[This is the second and final installment of my two-part report on the Shaliko Company’s staging of the 1930 Bertolt Brecht Lehrstück, The Measures Taken, the company’s second production. If you haven’t read Part 1, I urge you to go back to 10 November 2026 and do so; very little will make sense of you don’t read the two parts in order.]
The brief intro to the Measures Taken in the opening scene transcribed earlier (see Part 1) not only laid out all the Shaliko troupe needed to know, especially that the idea of “demonstrate” is the generator of the Brechtian acting technique—that is, the Brechtian Gestus—but also in working on this first speech, Shapiro discovered how he’d do the play as an ensemble production.
(As I’ve made clear in many of my previous posts about Shaliko and Leonardo Shapiro, the director’s two guiding theater models before he started Shaliko were Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski [Polish; 1933-99]. He often said, “What I’m trying to accomplish in [the Shaliko Company] is a synthesis between the impulses of Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. Brecht makes an essentially intellectual appeal. Grotowski’s is directly emotional.”
(There is no single English word or expression by which to translate Gestus; the German adjective is gestisch, translated as ‘gestic.’ According to Carl Weber [1925-2016], a Berliner Ensemble director and dramaturg [1952-61], and a protégé of Brecht (and later, a professor of directing at New York and Stanford Universities) from my notes from Weber’s Directing and Dramaturgy class at NYU in 1983, for an actor, Gestus is all her or his outward behavior—that is, dress, posture, voice, movement, expression, and so on.
(In “Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition” [Brecht Sourcebook], Weber defines Gestus more formally as “the total process, the ‘ensemble’ of all physical behavior the actor displays when showing us a ‘character’ on stage by way of his/her social interactions. It is an ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures, the face and the mimetic patterns and rhythms, costume, makeup, props, and whatever else the actor employs to achieve the complete image of the role he/she is performing.”
(While Shapiro may have first become aware of Grotowski’s work and theories in his teens—through his association with Julian Beck [1925-85], Judith Malina [1926-2015], and the Living Theatre—his real introduction to the Polish director and teacher came at New York University in 1967. Grotowski and Ryszard Cieślak [Polish; 1937-90], Grotowski’s principal actor, taught a four-week “methodology” workshop from 6 to 30 November in which Shapiro participated [see “’The Stone in the Soup’ – Excerpts” (14 and 17 April 2011)].
(In 1975, Shapiro went to Wrocław, Poland, to work with Grotowski’s Theater Laboratory at the Research University of the Theatre of Nations. The program ran from 14 June to 7 July during which Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003), whom Shapiro had known when the renowned actor was a member of the Living Theatre, ran a workshop.
In addition to the rhythmic speech Shapiro brought to the Shaliko production of Measures, he also reassigned the now-dialogue of Brecht’s choral passages of the Agitators. By breaking up the Four Agitators’ speech (in the scene excerpted above), originally intoned as a group, for individual actors, the director created the continuing individual roles that Mandel, McCann, Mayer, and Carrington would play, both individually and as a collective, for they are a functioning cell.
Mandel: He often did the right thing.
Carrington: Several times he did the wrong thing.
Mayer:
But in the end he endangered the Movement.
Three
together: He wished the right
thing and did the wrong thing.
All: We demand a verdict.
“We also established our unique rhythmic approach to the piece,” recalled Shapiro.
In the next speech of the Four Agitators, after the line “We shall repeat what was said,” he added “. . . and we will, each of us, take turns representing the Young Comrade, using this”—indicating the red cloth.
“Looking at this now,” Shapiro remembered, “I think that it may well have been Brecht’s intention for the Agitators to rotate playing the Young Comrade, but it doesn’t say anything about it in the script, but it certainly was instrumental in the play, meaning what it meant to us in the rehearsal process.”
(Readers will recall that in the Berlin première of Measures Taken, the Young Comrade was played by Brecht’s wife, Helene Weigel.)
The director continued:
And I think the fact that the Young Comrade was not played by one of our actors, the fact that he didn’t have an advocate in the room the way a continuing character always has an advocate in the room playing him, I think that had to do with our shifting response to the play, because I think we all started out thinking that they were right to have killed him, and we all came around to thinking that they were wrong.
I don’t remember which way it was. I was a pacifist; I thought it was wrong to kill him. I think that our audiences took it as compassionate, but they also saw us as very stern in the arguments of the actors. They were always arguing for the Young Comrade. In the discussions with the audiences, our actors really came to represent the party position that they were playing.
(In a statement made around 20 years earlier, Shapiro recollected about changing his tack as the work progressed, that he’d started presenting the play from the perspective of the Young Comrade. “But I changed,” he reported, “because it did not make sense.”)
In Shapiro’s application of Brechtian theory, the actors must take sides, but it may be either with or against the person, or it may vary depending on what their personae say or do. It may even change from performance to performance, as illustrated in comments by Christopher McCann about Measures. “Our attitude towards the thesis of the play changes from night to night . . .,” McCann recalled in an interview at the time of the New York Shakespeare Festival production. “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.”
(The comments above by Shapiro and McCann are from the comprehensive article about the production written by Claudio Vicentini. Vicentini [Italian; b. 1944] is Professor Emeritus of Theater History at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale.” He’s the author of numerous books in Italian on theater and acting.)
In a section of his unfinished memoir devoted specifically to Measures, Shapiro recounted the evolution of some of the production’s signal tropes:
So, in the first scene, I discovered the red thing to pass around, and added a line to explain it. In Ihe Second scene, we came up with the yellow masking tape for “The Blotting Out” [of the Agitators’ faces], after which they sang the worst song in the show, “Praise of Illegal Work,” written at least an octave higher than any red-blooded American is going to sing. For the third scene, “The Stone,” the mise-en-scène expanded to include the table the Control Commission sat behind being pulled as a rice barge up the river.
This liberation of the table to become whatever, or the ground of action, led to my having to have my carpenter friend David Putnam, formerly of the Appleseed [Circus, the guerrilla-theater troupe Shapiro led in New Mexico, 1970-71; see Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos), 5 August 2009, and Cheerleaders of the Revolution, 31 October 2009], build us a table that would never, ever, ever fall apart, not even when all four of the Agitators were kicking up and down in a military double time rhythm, actually three of them carrying a fourth on their shoulders while the table is on a 45-degree angle, one end up on the platform, the other aimed down a[t] the audience like a big rifle.
(David Putnam, whom Shapiro described as a carpenter with a Harvard degree, was the husband of Linda Putnam [b. 1944], an NYU classmate of Shapiro’s who joined the Appleseed Circus. David Putnam, whom Shapiro noted was “into Arcology,” the visionary architectural theory of Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri [1919-2013], served as the designer and builder, first of Appleseed and then for early Shaliko productions.)
Shapiro continued:
And we used Jerry’s [Mayer] script in a hard black binding for the stone that the Young Comrade kept putting in front of the workers who were slipping in the mud, thus helping them, but also helping the cruel overseer get the rice up the river while exploiting the workers. Instead of getting them to take action in common to demand shoes for all. And even so, he called so much attention to himself that he got the whole group in trouble, “and they pursued him for two days until he met us. Then they pursued us and him together in the city of Mukden for a whole week.”
Shapiro found that the play comes down very clearly on the side of the Control Commission, and he had no doubt that Brecht meant it to do exactly that. Brecht agreed with the conclusion of the Control Chorus:
We agree to what you have
done. YOU’RE REPORT SHOWS US HOW MUCH IT
TAKES TO CHANGE THE WORLD: ANGER AND
TENACITY, KNOWLEDGE AND INDIGNATION
SWIFT PARTICIPATION, PROFOUND
REFLECTION
COLD ACQUIESCENCE, ENDLESS
PERSISTENCE
COMPREHENSION OF THE SINGLE MAN
AND OF THE WHOLE:
ONLY AS TAUGHT BY REALITY CAN WE
CHANGE REALITY.
(This passage isn’t in Bentley’s published text. I presume it’s one of Shapiro’s insertions, the above typography for which is Shapiro’s.)
Shapiro felt that he and the company probably subverted Brecht’s intention as well as their own when they expanded the discussions from
little ritualistic recitative between the Control Commission and the Agitators, a between-scene frame device, that is Brecht’s (well, one wouldn’t want to say insidious, but Brecht would probably think it was a compliment) device to keep the Lehr back in Lehrstück, the didactic element that frames the questions the scenes are meant to illustrate.
By having the audience—inadvertently, perhaps, but certainly predictably, Shapiro felt—go up against the Control Commission on the Young Comrade’s side, because they’re coming from a culture that idolized the individual rebel. The director reasoned that they “never sat still long enough to really understand what the revolution was about.”
As for the physical “choreography” of Measures, Jiang Qing (Madame Mao Zedong; 1914-91) was the inspiration. “I think I was probably very influenced by The Red Detachment of Women,” acknowledged Shapiro. (The 1964 revolutionary Chinese ballet was developed under the guidance of Jiang, who also promoted it. Shapiro called it “the single most influential show on my work with Shaliko.”) The director explained:
I aspired to that level of physical vocabulary, [though] I certainly never had Chris or Jerry leaping across the stage doing splits while carrying a rifle overhead, but in my own modest way I put in a few high kicks and misdemeanors. . . .
I’m thinking of the last scene where [the Young Comrade’s] leaning out over the table, blindfolded with the red cloth, and [one of the Agitator’s] shooting her. Every scene had one of those, a gest, the gesture that holds everything together, where everything is condensed into an image.
(Shapiro is using ‘gest’ as the English version of Brecht’s Gestus, as designated by John Willett [1917 2002; British translator and scholar, especially of the work of Bertolt Brecht]. [‘Gest’ is an archaic word for ‘gesture,’ ‘action,’ or ‘bodily bearing’ from the early 14th century to the mid-17th century. Willett revived it for use in translating Brechtian theory.] Note that ‘gest,’ the English word, is pronounced with a soft g so that it sounds like ‘jest,’ while the German Gestus is pronounced with a hard g so that the initial syllable sounds like ‘guest.’)
Most of the scenes in Measures that were acted out by the Agitators for the Control Commission, Shapiro pointed out, were so highly choreographed and so extremely patterned in speech and the use of tone, pitch, and tonal extension (length of words), in fact contained—sometimes even subsuming the scene—actual song and dance. (Shapiro acknowledged that he meant something “crude and militaristic, definitely not Twyla Tharp [b. 1941],” referring to the popular innovative and experimental American choreographer.)
So what the viewers got was a contrast of “the loosest and most improvisational, open-ended, hard-to-control sections, which are the audience discussions, alternating with highly formalized, disciplined, rehearsed material.”
“The basic trick, gimmick, that I do as a theater director,” wrote Shapiro in his uncompleted memoir, “my asset, is that I make action out of words. I make action out of narrative.” He’s talking here about “language as gesture”—or Gestus.
I make theatre action—there’s several concepts of action—an action in theatre is very often not a physical action, to use the most perpetually obvious, stupidly obvious, the action of reaching for a glass of whisky is filled with a spiritual tension that has nothing to do with the muscular action involved in reaching for a glass.
That physical action of reaching for a glass and bringing it towards you is Stanislavski winning that debate as to what a dramatic action is, a dramatic action based on character, based on the idea of pursuing an objective, whereas the action of the women in the corps de ballet that form the Red Guard in the Beijing Opera’s production of Red Detachment of Women is a physical—in this case, balletic—action that has been tamed, by which I mean made symbolic of dramatic action.
In either case, they’ve picked two fairly simple, extreme, but telling and common archetypal actions of what these theatres are based on, a concept of physical action as a substitute or exemplar of spiritual action, and that, in either case, is the definition of dramatic action.
Dramatic is not walking across the room to pick up a pen, or shooting a seagull and laying it at somebody’s feet, dramatic action is when there is an essential spiritual movement, change, progression, overcoming of obstacles in the individual or group, that’s the action.
(The seagull reference here, for those who didn’t spot it, is to Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904) 1895 play of that title. [The Russian language has no articles, so the play we commonly call The Seagull or, occasionally, A Seagull, in Russian is simply Seagull (Чайка; romanized: Chaika).]
(Seagull was a deeply meaningful play for Shapiro and at the time he was working on this memoir, 1996, he was directing a production of it in Albuquerque [performed 22 August-14 September 1996]. It was his last production. I cover this episode of Shapiro’s life in “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 8” [7 May 2023].)
Whether you play it as an interior action that gets its strength from the audience identification with the guy reaching for the glass of whiskey, or an exterior action, where you perhaps not exactly identify with, but rather aspire to the virtuosity of the physical action on stage—for all the apparent difference between Jason Robards’ [1922-2000; actor] personal torment as he does or doesn’t do some action, or the esprit d’antigravity [sic] of the choral action of the women with rifles over their heads crossing the stage to revolt against the landlords [reference to Red Detachment]—what’s happening is the same thing: the story is being told through the relationship of the roles/character/whatever, the obstacles, and the actions.
(Because this passage was from notes left by Shapiro, I’ve taken the liberty of copy-editing it slightly. Shapiro’s words and intentions have not been altered, however.
(Though Shapiro gives no hint that the description of Robards with a glass of whiskey while he decides whether to take an action or not refers to a specific scene from one of the actor’s films, I suspect it’s exactly that. I consider two possibilities, both Westerns.
(One is 1967’s Hour of the Gun, in which Robards delivers a highly acclaimed and dramatic performance as Doc Holliday and often sits with a bottle of whiskey as he debates the legality, morality, and consequences of backing Wyatt Earp’s increasingly relentless vendetta against the Clantons.
(The other is The Ballad of Cable Hogue from 1970, in which Robards, in one of his finest performances as the title character, drinks heavily while plotting his ultimate revenge on his double-crossing former partners.)
Of those “audience discussions,” Shapiro wrote:
I bragged often that the show could vary in length of time by as much as an hour. And that's true, there were nights when the discussions were so hot, that there'd be as much time spent on the discussion as the performance, but what’s more interesting is the immediate effect of the discussion on the rehearsed part of the play, that is the performance.
[E]ven though Actor X is choreographed to the teeth on how he is to move, turn, speak, attitude/body/ gesture, vocal pitch. etc., nevertheless, because of something in the previous unrehearsed discussion with an audience member, the [e]ffect of his performance at that point might be entirely different night to night.
“Now we’re getting to the good part,” exclaimed the director at the end of the section of his memoir notes that focused on Measures.
What interested him as a basic problem in the theater was how to get “good stuff”—spontaneity and repetition: “finding out how to get it to be good, and then how to keep it once you’ve got it. How do you do the same thing night after night and keep it fresh? This is the problem of the professional theatre.”
It is not a problem that is ever worked on in acting schools or training situations, because they don’t have long runs, and therefore the problem of repetition never comes up. In school, they just try to get through the rehearsal process and to get to opening and then fall back on the standard 19th C. and previous performance clichés to get them through the run. They’re thrilled if they get any result at all, so actors use what they are taught.
But to get something that is alive 2-3000 performances later doesn’t even occur to them. This is one of the reasons why Western theatre, in particular American theatre, is so unstable. If you catch the play on a good night, it’s an entirely different experience than if you catch the play on a bad night. This is not a problem of the Grand Kabuki, where certain productions have been in performance for hundred of years.
The Measures Taken proposed one solution and led me in the direction of one solution, which is not to have the show be the same every night; with The Measures Taken it was different every night, it was supposed to be different every night, and the problems of spontaneity and form were confronted by the actors nightly. They had to learn to go back and forth instantly from rehearsed, choreographed sections to the completely unrehearsed, improvised sections in every performance[.]
Wallace Shawn, Shapiro’s friend and a supporter of Shaliko (and had brought Shaliko and Measures to Papp’s attention), deemed the Shakespeare Festival mounting “a very powerful, very clear, lucid presentation of a very political play . . . which was certainly very clarifying.”
The producer Joseph Papp, who had singled out the company for a rare residency at his theater, characterized the young troupe as “highly exceptional” among all the nascent companies in New York City and praised Shaliko’s work on “Brecht’s difficult piece” for its “insight, artistry and commitment.”
Many reviewers, including the notoriously censorious John Simon of New York magazine, had received the production very well. Simon summed the production up with “There is a good deal of brash theatricality in this, and the youthful company performs it, on the whole, well . . . .”
Harold Clurman, writing in The Nation, declared,
The means available to the Shaliko Company is in every respect minimal . . . . But there are effective players in the company, and all shine by virtue of their energetic determination. The director has done well within the microscopic dimensions provided for this fundamentally massive and imposing play.
“The actors seemed as if they were caught up with a debating society on the way to the theater,” Barnes continued. “Yet I would like to have seen the impact of one or two great actors walking into that Brechtian conundrum. He praised Mary Zakrzewski “as a vibrant interlocutor.”
In Newsweek, Jack Kroll, dubbing Measures “the most powerful and disturbing political play ever written, reported, “The young players of the Shaliko hurl themselves into this locomotive of a play with blazing ardor, including the singing of Hans [sic] Eisler’s songs . . . .”
For the Associated Press, Williiam Glover said,
The production . . . is . . . performed with gusto and power by a college-circuit group of work-shirt enthusiasts, the Shaliko Company. . . . Under Leonardo Shapiro’s restless direction, the seven performers swap vigorously through multiple roles to tell the story . . . . This ensemble’s enthusiasm, however, along with the reversal that time has wrought in arguments, makes “The Measures Taken” freshly interesting.
While a number of reviewers lambasted the company for Shapiro’s decision to insert the audience-questioning—you’ll hear from them shortly—Rose Mary Mecham, a Sports Illustrated reporter with a theater background, came out very strongly for the choice. Mecham, writing in The Nation, did something of a deep inquiry into the practice, and asserted, “The device of bringing the audience into the act may be the key to the popularity of the Shaliko Company’s production of a play that has seldom enjoyed success.”
The Village Voice’s Arthur Sainer averred, “The play can be seen as an intriguing document of a devil’s advocate position, but this beautiful production is intimidating. As for Shaliko, it’s a fine, driving dynamic company.” Sainer concluded,
Under the guidance of director Leonardo Shapiro, the performers . . . are forceful presences both as characters and as choral figures. The few Grotowski-like gestures seem to be elements of jarring with the Brechtian syntax, but Shaliko effects a kind of moral beauty that, despite the insidiousness of the message, tells us that there is something seriously human afoot.
Across the country, the reception was very positive. Starting in Baltimore, where Shaliko’s The Measures Taken débuted (and where the troupe launched its first production in 1973, becoming something of a local favorite), The Sun’s R. H. Gardner, labeling the company “renowned” and “gifted,” affirmed that Measures is “a fascinating and powerful drama, and the Shaliko Company’s handling is masterful.”
The performances at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were also well received. In the Times Chronicle of Jenkinstown, Linda Davis declared, “Philadelphians were fortunate to have the chance to see this disturbing and provocative production. It is probable that Brecht would have approved of it—many members of the audience left the theater muttering, with pondering expressions upon their faces.”
In the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, Linda Weintraub wrote, “The Shaliko Co. is willing to take risks. It has tampered with the very fundamentals of staged theater. The result is electrifying.” The cast (which was performing in a tour of Pennsylvania union halls and local colleges, including Northampton County Community College in Bethlehem, where Weintraub saw the show) “slips in and out of song. Music is interspersed with pure drama. They are united by a keenly abstracted staging which is capable of creating the impression of a platoon of marching soldiers with the stomping of eight feet.”
At Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Judy Newmark of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch witnessed “a thoroughly engrossing performance” of a “brilliant production of [Measures Taken] . . . by the Shaliko Company . . . .” She reported that “the company raised questions about tactics, ideology and morality without sacrificing the artistic values that make good theater.”
Newmark praised the acting, affirming that “[t]he agitators . . . explain their case so forcefully and so movingly that it is possible finally to understand the murder, if not necessarily to condone it.” The three actors who “portray the members of the control commission [do so] as sympathetic, intellectually acute persons, rather than bureaucratic stereotypes.”
The music and “director Leonardo Shapiro’s limber staging set a mood of unbroken intensity . . . .” Newmark concluded, “Although the play asks hard questions, it does not provide easy answers and therefore can be truly enlightening.”
In Student Life, Washington University’s campus paper, Paul Tang observed that “within [the production’s] austere framework, the members of the [Shaliko] Company managed to generate an intense, electrifying atmosphere, resulting from superb acting that was involved and spontaneous, almost improvisational.”
Of the actors playing the agitators, Tang averred, “It would be pointless to single out any one of them for special praise, for as a group they consistently maintained the intensity and plausibility of the various situations at hand.” As for the Control Commission, the student reviewer gave “special credit” to Mary Zakrzewski, the Chief Commissioner, “for she acted with all the appropriate, detached authority befitting her role, with both actors and the audience.”
Shaliko’s Measures got its share of negative responses, too. “The production,” found Clive Barnes in the New York Times, “has been staged, with a bleak, anonymous courtroom, by Leonardo Shapiro, and I felt it could have been more interesting.”
“The actors seemed as if they were caught up with a debating society on the way to the theater,” Barnes continued. “Yet I would like to have seen the impact of one or two great actors walking into that Brechtian conundrum.” He praised Mary Zakrzewski “as a vibrant interlocutor.”
Edith Oliver of the New Yorker felt that “whatever strength the play may have is frittered away in a drab audience-participation production, under the production of Leonardo Shapiro.” Referring to the audience colloquy, Oliver admonished, “Nothing could be more misguided or off-putting (or out-of-date) than the shenanigans on hand.”
“The only way to get in touch with an audience,” the New Yorker review-writer asserted, “is through artistry, and although these earnest young actors . . . are often very engaging, artistry is still far, far off. Nevertheless, there are some good moments and some ingenuity.”
In the New York Post, Martin Gottfried felt that while the cast
are strong in performance, either by choice or accident they and their director, Leonardo Shapiro, missed the work’s identity as a cantata. Hanns Eisler’s academic music is (not very well) sung as if it were simply a score and the commission in no way functions as a chorus. Shapiro’s direction of this music is harsh beyond the play’s needs and the house’s confines, while cozy in general, made the acoustics painful.
Gottfried wasn’t entirely uncomplimentary, though: “Otherwise, Shapiro captured the Brecht style and communicated the Brecht spirit faithfully enough. The play is by no means a major work but it is better than this production.”
The Daily News’s Douglas Watt didn’t like The Measures Taken pretty much in any way. As for the Shaliko version, Watt judged, “The performances are, with one exception (. . . whom I am unable to identify. . .) perfunctory, to say the least.”
Leonardo Shapiro has staged the piece in a setting consisting of a few chairs and a long wooden table . . . . There appeared to be a plant in the audience to stimulate between scenes discussions, but that didn’t come to much, though I was somewhat startled to hear a couple of my fellow reviewers respond.
As an example of German proletarian theater, and as a curio of Brecht’s prime years, “The Measures Taken” may be of some slight interest . . . .”
Three days later, in the Sunday News, Watt took up two Brecht Lehrstücke, Shaliko’s “Measures” and “The Mother” (1935) in production by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The reviewer opens his notice with the statement, “I’m not sure I'd want to see the Serpent Players do either ‘The Mother’ or ‘The Measures Taken,’ but I am sure I’d find myself more taken with their productions than with the ones on view."
(The Serpent Players, the South African mixed-race theater ensemble formed in the early ’60s by black actor/playwrights John Kani [b. 1942] and Winston Ntshona [1941-2018] and white playwright/director Athol Fugard [1932-2025] and others, brought their collaboratively created plays Sizwe Bazi Is Dead and The Island to Broadway in November 1974.
(This was at the height of the apartheid era of the racist white minority government in South Africa: Nelson Mandela [1918-2013; South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician, and philanthropist; President of South Africa: 1994-99] wasn’t released from 27 years’ imprisonment on Robben Island, the political prison referred to in the second play, until 1990 and apartheid didn’t end officially until 1993. Mandela became the first black president of the Republic of South Africa in 1994.
(The Island was first performed in Cape Town in July 1973. It was next staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in December 1973 and then at the Edison Theatre on Broadway, presented in repertory with Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, in November 1974. The world première of Sizwe Banzi occurred in October 1972 in Cape Town. Its subsequent British première was in September 1973 at the Royal Court, winning a London Theatre Critics Award for the Best Play of 1974. Its American première occurred in rep with The Island on Broadway.
(Watt, who gave the two-play rep glowing reviews—the two plays were nominated together for three Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding New Play (Foreign), and three Tonys, including Best Play; Kani and Ntshona were jointly awarded the Tony for Best Actor in a Play—was here alluding to the intellectual and artistic exercise represented by the Brecht learning plays versus the lived experience under a real-world authoritarian regime depicted in the South African plays.)
“Both sets of performers are sadly lacking, for the most part” wrote Watt, “though the Shaliko bunch is much superior to the San Francisco Mimes . . . .” Watt goes on: “But the main thing one notices about both plays is how simpleminded and dated they are.”
The Sunday News writer averred that “both plays fail to engage the spectator in human terms. Which must always remain a questionable aspect of Brechtian theater . . . . John Kani and Winston Ntshona and their plays present us with brutal facts and make us wish we could change things, but they are nothing if not human, and therein lies their strength.”
Ironically, Irwin Silber in The Guardian, a New York City tabloid that espoused a Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology, dubbed Shaliko’s production “anticommunist” and declared, “In the guise of ‘honoring’ Brecht it is actually a stab in the back.” In his Daily World review, entitled “No tribute to Brecht,” Jon Ryder admonished, “This production, of this play at this time in the U.S., is a disservice.”
Shapiro kept Measures running at the Public because it was a hit and was selling out. Meanwhile, Shaliko went into rehearsals for Ghosts, working on the next production days and performing The Measures Taken evenings.
Then Shapiro closed Measures in order to open Ghosts, “even though we had standing room only, which Joe Papp told me I was an idiot to do. . . . I had no idea about theater as a business at that time. You don’t close a show that’s standing room only.”
[The Measures Taken had been professionally produced in the United States only once before, directed by Edward Payson Call (1928-2023) for Los Angeles’s Center Theater Group in October 1973. Shaliko’s production was the Lehrstück’s first professional New York mounting.
[(There was a 1966 production staged by Erik Vos [b. 1929], a prominent director associated with the Dutch avant-garde theater De Nieuwe Komedie den Haag. He traveled to the United States on a Fulbright Grant to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology [now Carnegie Mellon University] in Pittsburgh. The Carnegie Tech stint was intended to introduce European ensemble-building techniques and Brechtian methodology to American theatrical training, and the production of Measures, staged at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, had a cast of Carnegie conservatory students.)
[Written in 1930, the play’s first English translation (entitled The Rule [or Doctrine] by Elizabeth Hanunian, a translator of principally German and Italian legal documents, diplomatic papers, and theatrical scripts into English between 1947 and approximately 1970) had been commissioned in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) when it questioned Brecht and Eisler, but the play’s apparent defense of Communist Party actions found little sympathy at either HUAC or, evidently, many theater groups.
[Brecht fled Nazi Germany in February 1933, just after Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) took power. Living a peripatetic existence in Western Europe for eight years, he emigrated to Los Angeles in May 1941. Brecht was blacklisted in Hollywood and investigated by HUAC.
[Brecht testified before HUAC on 30 October 1947, and the next day, Brecht fled to Europe and never returned to the U.S. In 1949 (the year the German Democratic Republic [Deutsche Demokratische Republik] was founded), he moved to East Berlin, the GDR’s capital, and established the Berliner Ensemble there. He died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.
[In contrast to HUAC and the Soviet Communist Party, Shapiro saw in the play’s investigation of the murder of a Young Comrade by a detachment of Soviet Agitators sent to China to foment revolution, a debate on political terrorism, a way to study “the paradoxes of radical committment [sic].”
[“We have humanized the play,” the company stated in the publicity for its “vigorous American adaptation,” “and exploited fully the difference between our contemporary situation and Brecht’s in Berlin 44 years ago.” This actually follows one of Brecht’s own oft-repeated maxims: that Epic-theater productions should show not only what happened according to the narrative, but imply all other possible actions and outcomes. The audience must not say, ‘This happened because it was inevitable’ but, rather, ‘This was just one of many ways this story could have turned out.’
[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 in 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.]
