[I’ve
written several times before on ROT about Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director I knew in
the 1980s and ’90s, and the downtown New York troupe he founded and directed,
The Shaliko Company. (I first met
Shapiro in 1986 at the Theatre of Nations international festival in Baltimore
when I interviewed him about The Yellow House, Shaliko’s presentation there.)
This time, I’m going to try to describe the last big company-created
performance piece Shapiro directed with Shaliko, Strangers, one of the projects he left unfinished
when he retired from New York theater in 1993.
That Strangers was left
unrealized was one of Shapiro’s greatest regrets just before he died of bladder
cancer in 1997, possibly because, despite its immense complexity and apparent
impenetrability in its initial form, it represented a potential culmination of
all the theories and techniques which Shapiro’d been developing over a lifetime
of making theater.
[In
the interest of full disclosure, and also because it provided me with a unique
perspective, I must explain that Shapiro asked me to work with him as a
dramaturg on a planned mounting of Strangers at La MaMa in 1991. The work didn’t get beyond the discussion
stages before it was abandoned for lack of funding, but I gained a familiarity
with the text, its structure, and its difficulties. I also reviewed video tapes of the 1990
workshop performances at the Washington Square Memorial Church in New York’s
Greenwich Village and had several detailed conversations with Shapiro about the
script and the potential production. (Much later, I also got to look at videos
of the earliest workshop presentation at the Yellow Springs Institute, an
artists’ colony in Pennsylvania, in 1989.)
Ironically, I’d missed seeing the Washington Square performance live
because I was out of New York City during its short run. That performance was a workshop so there were
no reviews, though there was some reportage in the press.]
In 1989, The Shaliko Company of New York began work on its
last collaborative production, Strangers, a performance piece assembled
from news reports and other documents—all the dialogue was quoted material—of
several unrelated incidents. Leonardo Shapiro,
Shaliko’s founder and artistic director, described his vision for Shaliko’s
most Artaudian project a year earlier:
STRANGERS will be built on music,
text and images which exemplify some of the contradictions involved in the
meetings of Third World and Western cultures within this hemisphere and on the
streets of urban America. It is about
homelessness, alienation and the confusion of language/image/value structures
in the Babel of cities.
The documentary sources were: 1) a 1987 case of radiation contamination in
Goiania, a provincial Brazilian city of over a million inhabitants; 2) the 1979-81
Atlanta child murders; 3) Hedda Nussbaum’s testimony at the 1988 trial of her
husband, Joel Steinberg, for the death of his illegally adopted daughter, Lisa;
4) the 1978 Jonestown massacre; 5) 1989’s so-called Central Park wilding
incident; 6) people who reported they’d been abducted by aliens, specifically Betty
Mitchell, who, with her sister Helen, wrote of her 1957 abduction in We Met
the Space People (Saucerian Books,
1959). (The Central Park jogger
material was ultimately eliminated from the script.)
After gathering the material from various sources, Shapiro
and a group of Shaliko actors (Cathy Biro, Du-Yee Chang, Steve Dominguez,
Mohammad Ghaffari, Jake-Ann Jones, Robbie McCauley) spent a year sorting
through it. They began meeting weekly in
April 1989 at P.S. 122, the East Village performance space, to read through the
material as Shapiro, the bricoleur, selected what to keep and use. (A segment of accounts by victims of torture
in the Philippines was discarded, for instance.) Workshopped over ten days at Pennsylvania’s
Yellow Springs Institute, an artists’ colony where the troupe did a residency from
26 July to 8 August 1989, the ensemble developed a preliminary scenario by
improvisation as the director edited and shaped the text. An hour-and-forty-five-minute version of Strangers
was first presented there on 5 August, followed by a short run as a
work-in-progress, which took six weeks to rehearse, at the Washington Square
Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1 through 24 March
1990. A planned production at the La
MaMa Annex (since renamed the Ellen
Stewart Theatre) in May 1991 was canceled because Shapiro couldn’t raise
the funds and Strangers remained one of Shapiro’s unfinished pieces.
Strangers was a study of “the contradictions involved
in the meeting of traditional and technological cultures,” conjuring up the
“dark Satanic mills” William Blake cited as symbols of the mechanized society
of the Industrial Revolution which bowed to the hegemony of Newtonian science
and Lockean reason over native intelligence and spirituality. The story of Strangers was based on
reports of two scrap dealers in
Goiania, capital of the Brazilian state of Goias, who found an abandoned
nuclear-medicine machine and opened the container of cesium-137 powder. (In the performance text, the two scavengers
were conflated with the family of the scrap-metal dealer, Devair Ferreira, to whom they sold the cesium container.
Except for six-year-old Leide, no names were used in the script, however;
the characters were identified only as “Father,” “Brother,” “Mother,” and so
on. For the revision on which I was
assisting, Shapiro planned to eliminate all personal names—Steinberg, Betty,
Lisa—to universalize the portrayals for the audience.)
Having no notion of the deadly potential of the mysterious powder (“It’s
beautiful,” said the Mother; “What is it?” asked the Child; “I don’t know,”
replied the Father—Act 1, scene 2: “They Open the Cylinder”), the Ferreiras
spread the radioactive core around their family and neighborhood because everyone
thought it had magical powers since it glowed blue in the dark. Family members began to sicken and were wheeled
off to a clinic where they were examined, found to be contaminated, and sent to
a hospital. The exposure eventually left
four family members dead (including Leide and her mother, Gabriela), 250 neighbors
seriously exposed, and 2400 square yards of their city (305 square miles) evacuated.
Because the Ferreira family had
thought the cesium-137 had magical powers, the story was a chance for Shapiro
to look at the lure of magic, a subject with which he had a lifelong
fascination, as well as the aftermath of the clash between cultures. Shapiro, however, also saw Strangers as a tale of “family and the
loss of family and the destruction of family,” another area of concern to the
director.
Having learned of the story of the Brazilian radiation
accident from one of his students, Shapiro’s take on it was that the Ferreiras
“thought the nuclear energy was a toy, that you could play with it, and that it
would do miracles for you. And instead
it killed them.” In Strangers,
each of the Ferreiras had some dream about his or her future: the Mother wanted
to sing, the Father wanted to be a doctor, the Sister wanted the glamorous life
of a movie star or model—all dreams from the technological Western world, not
the traditional one. Only the little girl,
Leide, had dreams that weren’t culled from Western media. She only wanted to make her toys come
alive—though even that may be closer to a Disney image than something from her
own culture. Nonetheless, they all saw
the blue stuff as a means of making their dreams happen so, for instance, the Mother
rubbed it on her throat and the Father administered its “healing power” to
others. Instead of realizing their
dreams for them, though, the Western “magic” killed them. “[T]hese are all images from the official
world,” Shapiro explained, “the media world—whatever you want to call it: you
know, the world that’s been created by materialism.” Like advertising, as Shapiro characterized
it, the media had made these images attractive; they’re derived not from life,
but from movies and magazines, invented elsewhere (Hollywood, for example, or
Madison Avenue) and foisted on ordinary people who absorb them passively.
Shapiro combined the Goiania tale, told mostly without
words, with newspaper headlines from the day of each performance and
first-person accounts of events such as Jim Jones’s last sermon at the People’s
Temple in Jonestown, Guyana; Hedda Nussbaum’s statements in her husband’s trial
for the 1987 murder of Lisa; comments by the mothers of the dead and missing
Atlanta children; reports by people claiming to have been kidnapped by UFO’s;
and pornographic dialogue from 970-JAIL, a phone-sex recording. To this bricolage of “public sources,”
Shapiro added Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder [songs of the death of
children], a cycle of songs inspired by poet Friedrich Rückert’s elegies on the
loss of his children set to music of intense sadness evoking enormous grief,
and stanzas from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which “talks about
the balance between the angels and people.”
Rilke’s angels were “intermediaries,” Shapiro explained, a
direct correlate to the Zuni shalakos who were messengers between the spirit
world and our own for whom the director had named his troupe. Indeed, the poem is, among other things, an
acknowledgement of death’s place in human existence—especially the deaths of
children: “those who died young” (Act 1, scene 1: “They Find the Cylinder”). “In the end, those who were carried off early
no longer need us,” Shapiro had the character of the Mother quote, as if
prescient of the dead and missing black children of Atlanta. “But we, . . . could we exist without them”
(Act 3, scene 1)? The Rilke lines
Shapiro used, all from the First Elegy, also relate to other important Shaliko
themes and ideas, however. There is, for
example, an implicit denunciation of the technological world in the
juxtaposition of the “terrifying” angels’ perfect existence and “our
interpreted world,” the one we all actually live in, where we have to be open
to everyday experiences. This resembles
the philosophies of William Blake, too, when he condemned the reverence of
Newtonian science—a vision of the possibility of perfection—over native
experience. (Blake wielded a strong
influence on Shapiro’s art.) While
modern Western society rushes headlong towards an evanescent technological
utopia—everything faster, bigger, more efficient with computers, the Internet, cell
phones, robots, interactive video games, virtual reality, instant communications,
supersonic transportation, bullet trains, global oligopolies—Shapiro seemed to
be asking, ‘Are we ultimately disconnecting ourselves from the world of
feeling, spirituality, meaning, and self-knowledge?’ Western writer Frank Waters, whom Shapiro
admired, admonished Euro-American society for “cut[ting] themselves off from
the roots of life” by “establish[ing] a machine-made society so utterly
devitalized that it is anticipating the synthetic creation of life within a
laboratory test tube.” When the angels
of Rilke’s Elegy ignore us (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the
angels’ hierarchies?” Shapiro quoted in Act 3, scene 1 of Strangers),
we, “the knowing animals,” are forced to fend for ourselves in that
“interpreted world.” Perhaps the angels’
unresponsiveness is a punishment for our lack of spirituality but perhaps, too,
if the angels are, say, our paternalistic “aliens”—which we shall see is part
of Strangers’ epistemology—it’s a warning to remain related to the
world.
Strangers ended with a litany of the dead of Atlanta,
Jonestown, and Goiania, and trance songs from various versions of the Native
American Ghost Dance. (It should be
noted that Shapiro was very attracted to and influenced by several Native
American beliefs and practices, as might be suggested by his choice for the
name of his company. He incorporated
many aspects of these cultures in his theater work.) From this nineteenth-century rite that
Plains Indians believed would resurrect their dead ancestors, Shapiro quoted
the Comanche verse, “We shall live again, / We shall live again.” In Shapiro’s view, this ritual was “meant to
be the dead’s dream of life. It’s not
meant to be a literal resurrection, but it’s supposed to be about the
possibility of resurrection.” In the play,
the cast sings:
The spirit will descend.
The earth will tremble.
Everybody will arise.
Stretch out your hands.
Shapiro substituted “spirit” for “father” in this Kiowa
song, but the image is still of the reawakening of dead Indians. Using the Ghost Dance manifests how much
Shapiro was drawn both to Native American lore and the transformative power of
performance. Along with raising dead
Indians, the practice was believed to have the power to annihilate by
supernatural means the intruding white people—and their insidious technological
culture—and return the land to an aboriginal paradise, as expressed in this
Kiowa verse Shapiro didn’t use:
The spirit host is advancing, they
say.
They are coming with the buffalo,
they say.
They are coming with the (new)
earth, they say.
When the Ghost Dance cult reappeared in the 1890s—an earlier
cult had flourished in the 1870s—its potential power so frightened the U.S.
government that it was outlawed across the Plains. Though the original Ghost Dance doctrine as
expressed by Wovoka, its prophet, repudiated both war and conflict with whites,
many white settlers and missionaries misconstrued the ritual as a war
dance. Further, because the Sioux
version of the Ghost Dance was being used to promote violence against whites,
the army was dispatched to suppress it.
On 29 December 1890, this white fear and ignorance led the Seventh
Cavalry to massacre hundreds of Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota. Such a tale would only confirm
Shapiro’s perception of the drive by a technologically strong but spiritually
deprived society to destroy a simpler, purer, more righteous one. In his words,
[T]he people who were totally
destroyed, whose civilization was destroyed . . . got cornered to the point
after however many hundred years where the only technology that they had to
fight against this technology of guns and small pox and genocide was this
artistic, spiritual [one]—this dance.
And by means of this technology they try to restore the balance.
The disparate, layered narratives of Strangers were hard
to bring together coherently. A key to
the connection among them was a passage Shapiro pointed out in Journey to
Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, Shiva
Naipaul’s 1981
study of the tragedy at Jim Jones’s People’s Temple. Naipaul compared the treatment of unskilled
laborers in a technological society to nuclear waste:
They are redundant. They are good for nothing. They do not even evoke fellow feeling. One can think of them as the human equivalent
of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants: sterile and
potentially lethal.
. . . . The junk people, the human waste left behind
by American history, are no less negative, no less dangerous a quantity.
If the paternalistic white society can be seen as the parent
of the native culture—it certainly stood
in loco parentis with its Bureau of Indian Affairs, reservations, Indian
schools, Christian missionaries, and Indian Agents—then actions like the
suppression of Native American religions and massacres like Wounded Knee are
further examples of our sacrifice of our children, a consistent theme in
Shapiro’s work. To make this appeal more
poignantly, Shapiro included this Sioux verse, which he adjusted for the
purpose, in the Ghost Dance sequence that preceded the naming of the dead of
Atlanta, Goiania, and
Jonestown:
Child, come home; Sister, come
home.
Mother and Father go about always
crying,
Mother and Father go about always
crying,
Cousin, come home; Child, come
home.
In one way or another, all the characters who suffer in Strangers are, if you will, “strangers”—outsiders,
aliens, “others.” Shapiro, in
fact, saw the people of Goiania, the members of the People’s Temple, the
children of Atlanta, the UFO believers, and Hedda Nussbaum as the innocents of
society: the children, the slaves, the colonized natives, the Indians. They’re patronized, subjugated, pushed aside,
left to languish by the “white man” who controls the technological world. The “natives” look upon the “colonizers” not
just as their masters, he contended, but as their caretakers—their parents, in
a sense. Even those in the technological
culture can feel infantilized in the face of technology they don’t understand,
viewing advanced science, as Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer and
social critic, observed, as a kind of magic outside our control. The UFO believers, according to Shapiro,
considered the aliens their “white men” who’d look after them. The masters, however, don’t really care what
happens to their “children.” When they’re
no longer useful, when they’ve served their purposes, they’re discarded—the
detritus of modern society. “Junk is
junk,” said Naipaul.
Shapiro, true to his belief in the transformative nature of
art, was somewhat more optimistic than Naipaul.
Hoping that Strangers would move his audience to action, he
wanted them to see
that we’re in exactly the same
situation as the Indians, . . . that we have destroyed the land, that we are
now what they were then, and the only technology that can accomplish this
reversal . . . is a spiritual technology, an artistic technology. I think those are more or less the same
thing.
“You never know when you’re going to be able to actually
help to change something,” Shapiro stated, declaring that he wanted Strangers
“to be a positive piece,” in contradiction to some criticism that it was
“depressing.” He intended the audience
to “share in that dream of resurrection” evoked by the Ghost Dance and
go out there, out of the theater,
having made some connection that they hadn’t made before—even if they are sort
of sobered by the material and not going out singing the tunes. But they have to, in some way, on some level,
be somewhat empowered, either by new knowledge or by new connections or by
being inspired by example that they can take some kind of action in their
life—on whatever level.
Shapiro conceived Strangers as a “healing ceremony
which contains within it a narrative of destruction and mourning for the family
as a vehicle of human culture and civilization.” This echoes the Navajo healing chants, one of
the Indian beliefs to which Shapiro had long been drawn. (I’ve written about this rite on ROT in “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May
2013.) One of Shapiro’s constant
theatrical tenets is that theater is a healing art, modeled for him by the
Navajo ceremony. Using a myth, legend,
or, as in Strangers, a mythologized event, the chant ceremony combines
theater, graphic art, poetry, and music to restore harmony to society.
Like a ritual, the performance of Strangers was
largely presentational, except for the wordless enactment of the Goiania
story. The actors didn’t play characters
in the conventional sense but remained present as actors, though, aside from
passing lit candles among the spectators during the Ghost Dance, they didn’t
address the audience directly. Since
nearly all the material was in the first person, however, the entire piece was Testimony, a technique about
which I wrote in “Testimony and Role
vs. Character,” posted on ROT on 25
September 2013. (I’m
capitalizing the word in this sense to distinguish this use from the courtroom
witness, for example, of characters like Hedda Nussbaum.) In The
Presence of the Actor, Joseph Chaikin, who was a friend, collaborator, and
mentor of Shapiro’s, described this technique: “When we as actors are
performing, we as persons are also present and the performance is a testimony
of ourselves.” Shapiro wanted the
audience to “go into a room where people are going to stand up and talk about
their real lives through these sort of forbidden topics . . . .” “We need to identify with this story,” he
insisted, “see that this story is about us as much as it’s about them, and that
we are still alive and capable of affecting—somehow—this dream of
resurrection—be infected by it.”
[I’ll complete my discussion
of Shaliko’s Strangers in
Part 2 of this article, to be published in a few days. The continuation will include some
descriptions of the March 1990 workshop production and scenes from the script
(as it stood in July 1990). Please log
onto ROT later this week to read the
rest of “Shaliko’s Strangers.”]
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