[The
second production of Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company, about which I’ve
blogged many times on Rick On Theater, was Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and Hanns Eisler’s (1898-1962)
The Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme, 1930).
[(The Shaliko Company, the experimental theater troupe founded by Shapiro (1946-97) in 1972, began as a project of New York University, facilitated by a recently-conceived program at NYU called the Ensemble Theatre Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.)
[In February 1975, in repertory with Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, the company’s third production, Measures went to St. Louis’s Washington University. The two-play rep continued at the Public through 18 May 1975, when the Ibsen closed.
[According to Shapiro’s calculus, Shaliko performed Measures 300-400 times. The troupe remained in residence at the Public Theater until 1976. Said Shapiro, Measures was probably Shaliko’s most popular piece. In the press, many reviewers, including New York magazine’s notoriously censorious John Simon, had received The Measures Taken very positively. (A sampling of the critical reception of Measures will be included in Part 2 of this post, coming up on 13 November.)
[This account of the Shaliko Company’s Measures Taken is based in large part on Leonardo Shapiro’s unpublished and uncompleted memoir (ca. 1996), sent to me after his death at 51 on 22 January 1997 by his romantic partner. I’ve added it to information from other sources, including my interviews with Shapiro, but much of the language is Shapiro’s—except that I’ve shifted from Shapiro’s first-person persona to my third-person voice.
[The Measures report will be posted in two parts. The conclusion, as I noted, will be published on Friday, 13 November.
[There are two published articles, which may be archived online if you have access to the right databases. One is a report on a significant aspect of the Shaliko production of The Measures Taken, the colloquy with the audience that took place during the performance: Rose Mary Mechem, “Theatre,” The Nation 7 June 1975: 698-700. The other is a lengthy and detailed report on the construction of the performance text by Shapiro and the Shaliko Company: Claudio Vicentini, “The Shaliko Company’s The Measures Taken,” The Drama Review 19.2 (T66: June 1975): 69-77.]
Shaliko Company publicity, composed by the troupe’s leader, asserted: “THE MEASURES TAKEN is a horror story about the paradoxes of radical commitment, it deals with the problem of ends and means. It asks the question:
“And what baseness would you not
commit
could you rid the world of all
baseness?
And if in the end, you change the
whole world,
For what task are you too
good? Who are you?”
(The lines quoted above are slightly different from what appears in Eric Bentley’s published translation, referenced below.)
Jeffrey Horowitz (b. 1946), Shapiro’s high school classmate and founder in 1979 of New York City’s Off-Broadway Theatre for a New Audience, declared that “this Measures Taken was an Off-Broadway success. I mean, it was a powerful, clear, clean, striking production . . . .”
Shapiro said he didn’t remember very much about starting to work on The Measures Taken. “The myth in my mind is that the company chose it while I was out of town sitting shiva for my father,” the seven-day Jewish mourning observance after the funeral of a family member when the family remains at home and receives callers coming to pay respects. Irving Shapiro (b. 1912) died at 61 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the city of Leonardo’s birth, on 15 January 1974.
“We were working on an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ [English; 1866-1946] The Time Machine [1895] that was the first of many fantasy projects that never happened,” recalled Shapiro. He’d proposed The Measures Taken to the company at some point in 1973, but they’d rejected it as too hard-edged.
When Shapiro got back from Minnesota, Jerry Mayer (1941-2003)—after some forgotten fight with André Gregory for whom he had just played the Mad Hatter (and other roles) with the Manhattan Project in 1970’s “funny and terrifying” Alice in Wonderland—had started work with Shaliko, and the company was reading The Measures Taken. Gregory (b. 1934) founded the renowned experimental theater company in 1968 and created Alice in 1970. (The quotation is from Clive Barnes’s New York Times review: “Stage: Savage ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” 9 Oct. 1970.)
(The Measures Taken [Die Maßnahme, also translated as The Decision and other less-common English titles] is one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke or “learning plays.” It premièred at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin on 10 December 1930. The director was Bulgarian filmmaker Slatan Dudow [1903-63], not Brecht himself, but the Young Comrade was played by Helene Weigel [1900-71], the playwright’s wife.
(The German word Lehrstück actually translates as ‘teaching play’—Lehre means ‘teaching’; the German word for ‘learning’ is Lernen—but Brecht wrote in “The German Drama: Pre-Hitler” (New York Times 24 Nov. 1935) that “the nearest English equivalent I can find is the ‘learning-play.’” The word is also often translated as a “didactic play.” Das Stück is German for ‘piece,’ but it often means ‘play,’ as in ‘a dramatic piece.’
(The Lehrstücke had an explicitly didactic purpose in which Brecht employed theater practices to demonstrate his political and moral theories. They were, however, conceived for the concert platform or the lecture hall rather than a conventional stage.
(The lessons of a Lehrstück were directed at the participants; there’s was no “audience” in the conventional or theatrical sense. If there were spectators, they were students or workers, party members, not entertainment-seekers. They were there to be taught a lesson in correct communist thinking and action—according, of course, to Brechtian principles, which were not always in line with Party protocols—The Measures Taken, ironically, was rejected by the Bolsheviks and never performed in the Soviet Union or most of the USSR’s satellites.)
The basic setup of The Measures Taken is that a group of Russian agents provocateurs are sent to Mukden in the Republic of China to disseminate propaganda and spread the revolution in China, so they’re reporting back to the Control Commission in Moscow in 1919 on their clandestine mission.
(The modern city of Shenyang, China, was officially called Mukden between 1634 and 1914, and continued to be known by that name through the first half of the 20th century. It’s now the capital of Liaoning Province, in northeastern China, on the Yellow Sea and the northwestern border with North Korea.)
The Agitators had selected an intemperate Young Comrade as their guide in China. He wanted immediate action and refused to listen to his older, more experienced companions. Certain that the Young Comrade would inadvertently betray them and their mission, the Four Agitators killed the Young Comrade for the good of the Party—and with his acquiescence—to save the mission.
As the play opens, the Control Chorus says: “Step forward! Your work has been successful. In yet another country the ranks of the fighters are joined, and the Revolution marches on. We agree to what you have done.”
Four Agitators: Stop! We have something to say. We announce the death of a comrade.
Control Chorus: Who killed him?
Four Agitators: We killed him. We shot him and threw him into a lime pit.
Control Chorus: What did he do, that you shot him?
Four Agitators: He often did the right thing. Several times, he did the wrong thing. But in the end, he endangered the Movement. He wished the right thing and did the wrong thing. We demand a verdict.
Control Chorus: Demonstrate how it happened and why, and you will hear our verdict.
Four Agitators: We shall respect your verdict.
(Shaliko’s text of The Measures Taken is available in Bertolt Brecht, The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays, trans. Eric Bentley [Grove Press, 1965]. Shapiro made a few emendations to the published version for the troupe’s production.
(The Daily World, a New York City paper that served as the official organ the Communist Party of the United States of America [CPUSA], denounced the Bentley translation for “serious omissions and sometimes distortions.”)
The Measures Taken “was put together the fastest of all the works,” said the director, referring to his troupe’s productions. Shaliko had worked on the show for about 14 weeks. The company had “like five or six weeks of rehearsal,” recalled Shapiro. “But then we did it, you know, four weeks in Baltimore” at the Theatre Project (March 1974), subsequently touring to Philadelphia (Wilma Theatre, 2-4 May 1974); Boston (Charles Street Meeting House, 16-19 May); Provincetown, Massachusetts (Town Hall, 12-14 July); and then returned to New York.
The company opened Measures in New York on 15 October 1974 and it ran until 13 January 1975. Before it opened, Shaliko previewed the production for three or four more weeks at the Public Theater (in the newly opened Little Theater, now the Susan Stein Shiva Theater, the smallest space in the complex at 99 seats) of the then-named New York Shakespeare Festival.
(The venue was always named the Public Theater from 1966, when NYSF purchased the former Astor Library, but the theater company became the Joseph Papp Public Theater / New York Shakespeare Festival in 1992 and the Public Theater, its current name, in 2002.)
Before its transfer to the Public, Measures Taken played briefly at New York University, Shaliko’s birthplace, where NYSF artistic director Joseph Papp (1921-91) saw a performance. (The performances were staged in Central Plaza, 111 2nd Avenue at East 7th Street in the East Village, home of the nine-year-old NYU School of the Arts, where Shaliko débuted the New York mounting of Children of the Gods in 1973.)
Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn [b. 1943], a friend of Shapiro’s since their NYU student days, was a long-time supporter of Shaliko, and came to see the show. Shawn, whom Papp once called “my favorite writer,” got Gail Merrifield [b. ca. 1934], Papp’s wife, to see Measures. Merrifield was also the head of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s new play department, and she got her husband to see it, and he gave Shapiro a room at the Public—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.
Measures was well received by audiences. (The critical response is summarized below.) The production visited Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before opening at the Public, as well as Washington University in St. Louis afterwards.
Under Dickinson’s sponsorship, Shaliko toured Pennsylvania, including several union halls, local colleges, and prisons. (Shapiro, himself, performed in the play during this tour, taking the Commissioner role originally played by Tom Crawley, who’d left the show.)
When the director began working through the text, he made three major decisions for doing The Measures Taken that he’d never done before, but that became signature aspects of his work in theater.
First, he discovered that the play was written in verse, which he hadn’t realized when he first read it because it doesn’t rhyme in English. It’s written very metrically, with very heavy metric accents and patterns, he noted.
Second, he broke up the choral passages of the Control Commission and the Agitators to create seven ongoing roles. So, although most of the play is written as “Agitators: blah blah blah; Control Commission: blah blah blah,” Shapiro divided the choral texts into separate speeches, giving the individual actors roles to work on with through-line actions.
Breaking up the speeches into individual back-and-forth speeches punctuated with choral speech did two things, Shapiro thought. It took something monolithic and boring, which didn’t seem interesting, and turned it into something that’s very exciting theatrically.
The third special ingredient in Measures for the director was the extension of direct address to the audience. “The Measures Taken took this to an extreme,” Shapiro later wrote, “that I’ve never recaptured but which has always been a clear, strong element in construction.”
The original production of Measures was an oratorio—sung through with a choir, a soloist, and a small orchestra. Eisler’s songs were sung by the Control Commissioners, designated in the text as “Control Chorus.”
Shapiro jettisoned the oratorio and the songs were performed by the entire seven-member cast. The orchestra was replaced by a single pianist. (Interesting, but irrelevant coincidence: Warren Swenson [b. 1937], who played the piano for Shaliko’s Measures Taken in New York, was later the chairman of the music department at a private school in Brooklyn where I taught theater from 1977 to 1980—before I met Leo Shapiro in 1986.)
What had been the recitative of the oratorio was spoken as dialogue. A Shaliko technique that became a frequent hallmark was rhythmic patterned musical speech that Shapiro, who started out to be a poet, used to accentuate the poetic forms inherent in the language. This he worked on with the Control Commission where some of the recitative would have been and those passages were spoken as a group, while other lines were spoken individually as ordinary speech.
Rhythmic language, is “more poetical, in the sense of musical, and more dramatic,” felt Shapiro. But in one statement, he also admitted that his and his actors’ attraction to rhythmic speech “owed a lot more to our being the first generation of rock ’n’ roll to come of age in the theater.”
From a representative conversation with audience members at Measures, Shapiro often cited this exchange:
Question: Why do the actors talk so funny?
Answer: Because it’s poetry.
Question: I thought in poetry you were supposed to make it sound like anything else, like they weren’t talking poetry, good poetry was like technique, invisible.
Answer: You went to the wrong school.
As an aspiring poet, Shapiro was drawn to William Butler Yeats [1865-1939] from his high school years. In a 1970 column for a hippie publication in Taos, New Mexico, Shapiro quoted the Irish poet: “I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung” [“Speaking to the Psaltery,” Essays and Introductions]. In a later recording, Yeats explained:
I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon the rhythm. . . . It gave me the devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read. And that is why I will not read them as if they were prose” [“Talk on Rhythm” (4 Oct. 1932) in W. B. Yeats, The Poems of William Butler Yeats].
Shapiro’s remark concluding the spectator exchange alludes to Yeats’s statement, and the director further observed, “Poetry, especially theatrical [poetry], comes from the chant—it is an incantation; a theatrical event is, by definition, an incantation in which the performance of the words as much as the words themselves change reality.”
(It bears noting that the classic Greek drama, the forebear of all Western theater, was the dithyramb, a wild, passionate choral hymn, which in turn was derived from a pre-literary dithyrambic chant.)
In Measures, for the first time, Shapiro structured the life of the scene firmly on the structure of the language itself—and he said he did so ever since. He affirmed that he meant “the poetic qualities of the language . . .[:] alliteration, assonance, meter, rhyme—basic techniques of English-language poetry . . . .”
The core aesthetics of The Measures Taken, Shapiro decoded, were “narrative thrust, narrative line, patterned speech and movement and the basic idea (which came very late), of the lehrstuke [sic] as a dialogue between the actors and the audience, a real-time dialogue.”
Shaliko’s Measures was presented as a play-within-a-play in which the Control Commission required the Four Agitators to demonstrate their actions, which they reenact for the Control Commission as the diegetic audience. The extradiegetic audience—that is, the Shaliko production’s viewers—were asked to represent Russian students invited to attend the hearing.
In the reenactment, the Four Agitators played not only themselves, but all the other personae as well: the barge Coolies, the Overseer, a Policeman, various Workers. The role of the Young Comrade was passed among the Four Agitators; whoever was playing that part had a red piece of cloth on her or his body, such as an armband or headband, to identify the individual.
As a learning play, according to Shapiro, Measures was never meant for theatrical production. But in his mind’s eye, it could be staged as “a rip-roaring kind of . . . it kind of had the energy of a kung-fu Western.” Among the keys to realizing this, he saw, were role-playing and the basic idea of the Lehrstück as a real-time dialogue between the actors and the audience.
(Role-playing and the real-time event were fundamental concepts in Shapiro’s theatrical theories and integral in one way or another to every Shaliko production. I blogged in these concepts in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character” [25 September 2013], and “The Real-Time Event” [6 July 2021].)
Testimony was a third basic concept of the experimental director’s theater practice which is intertwined with both role-playing and real-time performance. “[T]estimony,” said Shapiro, “is simply the actor speaking directly to the audience about what matters to them both in that moment in a way that can change it . . . .”
He explained that the technique was “using [the persona’s] words without pretending to be him or her; 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.
Mary Zakrzewski, who played the Chief Commissioner who questioned the audience in The Measures Taken, confirmed: “You start to develop a relationship with the audience. They are very personal, real relationships,” she specified, “that are only there for an hour.”
At a Shaliko performance, testimony encouraged the spectators to enter into a debate about the people, the situation, and the actors’ takes on either or both. In The Measures Taken, the company showed the audience what they deemed the “most important point,” expecting the spectators to form opinions and even discussing it with one another outside the theater.
What Shapiro called ‘role,’ wasn’t what others used as a synonym for ‘character.’ For Shapiro, though, the two words meant something significantly different. Role-playing, in Shapiro’s conception, was “playing the definition of [the actor’s] relationship with the audience and the story that is being told.”
This is opposed to character, which, for Shapiro, “is something that’s fixed”—once the actor has chosen and set it. “Role is something that opens,” because it’s mutable, impermanent, and manipulable—depending on the actor’s connection to the audience at a given performance, the story, and even the actor’s approach to his or her actions that evening.
As examples of the difference, Shapiro affirmed that in Children of the Gods, the collage of Greek tragedies, he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as 3,000-year-old characters as limned in myth and the classic plays; but as fresh contemporary roles: “[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”—their functions in the story.
(Children of the Gods, Shaliko’s first production, was a composite of Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) Agamemnon and Euripides’ (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE) Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis. It premièred in 1973 (see “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973) [19 November 2021]).)
This is in contrast with performing the fictional construct that is ‘character.’ For Shapiro, this was like playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet based on the basic elements of “the Boy, the Girl, the Moon, and the Audience,” as opposed to basing it on the contrived fictional characters Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, teenagers from wealthy families in Renaissance Verona.
What Shapiro was rejecting was the technique by which Stanislavskian actors assemble aspects of themselves that fit their notion of the character, drawing on their pasts using remembered emotions and sensations, then ask themselves, ‘What would I do in the character’s situation.’
Shapiro’s theater, however, used the Brechtian technique of demonstrating or showing. “Acting,” Shapiro noted, “becomes actually demonstrating the most important point about a situation that is presented to an audience.” In Brechtian manner, role-playing actors were to refrain from “going over wholly” into the personas they were demonstrating; they were to remain “detached,” imitating behavior but still commenting on their roles—an aspect of testimony—and inviting criticism from the spectators.
The real-time event, in Shapiro’s terms, was what happens at a performance while the audience is in the room, a concept dependent on the audience-performer relationship, which was the fourth leg on which the Shaliko technique stood. Starting with Children of the Gods, Shapiro made “the audience the active participant” in the performance. Shaliko strove to “enter into a relationship” with its audience “and try to get them to play their parts.”
The “part” assigned to the viewers was seldom spelled out, as it was in Measures, and sometimes the spectators didn’t even recognize their roles—but the actors knew. The tactic was, however, always a part of the Shaliko performance text and something the director worked on with his casts during rehearsals. In this way, “everything is not just done for the audience or to the audience, but with the audience.”
In Children, the spectators were the gods to the actors’ Greeks, with, as Shapiro explained it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.” In Ghosts (1975), Shaliko’s third production, they were ghosts, though there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors, the form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions.
In Measures, however, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were students being indoctrinated in Communist Party practice. “Since this is a learning play,” Mary Zakrzewski, as the Chief Commissioner, told the audience, “we are asking you to represent students, and from time to time during the production we will ask you questions about what you have seen.”
Zakrzewski stopped the show six times during the performance. There weren’t discussions at the end of the show because Shapiro didn’t want to let the audience off the hook by allowing them to reach conclusions in the theater. So the discussions stopped at a certain point and then the Control Commission gave its verdict, with which most of the audience tended to disagree.
So the spectators went out talking—“incredibly much,” asserted Shapiro. “I mean, they went out arguing with each other in a way that you don’t normally see. We didn’t give them the chance to blow it off in the theater.”
Shapiro’s decision to include these six interludes came quite late in the preparation process: two days before the production opened, the director told his cast that “you’re going to talk to the audience.” (This quotation comes from Rose Mary Mechem’s report on Measures in The Nation in which she recounted at length this aspect of the production.) The Measures Taken was the last Shaliko show in which performers addressed spectators directly from the stage.
There was a colloquy with the “students” about whether the Agitators had done the right thing or not in the scene just presented, led by Zakrzewski at the end of most scenes. These audience-questioning episodes, which was an insertion of Shapiro’s not part of Brecht’s original performance text, could extend the length of the performance, which would have run about 80 intermissionless minutes unaugmented, as much as an hour from one show to the next.
In Brecht’s view, the Four Agitators were right to kill the Young Comrade in order to secure the mission because the Young Comrade was wrong to put the plight of the barge workers above the Party’s ultimate goal of spurring revolutionary action among the Chinese people.
(Oddly, the Communist Party rejected the lesson on the grounds that Brecht was wrong to say that emotionalism was detrimental to revolutionary action, the Agitators shouldn’t have entrusted such great responsibility to the Young Comrade when he’d failed at lesser ones, and that the Young Comrade was correct, according to Bolshevik precedent, to have urged the barge workers to rise up spontaneously.)
Shapiro, however, saw the play as an exploration of the questions and contradictions it raises, not an instructional tract to inculcate specific responses. He and his troupe had a different lesson in mind for their interpretation of the play, both in terms of the content and the staging.
In a company announcement, Shapiro wrote that the Shaliko production of The Measures Taken was not “a dogmatic tract designed to teach a specific lesson, but a provocation which by leading the spectator to formulate his own questions, allows him to discover her or his own lessons.”
At one Pennsylvania union hall performance, staff writer Len Barcousky reported in the Bethlehem Globe-Times, “Communists confronted trade unionists last night at . . . the United Steel Workers of America, Bethlehem locals, and surprisingly few sparks flew. . . . The old ideological fires had apparently dimmed, for the more than 60 members of the audience found themselves agreeing with many points of the play.”
“The audience discussions were totally different in the prisons than at the Public,” recalled Shapiro. The prisoners were “really concerned with these issues in a very immediate way. The questions of ends and means and radical activity and who got the gun: these are all questions they’re familiar with. It isn’t theory to them.”
Shaliko’s second production was supposed to reopen the wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art built to house the Cone sisters’ collection of Matisses and other French artists. The gig was scheduled for March 1974, and now it was late January.
(The Cone Collection is one of the most important art collections in the world, assembled by two Baltimore sisters, Claribel (1864-1929) and Etta Cone (1870-1949). From 1898, the sisters collected French modern art for 50 years. Etta inherited her sister’s art and then, at her death in 1949, she willed the collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The newly built Cone Wing opened in 1957, and was remodeled in 1974—the reopening for which was supposed to include a Shaliko performance.)
When the company chose to do Measures, they didn’t know it was a musical. Shapiro didn’t know what the sections of verse in the text were supposed to be and, he confessed, “I certainly didn’t know what an oratorio was.” He joked that he “knew it was more than just [a cookie with] the creamy filling.”
Shapiro recalled that when they got the score—he thought it came from Erwin Piscator (German theater director and producer; 1893-1966)—it was in German. The director’s recollection was that Eric Bentley (British-born American theater critic, playwright, singer, editor, and translator; 1916-2020) must have put them onto the Hanns Eisler estate.
The score was four-part, atonal harmony written by Eisler for full chorus and orchestra, and, realized Shapiro, “I had this panic-stricken realization that we actually had to sing this stuff.” He found that “just trying to pick out the piano part and play it, it was a really threatening score, unbelievably difficult.” And he was trying to do it with seven actors who had put on their résumés that they could sing—none of the whom, it turned out, could sing.
It cost Shaliko a fortune to hire singing teachers to come in and work with everybody. It was a very difficult score, insisted the director: “four-part harmony, when it’s atonal, is like . . . you just have to learn every single part of it by rote. It’s tough.”
After all the frustration and terror of the reorganization of the company after the loss of several key original members and the breakup of his marriage (divorce came in 1973), after Children of the Gods, Shapiro was surprised to find himself totally “enraptured” with Measures Taken rehearsals. The troupe put it together in a short time.
After two years, Shaliko’d done just one show; after Children, more than half the company left. The three remaining old members, Mary Zakrzewski, Tom Crawley (1940-95), and Candace Tovar (b. 1947; Shapiro’s former wife, but still a Shaliko member), were the Control Commission in Measures. And the four newer and younger members of the company were the four Agitators, Jane Mandel (b. 1947), Chris McCann (b. 1952), Jerry Mayer (1941-2002), and Jim Carrington (1949-2025).
At the time, everyone in the company was on unemployment, because they’d figured out that they could pay themselves twice as much for 26 weeks and then get, maybe $75 a week from unemployment for 26 weeks. That was how Shapiro found the basic production concept for Measures.
It was a line of tape on the floor, separating the Control Commission from the Agitators, and the rest of the world. It came from the white line people had to stand behind at the unemployment office. It meant so much to all of the troupe that Shapiro was certain it must be a universal symbol. It turned out that it really was!
The line ultimately evolved into a platform; there was no line, there was a little raised platform. But the company was rehearsing on a taped-out floorplan, so Shapiro used tape for everything. The Rice Barge that the coolies pulled, they pulled with tape, and the whip the Overseer whipped them with was tape.
So, when it came time to obscure the European faces of the Agitators, it was supposed to be with Chinese masks, but Jerry Mayer tore off four inches of yellow masking tape and put it across the actors’ faces.
That dividing line had a lot to do with the dynamic of the show (old guys vs. new): the Control Commission, three people sitting on the platform behind the table or a line of tape, and the Four Agitators in constant action, constant transformational action. Because the Control Commission just sits there and does nothing through the whole show but say, ‘Tell us how?’ and so on, they were already resentful, in a way, of the newcomers.
[“Shaliko’s The Measures Taken, Part 2,” as I said above, will be posted on Friday, 13 November. It picks up right where the first part leaves off. Please come back to Rick On Theater for the conclusion of my report on the development and performance of Leonardo Shapiro’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1930 Lehrstück in three days.
[As readers of ROT know, I don’t do footnotes on the blog. I do have, however, an annotated version of this report and if anyone’s interested on the sources for the quotations used in the post, I will be glad to provide them. Be aware, however, that a number of the sources aren’t published or even publicly available (e.g.: interview tapes, performance videos, Shapiro’s memoir notes). Other documents, including newspaper articles from local or obscure publications, may be hard to locate.
[For
those who are inclined to pursue their interest to a greater extent, Leonardo
Shapiro’s papers (including the files of the Shaliko Company are archived in
the Billy
Rose Theatre Collection of the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Researchers should note that there are documents
pertinent to Shapiro and Shaliko in the New York Shakespeare Festival records,
also in the Billy Rose Collection. Both
these archives are stored offsite and therefore require advanced reservations
(i.e., no walk-ins); contact the Billy Rose to make arrangements.]
