'The Yellow House'

[I’ve written about Leonardo Shapiro and his stage work quite a bit since I started Rick On Theater back in 2009.  (See, for example, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009; “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009; “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010; “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010; “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010; “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011; “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014; “Mount Analogue,” 20 July 2014; and “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8 November 2015; as well as “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep,’” an early piece of writing by Shapiro himself, 7 May 2011.)  

[I’ve probably mentioned at one time or another that I first met Leo and saw his work in 1986 at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore.  Then a biennial program of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—it now no longer keeps to a regular schedule—its aim is to bring together theater artists and performances from all around the globe to one city for a few weeks—from 15 to 29 June in ’86—to promote world theater and international  culture.  He and his company, a revival of The Shaliko Company which he started in 1972 in New York City, had brought their current production, The Yellow House, a performance piece in which the painter Vincent van Gogh is viewed through the medium of his letters to his brother, Theo, an art dealer in Paris.  (The artist’s correspondence has been published in Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 3 vols. (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, [1958]).)  After the performance at the North Hall of the 1857 Peabody Institute near the Washington Monument at Mount Vernon Place and Washington Place in north Baltimore, I interviewed Leo.

[I was on assignment as the editor of the American Directors Institute’s in-house newsletter, Directors  Notes, to cover the Theatre of Nations, the first (and still only) TON held in North America.  I ended up also writing up the festival for The Drama Review.  (That report ran as “Theatre of Nations” in TDR in the spring issue of 1987 and a much abbreviated report was also published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986.  I posted a version of the TDR article as “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986” on ROT on 10 November 2014.)  I not only saw as many as three performances a day, but conducted formal interviews with some of the artists, and hung out at Club 45, the pop-up café-cum-bar behind one of the performance venues that was an oasis for the artists and performers at TON, to schmooze and kibitz.  Leo Shapiro was one of the artists I interviewed, in a session the day after I saw Yellow House.  I’m probably not giving anything away if I admit here that I was greatly taken with Yellow House, possibly the most striking production at TON and one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever seen. 

[It was four years later that I met Leo again and then two more years until Richard Schechner, editor of TDR, asked me to do a profile of Leo and Shaliko; I spent the better part of a year shadowing Leo as he worked, searching his files and picking his brains and memories.  The impression of that remarkable performance I witnessed in Baltimore six years earlier had never left me—in fact, it was the principal reason I took Richard’s assignment to write about Leo and Shaliko.  I’m going to try to recreate some of that sense of astonishment I felt that evening in 1986.  I warn readers, however, that while Shapiro’s theater work put an emphasis on language—he was a poet before turning to theater—his was a theater of performance as well—he was also a devotee of jazz—not literature.  Merely reading about his productions, including The Yellow House, deprives us of the full impact of seeing them performed.  I’ll give it a try, though.]

In 1986, with the first professional production of The Yellow House, The Shaliko Company’s performance piece about Vincent van Gogh based on his letters to his brother Theo, company founder and artistic director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) began creating what he designated as “Original Collaborative Work.”  Though this effort (from 1986 to 1992) overlapped his work on “New International Plays, Commissions, and Musical Adaptations” (1981 to 1990), it marked a change in the kind of material that occupied most of his attention.  (Shapiro designated Shaliko’s earliest period, from 1972 to 1977, as “Meetings with Classical Texts.”  The company disbanded until the director re-formed it in 1981 for a single season, and then again in 1983.)  Instead of finding texts that spoke to subjects of interest to him, Shapiro began creating pieces for what he wanted to communicate.  The pieces—Shapiro didn’t like the word, but agreed that they “are basically ‘theater pieces’ as opposed to ‘plays’”—were far larger in scope than Shaliko’s previous work, and drew on more and more diverse sources for materials and themes. 

Additionally, though Shaliko productions had always been site-specific, adapting to fit the performance spaces in which they were presented, works like The Yellow House and those that followed were changed, sometimes radically, to occupy each new venue.  Furthermore, when he recast Yellow House after its developmental workshop, he actively put together a new ensemble to explore this latest direction of his work.  A lack of money and the consequential lack of a permanent home base, however, prevented complete success in this endeavor.  (The company was dissolved again in 1993, a little less than four years before Shapiro’s death at 51.)

Having conceived an intense interest in Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) early in his life, Shapiro spent time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam while at the 1976 Holland Festival with the Shaliko production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (which starred former member of the Living Theatre and founder of the Open Theater, Joseph Chaikin, 1935-2003).  In 1982, when he was experiencing “a personal crisis,” Shapiro conceived the idea of a play about the artist, using some of the paintings (especially 1889’s Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, he said) as “settings for action.”  (This was, of course, 35 years before filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's 2017 release of Loving Vincent, an animated film created from many of van Gogh’s paintings.)

Shapiro wrote a first script of what would be known as The Van Gogh Project in the summer of 1984 and that June, he used parts of it in a workshop at the Quebec International Theatre Fortnight (Quinzaine Internationale de Théâtre de Québec) in Quebec City.  Shapiro began developing The Yellow House, still called The Van Gogh Project, in a November 1984 workshop with students and faculty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was then artist-in-residence. 

After reworking the script and reconstituting Shaliko, Shapiro mounted a new version of the performance piece, now entitled The Yellow House, at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan’s East Village.  As Jerry Rojo (b. 1935), who designed the mises-en-scène for La MaMa and, later, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, explained, the La MaMa production “had a very different feeling” than the one at Trinity, which had been designed by Shapiro and his students, because “all we used in the New York production was the furniture.”  The New York production, designated in the program as a “Work in Progress,” ran from 12 February to 2 March 1986. 

Following the New York “experimental production,” Shapiro did additional work on the literary and performance texts based on what he’d learned from the La MaMa workshop.  “The show [at La MaMa] was too dark and too focused on Van Gogh’s personal problems and his madness,” specified the director.  “I wanted to make the joy of the work and the process of creation more present than the madness.” The show that ran two hours and 45 minutes in Hartford and one hour and 45 minutes in New York, would now run an hour and a half at the Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore, where performances were scheduled from 21 to 29 June.  It was at the Peabody on the evening of Friday, 27 June, that I saw Shaliko’s The Yellow House—still dubbed a “work in progress”—and was introduced to the work of Leonardo Shapiro.  (I didn’t see the Van Gogh Project workshop at Trinity College, nor did I see The Yellow House at La MaMa.) 

(Shapiro had plans to take a finished Yellow House on tour in Europe over the summer of 1987 and then return to perform it in its completed form in New York at the La MaMa Annex—renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2009—in March 1988.  He was never able to raise the money to realize these plans, however, and, as Shapiro pointed out numerous times, La MaMa’s Stewart, 1919-2011, didn’t generally permit the mounting of plays at her theater that had already been presented elsewhere in the United States.  Still, even as late as 1992, Shapiro harbored hopes of mounting a final production of Yellow House in New York or abroad.)

The text of Yellow House that I saw was compiled by research and workshops with different groups of actors from the letters of van Gogh and other documents.  The director and creator, though, admonished, “While the words are important, they are not the essence of the piece . . .” and stressed the theatricality of The Yellow House.  It’s non-linear so a narrative is hard to assemble as Yellow House depicts what Shapiro called “Van Gogh’s heroic struggle to resist disintegration.”  J. Wynn Rousuck of the Baltimore Sun (25 June 1986) said it’s a portrayal “of the thin juncture between genius and madness.”  In the Baltimore City Paper, David Bergman (11-17 July 1986) felt that “Shapiro thrusts the audience quite literally into the center of the madness . . .” with his use of a kinetic set and staging the performance all over the North Hall space so that actors were often standing right beside spectators and even addressing them individually. 

In New York, Theo van Gogh was performed (by actor Paul Walker) as an unseen voice on tape.  The character was cut by the time the show came to Baltimore, but Shapiro had a notion, never articulated either from the stage or in the program, that the audience was Theo.  Spectators were “always addressed as Theo . . .,” and though it was never acknowledged, “that’s the [actor-audience] relationship we assume[d].”  The director maintained that “the goal of doing that show was to make the audience feel like Theo and respond that way, with that kind of generosity and understanding.”  Jo (Janet Langon), Theo’s wife, who was a minor character in Hartford, became, especially with the final elimination of Theo as a character in Yellow House, the mediator and the voice of both Vincent and Theo—the artist and society.  In the play’s prologue, Jo directly asks the audience Yellow House’s central question: ”Now that they’re gone who will carry on the courage and generosity of the vision?” 

The play covers the span of van Gogh’s life, from his youth in Holland to his death near Paris.  There are scenes of him as a young man, preaching to miners, and at the the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy—but most of The Yellow House, as the title suggests, takes place in locations in Arles (where he lived from 1888 to 1889).  The settings are all pulled from van Gogh paintings (as Shapiro’s original notion suggested: Van Gogh’s Bedroom, The Night Café (1888), Gauguin’s Chair (1888), Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, Crows Over the Wheat Field (1890), and, of course, Starry Night (1889).  But Yellow House isn’t a bio-play like  Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) or even Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (1990); if we stick with movies, it’s more like 1999’s Being John Malkovich by  Spike Jonze, only more psychedelic and hallucinogenic. 

I’m not certain how early in his life Shapiro became interested in van Gogh, but it may have been around 1965, when the incipient director was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This conclusion is based on the possibility that Shapiro’s interest was sparked by Antonin Artaud’s writing about the painter in “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society” and other writings which were published in the Artaud Anthology in 1965, a book which I believe Shapiro read at that time.  (It’s certainly possible that Shapiro had already conceived an interest in van Gogh before this time, but he made no mention of the painter in discussions with me of his early childhood or his high school years at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts.  At Windsor Mountain, in fact, Shapiro was fascinated with Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, whose name he adopted: Leo Richard Shapiro became Leonardo V. Shapiro in 1960.)

(Theater theorist and Surrealist poet and essayist Artaud, 1896-1948, saw Vincent van Gogh, an important exhibit of 173 paintings which ran from 24 January to 15 March 1947 at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris.  In February of that year, after having read psychiatrist François-Joachim Beer’s “Sa Folie?” [“His Madness?”], a description of van Gogh as a degenerate, in the Paris weekly Arts on 31 January 1947, Artaud started Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, though it wasn’t published until September.  On 16 January 1948, Van Gogh won the Paris Sainte-Beuve prize for the best essay published in 1947, the only literary award Artaud ever won.  Illustrating “Sa Folie” was a print of van Gogh’s Corridor in Saint-Paul Hospital, a painting Shapiro used in the New York production of The Yellow House. 

                                                         

(Though there are other translations of this essay and other Artaud works, I believe that Shapiro knew, read, and probably owned Artaud Anthology, because the director made other references to Artaud which correspond to the volume’s content and translations, especially the David Rattray rendering of the surrealistic poem “All Writing is Pigshit . . . ” which Shapiro quoted in a 1970 theater column he wrote for the New Mexico commune newsletter Fountain of Light—and which I posted on ROT on 29 December 2010.)

Shapiro began working on a van Gogh theater piece six years after that trip to Amsterdam, “when I was 36 and thinking of killing myself.”  He was identifying with van Gogh who, he believed, had been “suicided by society” when the painter was 37, but when Shapiro had finished Yellow House four years later, he was already 40 and “had missed jumping out my window of opportunity.”  Working with composer-singer-violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), Shapiro and his team created The Yellow House as a vehicle for the painter’s “personal testimony about the life and the mission of the artist,” a recurring theme in Shapiro’s work. 

That the image of van Gogh, whom Shapiro considered the quintessential courageous artist and would certainly have seen as an art-martyr, would attract the director makes a great deal of sense, of course.  In alluding to Artaud’s surrealistic essay, Shapiro suggested some of the parallels he saw between himself and van Gogh.  Artaud, who also saw similarities between his life and the painter’s, particularly in his own nine-year commitment to psychiatric hospitals for schizophrenia (1937-46), focused in his essay on the suppression by societal institutions—doctors, scientists, asylums—of the non-conformity represented by van Gogh and his art. 

For both Artaud and Shapiro, society suffers spiritual poverty as a result of the suppression of such individuality.  Like Artaud, Shapiro felt that van Gogh’s art was “wildfire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision, compared to all the other paintings popular at the time, would have been capable of upsetting the larval conformity of the” societal establishment of his day; it didn’t attack just the “conformity of manners and morals” but society’s institutions themselves.  Van Gogh wasn’t just a pest, he was a truly dangerous force, “[f]or a lunatic is a man that society does not wish to hear but wants to prevent from uttering certain unbearable truths”—a characterization very like the one Shapiro applied to oracles and artists in general.  Like the poets in Plato’s republic, van Gogh had to be removed from society, hence he was declared insane, marginalized, locked away, and finally driven to suicide.  Van Gogh, in the terms with which Shapiro characterized David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), an artist whom he greatly admired, was “the canary in the mines.”  (I blogged on Wojnarowicz on 15 March 2011.)

Furthermore, like Shapiro himself, van Gogh was a difficult man whose personality created rifts with most of those with whom he came into contact, including, as Theo van Gogh (1857-91) remarked to his wife, the painter’s best friends.  Vincent’s brother wrote to their sister, “It seems as if he were two persons: one, marvelously gifted, tender and refined, the other, egoistic and hard-hearted,” a characterization that fit Shapiro, too.  “It is a pity that he is his own enemy,” Theo van Gogh continued, “for he makes life hard not only for others but also for himself.”  How different Shapiro’s career might have been had he not shared this characteristic as well. 

But van Gogh was also committed to his art, despite the lack of acceptance from the dealers, critics, and even other artists.  (Van Gogh had a famous love-hate relationship with painter Paul Gauguin, 1848-1903, with whom he shared the little, yellow house in Arles, France, for nine weeks in 1888.  Gauguin appears as a character in The Yellow House, played in New York by Olek Krupa and in Baltimore by William Verderber.)  The painter was destined, his brother predicted, to be “appreciated by some but not understood by the public at large.”  Nonetheless, he insisted on pursuing his own vision, no matter the consequences:

Believe me, in art matters the saying, “Honesty is the best policy,” is true; rather more trouble on a serious study than a kind of chic to flatter the public.  Sometimes in moments of worry I have longed for some of that chic, but thinking it over I say, No, let me be true to myself, and express severe, rough but true things in a rough manner.  I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers; let whoever wants to come to me.

“I do not care a penny for the world’s opinion,” van Gogh declared in an unambiguous statement that Shapiro undoubtedly relished, and further noted that

he who wants to accomplish something really good or useful must neither count on nor want the approval or appreciation of the general public, but, on the contrary, can expect that only a very few hearts will sympathize with him and take part in it.

As Shapiro stated, he’d worked on the van Gogh piece expressly “to learn about courage”: the project had come out of his own “search for courage and a way to do real work and not rely on technique.”

Like Shapiro, too, van Gogh took an uncompromising view of what art and artists should and can do.  “I want to do drawings that touch some people,” the painter wrote, but even more, “I draw . . . to make [people] see things which are worth observing and which not everybody sees.”  His sister-in-law, Johanna (1862-1925; called “Jo” in Yellow House), pointed out after his death that “Vincent had often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.”  As for the real subject of his paintings, however, van Gogh insisted, “I . . . will not let myself be forced to produce work that does not show my own character.”  The painter proclaimed, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”  Being an artist, both he and Shapiro believed, means “[a]lways seeking without absolutely finding.”

This principle was the artist’s own expression of “testimony,” a performance technique Shapiro developed with Shaliko.  In Yellow House, Shapiro explained, it was manifested as “using Van Gogh’s words without pretending to be him; to talk directly one-to-one, actor to audience” not simply to present a play, a fictional story, but to use the text as a way to communicate with the spectators, to concentrate “on the interaction between actor and audience.”  (I blogged on this technique in “Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.)  Shapiro asserted that he’d always intended testimony to be “a principle mode of performance, but somehow at La Mama . . . narrative took precedence over the real world inhabited by the actors and the audience.”  The reworking of the script after New York focused in large part on developing this aspect of the script and the production, including writing a new scene, entitled “Testimony,” that came third in the production.

The Yellow House was Shaliko’s first deliberate experiment with testimony, though it figured in previous works, albeit in rudimentary form.  Building on the established Shaliko technique of asking questions, and inspired by van Gogh’s own “testimony,” Shapiro intended Yellow House to consider courage and the artist’s struggle to find a role in society.  Describing one moment in the performance, Shapiro explained: “[T]he actors address the audience directly as themselves—using Vincent’s words . . . but speaking for themselves as actors, artists and citizens . . . .”  The technique, in simplistic terms, is akin to Stanislavskian acting except that instead of finding elements of the characters in themselves, the actors make personal connections to aspects of the role—which Shapiro sometimes spoke of as “cross-documentation.”  This technique is combined with the Brechtian practice of an actor commenting on and criticizing the character and the situation.  While testimony started in The Yellow House mostly as direct address to the audience, it appeared afterwards in subtler manifestations. 

In The Yellow House in New York and Baltimore, four actors played different aspects of one character, Vincent van Gogh, and Shapiro explained that they each played a different role: Young Vincent (Elena Nicholas), the Painter (Judson Camp in New York; Brian Mallon in Baltimore), the Mirror (Olek Krupa in New York; William Verderber in Baltimore), and Self Portrait (Cristobal Carambo).  (At Trinity, one actor played the character.)  As their labels suggest, Shapiro didn’t see them as “characters,” but as “roles”—the various roles van Gogh played (or in which society cast him) in his life; this form of “role-play” Shapiro called “psychodrama.”  (I examine this Shaliko acting principle in the second part of “Testimony & Role vs. Character.”)

As a collaboratively built piece, The Yellow House changed as it developed.  At Trinity in 1984, it had been “frontal, chronological, direct [and] biographical,” but when the piece was restaged at La MaMa in February 1986 and then at Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations in June, it had become more intricate, less linear, and more metaphorical.  Set designer Rojo created an environment first for the long, narrow second-floor theater at La MaMa (the stage is 22 feet wide and 30 feet deep), then for the huge, vaulting 35-foot-by-100-foot North Hall of the Peabody Institute.  The two designs were very distinct, and Shapiro exploited the special qualities of each space. 

At La MaMa, for instance, “it was all head-on,” Shapiro explained.  “The good part of that was we were able to use this deep perspective” to get “the feeling of depth,” placing van Gogh far upstage on the fire stairs of the theater.  Behind him was a rear projection of the artist’s 1889 painting of Saint-Rémy, Corridor in Saint-Paul Hospital, “so you get depth behind depth behind depth,” added the director.  “That’s how I made that small space work.”  They performed “a lot of scenes way up behind the theater, so you’re really looking very hard through.  And that’s very good for van Gogh—depth.  But [with only a 16-foot ceiling,] there isn’t any height.”

Contrastingly, in his most striking theatrical effect in Baltimore, Shapiro used the high, vaulted ceiling at the Peabody to create his climactic moment.  As soon as he saw the North Hall while scoping out the available performance spaces in Baltimore, he chose it for The Yellow House.  “I like the height and the windows,” said the director to himself.  “That’s what I liked about the room.”  Projecting van Gogh’s Starry Night onto the 30-foot-high ceiling, Shapiro had Cristobal Carambo (as Self Portrait) climb up a rope 23 feet into the “sky above St. Remy” where he stood on a pipe to “paint” the picture.  “As soon as I saw that room, I knew I had to do something like that,” he effused.  He felt that the effect “made The Yellow House into a kind of passion play,” revealing “the religious, artistic, and social impulses in all of us.” 

As an illustration of how Shapiro reconceived his productions for each performance venue, the evolution of what the director called “the Ascent” is revealing:

The script had always called for Vincent to transcend the bars of St. Remy and paint Starry Night, but before Baltimore, we didn’t have the height to make it possible.  At Trinity, using only one Vincent, we made plywood cutouts of the stars, the Cyprus trees, and other features of Starry Night which we flew in in a three-dimensional arrangement and on which we projected a slide of Starry Night from the front (that is, from the center of the audience).  Van Gogh stood there and pretended to paint it.  At La Mama, with its four Vincents, the Mirror (the protagonist at this moment [Krupa]) was painting Starry Night in his cell beyond the back wall, shown by rear screen projection.  Young Vincent [Nicholas] came in and pulled a large (20 feet by 30 feet) white scrim out of the cell and diagonally across the stage, as if Vincent’s canvas were being stretched across the theatre.  On this was projected Starry Night.  All four Vincents stood on chairs to help paint it.

In Baltimore, the Self Portrait [Carambo] painted Starry Night after climbing a rope up 23 feet, where he stood on a pipe to paint.  The picture was projected on the 30-foot high ceiling.

Starry Night was the final spectacle of the TON Yellow House, but the performance also started with a site-specific effect.  Those big windows in the North Hall, seven feet wide by 16 feet tall, had inspired Shapiro as well.  They were left exposed, with the curtains pulled back so that when the show began at 8 p.m. on the mid-June evenings, the sun was still shining in from the real world outside.  It was all the “lighting” designer Marc D. Malamud used until the daylight from outside faded gradually until sunset a little after 8:30 as the performance progressed.  (The room once had skylights, but a false ceiling had long ago been dropped beneath them.  Shapiro mused that it “would be great to do it like that.  To figure it out so that you started at the right time and went right through.”) 

Malamud and Shapiro hung theater instruments outside the windows as well to use for the testimony scene so that they could match the “color and quality” of the outside light to the stage lights inside.  In a scene set inside Vincent’s house, Rojo aligned the house’s window with the ones of the North Hall so that Vincent opened his window and pointed out to a real Baltimore landmark and said: “[T]his could be the center of a new renaissance”—acknowledging the real world.  (The Peabody is within view of the Walters Art Museum, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and Baltimore’s Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place, among other sights.)

As I noted earlier, The Yellow House also reintroduced the Shaliko technique of the multiple casting of one role.  Shapiro had used this technique before, but in Yellow House, four actors, including a woman and an African-American, played van Gogh in various avatars.  In one remarkable scene, three Vincents, all dressed the same (in a representation of 1889’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, appeared together as the Painter (Camp/Mallon) painted his Self Portrait (Carambo) from his reflection in the Mirror (Krupa/Verderber)—as they conversed with one another (or themselves, as it were). 

Shapiro also used Julie Lyonn Lieberman’s music and songs as the voices of characters on stage.  He explained that “Van Gogh was inarticulate and rough . . ., and yet his letters are so eloquent.  I wanted him to stand on stage unable to speak . . . while someone was singing the words of one of his letters.”  In an interview, Shapiro commented about these devices, reminiscent of practices in certain Asian performance forms.  At the time, Shapiro said he knew nothing about Asian theater and that the resemblance was certainly not conscious.  (He surmised he might have absorbed this effect through his long-time study of Bertolt Brecht who was influenced by Asian theater forms.)  In retrospect, Shapiro concluded, he’d “stumbled on very early without the slightest knowledge” that he had done so, the “essence” of Asian theater: an emphasis on storytelling and a “complete redefinition of the concept of dramatic action,” the spectator-performer relationship, and the way both the actors and the audience relate to the story.  (It’s interesting to note that van Gogh, himself, was influenced by Japanese art.) 

The Asian-theater similarity goes even farther, and reveals another of Shapiro’s long-time goals.  The Yellow House, which Shapiro described in publicity as an “image opera,” also began the exploration of the synthesis of arts in performance with Kabuki and Beijing Opera as paradigms.  This Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk was also a principle of one of Shapiro’s significant influences, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940): “Wagner’s idea of a new theatre which would be a dramatic synthesis of words, music, lighting, rhythmical movement and all the magic of the plastic parts.”  (Meyerhold, arguably an inspiration for almost all avant-garde theater people who came of age in the 1960s as Shapiro had, maintained a life-long interest in Asian theater which was one of the central influences on his work as a director.)

Though previous Shaliko shows had included music and dance—or at least choreography—with The Yellow House Shapiro began complecting music, sound, dance, movement, speech, poetry, and slide projections more and more into his pieces.  The director saw Yellow House as a “musical dialogue involving singers, musicians, actors, and set.”  Theater technology, as represented by projections like the van Gogh paintings at La MaMa and TON and, later, videos, also became increasingly integral to Shaliko performances.  In other productions, Shapiro also used recorded voices, electronically distorted speech, and on- and off-stage microphones. In the Trinity  performances of The Van Gogh Project, Theo van Gogh’s voice was heard over a microphone from off stage.  At La MaMa, Theo’s voice was on tape.   

While the La MaMa workshop was performed largely on the stage, however much Shapiro extended it beyond the back wall, with the audience out front, the TON performance space was essentially a huge room with a raised recital stage at one end.  Rojo lined the room with 16-foot construction scaffolding (not coincidentally, the same height as the windows) on three sides, leaving the recital platform open (for the musicians).  Shapiro (who’d been constrained not to alter the room itself) felt the “versatility, verticalness, cheapness, and roughness” of the scaffolding “subverted some of the room’s formality and prissiness.”  The viewers were seated along the sides of the room while the action took place all over the center of the space (including near enough to the spectators for the actors to speak to them) and on the scaffolds.  In contrast to the New York performances, the Baltimore presentation was much more environmental.  The Yellow House sets were even interactive: when van Gogh goes mad, the furniture danced in mid-air, manipulated like marionettes by the actors, themselves, in full view of the audience. 

Just as the set was a vital element in the performance, however, the music and singing, composed and performed by violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), was also integral.  John Strausbaugh of City Paper (4-10 July 1986) remarked that the text “was less a dramatic script than an oratorio.”  This was intended, as Shapiro asserted, “to reveal the psychic activity with extended moments and images.”  In Baltimore, Lieberman and a cellist (Pam Devier) played and sang on a tall platform at one end of the hall (at La MaMa, Rojo had a balcony built above the audience’s heads)—but members of the cast also sang, chanted, and otherwise vocalized from the performance area.  Shapiro dubbed the show “an image opera,” and Strausbaugh called the music “as much an environment as the set.”  (In his review of the New York presentation, Victor Gluck contended in the theater trade paper Back Stage on 28 March 1986 that the concept owed “much to the Theatre of Images” of Mabou Mines, Lee Breuer, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman.)  The music and singing, declared Strausbaugh, “provided both the emotional and narrative context for the piece.”

The Yellow House was perhaps Shaliko’s prettiest production.  Director Shapiro and designer Rojo derived the colors for the set and other production elements from van Gogh’s last painting, Crows Over the Wheat Field, dominated by blues and a deep, intense yellow color. (This fact contained its own small irony: the cadmium yellow pigment was significant to the painter because it evoked the bright, hot sun of Arles, but it also contained arsenic and may have helped cause van Gogh’s madness because he had a habit of sucking on his brushes.)  Though essentially ignored by critics outside Baltimore (there was one review of the New York production), it received excellent notices at the Theatre of Nations.  Non-linear in structure and surrealistic in design, it was visually stunning, captivating audiences and critics alike. 

The presentation at La MaMa received one sole review, in Back Stage (published almost a month after the last performance), in which Victor Gluck wrote that the production “as a visual experience . . . was absolutely startling.”  While complaining that as drama, “it was quite fragmented and sketchy,” Gluck declared that “it brilliantly captured Van Gogh’s psychological states of mind.”  He also proclaimed that the performance “was always startling and always intrigued the mind, the ear and the eye.” 

The TON production garnered a few more notices, but they were all local—no national press covered the festival as heavily as it deserved—and the weekly City Paper ran two reviews, one covering the whole event and the other on The Yellow House alone.  Both, though, came out after the Theatre of Nations had folded its tents and left town.  First up was John Strausbaugh’s “The Color Yellow,” in which he described the Shaliko production as “boldly staged.”  Reporting that Shaliko had “totally transformed their performance space . . . with an ingenious environmental set,” he added, “The staging made brilliant use of the entire room.”  The Yellow House, wrote Strausbaugh, “was a busy, highly stylized production that filled this space with an imagistic interpretation of Van Gogh’s troubled life.”  It was “an almost operatic interweaving of music and text.”  The reviewer described the painting scene with the three van Goghs I mention above as “gorgeous” and characterized the scene in which the set pieces “literally danced in the air” as “a great moment of theatrical overload, very like being stuck in Van Gogh’s mind and being barraged by a chorus of mad, conflicting voices and visions.”  The Yellow House, summed up Strausbaugh, “was crammed to bursting with ideas and images, words and actions and music.”  He went on:

There was so much going on, at such a constant pitch of intensity and ingenuity, that it was sometimes overwhelming and exhausting.  Mounting a production that was both this monumental and this meticulously detailed was a feat of heroic, obsessive vision worthy of its subject. 

David Bergman’s omnibus City Paper column, “The Party’s Over,” followed Strausbaugh’s review a week later and he called The Yellow House “a devastating play.”  Of the three-Vincent painting scene, Bergman labeled it “unforgettable” and declared, “I have never seen schizophrenia so convincingly handled on stage.”  He also called the Starry Night climax “one of the most beautiful stage images I have ever seen.”  (He concluded his article by averring, “The gesture summarized what the festival was all about—the power of artists to make another world.”)

In Baltimore’s daily Sun, J. Wynn Rousuck called the play a “highly inventive piece that’s “an intriguing study . . . suffused with a sense of the sanctity of the creative life.”  He, too, praised the three-painter scene as the performance’s “most stunning effect.”  Lieberman’s songs and Jo’s narration “bring to life the written words and inner thoughts of this plagued spirit.”  Rousuck was so taken with The Yellow House that a decade later, when Shapiro’s production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov came to Baltimore’s Theatre Project from Albuquerque, the Sun reviewer reminded his readers about Shapiro’s “extraordinary work about Vincent Van Gogh” (31 October 1996) which had been “stunning” enough to "take your breath away” (12 November 1996).  (The theater artist hadn’t come east with his Riverside Repertory Theatre Company cast because he was too ill to travel.  Leonardo Shapiro died of cancer at home in New Mexico, where he’d gone to retire in 1993, on 22 January 1997.)

[I think that Yellow House was the most potentially successful of Shapiro’s work in terms of critical and audience reception—had it only received the kind of attention it deserved, especially at the Theatre of Nations.  It’s more accessible than Strangers, arguably the theater piece that most realized the principles and techniques Shapiro developed with the Shaliko Company (see my post on 3 and 6 March 2014), but it still demonstrates the theatricality, the space use, the synthesis of arts,  and so on.  It’s also a recognizable topic—people know about van Gogh—and it’s an exploration of something audiences understand intuitively.  Shapiro agreed that Yellow House was “pretty” and “not too rough . . . to be popular,” as he recognized that some of the Shaliko projects were.  The Baltimore theater festival was largely ignored except as a local event (even the Washington Post didn’t cover it, much less the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, New York magazine, Variety, Time, or Newsweek.  As you see, those Baltimore reviewers that did write about The Yellow House essentially raved over it.  Had the show garnered that kind of attention out of New York or nationally, it might have allowed Shapiro to raise the money for that unrealized European tour of Yellow House and a final New York production of the finished theater piece.  Nothing probably could have prevented Shapiro getting the diagnosis of bladder cancer the director received in July 1995, but had Yellow House gotten the kind of press coverage I think it should have, the end of Shapiro’s career might have been very different.

[I don’t put footnotes on Rick On Theater, but all the quotations in “The Yellow House” are sourced; I will be pleased to furnish any reader who’s interested with the citations for them upon request.  The sources, some of which aren’t published, run a gamut of Shaliko documents, articles and essays written by Leonardo Shapiro, reviews and press coverage of Shaliko’s and Shapiro’s work, interviews with Shapiro and  his colleagues and associates conducted by me, interviews of Shapiro conducted by other writers (some published and some not), transcripts from video tapes, and several other resources.  I won’t append a list of sources here—it would go on for pages—but I will list the reviews I quoted at the end of “The Yellow House”:

·   Victor Gluck, “The Yellow House,” Back Stage [New York] 28 March 1986: 42A.

·   John Strausbaugh, “Theater: The Color Yellow,” City Paper [Baltimore] 4-10 July 1986: 28-29.

·   David Bergman, “Theater: The Party’s Over,” City Paper [Baltimore] 11-17 July 1986: 28.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “‘The Yellow House’ Paints a Brilliant Picture of Van Gogh,” The Sun [Baltimore] 25 June 1986, sec. B: 1, 3.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “Shapiro’s Chekhov,” The Sun [Baltimore] “Like” [magazine sec.] 31 October 1996: 28.

·   J. Wynn Rousuck, “Theater review; Avant-garde director takes wing with ‘Seagull,’” The Sun [Baltimore] 12 November 1996, sec. E: 3.

[If any reader wants to verify a citation, leave a request in the Comments section for this post.  Just a reminder, however: not all sources will be available to the public and others may be hard to access because they exist only in non-circulating collections like the New York Public Library Billy Rose Theatre Division.]

Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character

[When I was shadowing Leonardo Shapiro, the late innovative and experimental theater director, while he was directing and teaching, and interviewing him about his work, I learned that among his company’s most important acting techniques were what he called “testimony” and the distinction of what he designated “role” versus “character.”  Along with the actor-audience relationship and “real-time” performance, these were the hallmarks of the art of the Shaliko Company, the troupe he founded and ran in New York City’s East Village.  (I’ve drawn on my research on Leo Shapiro for a number of ROT posts since the blog’s inception; see, for example, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009; “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009; “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010; “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010; “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010; “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011; and “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep,’” an early piece of writing by Shapiro himself, 7 May 2011.  Many other blog articles were derived from reading, experiences, or discussions that came out of my work with Leo.)]

Avant-garde stage director Leonardo Shapiro, founder and director of the Shaliko Company from 1971 to 1993, developed an idiosyncratic acting technique of which he said: “I set out to synthesize what I'd learned from Brecht and Grotowski—to combine the personal, confessional will of the actor with Brecht's idea of telling the useful truth to the audience and . . . structure content in such a way that it is activating to an audience.”  In concert with the impact of Brecht’s Epic-theater acting, Shapiro applied his interpretation of one element of Grotowskian theory: “the prophetic, personal, confessional function of the artist.”  Shapiro sought a “strong, personal commitment of the actor and that full use of the actor with the emphasis on the audience—with Brecht’s emphasis on what you’re saying and how you’re saying it to the audience. . . . .  That’s what the company was absolutely about—finding that synthesis.”  This gave birth to “testimony” and the director’s emphasis on “role” over “character.”

Shapiro’s idea of testimony was very much embodied in the notions of the real-time event and the direct communication between actor and spectator.  If the actors present themselves as people like the spectators, doing actual things in real time, then, the director hoped, the audience would become part of the event by making connections between actions that previously appeared unrelated.  (Shapiro defined the “real-time event” as simply what actually happens at a performance while the audience is in the room.  It was the fourth leg of the Shapiro-Shaliko artistic platform; “the primacy of the audience/actor relationship” was the third.)  In The Yellow House (1986), Shapiro explained, testimony was “using Van Gogh’s words without pretending to be him; to talk directly one-to-one, actor to audience” not simply to present a play, a fictional story, but to use the text as a way to communicate with the spectators, to concentrate “on the interaction between actor and audience.”  One of Shapiro’s most important theater principles, he related it to Bertolt Brecht, explaining that it regularly interrupted the fiction “to make all the people equally real and present; to keep applying the present situation in the room to the story being acted out.”  It’s certainly connected, too, to one of the basic lessons Jerzy Grotowski inculcated in his students at the New York University workshop in which Shapiro participated in 1967.  (See “‘The Stone in the Soup’ – Excerpts” by Tom Crawley, on ROT 14 and 17 April 2011.)  “The first principle,” the Polish director explained to the young actors, “is the use of the person, the use of yourself.  The actor should concentrate on what he, the actor, is personally revealing or displaying.  The first consideration is the personal experience, the life and energies of the actor himself.”

The Yellow House, Shapiro’s consideration of Vincent van Gogh, was Shaliko’s first deliberate experiment with testimony, though it figured in previous works such as The Measures Taken (1974), Brecht’s 1930 Lehrstück in which the debate with the audience actually took verbal form; Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1976); and, especially, Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor (1983).  While testimony started in The Yellow House mostly as direct address to the audience, it appeared afterwards in subtler forms.  In Strangers (1990), for instance, there was little direct address in the literal sense, but the whole piece, nearly all of whose text was first-person, was testimony. 

Building on the established Shaliko technique of inquiry, and inspired by van Gogh’s own “testimony,” as Shapiro saw it in the painter’s work and letters, the director intended Yellow House to consider courage and the artist’s struggle to find a role in society.  Describing one moment in the performance, Shapiro explained: “[T]he actors address the audience directly as themselves—using Vincent’s words (about his struggle to discover an honest, effective, creative role in society) but speaking for themselves as actors, artists and citizens . . . .”  The technique, in simplistic terms, is akin to Stanislavskian acting except that instead of finding elements of the characters in themselves, the actors make personal connections to aspects of the role.  This technique is combined with the Brechtian practice of commentary and criticism, as illustrated in Brecht’s description of Charles Laughton’s acting in Galileo. 

 

This principle—that the actor appears on the stage in a double role, as Laughton and as Galileo; that the showman Laughton does not disappear in the Galileo whom he is showing . . .—comes to mean simply that the tangible, matter-of-fact process is no longer hidden behind a veil; that Laughton is actually there, standing on the stage and showing us what he imagines Galileo to have been.  Of course the audience would not forget Laughton if he attempted the full change of personality, in that they would admire him for it; but they would in that case miss his own opinions and sensations . . . .

Of course, since Shapiro didn’t give them character notes, the actors had to fill the outer frames themselves.  In notes for a pep talk intended for the cast of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (1992), Shapiro explained how he expected his actors to fill the shapes he created with them: “cross document our lives with [the] characters’ lives, our props with theirs, our gestures with theirs, our voices with theirs,” so the actors would speak of themselves through the dialogue.  (In my mind, this is a delicate, highly complex and selective application of what Uta Hagen called “substitution.”)  In this way, testimony was accomplished without direct address to the audience.

For Shapiro, testimony wasn’t just sharing information—which, he acknowledged could also be seen as testimony—but something more “important” and “personal,” in the vein of poets Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Robert Lowell.  Shapiro, in fact, compared it to the testimony people give in church or court, “but with all the possible heightening, concentration, and economy that the theater traditionally uses for . . . fictional ends.”   Testimony “has to do with concentrating on the present tense and the interaction between the actors and the audience, and not concentrating on fiction,” Shapiro asserted, defining the technique as “simply the actor speaking directly to the audience about what matters to them both in that moment, in a way that can change that moment, change the world they live in.”

For his last production, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull with the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque (1996), Shapiro described the rehearsal process for arriving at this kind of performance:

The touchstone is when you’re talking to the audience or me standing in for the audience, that level of communication is direct testimony.  When Shenoah [Allen, the actor who played Medvedyenko] says, “Tonight their souls [will mingle in art true to both of them],” he’s talking to us, he’s establishing the basic relationship of performances, human-human relationship, not character . . . .

Applying this principle to a role like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Grotowski taught that the actor’s “own creative work is not to reproduce” the persona devised by Shakespeare, “but to use this mythic creation for expressing himself, the actor’s own deeply-rooted self.”  All this is to be accomplished through the playwright’s text, of course. 

Actor Charlie Chaplin epitomized the kind of performative duality that Shapiro and Brecht (who both admired the film great) sought and which Joseph Chaikin, whom Shapiro directed in Woyzeck, described in The Presence of the Actor:

When we as actors are performing, we as persons are also present and the performance is a testimony of ourselves.  Each role, each work, each performance changes us as persons.  The actor doesn’t start out with answers about living—but with wordless questions about experience.

James Naremore, author of Acting in the Cinema, pointed out that Chaplin actually appeared habitually as three personae.  Aside from “himself,” a carefully constructed Charlie Chaplin persona that’s no more real than the roles he played, and the fictional character Chaplin played in the film (say, The Lone Prospector in 1925’s The Gold Rush), there was usually also a diegetic persona the film character assumed (in The Gold Rush again: explorer, waiter, valet, millionaire, dancer, and lover, among others).  In other words, Charles Spencer Chaplin played Charlie Chaplin (i.e., the Little Tramp), who played The Lone Prospector, who in turn played various roles as circumstances dictated.  These last three are simultaneously visible to the viewer of The Gold Rush.  While he didn’t portray a character with whom audiences could identify directly—no one was really like that Little Tramp, after all, as Vsevolod Meyerhold succinctly pointed out—he drew audiences into his world on both an emotional and intellectual level.  Indeed, Brecht wrote that were Chaplin to play Napoleon, he wouldn’t try to look like the emperor, but “would show objectively and critically how Napoleon would behave.”  The result is that in his films, Chaplin was clearly acting while at the same time “revealing the essence of his soul.”  Some Brechtian critics have called this “schizoid” acting—actors presenting simultaneously as both performers and persons.  In addition, Chaplin was able to address the audience directly in a way that further removed him from the realm of Realistic and Stanislavskian performance.

(The use of the word “schizoid” above to imply a split personality, in the sense of someone behaving like two different people, is clearly a misuse in terms of today’s understanding of schizophrenia.  Nonetheless, it’s the word used by certain Brechtian analysts to describe the presence of the actor as both a performer enacting a role and a person with opinions and responses.  The misuse of the term notwithstanding, the concept still applies.)

Because no “fourth wall” separated the actors and the audience at a Shaliko performance, testimony encouraged the spectators to enter into a debate about the character, the situation, and the actors’ takes on either or both.  In the Shaliko production of The Measures Taken, the company practiced this principle, showing the audience what they deemed the “most important point” and expecting the spectators to form opinions and even discuss it with one another outside the theater.  Indeed, The Measures Taken is, itself, a paradigm for Epic acting.  In the diegetic demonstration, the characters, functioning as actor-demonstrators, enact the events to which they were all witnesses or participants themselves.  They comment on the characters they depict—themselves, the Young Comrade, and all the other figures in the event—and their audience, both the diegetic one (the Control Council) and the spectators at Shaliko’s Measures Taken, judges and criticizes them instead of empathizing with them.  (Since the Shaliko actors in the production were also demonstrating their observations, there were, in fact, two levels of commentary for the theater audience to judge.)

Chaikin explained the technique with respect to Brecht: “In addition to [the actor’s] presence on the stage as the character in the given circumstances he is sharing with the audience a response to the character’s predicament.”  That response changes from moment to moment, shaping “the [inter]play between actor and audience” who are partners in the experience.   Both Grotowski, as noted, and Ryszard Cieślak, Grotowski’s leading actor, spoke of this, too.  “The subject of the performance,” declared Grotowski, “is this confession of the actor which occurs in the here and now,” while Cieślak stated that the actor must be stimulated “to reveal himself, to expose to everyone his inner being.”  Chaikin described Cieślak as the paradigm of this type of performance: “[T]here is no evidence of character in the former definition of motives and information.  His work is an articulation of a common human condition.  In every moment he seems aware that his ‘confession’ is something which applies to him but not only to him.”

In fact, Shapiro essentially eschewed “character” in the sense to which Chaikin referred.  He delineated the Shaliko approach to acting by describing the lessons he learned back at NYU’s School of the Arts:

First, make sense of the words; then find what your objective is and learn how to pursue it; and then find out who the character is and how to portray that.  From the beginning of our work as a company, I was never interested in that last part, character.  We just threw that out and made everything based on the other two, making sense and pursuing the objective.

Reflecting on Shaliko’s work on the Greek tragedies in Children of the Gods (1973), the director affirmed that he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as characters, “but was fascinated by them as hereditary 3,000 year-old roles as fresh today as when their garments were first produced by exploited children laboring in Athenian sweat shops.”  For him, they were “[t]he greedy King, the unforgiving Queen, the sacrificed Virgin on the altar, the stormy Uncle, the wounded, disillusioned Young Hero, the Sister who has been unhinged by the thirst for revenge.”  Shapiro called this form of “role-play” “psychodrama.”

“Part of the conception of the actors’ job is role playing as opposed to character,” explained Shapiro, “playing the definition of their relationship with the audience and the story that is being told.”  By way of illustration, Shapiro said after the 1992 run of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son that neither Franz nor Hermann, the writer’s father, were interesting to him.  For the director, both actors in the cast represented the same “character”: “The father is a voice inside the son” in a clash of creativity (“the son”) and repression (“the father”).  In The Yellow House, in which four actors played different aspects of one character, Vincent van Gogh (Young Vincent, the Painter, the Mirror, the Self-Portrait), Shapiro said that they each played a different role (the “blank page,” the artist, the self-image, the public image).  We can see in this technique a demonstration of fragmentary character that Shapiro used previously in The Measures Taken, with the way the Four Agitators each portrayed the Young Comrade, and again later in Strangers, in which actors played several characters while embodying the same role.  Brecht’s view of character in general is also discernible in Measures, as it is in his Man Is Man, a play that was very important to Shapiro, where Galy Gay abandons one character and adopts another when it becomes advantageous for him to do so—the same adjustment Shapiro and his collaborators depicted in Brother, You’re Next, a 1967 pre-Shaliko performance based on Man Is Man (described in an ROT post on 26 January 2010).  For Brecht, and therefore to Shapiro, character, on or off the stage, is a mutable, impermanent, and manipulable thing, not, as Stanislavsky taught, an inevitable consequence of psychological stimuli.

For the cast of The Seagull, Shapiro differentiated between “character” and “role”: “Character is something that’s fixed”—once the actor has chosen and set it.  “Role is something that opens.”  He told his Seagull cast, “I was never interested in these imaginary characters; they never existed.  I don’t care about them.  What I was interested in was YOU in these roles.”   He tied “character,” a fictional construct, to the psychological analysis Stanislavsky-trained actors use to delve into their parts, fixing their behavior through techniques such as affective (emotional) memory and sense memory that result in actors giving the same performance every time, ideally eliciting the same response from the audience at every performance.  The director saw this as a “screen between the actor and the audience, or the actor and another actor.”

Actors performing “roles,” in contrast, are in the “present tense,” performing their actions on stage, “open to what’s happening now” and “exploiting” the differences among audiences.  In this instance, the “characters” are determined by their actions, and the audience may draw conclusions about them.  This contrasts with actors who develop a character first, then present their actions as the unavoidable effects of that psychology, thus obviating spectator criticism.  Brecht posited that actions which are presented as the inevitable consequences of the characters’ mental make-ups cannot be criticized by the audience because the characters had no choice but to behave the way they did, but when the actors suggest all possible choices, as Shapiro wanted, the audience can criticize the actions that are selected. 

The kind of “character” work Shapiro was here disparaging is often filled with adjectives and descriptive, as opposed to active, language: Hamlet is “indecisive,” “confused,” “weak,” “unsure”; Lady Macbeth is “domineering,” “ambitious,” “ruthless,” and so on.  (Actors often call this “playing adjectives.”)  The kinds of actions (also called “objectives”) to which Shapiro was referring are expressed as transitive verbs, sometimes with direct objects but with a minimum of adverbs and adjectives, as in “to control” or “to find the murderer.”  The distinction’s not inconsequential: the former actor will be static and unchanging, the latter responsive and reactive.

In “On Acting and Not-Acting,” performance scholar Michael Kirby established a continuum of performative behavior that ranges from “not-acting” at one end to “acting” at the other.  Kirby, who defined acting as “to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate,” also asserted that much contemporary performance was shifting toward not-acting, which he defined as “where the performer does nothing to feign, simulate, impersonate, and so forth.”  Shaliko’s acting was representative of a position closer to the acting end of the scale but without all the elements Kirby ascribed to “complex acting,” which would include, among other styles, Stanislavskian Realism and Method acting, where “more and more elements are incorporated into the pretense.”

Richard Kostelanetz, an artist, author, and critic who’s a passionate defender of the avant-garde, noted in The Theatre of Mixed Means about the kind of performance that’s paradigmatic of Shapiro’s type of theater:

In mixed-means theatre, the performers usually do not enact roles but carry out prescribed tasks.  Since these gestures and movements are, to varying degrees, less precisely programed than actors’ activities in theatrical drama, mixed-means performers, unlike actors, do not assume other personalities, but merely display their own.

What Kostelanetz, who used “role” in a sense closer to Shapiro’s “character” (as unfortunately many writers do), was describing fits roughly into Kirby’s performance continuum between “nonmatrixed representation” (“that condition in which the performer does not act and yet his costume [or other non-performance element] represents something or someone”) and “simple acting” (“in which only one element or dimension of acting is used”).  It most closely resembles a form of “received acting,” in which the performers behave as themselves while the performative aspects are projected by a very “strong, persistent” environment, especially masks, as Shapiro employed in Punch! (1987).  In the director’s application, however, there’s more manipulation on the parts of the actors.  This shouldn’t be confused, however, with what’s sometimes described as “transparent” acting, which may be seen as the ultimate Stanislavskian performance.  The transparent actor appears to be behaving naturally, as if in real life.  He or she is transparent because we don’t see the actor’s technique; we “see through” the actor to the character.  It’s the preferred type of acting of American film and found its culmination in the Method acting of Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio.  “Just being,” a description of transparent acting, wasn’t what Shapiro—or Brecht, for that matter—was aiming at.  Brecht named Charlie Chaplin as a paradigm of the Epic actor, but though Chaplin emulated everyday behavior on screen, he evinced a “theatrical eloquence, never using the transparent gestures of offstage communication.”  It’s this theatricality, or “ostensiveness,” that lets the audience know it’s watching a performance and generates the distance for it to observe and criticize the situation.  Ostensiveness, in James Naremore’s terms, “makes us more than usually aware that we are watching a performance.  . . . .  It is a deliberate ‘showing off’ rather than a transparent ‘being there’—a  toying with illusion that serves in part to heighten the viewer’s desire.”

“[A] lot of people are concerned with role as opposed to character in various ways,” Shapiro observed, though for him, the difference between playing a character and playing a role went further than merely pursuing actions on stage, whether transparently or ostensively.  “I think it’s . . . not making the fictional character of a plot the point of the theatrical event . . .,” he explained.  The director specified further: “Working my way, the basic elements of the scene might be the Boy, the Girl, the Moon, and the Audience, as opposed to another way of working which would be based on the specific characters Romeo and Juliet.”  In this, he wasn’t far from Aristotle, who relegated Character to a position inferior to Action.  Shapiro illustrated what he wanted by contrasting the 1986 British and 1988 American casts of Jim Cartwright’s Road, an environmental play set in the industrial north of England during the Thatcherite 1980s.  According to Shapiro, the American actors “very self-consciously had to work on the characters”—the fictive constructs—while their British counterparts “worked on the issues and the people”—their roles.  Shapiro felt of the British actors that “who they were shone through much larger, but without being self-conscious.”  He concluded that “all this work on self and character diminishes people, makes them smaller, makes them smaller than people are in extreme situations and moments.  People don’t make sense; people aren’t characters.”

In this oblique reference to Stanislavsky’s first acting text, An Actor Prepares, whose original Russian title translates as “The actor’s work on himself,” Shapiro was disparaging the technique by which actors develop characters by assembling aspects of themselves that fit, drawing on their pasts using remembered emotions and sensations—affective and sense memories—then ask themselves, ‘What would I do if I were in the character’s situation.’  (When I was taking acting classes from Stanislavsky-based teachers, I was admonished not to speak of the character as “he” and “him,” but always as “I” and “me” in order to reinforce the notion that I am the character.  Not only is this the opposite of the Brechtian actor’s approach, but as a playwright, Brecht often included the words “he said” or “she said” in his dialogue to reinforce this separation.)  This is known as the “Magic ‘If’” and Grotowski unequivocally instructed his 1967 workshop students not to employ it to identify with their characters, and Brecht insisted that this type of acting works by a kind of “hypnosis” whereby the actors “go into a trance and take the audience with them.”  This “bourgeois ‘psychologism,’” as Shapiro described it, does “more to stimulate illusions than to give experiences,” Brecht said, “more to intoxicate than to elevate, more to deceive than to illumine.”  The result is that “everybody feels” but “nobody learn[s] any lessons.”  “Brecht,” Shapiro maintained, “tried to depict everything with utmost clarity.  Every scene, every [bit of] dialogue comes out in sharp clearness.”

Playwright Mac Wellman, whose Whirligig Shapiro directed in 1989, insisted that the “meaningfulness” of a performance doesn’t depend on “a lot of antiquated rules” of Stanislavskian and Aristotelian drama and Shapiro wanted his actors to approach their work without such a psychological ruse.  Joseph Chaikin described this anti-Stanislavskian tactic: “I don’t start with myself saying ‘What would it be about for me?’ [but] ‘What is it about for this character?,’ which corresponds to something I can understand, which corresponds to something which is transmittable to the audience, which is part of the audience experience.”

In another illustration, Shapiro described the work Vanessa Redgrave did for her 1989 Broadway presentation of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending.  He’d taken some students to a performance and they met with Redgrave.  She explained to the students that because her character’s father was an immigrant from Sicily, she researched Sicilian peasants.  Shapiro recounted that “she took them through an hour and a half of class analysis.”  Spotlighting Redgrave’s ostensiveness, he declared, “[I]t’s why she was so good”: 

She was playing all Sicilian peasants, a whole lost nation, you know?  That’s how she blew every American actor off that stage.  Because they were all playing what they had for breakfast, that Stanislavsky thing where the actor’s reality is all internal.  Her method isn’t less personal.  It isn’t less real, it isn’t less honest.  It’s just bigger.

Shapiro attributed the bigness he admired in Redgrave’s performance to a combination of a Grotowskian/testimonial “nakedness” and bravery.  The actress, Shapiro reported, stood on stage “totally exposed” because she did “[a]ll the things that you are not allowed to do, that are stupid” (namely, turning away from the audience and using a “thick,” “preposterous” Italian accent).  He concluded: “[I]t’s an incredible performance.  I wish that more experimental theater artists were willing to take the kind of risk” Redgrave took.

One important difference between Grotowskian acting and the more Brechtian style for which Shapiro aimed lies in precisely what the actors reveal.  Grotowski prohibited his actors not only from identifying with their characters—that is, pretending that the actor and the character are the same person—but also from demonstrating or showing anything that doesn’t spring from immediate and organic impulses.  Shapiro and Brecht both wanted their actors to find intellectual connections and, as Brecht put it quite literally, demonstrate the actions of the character.  What Shapiro expected his actors to reveal, therefore, was less an aspect of their inner selves than a commentary, a personal take, on the situation of the play and, by extension, the actual world beyond the theater.  This precisely echoes Bertolt Brecht’s own description of Epic acting:  “The actor doesn’t have to be the man he portrays.  He has to describe his character just as it would be described in a book” and Chaikin explained : “I must depict Woyzeck, tell about him, not be him.”  

It must be noted, therefore, that a focal aspect of Grotowskian acting which Shapiro didn’t espouse is one for which Cieślak was most renowned: “secular holiness.”  Grotowskian actors are to become instruments for revealing “the innermost core of our personality—in order to sacrifice it, expose it.”  It’s a nearly mystical experience for both the actor and the spectator.  While the Stanislavskian actor’s goal is to merge with the character, to understand his or her motivations and goals, the Grotowskian actor’s goal is to reveal what’s “most personal and closely guarded” within him- or herself.  The relation among the three types of actor has its counterpart in the way the theoreticians approached their audiences.  While Stanislavsky wanted his audience to feel and respond to the emotional experience communicated by the actor and Grotowski saw the shared experience as “shamanistic,” Shapiro rejected both approaches in favor of the Brechtian dialectic.  

Shapiro’s early training was Stanislavskian Realism as interpreted in Strasberg’s Method: the actor was expected to examine the character’s circumstances and personalize the emotional experience.  Shapiro, however, became more interested in the technique of demonstrating or showing, an essential aspect of Brechtian theater.  “Acting,” Shapiro noted, “becomes actually demonstrating the most important point about a situation that is presented to an audience.”  Brecht’s actors, too, were to refrain from “going over wholly” into the characters they were demonstrating; they were to remain “detached,” imitating behavior but still commenting on their characters, inviting criticism from the spectators.  This approach is illustrated, as I mentioned earlier, in Brecht’s characterization of Charles Laughton’s 1947 performance in Galileo (in which we note, too, Brecht’s implied disparagement of transparency).  We wouldn’t learn much from this “schizoid” performance about Laughton’s “innermost core” in Grotowskian terms, but we’d learn something about what Laughton thought of the character and his circumstances. 

It’s significant, both to Shapiro and to Brecht, that the actor’s opinions regarding the character need not be in sympathy with the character.  The actor must take sides, but it may be either with or against the character, or it may vary depending on what the character says or does.  It may even change from performance to performance, as illustrated in comments by actor Christopher McCann about The Measures Taken.  “Our attitude towards the thesis of the play changes from night to night . . .,” McCann recalled.  “Thus, some nights we think the young comrade should not die.  Other nights, we think he is a fool and should have been killed much earlier.” 

Now, compare the description of Laughton’s acting—in terms Brecht also used to praise Charlie Chaplin—with the way Shapiro spoke of the work of Robbie McCauley in Strangers, the Shaliko performance based on the story of a massive nuclear contamination in Goiania, Brazil, Shapiro used to investigate child abuse, societal alienation, homelessness, the technological subordination of more traditional cultures, and other similar issues.  McCauley portrayed, among other figures, Hedda Nussbaum, the battered wife of Joel Steinberg who beat their illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, to death, but, the director explained:

I don’t want Robbie to think about Hedda at all.  I want her to talk about her own life, about her life in New York as a black woman, about her relationship to the audience as she’s talking to them.

Shapiro’s theater, which he labeled environmental because he conceived his productions with the whole space in which they were to take place in mind, was supported by the four pillars I’ve mentioned, including the two performing techniques I’ve been discussing, plus the idea of the real-time event and the audience-actor relationship.  The director explained that

the point of environmental theater is simply its concentration on the reality of the actual transactions going on during the theatrical event—the complicated three-way meeting between audience, actors, and text which happens, each time uniquely, during the performance: those two or three hours when they are locked together in spiritual combat in a dark room. . . . .  The play itself—in its text, thematic content, etc.—is the key element of the equation: it provides the purpose of the transaction, and therefor[e] determines its form.

Those transactions with the audience are, of course, the consequence of the real-time event and testimony, both of which can only transpire when the actors perform their roles as Shapiro conceived the process.

[The sources for the quotations in this article are varied, ranging from published articles and books, interviews, videotapes, private conversations, and just about every other possible resource you can imagine.  For figures like Joseph Chaikin, Jerzy Grotowski, and Bertolt Brecht, I drew on their well-known works (i.e., The Presence of the Actor, Towards a Poor Theatre, and Brecht on Theatre) as well as others less familiar (e.g.: Brecht’s The Messingkauf Dialogues) and sources such as Margaret Croyden’s 1969 interview “Jerzy Grotowski” on CBS-TV’s Camera Three and “The Stone in the Soup” Thomas F. Crawley’s contemporaneous journal of Jerzy Grotowski’s first American workshop in 1967.  As for Shapiro, I interviewed him nine times, once in 1986 and the rest between 1991 and 1993; I have almost every article he published (including drafts), scores of letters (published and unpublished—and sometimes both), several videotapes, pages of notes of observations, including rehearsals and classes, and conversations, typescripts of plays and poems he’d written, and dozens of pages of his unfinished memoirs.  In any case, I can document all the quotations and paraphrases above—although some of the documentation leads back to sources that are unavailable publicly (or just so obscure that finding them outside my files would be difficult).  The same might be true of sources for even the well-known figures like Brecht and Grotowski.  If any reader, however, wants to know the source of a quotation, I’ll gladly supply it on request.

[In the interest of brevity, I didn’t describe each of the Shaliko productions I mentioned above, but almost all of Shapiro’s shows were reviewed in the mainstream press, including the New York Times and the Village Voice, as well as papers in other cities where the company performed (e.g.: Baltimore, St. Louis, Albuquerque—even Moscow and Edinburgh).  A few, like Strangers, which was a workshop, weren’t reviewed but were covered in other publications, both popular and academic.  I probably have the largest collection of Shapiro/Shaliko clippings anywhere except possibly Shapiro’s own records, deposited now in the archives of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—and I may still have documents he didn’t—but I almost certainly have the most complete collection of reviews and production coverage in existence, including many I know Shapiro either never knew about or had long forgotten!

[I knew Leonardo Shapiro for 11 years, having met him in Baltimore when I covered the International Theatre Institute’s 1986 Theatre of Nations, where the Shaliko Company brought The Yellow House.  I started writing about him and the Shaliko Company when Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review, asked me to profile the director and his company for the journal.  That article, “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony,” appeared in TDR in the winter of 1993.  I also worked with Shapiro briefly on his 1991 anti-Gulf war performance collage, Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), and on a potential staging of Strangers (which never happened).  Shapiro retired from New York theater in 1993 and moved to New Mexico, pursuing a dream he’d had since he first lived near Taos between 1969 and 1971, but was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer and died in 1997, two weeks after his 51st birthday.  At the 1 April memorial service held that year at the LaMaMa Annex (now named the Ellen Stewart Theatre), I spoke about his career and professional accomplishments.]