'Blue Heaven' (or 'Going to Iraq') – Part 1

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner, who was planning a series of articles on experimental theater companies that had begun in the 1960s and ’70s and were still producing. At the time, I was working a little as a freelance dramaturg with Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company (which I’ve mentioned many times on Rick On Theater), having met Leo and seen the company’s work at the Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore in 1986.

[Since I’d written for TDR before, Richard and Leo agreed that I might be the person to do the profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series. (I don’t believe the series actually materialized in the end. "Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," however, was published in the Winter 1993 issue of TDR.)

[For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo, interviewing him and his colleagues, friends, critics, and employers; attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing; observing classes for his Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program; combing through the company’s files and records; and generally gathering everything I could on Shaliko and Leo that might be pertinent.

[The Shaliko Company’s main project during that time was the environmental production at Theater for the New City of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, and I attended most of the rehearsals starting on 10 August. Shortly before opening, Leo, Karen, and I decided to try to get a little early publicity for the production by submitting an article on the work-in-progress to the Village Voice, and I set out to write it.

[The result was published as “As It Is in Heaven” on 22 September 1992 (posted on ROT on  25 March 2011 [http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-it-is-in-heaven.html]; I posted an unpublished, early version of the article on the blog on 10 July 2019 as part of “Some Women Writers from the Archives” [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/07/some-women-writers-from-archives.html]).

[I’d also interviewed playwright Malpede before rehearsals began (“An Interview with Karen Malpede,” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 8.1 [1993], reprinted as “Karen Malpede” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996]; the interview was posted on ROT on 5 November 2014, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/11/an-interview-with-karen-malpede-1992.html), as well as during the work as part of my research for the TDR article.

[As far as I can find, the play hasn’t been published and I’m also not aware of any other productions other than the TNC staging, except a reading over WBAI radio in March 1992.]

At about 6:30 Eastern Standard Time on the evening of Wednesday, 16 January 1991, President George H. W. Bush and his U.N.-sanctioned coalition began raining bombs on Saddam Hessein’s Iraq.  (It was 2:30 Thursday morning in Baghdad.)  Hussein had invaded neighboring Kuwait in August 1990 with the intention of annexing the emirate as a province of Iraq.  

The 1991 Persian Gulf war ended on Thursday, 28 February, but Leonardo Shapiro, an experimental theater director, artistic director of The Shaliko Company, and an inveterate anti-war activist who’d been arrested on several occasions protesting the war in Vietnam as a teenager, had already begun making plans for a protest performance.

When on Monday, 10 June, a tickertape parade was planned in lower Manhattan to honor the troops of Operation Desert Storm, as the combat in Iraq was called, Shapiro staged Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), an anti-Gulf War theatrical collage he conceived as a benefit for the War Resistors League and Oxfam America, at the La MaMa Annex (now known as the Ellen Stewart Theatre) in New York City’s East Village on 5-8 June 1991.

This counterpoint to the victory parade, headlined by Vanessa Redgrave, was assembled from poems, monologues, scenes, and playlets composed by many writers.  One of them was Karen Malpede, an activist and playwright whose professional habitat, like Shapiro’s, was the East Village and the Lower East Side.  The writer and the director were familiar with each other’s work and admired each other for both their art and their politics.

During the collaboration on Collateral Damage, Malpede had already drafted her latest play, Going to Iraq, which included unequivocal criticism of the Persian Gulf war, but it was unfinished.  The playwright did a reading in September 1991 which Shapiro attended.  He let Malpede know that he’d like to direct the play. 

Malpede pointed out that after Collateral Damage, Shapiro staged a revival of Russian dramatist Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son whose cast included George Bartenieff—with whom Malpede was living.  So she was already becoming favorably familiar with the director’s work.

Malpede and Shapiro began working on the play for a co-production of Shaliko; Theater for the New City, an Off-Off-Broadway theater complex at 1st Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village; and Westbeth Theatre Center, a now-defunct performing arts complex at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets Greenwich Village in a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists.  The production would be mounted in TNC’s Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

The executive director (and co-founder in 1971 with Crystal Field, then his wife) of TNC was Malpede’s romantic partner, Bartenieff, an alumnus of the Living Theatre.  (Bartenieff left TNC in 1992 and he and Malpede married two years later.)  He was cast as Herbie, the cook of the Heaven Cafe, a principal character in the play.  Playwright Malpede wrote several roles in Blue Heaven for specific actors.

Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  (One speech from Going to Iraq was part of the text of Collateral Damage, delivered by avant-garde actress Ruth Maleczech, co-founder in 1970 of the New York City Mabou Mines experimental theater troupe.)

The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the 1985 death of artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85), who fell or was thrown from the East Village apartment of her artist husband, Carl Andre (b. 1935).  For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991. 

Shapiro and Shaliko presented two staged readings of Going to Iraq.  The first reading with Shapiro was at Westbeth in December 1991 with a cast consisting of Nicki Paraiso, Christen Clifford, Sheila Dabney, George Bartenieff—who all would go on to the full production—and Carrie Sophia Malpede-Hash, Malpede’s then-12-year-old daughter, some months after Collateral Damage and the tickertape procession through Lower Manhattan’s “Canyon of Heroes.”  

The second reading was at TNC with essentially the same cast except Paraiso (who was unavailable) and Clifford (who was out of town)—and Lee Nagrin joined the company, on 16 January 1992, the first anniversary of the start of the Gulf war.  On the basis of the readings, Going to Iraq was named a Voice Choice by the Village Voice.

A five-part radio broadcast of the script was aired on WBAI, an independent, non-commercial, left-leaning radio station in New York City, from 23 to 27 March 1992.  Among the cast for the readings were Bartenieff, Dabney, and Gordana Rashovich, who read Aria, played in the full production by Rosalie Triana.

Shapiro and his cast began rehearsals for the fall mounting of Going to Iraq on Monday, 10 August 1992.  Between the four June 1991 performances of Collateral Damage and that date, Shapiro and Shaliko were engaged in the two readings of Going to Iraq and the radio performance in March 1992.  Shapiro was already in rehearsal for his second revival (the first English-language revival) of Kafka (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 25 January-8 February 1992; see my post on ROT on 5 and 8 November 2015).

He also participated in Roadkill on 3 May, a street event with text by Malpede and Shapiro performed as the closing event of the First Annual Eco-Festival, co-produced by Shaliko  and the Theater for the New City on the streets and empty lots of the East Village.  Bartenieff was a principal performer in Roadkill, which protested the pollution and pedestrian injuries and deaths caused by automobiles on American roads.  (As part of his performance, Bartenieff had a monologue that evoked a car that had gone out of control on lower Fifth Avenue on 23 April 1992, ultimately killing five people and injuring 26 in Washington Square Park.

By August, Shapiro’d already been working on Going to Iraq for about a year, even before Kafka: Father and Son was restaged, but much of the cast and the environmental mise-en-scène were new.  Ultimately, the play even acquired a new title: Blue Heaven.  The title change had been at Shapiro’s behest, apparently because he felt Malpede’s original one was too on the nose—if that was so, I agreed with him (though I never told anyone that)—but I never heard the playwright balk.

Malpede explained her rationale for the change:

One reason we changed the title [from Going to Iraq] was to address the deeper issues that the play is about, and not just to focus people’s minds on a war that is too easy for them to dismiss.  We wanted to make it more difficult to dismiss that war by opening up the field of vision and call the play Blue Heaven.  It has to do with the song [“My Blue Heaven” by Walter Donaldson and George A. Whiting, 1924] as the quintessential version of make-believe America. 

According to WBAI’s promos for their broadcast of the play, it’s an

antiwar tragi-comedy about conditions of life in this country which supported and . . . reflected [the] war in the Persian Gulf.  The play takes place in a Lower East Side cafe, a pressure cooker where the lives of artists, merchants, ancient gods, modern prophets, and media stars fatally intersect.  It begins as warm psychological realism and becomes a searing surrealist exploration of the effects of public violence on private imagination.

The East Village cafe is Sada’s Heaven Cafe with an artist’s studio in back.  A “sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries,” as the script calls them, comes into the cafe and, little by little, the lives of these characters intersect.  Act I of Blue Heaven begins on the morning of 16 January 1991, earlier on the day that was the start of the coalition bombing of Iraq.  Act II takes place during and shortly after the war in the Persian Gulf.

                                         

Aria (Rosalie Triana), a sculptor, and Sierra (Lailah Hanit Bragin), her 10-year-old daughter, have been evicted from their apartment and have moved into the studio in the back of the Heaven Cafe.  Aria is in the throes of a creative block, made worse by the news—seen in a newspaper headline shown on video monitors—of the possible murder of another sculptor with whose husband Aria’s having an affair.  

The Heaven’s owner, Sada (Obie-winning dancer-choreographer Lee Nagrin), doesn’t like having Aria and Sierra around.  To her, the sculptor represents the latest artist of the moment: sex-obsessed, morbid, solipsistic.  Sada herself, though, is angry, morose, and anguished.

Herbie (Bartenieff, another Obie-winner), the cafe’s cook and handyman who’s identified with the Greek god Hermes, plays a sort of court jester to the aging and domineering Sada, trying to keep her in good humor.  (According to playwright Malpede, Hermes is the “primal lover” but also “escorter of souls to the underworld.”  The dramatist quotes Camille Paglia in the program that the “early Hermes” was depicted “as a mature bearded man” who’s also a “healer”—his symbol is the caduceus, the winged staff entwined by two serpents that’s the emblem of healing.)

Eventually, other Lower East Side denizens come in take shelter in the cafe: Dee (Sheila Dabney, yet another Obie-winner), a black female junkie; Dee’s teenaged junkie friend, Jill (Christen Clifford), whose lost a leg; John (Nicki Paraiso, a Bessie Award-winner), a young man with AIDS; and Daniel (Joseph Kellough), a promising young director.  Another visitor is Mary (Beverly Wideman), a middle-aged matron who’s selling “Support the Troops” bumper stickers, yellow-ribbon magnets, and other paraphernalia to subsidize patriotic organizations.

Herbie-as-Hermes is identified in the script as a healer, and the playwright affirmed that both he and Aria are “healers.”  But Malpede further observed that Shapiro called all the characters “wounded healers.”  For Shapiro, though, from Brother, You’re Next, a 1967 street performance that was his first New York City theater work (see 26 January 2010), through Children of the Gods, his first Shaliko show in 1973, to Strangers (1990; see 3 and 6 March 2014) and Blue Heaven, his protagonists were always the powerless, abandoned, or despised of society whose efforts to lift themselves up often meet with failure and death. 

Herbie’s depicted as a healer, according to Malpede, and she sees his relationship to Aria, who serves as the play’s central character, as “a kind of muse dynamic, where he sees in her things about her that she doesn’t see or doesn’t believe yet in herself, and his seeing allows her to be.” 

Aria’s also of mixed Israeli-Palestinian heritage and the playwright created her as

torn in as many directions as I could tear her.  So, she’s Palestinian and Israeli; and that’s not enough, so she’s the mistress of a man who’s married; and that’s not enough, so the married man whose mistress she is actually kills his wife; and she’s a wanderer, a homeless person, coming from nowhere with no place to call her own; she’s a mother; she’s an artist; she’s a lover; she’s blocked.  In as many different ways as I could pull her apart, I wanted to pull her apart because I do feel that that’s not only my situation often, but it is a woman’s situation . . . .

TNC’s Johnson Theater was a cavernous, concrete, open room, about 70 feet long and 45 feet wide (3,150 square feet—about two-thirds the area of a basketball court; it’s been remodeled some since 1992).  For Blue Heaven, it was set up as a working cafe with drinks and food catered by Palmyra, a Middle-Eastern restaurant at 1st Avenue and 9th Street, a block south of TNC.. (In early plans, Shapiro had considered producing Blue Heaven in a real night club or bar, or perhaps different bars on succeeding weekends.) 

The elaborate mise-en-scène included a live trio playing music specially composed by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld, and with one character, John—played by actor Nicki Paraiso who is also a pianist—as a band member (the third member of the combo was guitarist James Rohler); live video broadcast by video artist Maria Venuto, who moved about the playing area with her hand-held camera during the performance; and scenes staged amongst the patrons’ cafe tables. (There were also bleacher seats along one side of the playing area.)   

Shapiro intended to fill the Heaven Cafe set with life so that spectators at the tables surrounded by the action, would have to decide where to look and listen.  There was no seat in the audience which didn’t require the spectator to turn around at one time or another. 

Watching as Blue Heaven took shape, two things intrigued me most.  First was the prospect of being immersed in the action—not only being in the cafe, but being in contact with the characters was an exciting and engaging prospect.  We were going to share in the examination of life with them.  

The closest theater adventure to what I projected TNC’s Blue Heaven would be was Jim Cartwright’s Road when I paid a visit to a block in an English rust-belt town and was given a resident’s-eye-view of its reality.  (Road was first produced as what was then dubbed “promenade theater,” where the actors and the spectators shared the same space, in 1986 at London’s Royal Court Theatre.  It was then produced in New York by Lincoln Center Theater at La MaMa in 1988, when I saw it in September at the Annex on E. 4th Street.)

Second was Malpede’s poetic consideration of aspects of our world: the artist in society, war, AIDS, homelessness, domestic violence, drugs—all concerns of director Shapiro’s as well  The specific events she evokes are part of who we are but, more immediately, the efforts her characters make to survive each day are totally familiar to us.  If we don’t actually know these people, we’ve encountered them over and over again at work, in our neighborhoods, and in places like the Heaven Cafe

As we’ll see, these possibilities never came to be..

The director originally concocted a highly theatrical event which, aside from the live music and videos, employed film, pre-recorded video, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects.  The production was designed to draw the spectators into the world of the unrepresented, a frequent subject of Shapiro‘s theater—who lived, worked or visited at the Heaven Cafe during the time when the United States unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian desert.

‘How does an artist respond to such a momentous happening?’ Malpede wondered.  ‘What is her responsibility at such a time?’  Having created the character of Aria, a half-Israeli, half-Palestinian artist (whose name is meant to evoke Ariadne, the ancient Greek mythical figure), Malpede used Blue Heaven to investigate the question.  “All of us experienced the war,” Malpede pointed out to me at an early rehearsal, “and most of us also experienced the death of Ana Mendieta.  These are two contemporary historical events that are part of our lives.” 

At the same time, one of Shapiro’s perennial themes, as most clearly considered in Kafka (1985, 1990 [in Russian], 1992), The Yellow House (1986; see my post on ROT on 9 February 2018), and Blue Heaven, was the place of the artist in society.  In each of these pieces, too, the central figure is an artist struggling with the creation of a work of art: Franz Kafka writes “The Judgment”; Vincent van Gogh, in The Yellow House, paints his Self-Portrait and Starry Night; and sculptor Aria in Blue Heaven fights a creative block. 

Blue Heaven also centers loosely on a film production, involving several of Blue Heaven’s characters, of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play in part about art and artists.  “It speaks to artists about creativity,” said Shapiro, “and getting caught up in the ‘theater world.’”  Ironically, Shapiro eventually directed a production of The Seagull, a play he acknowledged was deeply meaningful to him, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1996.  It was his last work.  (Shapiro died of cancer on 22 January 1997, 15 days after his 51st birthday.)

(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played the sculptor Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana, also played Arkadina in Shapiro’s Albuquerque Seagull.  She had portrayed Ana Mendieta, the real-life artist on whom Aria is modeled, earlier in 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work—on West 57th Street in Manhattan.  Note that Triana, who’s a Latina, used the anglicized first name Rosalie at the time she appeared in Blue Heaven and is listed in the program and other production materials that way.  She returned to her home state of New Mexico when Shapiro retired there in 1993 and she’s resumed her Hispanic given name, Rosalía.)

Blue Heaven was rehearsed in five weeks (originally planned as four weeks plus a week of previews), though that came after months of scattered workshops and readings (albeit, with different casts).  I’d been invited to observe the process by both Shapiro and Malpede, so except where otherwise noted, the account of the rehearsals and the production are taken from my notes and conversations with Shapiro, Malpede, and other participants.  A certain degree of subjectivity, however, is inevitable.

The rehearsal period for Blue Heaven started out pretty much as other Shaliko rehearsals I’d seen had.  (I had also attended rehearsals for Kafka at the end of 1991.  I worked a little on Collateral Damage, but because that was a collage and the artists, including the writers and performers, were all volunteers, the rehearsals were rather ad hoc and somewhat haphazard.) 

The company gathered at TNC for the first session and read the script.  Shapiro had told me that since he didn’t know at the first rehearsal what he wanted, he always started with a sit-down read-through.  He derived his ideas about a production from rehearsals and the actors’ work, so he needed to “see where we are, where we’re starting from.” 

For the most part, Shapiro just let the actors read on that first day, seldom interrupting unless somebody was “just wrong-headed.”  Shapiro’s only instructions were words to the effect of “Let’s read it for sense.  Let’s just get it out there”—all he usually needed to say, he felt, since most of his casts had worked with him previously.  The director, though, did admonish the actors to work on the language of Blue Heaven, especially Malpede’s “rhythm, pitch and tone,” from the beginning.

Shapiro’s goal was always to make what was happening on stage as “authentic” as the life the audience was living off stage.  In rehearsals for Blue Heaven, for example, Shapiro told the cast, “The play is set a year ago, but the production is happening now.  We here in this room are doing this now.”  (This notion is part of Shapiro’s concept of the “real-time event”’ I touch on this in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.)  “[D]eveloping a piece with the audience,” Shapiro declared, “is as important as developing a piece for the audience.” 

As noted, Shapiro had said very little during the initial script-reading, except that he described the environment and some images he wanted the actors to hold onto.  One image was William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, a 1939 play (and 1948 movie) set in a saloon, but he likened the performance atmosphere to the Caffe Cino production of Saroyan’s one-act play Hello Out There he had seen back in the 1960s. 

The import of these two references was two-fold.  First, Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace in The Time of Your Life could be taken as a prototype of Sada’s Heaven Cafe in Malpede’s play, where the denizens create a kind if mini-community.  “The cafe represents community,” said Shapiro.  “That’s why people go to cafes. . . .  [B]ecause they want community.” 

Second, Joe Cino’s Village coffeehouse provided a place for artists, writers, and performers to show their work amidst patrons having coffee and pastries, Shapiro’s model for the production of Blue Heaven. 

(I covered the Caffe Cino, which Shapiro had frequented in his teens and early 20’s, in two posts: “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018.  I never confirmed this with the director, but I think the production of Hello Out There Shapiro meant was in 1963 and starred Al Pacino in his first stage appearance before a paying audience.)

Caffe Cino (1958-68) may have been Shapiro’s image for the play and the milieu, but I see another progenitor.  At the turn of the 19th century in New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods were restaurants or bars that offered entertainment along with food and drink.  They were a sort of a downscale precursor of the modern-day night club or cabaret, with songs and comic sketches that were largely satiric, often politically pointed, and frequently rude.  In fact, the German ones were called Kabaretten (and the French called their places café-concerts)—but the Italian name, the phenomenon’s most common label, was caffè-concerti.  Indeed, I think these establishments were a kind of prototype of what the Caffe Cino was like when it first started.  (Joe Cino was, after all, a proud Sicilian-American.)

The entire play (except for the film of The Seagull, projected on a wall of the set, which was shot on location) takes place in the Heaven Cafe, so the actors moved among the cafe tables and the spectators-cum-patrons, occasionally even addressing them directly. 

The cafe set evolved over the rehearsal period.  The configuration changed and changed again as the physical performance text developed.  As of the first rehearsal, Shapiro had determined that there’d be little built scenery, and that remained true.  At that first session he advised the cast to use the space of the Johnson as it was—an “empty theater.”

The performance space within the Johnson was demarked principally by the area occupied by the large, round cafe tables; otherwise, it was the walls of the Johnson itself.  There were “blacks” hanging a few feet from the eastern wall and the easternmost quadrant of the southern wall.  In performance, the cafe was all washed in soft blue light—hence the new name for the play: blue candles on the tables, blue Christmas lights hanging from the walls, and blue paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

[This is the first installment of my account of the production of Leonardo Shapiro’s production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven at the Theatre for the New City in 1992.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days for the concluding half of “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),]