, the set, costumes, props, and various effects Shapiro engineered with shadow, light, and color; vocal, the “libretto” made up of the testimony taken from published sources and which actors delivered over microphones on the set; and instrumental, the Mahler recording and original music composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach (1924-2007) and played live by musician Francisco Mora (b. 1947).    

In his detailed analysis of the work-in-progress for Text and Performance Quarterly, Michael Wright, a playwright, director, and teacher, observed that Strangers was “not easily absorbed in one viewing.”  Another observer, Richard Schechner, described the performance as “a mess.”

Only two publications covered Strangers in New York City as reports on a work-in-progress.  (Wright’s study was published over a year after the workshop closed.)  In High Performance, the performance-art journal, Allen Frame called the piece “a dirge-like collage of the bad news of the last decade,” explaining, “There were no laughs, no absurdity, and no ironic edge in Strangers.”  

The writer and photographer continued: “Balancing the heaviness was the sophisticated touch of director Leonardo Shapiro . . . .  He elicits performances that are strong and compassionate . . . .  He stages narrative incidents abstractly but clearly, with a minimum of props and an absence of clutter.”  

In The Villager, a neighborhood weekly, Todd Olson asserted: “‘Strangers’ is a performance to watch, even to witness.”  The performance, Olson wrote, “is impressive in its athleticism as well as its sheer mass.  It is an hour and 45 minutes of running, flying and suspension.”  The Shaliko Company, said Olson, “are non-traditional storytellers” and they and Strangers “warrant watching.”

At the end of my 2014 post on Strangers, I reported that after working on this material, I decided that Strangers was really autobiographical in a way.  I never ran this notion by Shapiro, but I think it’s true.  Shapiro was a “stranger”: he saw himself as an outsider—not just an avant-gardist, but a real outsider.  He identified with all the “strangers” in the play—they were him! 

I began to think through the other work he did and the people he admired and was drawn to (American Indians, the artist David Wojnarowicz, the Beats, prisoners) and how he described himself in various situations (he was one of only two Jews at Farragut Academy, for instance; he was a lone Anglo among “Cuba’s angry exiles” in his Miami schools, and so on) and the kinds of philosophy and politics he espoused—it’s all about being on the outside.  Not just ahead of the crowd, but completely different.  Strangers is an expression of this sense of himself in a way that all the other pieces only suggested.

That Strangers was left unrealized was one of Shapiro’s greatest regrets.  Despite its immense complexity and apparent impenetrability in its initial form, it represented a potential culmination of all the theories and techniques which Shapiro’d been developing over a lifetime of making theater. 

Unfinished or not, however, Strangers represented the pinnacle of Shaliko’s work in terms of its sophistication, scope, complexity, and daring.  Clearly, Strangers was a major step towards the new theatrical form for which Shapiro had been searching.  If he’d managed to continue his search, Strangers would surely have been recorded as the breakthrough event.

After a Strangers workshop at Yellow Springs in March 1989, Shapiro traveled to Moscow in December to cast and oversee the set design of the Russian-language première of Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  The play went into rehearsal in April 1990 at the playwright’s own Nekitsky Gate Theatre and was presented in the spring of 1990.  It subsequently went on tour in the USSR and U.S., playing a run at Trinity College as part of “Contemporary Theater in the Soviet Union,” 2-3 December.

Then he flew to London to direct Jerusalem For Reconciliation at the Royal Albert Hall (28 April 1991), an “international peace concert for children of all nationalities in the Middle East suffering from war,” produced by Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937) as a benefit for UNICEF and the Arab Women’s Association with a cast that also included Kris Kristofferson, Maurice Béjart, Simon Callow, Duran Duran, and artists from around the world. 

Redgrave had put the one-night event together and asked Shapiro to come to London to direct it.  He and Redgrave had met initially when Redgrave was in New York performing Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending on Broadway in 1989 (Neil Simon Theatre; 24 September-17 December).  He’d taken some Trinity/La MaMa students to a performance and they met with Redgrave, first backstage at the Neil Simon Theatre, then in her apartment over tea. 

Shapiro subsequently helped Redgrave produce The Wall Breaks, an all-star benefit on 10 December 1989 at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre for The Memorial Society for the Victims of Stalin’s Repressions in the Soviet Union.

In return, Redgrave appeared at a Shaliko benefit at the United Nations on 12 February 1990, hosted by the United Nations Society of Writers, with, among others, monologist Spalding Gray (1941-2004), actors Harvey Fierstein (b. 1954), Olympia Dukakis (1931-2021), Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), and Joanne Woodward (b. 1930); poet Allen Ginsberg; playwright John Guare (b. 1938); directors Peter Hall (1930-2017) and Joseph Chaikin; and jazz percussionist Max Roach. 

In exchange for his work on Jerusalem, Shapiro got Redgrave to come to New York for Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars) at the La MaMa Annex (5-8 June 1991), an anti-Persian Gulf war (Operation Desert Shield: 2 August 1990-17 January 1991; Operation Desert Storm: 17 January-28 February 1991) theatrical collage he conceived as a benefit for the War Resistors League and Oxfam America.

In January and February 1992, Shapiro was in production for The Shaliko Company’s first show of the year, a second revival of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village.  (The first “revival” was the 1990 Russian-language première he mounted in Moscow.)

Why was Shapiro doing a remount of the two-character, psychological, language play instead of his more usual Shaliko production, a physical, socially conscious, politically oriented, multi-cultural theater piece?  Shapiro explained flatly: “After 25 years in the New York theater . . . it’s all we can afford.”

He’d hoped that this production would garner Shaliko some much-needed rewards: critical attention, box-office income, a move to a more commercial theater, and cash in the form of grants and donations.  Kafka, which Shapiro described as “the most conventional piece we’ve done in a long time,” was supposed to keep Shaliko afloat for another season and shore it up enough to mount Shapiro’s more expansive works, on hold for lack of money. 

Even before Kafka was restaged, Shapiro’d begun working on Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (see “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 and 14 May 2020; also “‘As It Is in Heaven,’” 25 March 2011).  In September and October 1992, the play, set in an East Village café with an artist’s studio in back, was staged in Theater for the New City’s Seward and Joyce Johnson Theater, which was set up as a working café with catered drinks and Middle-Eastern food. 

Shapiro and a cast, some of whom were in the final production of Blue Heaven, had been doing readings of Malpede’s play, then called Going to Iraq, at Greenwich Village’s Westbeth Theatre Center, a co-producer with Shaliko and TNC.  Between 23 and 27 March 1992, Going to Iraq was broadcast on radio on WBAI in New York City in five parts.

As plans for the play were underway, the principal figures in the production of Going to Iraq were organizing Roadkill, a street event on 3 May with text by Karen Malpede and Leonardo Shapiro and co-produced with Theater for the New City, performed as the closing event of the First Annual Eco-Festival.  Organized as a procession through the streets in the East Village to protest the damage done to human society by the automobile, the main performer was George Bartenieff.

Unluckily, the Sunday of the procession was only five days after the riots had begun in Los Angeles in response to the 29 April 1992 acquittal of the four white police officers charged in the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.  Police in New York, on alert because of the reports of unrest there like that in San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and nearby New Rochelle, New York, were nervous and wary of any disturbances. 

As the procession of artists, performers, and spectators accompanied by two loud percussion bands arrived at Tenth Street and Avenue A, a cordon of police stopped the march.  Shapiro and five more participants in Roadkill were arrested, including 21-year-old Spartacus Shapiro.  Since no one actually did anything remotely criminal—I was present at the event as I was still working on the TDR article—all charges were eventually dropped against those arrested.  It was just the last time in a long chain that Leonardo Shapiro was arrested.

Rehearsals for Malpede’s play, now under its new title, Blue Heaven, began on 10 August.  Shapiro‘s elaborate mise-en-scène included a live trio playing music specially composed by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld (b. 1948), and with one character, John—played by actor Nicky Paraiso (b. 1951) who’s also a pianist—as a band member; live video broadcast by video artist Maria Venuto (b. 1965), who moved about the playing area with her camera during the performance; and scenes staged amongst the patrons’ café tables. 

There was no seat in the audience which did not require the spectator to turn around at one time or another—reminiscent of the environment Jerry Rojo had created for Shaliko’s Ghosts almost 20 years earlier—and the spectators had to decide where to look and listen to the life of the Heaven Cafe swirling around them.  Shapiro, who conceived Blue Heaven’s mise-en-scène, originally concocted a highly theatrical event which, aside from the live music and videos, employed film, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects. 

At the first rehearsal, Shapiro described the environment for Blue Heaven and some images he wanted the actors to hold onto.  He likened the atmosphere to the Caffe Cino performance of William Saroyan’s Hello Out There he had seen back in the 1960s (the one that had featured Al Pacino, I presume) and admonished the actors to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices with theirs,” so the actors would speak of themselves through the dialogue.  This was the director’s instruction regarding testimony (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”).

The production was designed to draw the spectators into the world of what the script calls the “sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries” of the Lower East Side—once again, the unrepresented, like Galy Gay of Man Is Man, Franz Woyzeck, Andrea in The Arbor, and the people of Goiania—who lived, worked, or visited at the Heaven Cafe during the time when the United States unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian Desert.

Tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the other had begun to develop within a few weeks of the start of rehearsals.  Before rehearsals began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede expressed excitement in my February 1992 interview with her for all of the director’s proposed plans for the production.  But at the end of the rehearsal period, recriminations (which I won’t recount) flew back and forth.

The relationship between the playwright and the director finally broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as director on 13 September, four days before the official opening of the show.  Malpede took over direction of the production in practice, but no director was listed in the program.

Knowing Shapiro’s tendency to engineer clashes with nearly everyone with whom he worked over the years, and recognizing that Shapiro and Malpede each had strong opinions, an aggressive personality, and an unrelenting individuality, it’s likely that despite previously successful collaborations, friction was inevitable and that the blame was on both sides. 

It’s also likely that Shapiro’s old problem with sharing authority with someone else had returned.  On the simplest level, Malpede felt that Shapiro had usurped her authority as playwright and turned Blue Heaven into his own project—the same allegation Judy Dworin leveled at Shapiro when he left the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the same year (and clearly, by his own account, how Shapiro had behaved in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No). 

It may be no coincidence that Shapiro’s very next production suffered similar difficulties in February 1993.  He encountered frustrations with the Chetana Theatre in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, which escalated to an impasse. 

Shapiro made a long-planned trip to Calcutta under the sponsorship of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, a program of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the cultural propaganda agency of the U.S. Foreign Service, to direct Beckett’s Endgame in Bengali. 

It had taken two years to finalize the plans for the Calcutta production, which the director called “one of my favourites [sic]” that he had dreamed of presenting “for a long time.”

Suman Mukherjee (b. 1966), who brought Shapiro to Calcutta, was a director with the Chetana Theatre and Shapiro’s assistant on Endgame.  “Beckett in an Indian context,” according to Mukherjee, a 1990 TLM student from India, “seemed out of place.”  Further, Shapiro didn’t “take his time” to learn the way the Indian actors, who were prominent stage veterans in Calcutta, habitually rehearsed. 

They expected the director to “have an answer to everything concerning the play” and when Shapiro invoked his ‘Let’s find out’ response, the actors misconstrued this as lack of knowledge—though Mukherjee, who admired the director, affirmed that the director “lived with the play 24 hours” a day. 

After a ten-day “workshop,” the production was supposed to have begun a three-month tour of India, but the actors stopped communicating with Shapiro and the actor-director collaboration came to an abrupt end. 

Despite Mukherjee’s attempts to mediate, “[e]go”—on both sides, it seems—“became an obstructive factor,” the conflict escalated, and the breach became impossible to heal.  The result was a total rupture: the actors refused to perform again after the opening performance on 19 February and Shapiro left Calcutta.

That same month, Shapiro formally shuttered the Shaliko Company (having resigned from the directorship of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the previous fall).  He’d built a house, with the help of his son, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico during 1992.  The Sangre de Cristos are sacred to the Taos Pueblos.

In June 1993, Leonardo Shapiro retired from New York theater and moved to the tiny “populated place” of Vallecito: population, 767; elevation, 7,060 feet (1¼ miles); 32 miles south-southwest of Taos, where in 1969 Shapiro had broken his trip west.  (Vallecito in Taos County shouldn’t be confused with Vallecitos, 73 miles to the northwest in neighboring Rio Arriba County.)

From Vallecito, Shapiro wrote, “I am slowly getting in touch with the world here, with the sun and moon and stars, with wood and mud and seasons, with neighbors and trucks and dogs, with kids and birds and clouds,” declaring that “it’s a lot like paradise!”  As a post script to one letter, he even chuckled, “Once in a while I realize for a moment that the birds are talking to me.” 

The escapee from New York did, indeed, find himself enfolded in his new community.  Even before his house was completed, while he was living in a tent “with his fax machine and his telephone,” his new neighbors, whom Shapiro characterized as “helpful and friendly,” immediately included him in their lives.  On his first Fourth of July in Vallecito, his new neighbors, Larry and Barabra Malisow, invited him to join the neighborhood families to “eat berries and cream and drink wine” and set off fireworks in the driveway. 

Shapiro reciprocated in his own way after the house was finished by holding a housewarming at the end of July 1993 that featured a performance by the neighborhood children, some dozen or so aged five through 12, of an adaptation of Snow White.  “It was great!” declared Shapiro. 

The Malisows, whose youngest daughter, five-year-old Ivy, was in the cast, concurred, noting with approval and awe that the director and teacher treated the children as if they were adults and professionals, demanding from them discipline and concentration.  “He never talked down to them, and assumed that they understood anything he gave them—using political and social issues—and they got it!” observed Rosalía Triana. 

It's little wonder, given this readiness to accept a stranger, that he found a contrast between his new and old surroundings.

Shapiro retired from New York theater, but not theater in general—or other endeavors.  He conceived many projects for his retirement.  In addition to plans to direct Vanessa Redgrave in Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, and hopes to build his “real rep company,” he contemplated a production of Marguérite Duras’s (French; 1914-96) L’Amante Anglaise with British actress Frances de la Tour (b. 1944) and Gerald Hiken (1927-2021), the American actor; a co-production of Büchner’s Danton’s Death with Yuri Lyubimov’s (Russian; 1917-2014) Taganka Theater; and an opera based on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in collaboration with video artist Paul Garrin (b. 1957) and Marilyn Zalkan (b. 1967), Shaliko’s former administrator and composer of the music for the 1992 production of Kafka: Father and Son. 

He also still harbored the hope that he could find a producer for a new production of Strangers with Max Roach performing his own music.  In Vallecito, he had drafted several scenes of Julius and Ethel, A Love Story, an opera in collaboration with composer Noa Ain (1942-2019) and made “a lot of notes”; he was working on a poem, Refuge, he had begun in India; and he was writing The Big Hit!, “a satirical backstage mystery novel, . . . in the fond hope that it will make money for me.”

He was preparing to accompany Vanessa Redgrave to Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade in September 1993 to help with peace concerts sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other activities, but he never went.  (Redgrave made the trip as planned as a special envoy for UNICEF.)

In December 1994, he was developing plans for a “large event” in Los Alamos over three days in August 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid.  He called this commemoration Days of the Dead at Los Alamos, in reference to the annual Mexican celebration.  “I have been putting off plunging in on this,” he wrote.  “I have no enthusiasm for dealing with all those people, but I’m here, and it’s my thing, and it needs to be done, and I probably will get it together,” he predicted.  He dropped out of the event the next year.

Though the refugee from the big city wasn’t entirely open to the communal way of life presented by little Vallecito, he did participate in the community.  Barbara Malisow related that Shapiro joined in Seders at Passover, which, like most valley activities, included many neighbors who convened at different homes year to year, and even scripted the service for the group.  (Passover 1994 was sundown, 26 March, to sundown, 3 April; in 1995, the holy days would have fallen shortly before the cancer diagnosis, 14-22 April.)

His contributions to the life of the little valley, however, always came back to the children: “[W]hen he played for our kids or something,” Larry Malisow asserted, “that was priceless.”  Although Shapiro could spend much of his time “not really extending himself, or wanting to be part of what was going on around,” as Larry Malisow noted, the children were obviously special to him. 

In August, he wrote and presented Who Stole Summer? or The Trick and Treat Show: Fantasia for kids and band instruments—a play all about Happy Valley, New Mexico, which is under attack by grasshoppers and pollution—on the backyard stage he had built.  (Barbara Malisow related that at the time, the valley had, in fact, suffered “a huge infestation” of grasshoppers.)

Confronting nuclear and toxic pollution and the threat of casinos in the area, Who Stole Summer? was a complete production, with sets and costumes—the latter designed by the Malisows’ daughter Lauren, a student of costume design writing a thesis on a related topic, who later became an assistant designer at the Santa Fe Opera—featuring 25 to 30 children and teenagers from the neighborhood and nearby valleys and performed before some 90 adults. 

Barbara Malisow affirmed that Shapiro liked the children so much that he really got to know “their different personalities,” and, when he knew he was dying, he arranged specific bequests for each child “according to how he perceived them.”  “And every child that got something was pretty happy with what he left them, you know,” added Larry Malisow.  “So, he saw things in them—even though he may not . . . he didn’t react that way.”

[Shapiro’s retirement to New Mexico marked the start of the last phase of the director’s life and career.  In the eighth and final installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” to be published on Sunday, 7 May, you’ll hear about his work with neighborhood children and his period of introspection.

[Shapiro mounted one more professional production with a young troupe in Albuquerque, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, during which time he was under treatment for fatal cancer.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6

 

[In “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6,” the young director becomes a teacher in his own performing arts program.  We’ll see how he adapts many of the lessons he learned at the Windsor Mountain School and some of the philosophies espoused by Paul Goodman. 

[Following The Yellow House, Shaliko continued on the path of company-built theater with some of Shapiro’s most ambitious performance pieces—many of which were never fully realized.  One of the new plays, Punch!, was the proximate cause of Shaliko loss of NEA funding, an event that caused Shapiro to sound off in a number of published articles.

[As I have done since Part 2 was posted, I recommend that all ROTters who are just joining this series go back first and read Parts 1 through 5, published on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, before reading this installment.  By now, I’ve introduced many people, events, and ideas important to Shapiro’s life and art that I’ve identified and explained.  Subsequent parts of this bio post won’t make much sense if you haven’t read about those first.]

The 1984 Van Gogh Project workshop in Hartford produced a byproduct that constituted one of Shapiro’s most rewarding occupations outside Shaliko.  The workshop was the culmination of the director’s work as artist-in-residence at Trinity College from 1983 to 1985, as a result of which the college invited Shapiro to develop and supervise an advanced performing arts program. 

Judy Dworin (b. 1949), head of the department under which the program was to be established, and Shapiro discussed the efficacy of sending a test group of students to New York City to expose them to the practicalities of performance in the professional worlds of dance and theater. 

The outcome was a three- or four-day field trip to New York in the spring of 1984 during which Shapiro and Dworin took their students to various performances and rehearsals and toured the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village and the Joyce Theater, a dance venue at Eighth Avenue and 19th Street in Chelsea. 

For what he described as the “seed” of what became the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, Shapiro also arranged with artists to work with the visiting students.  At Shapiro’s request, when Trinity College made the offer for the program, it was based at La MaMa in New York City and administered from Hartford.

In the fall of 1986, the first Trinity/La MaMa Program got underway with eight Trinity College students.  The structure of the program that first term essentially remained the structure for the six years Shapiro ran it.  The students resided in the city for a 13-week semester, immersing themselves in its arts and cultural offerings while taking classes overseen by Shapiro. 

The program consisted of three courses: Performance Workshop, Seminar, and Internship.  The Performance Workshop, taught by professional artists at La MaMa’s East Village rehearsal studios, was the practical, hands-on class, breaking down into movement, voice, and “text and image work.” 

Among the artists and others the TLM students worked with, met informally, or saw in performance or rehearsal, were actor-director Joseph Chaikin, actor-director Judith Malina, actor and activist Vanessa Redgrave, New Vaudevillian and later actor Bill Irwin (b. 1950), avant-garde composer-musician John Cage (1912-92), circus artist and director Cecil MacKinnon, dancer-choreographer Nina Martin, performance artist-musician Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), and the new-music ensemble Kronos Quartet.

TLM students interned at places like the Asia Society, Dance Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HOME for Contemporary Theater and Art, Kei Takei’s Moving Earth, Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, New Dramatists, Performance Space 122, Ping Chong and Company, or the Wooster Group, and even individual artists like playwrights María Irene Fornés (1930-2018), Charles L. Mee, and Mac Wellman; lighting designer Blu (the professional name of William Lambert); composer Elliot Goldenthal (b. 1954); and actress-performance artist Robbie McCauley (b. 1942).

Along with the formal classes, readings, and papers, Trinity/La MaMa students got a perspective on the world of the performing arts, indeed art and culture in general.  A prominent aspect of Shapiro’s TLM, in fact, was the interconnection of the arts. 

To him, this meant not only that dancers, painters, actors, and other artists were interdependent or that art draws on all the forms of culture that exist in a society, but also that art and artists are part of that society and form a segment of the community from which they come and to which they play. 

Shapiro believed that the city should be an extension of the classroom and unquestionably related to Shapiro’s appreciation for Paul Goodman’s epic Bildungsroman, The Empire City (1959), which he said was an inspiration for his conception for Trinity/La MaMa.

It was also bound to his admiration for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where students lived in close association with practicing artists and so learned about “the financial sacrifices, the commercial aspects such as getting a gallery and selling art, the politics of publication, and inevitably the necessity of making a decision for art.”

(Goodman [1911-72] was someone Shapiro named as an influence and he was briefly a teacher at Black Mountain and an associate of the Living Theatre.  His 1962 book, The Community of Scholars, describes many of the practices at Black Mountain and tenets of Shapiro’s educational philosophy.)

A disagreement with Trinity College led Shapiro to resign the program he helped create after the fall 1992 term, though the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program itself continued to operate under new directors.  (I don’t, in fact, know if the program still exists, now thirty years after Shapiro’s departure.  According to Wikipedia, it does, but has changed substantially.)

The split with Trinity came at the same time that Shapiro was having a similar dispute with Karen Malpede and George Bartenieff (1933-2022), respectively, the playwright and co-producer of Shapiro’s last show in New York City, Blue Heaven, and harks back to his dismissals from Yes Yes, No No and The Misanthrope. 

The breach came as the result of a specific incident in 1992 which heightened the acrimony and the sense of separation, both physical and psychological, Shapiro had with the college.  The fundamental reason, however, was a recurrence of Shapiro’s lifelong problem with bosses. 

The key seems to have been “control”: if Shapiro was—or felt he was—under the thumb of an outside authority (even a legitimate and appropriate one), he bristled and rebelled, and usually scuttled the project by engineering a fight.  Shapiro had run TLM for six years according to his own dictates, insulated from the administrative control of the Theatre and Dance Department of Trinity College way off in Hartford, Connecticut. 

Following The Yellow House, Shapiro put together a contemporary version of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe as a project of Shaliko’s residency with the Department of Dance & Theatre of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. 

Billed as “A Circus Opera,” Mystery History Bouffe Goof was intended to be performed in a tent with high-wire and trapeze artists, stilt-walkers, and a circus band, translating Mayakovsky (Russian; 1893-1930) “from the past into the future.” 

With allusions to Vsevolod Meyerhold, Seagull’s Konstantine Treplyev, and his own dream, Shapiro pronounced “circus opera” “a new form with moving sculptures, dissident art, prophetic poetry, ritual choreography, giant puppets and wild music.”

Unhappily, Shaliko never completed Mystery History, though they performed pieces of it in March 1987 at Manhattanville College; in August at the Yellow Springs Institute artists’ colony in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania; and in September at Creative Time’s Art on the Beach at Hunters Point in New York City’s borough of Queens. 

(Creative Time, the organizers of Art on the Beach as part of a program to bring art to the city’s public spaces, was a peripatetic non-profit arts organization that mounted art installations and performances in unlikely sites all over New York City.  In 1987, Art on the Beach ran at Hunters Point, a “six-acre site that still looked more like the garbage dump it once was” than the home of an art exhibit, from 24 July to 20 September 1987.) 

Mystery History Bouffe Goof, envisioned as “a multidisciplinary collaboration between visual and performing artists,” was performed on the evenings of 13 and 16 September 1987 (see “Speaking Truth To Power”).

Starting at dusk and playing into the evening as the Manhattan skyline, centered on the United Nations complex across the East River to the northwest, began to light up in the background—the only artificial light in the production—the  allegorical and mobile Mystery History Bouffe Goof meandered through eight other large-scale artworks on the “rocky, riverside mound” to its own set piece on the riverbank, “two giant wood figures tugging at a fragile blue globe suspended above a small gray battleship.” 

Alvin Klein called Mystery History “extravagant” in the New York Times and observers of the workshop at Yellow Springs remarked on “the incredibly resilient, energetic quality of the production, which swept the audience up into a posture of a kind of similarly resilient reception.”  Saying that the performance “inflamed” them, the workshop viewers added, “It was interesting to be a participant while a spectator, which is very different from the way one normally is a spectator . . . .”

Concurrent with Mystery History Bouffe Goof, the company was mounting Punch!, adapted from an anonymous 1827 Punch-and-Judy puppet play.  (This project precipitated the loss of Shaliko’s NEA funding the following year.) 

Developed in collaboration with choreographer Nina Martin and actors Elena Nicholas (Prischepenko), Cristobal Carambo (b. 1950), and Michael Preston (b. 1969), the performance was “a physical theater piece created as an investigation of violence and escapism.”  The set, representing contemporary urban locales, was a human-sized puppet theater designed by Shapiro and painted in primary colors by Goro Fujii (1929-2005), and the actors wore brightly colored Commedia-like half-masks.  (See “Punch! (Shaliko Company, 1987),” 4 September 2021.)

The text of Punch! was taken verbatim from the pre-Victorian puppet play that delighted children for generations.  (There were a few interpolations, such as “Shoot the nigger!” and “You look all right.  Here’s another!” which is an alleged quotation of Bernhard Goetz [b. 1947], the so-called Subway Vigilante who shot four black youths he thought were about to attack him on a New York City subway on 22 December 1984.) 

Shaliko’s Punch! was clearly no children’s amusement.  It was loud and aggressive, assaulting the audience’s senses and, sometimes, their sensibilities (but never their persons).  If The Yellow House was Shaliko’s prettiest show, Punch! was, in Shapiro’s own words, its “nastiest, ugliest” one. 

Shapiro said when he was planning Punch!, “It’s about . . . the way that we identify with violence and why it is that somebody can beat seven people to death in an hour and everybody thinks it’s a scream.”  Nevertheless, the critical reception was positive in the three venues where it played: La MaMa in New York City in May 1987; the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in August; and in Glasgow, Scotland, in September. 

On WBAI radio, Rick Harris pronounced himself “very impressed” with Shapiro and his company for a “very, very fine piece of work” which he declared “theatrically inventive.”  In The Nation, Thomas M. Disch described the production as “a remarkable spectacle that ranges from chucklesome to breathtaking, and from thought-provoking to off-putting” and predicted that it “has every chance of becoming a classic of the New Vaudeville.”

At the Edinburgh Festival, The Scotsman reported that Shaliko and Punch!

connect the events of the old legend with unvarnished, day-to-day truths, but also reveal its deep roots in the subconscious and in popular culture. . . . .  This is a harrowing brutal, sometimes gruesome piece, definitely not children’s entertainment, but always performed with awesome skill and always thoughtful and arresting.

After describing the production at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre as “most skilful [sic]” and the cast as “brilliant, acrobatic and paradoxically charming,” the Glasgow Herald warned, “You won’t—if you ever have done so—watch a Punch and Judy show again with amusement after experiencing this production . . . .”

In 1988, however, largely because of the Endowment’s site reports on Punch!, Shaliko lost its NEA Theater Program funding, followed by the loss or reduction of its grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and most of its support from corporations, foundations, and private sources.  Shaliko’s general funding—the company still got grants for specific projects—wasn’t restored until 1992, the year Shapiro decided to close Shaliko and retire to New Mexico.

Shapiro believed the defunding was based on “the content and (political) nature of the work,” and there’s evidence that the National Endowment for the Arts was being influenced politically around the time of Shaliko’s defunding. 

After the grants to the notorious “NEA Four” were rejected on 29 June 1990, after having been approved by the agency’s peer review panel, the performance artists—Karen Finley (b. 1956), John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), and Tim Miller (b. 1958)—sued the Endowment on 27 September on the grounds that their grants had been illegally denied for political reasons rather than artistic ones. 

When the government settled the suit out of court on 4 June 1993, it tacitly admitted that Chairman John Frohnmayer (b. 1942) and the Endowment had been making political determinations, at least in the early 1990s.  This isn’t proof, however, that the agency had become politicized as early as 1988 or that Shapiro and his troupe had been the subjects of politically-oriented exclusion.

As a byproduct of his campaign to regain Shaliko’s NEA grants, Shapiro, ever the anti-authoritarian, began a broader offensive against the powers who control the arts funding and, in general, cultural confirmation within our society. 

Between April 1990 and January 1992, he published at least eight articles or interviews—some of them quite vehement—focusing, at least in part, on the NEA and the issue of arts funding and support.  In “The Tip of the Iceberg” in the September 1991 Performing Arts Journal, written shortly after the contretemps over the “NEA Four” and the promulgation of the anti-obscenity pledge for grantees (called by many artists the “loyalty oath,” a reference to a McCarthy-era practice), Shapiro took on the NEA and the funding/validation establishment:

We don’t have a National Endowment for the Arts, we have a National Allowance for Polite Artists . . . .  If there were a real Endowment, it would a) belong to the artists, uncensored, as a trust for our use in making the creative work necessary for the health of society; b) it would grow.  Endowments are permanent and they grow.

In a fall 1991 column in Theatre Times, the publication of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (ART/NY), Shapiro went even further.  After proposing a number of programs the Alliance should undertake in support of experimental artists, he scolded his colleagues: “Somehow the non-profit theatres have come to blindly imitate the structure of the corporations and foundations we are dependent on.”

In his most virulent attack on his own peers, in the entertainment industry trade paper Back Stage of 24 January 1992, he called them “cowards and pseudo-corporate parasitic wannabees, failed junior partners of Broadway and Hollywood” who are afraid to risk the corporate world’s disapproval and their own conformist visions of success.  Referring to the Stanley Kubrick movie Spartacus, which held personal significance for him (readers will remember that his son is named Spartacus), Shapiro decried angrily that

we are still slaves; we are still ruled by Rome; we are still fighting and killing each other for our owners’ amusement; we are still bought and sold in the stinking marketplace; we are still unaware of our birthright, of our creative human power, even of our simplest personal needs.

The loss of the NEA Theater Program funding after Punch! hurt Shaliko financially, of course, but it enraged Shapiro morally.  “Isn’t the function of the artist supposed to be to tell the truth?” he pleaded in a 20 April 1990 interview in the weekly New York Press.  “How can you blame him when he does?” 

When the New York Press, a newspaper with a right-of-center sensibility, published a satirical “quiz” about the NEA and the First Amendment (18-24 July 1990, about a month after the grant rejections for the “NEA Four”), Shapiro responded.  In answer to a question about “Our Friend, the Government,” he averred in anti-statist terms that “the government is not our friend.  It is supposed to be our servant and is in fact our master.” 

He also emphasized the connection between funding denials and effective censorship by pointing out that “not giving the artist the necessary support to create prevents everybody from experiencing that art; supporting the artist and creating the art forces nobody to experience it.”

(If this makes Shapiro appear to have no sense of humor at all about this, consider his response to a question on reconciling complaints about defense spending with support for unrestricted arts funding.  After admitting that he objected to the use of his tax money to kill people around the world, Shapiro added: “And yes, I would also be against the government using my money to fund artists to kill people, no matter how elegantly.”)

Somewhat ironically, almost a year after publishing his admonition in Theatre Times, Shapiro found himself at odds with ART/NY itself—for now-familiar reasons.  The director was going to chair the art committee, but he and the Alliance had differing views of what the committee’s responsibility was. 

While the Alliance expected Shapiro’s panel to gather information on the activities of New York artists and report to its board, Shapiro believed his duty was to report to the citizens of New York City.  The upshot of this fundamental disagreement with the organization, a manifestation of Shapiro’s habitual anti-authoritarianism, was his resignation from the Alliance’s board.

Shapiro’s struggle with the NEA and his fight for adequate arts funding in general continued, as did his efforts to complete the work on Shaliko’s pieces that were still in progress.  In part because of the funding loss, but for reasons of scheduling and space availability as well, neither The Yellow House nor Mystery History Bouffe Goof was remounted after the production of Punch! had returned from Scotland. 

While still exploring the uses of power as in Mystery History, Shapiro reverted in 1988 to the sources the original Shaliko Company had used: the classics.  He turned to Christopher Marlowe’s (English; 1564 [baptized]-93) The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592), which Shapiro called “the first great theatrical poem of the English language” (see “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016).

Certainly he was drawn to the play, which he had wanted to do for years, by his affinity for the poetry he described as “this sort of wild beast that Shakespeare domesticated.”  Shapiro maintained “that poetry is the basis of theater.”  It isn’t surprising, then, that many of Shapiro’s acknowledged influences were theater poets: Euripides, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Ibsen, Anton Chekhov (Russian; 1860-1904), Auden, Tennessee Williams (1911-83), Mayakovsky, Brecht, Beckett. 

The Shaliko director, readers will recall, also had a fascination with magic and this was another reason he decided to do Doctor Faustus.  We’ve seen how Shapiro used stage magic as a child to create a sense of control over a hostile world and that he viewed theater as a form of magic because it’s transformative, much as the Navajo healing chants are transformative. 

In the chants, a sick person becomes a holy person and, as Shapiro wrote, in theater, the spectators turn the actors into “super-human beings.”  In the radio play he wrote in retirement, Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun, inspired by Doctor Faustus, Shapiro put these words into the mouth of a character called Dr. Henry Faustus:

When I was a boy I did magic tricks.  I made things appear and disappear, I changed one thing into another.  I found things that were lost and lost things that were found.  Cards, balls, silk handkerchiefs, rabbits.  Now I’m 500 years old.  You’d think I would have learned better tricks.

Using an environment designed by Jerry Rojo for the La MaMa Annex, with original music composed by David Linton (b. 1956), Shapiro planned a production of Doctor Faustus “full of surprises: appearances, disappearances, and transformations. . . . .  Angels will fly and devils change shape.  We want the play to be as scary and dangerous today as it was for Marlowe’s audience 400 years ago.”

In addition to the magic tricks, Shapiro incorporated many low-comedy gags in the Shaliko production, such as the performance of the Seven Deadly Sins, which was danced to Linton’s electronic compositions in skeleton costumes. 

Though it played its full one-month run, the troupe’s Doctor Faustus was both a critical and an emotional failure.  Several reviews were mixed, but the two most important critical voices were harsh. In the New York Times, Mel Gussow called Shaliko’s Doctor Faustus an “unexciting production” and a “spiritless affair” that’s “lessened by the actors.” 

Jonathan Kalb was even blunter in the Village Voice, writing: “[A]ll the actors are miscast, the set is well designed but poorly utilized, and the production offers no coherent ideas about the play’s action . . . .” 

From Marlowe’s demons from Hell, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989 and performed at the Cooper Square Theatre (East 7th Street in the East Village) from 5 April to 7 May. 

Described by one wag as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl who meets a metallic spaceman at a bus station in the middle of nowhere. 

Visiting Earth to discover why we’re so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns, and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister. 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig was political—the isolated bus stop is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe. 

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group that would also let him do what he wanted to do with language. 

Once again, however, the press showed little interest.  Those critics who did come, including Michael Feingold of the Village Voice, mostly conceded that they didn’t understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold wasn’t among these last, though.

[I invite all ROTters who've been following along through the sixth part of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” above, to return to Rick On Theater for the next installment on Thursday, 4 May.  I’ll be taking Shapiro through his last big collaborative theater piece with Shaliko, the unfinished Strangers, which I dubbed the potential culmination of his quest for a new form of theater.

[You’ll also hear about the final Shaliko production and Shapiro’s last show in New York City as the theater artist retires to New Mexico in a return to his sipapu, his place of emergence, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.]