[Below is the second part of my account of the production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven in September and October 1992. In this section, I’ll recount the rehearsal process, the departure of director Leonardo Shapiro, the performances, and the critical reception..
[If
you haven’t read Part 1 (11 May), which gives the background and origin of this
production, I strongly recommend going back and reading that before starting
Part 2. My introduction to the first
installment also explains how I got to be involved in the production and the
perspective from which I was observing it.
[Part
1 also contains the identifications of all the people involved in the
productions, including the actors who played the characters in Blue Heaven’s première. Without that
information, following this account will be confusing.]
The Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater is located at the
western end—that is, the rear—of the ground floor of TNC’s building. Its long dimension runs east-west, with the
entrance from the lobby at the northern end of the short, eastern wall of the
theater. The set configuration
established on 14 August (according to the thumbnail sketch in my hand-written
notes; I didn’t transcribe the diagram into my word processor) located the triangular
bandstand at the middle of the eastern wall, just left of the entrance,
pointing into the center of the room.
Aria’s studio, set off from the rest of the cafe set by a
scrim, was in the southwest corner,
dominated by the bed oriented southwest to northeast. Along the long southern wall, near the eastern end, was Sada’s booth, a
raised counter-like structure that looked a bit like a judge’s bench. Sada sat there, ensconced in her observation
post, overseeing the world of the Heaven Cafe, her domain.
Herbie’s kitchen was on stage in front of the southern
wall—across the cafe from the bleachers.
Several TV monitors were arrayed on the
risers along the northern side of the playing area, creating an off-stage space
behind them. On these screens were shown
both the live video Maria Venuto was shooting during the performances and the
pre-recorded videos of war news, “candid” shots (including the viral video of
the little blond tyke who sang “You Are My Hero” at the Super Bowl),
politicians’ speeches (George H. W. Bush declaring the start of the bombing),
and so on.
A kind of open
off-stage space was established along the eastern expanse of the Johnson,
between the back of the bandstand and the wall; it was visible, but
ambiguous. The center of the performance
area was the cafe floor, occupied by the band platform and the tables and
chairs.
Along with the Seagull
film sequence and the taped and live video projections on the multiple
monitors in the performance space, director Leonardo Shapiro employed actors
speaking through microphones and singing some of the dialogue. (One such scene is described in “As It Is in Heaven,”
25 March 2011.) There were also scenes
behind a scrim or with film and numerous effects, tricks and gags, masks, wigs,
and funny faces. Shapiro was greatly
influenced by, among other performative forms, circus, theater games, and
masks..
The director
reconciled this extensive theatricality with the drive for truth and reality in
acting by saying, “Nothing is pretend.”
The real is real, he insisted, and the artificial is artificial—in
contrast to the stage magician invoked by Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s
Glass Menagerie who presents pretense disguised as reality. (Shapiro included Williams among his
acknowledged influences and was attracted to stage magic from his early
childhood.)
Sue Jane Stoker,
stage manager of Blue Heaven, affirmed that Shapiro “allowed an enormous
leeway for the actors to create.” She
recognized that, after some early trepidations, many actors in Blue Heaven
“found his work very liberating.” Stoker
reported: “He gave [the actors] this framework . . ., and [the characters] were
very much the creations of those actors.”
Shapiro gave few
specific directions during rehearsal; the most he did was ask an actor to speak
more loudly or more softly, or he might ask her to move to a different part of
the acting area. There were no
Stanislavskian discussions of psychological motivation: Shapiro did not let the
actors indulge their emotions and then discuss those feelings with them. Stoker, describing Shapiro as a “visual
director,” said, “He works more from the outside in.”
While watching Blue
Heaven rehearsals, I was consciously looking for the way Shapiro
communicated what he wanted from the actors.
In the years when the director had a permanent ensemble, I knew from
interviewing him and many of the original Shaliko actors how Shapiro’s
technique and the company style was developed over time. In those years, Shapiro and his troupe worked
on shows for months.
But I didn’t know
Shapiro or Shaliko then; all the Shaliko shows I’d seen since 1986 (The
Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore) had casts the
director assembled from the pool of actors he knew and had worked with and
others cast from outside his circle.
Gone were the years of working together closely and working for months
on one production. So how did he get the
kinds of stylized and highly physical performances I’d seen?
I never saw it. More
to the point, I never heard it; I never heard Shapiro give oral instructions to
his cast. I went to nearly every
rehearsal; I was teaching an evening class in New Jersey, so I missed two
rehearsals a week, but I was in attendance for five days a week. In the end, I had to ask about this.
Actress Rosalie Triana explained that he did it by body
language: “He wouldn’t say a word. Or
he’d throw out a word and nothing else.
And I’d be standing there, but I would know even from his breathing . .
. to go further.”
“I do it in the tone of voice,” explained Shapiro; “I do it
in the way I’m breathing; I do it in how close I am to them physically. I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ all the time, and I’m
always . . . . You know, I’m right
there. When they’re working, I’m on top
of them, going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’”
“It’s like a conductor,” he continued, again using a musical
reference. “You don’t just describe . .
. . I mean, how many words are
there? Andante, adagio—you
know—presto. You know, there’s a very
limited vocabulary, and the rest is communicated personally. I’m communicating to them the same way
they’re communicating to the audience.
I’m in their face. There’s no
actor that doesn’t know how I feel.”
George Bartenieff,
who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a 1977 Obie as a
director of TNC and later, individual acting Obies in 2001 and 2006, remarked
that the work on Blue Heaven was “like living the experience” as he had
in the Living Theatre’s The Brig (which won three Obies in 1964).
Michael Preston, a Shaliko
actor who is also a circus artist—he performed as Rakitin with the Flying
Karamazov Brothers from 1991 through 2000—who was in the 1992 revival of Kafka:
Father and Son with Bartenieff, compared this part of the Shaliko
experience to circus work “where nothing is rehearsed.”
The process of improvising and experimenting got more
complex when technical and other elements were added. Since Blue Heaven had a live band,
Shapiro incorporated music into many of the scenes, even directing the actors,
like Nicki Paraiso at the piano or Bartenieff, to sing some lines. While some of this work was abandoned, some
remained as part of the performance text.
In one rehearsal, Bartenieff had improvised an a cappella
melody for some lines which composer Gtetchen Langheld later picked up on her
saxophone. After a few rehearsals,
Bartenieff no longer sang, but the music remained as part of the score.
(I asked Shapiro when he came up with the idea to have these
lines sung. He told me: “At the
moment. I mean, in rehearsal.” I was a little surprised: “Just right there,
and it happened?” “Yeah,” conformed the
director. “It was just a thought that
occurred to me.”)
Then Shapiro continued volubly. “I remember the day . . . that I had Nicki go
to the piano to play during the scene.
It says in the script he’s supposed to get a cup of coffee. . . . That was an exciting study for me. That was a really exciting moment, when I
discovered that the music . . . .
“I mean, I had known I wanted Nicki to play the piano. And I had known I wanted him to play during
the scene. But I hadn’t . . .
. You know, that was a sort of general,
vague thought, not like anything real.
And finding that specific moment was very important, and it opened up a
key to a lot of things. But it was a
long time between that and singing. I
mean, what he did . . . . I don’t think
he sang the first day. I think he just played the piano.“ (This is the scene I described in “As It Is
In Heaven, referenced earlier.)
The director asked Paraiso to sing one of his lines at the
next session, and then a week or so later, Shapiro said, he asked Lee Nagrin to sing, and then
Bartenieff and Triana in another scene.
Max Roach, a jazz
percussionist who’d collaborated with Shapiro on Strangers, compared the
director’s rehearsal method to a Charlie Parker improvisation in which no one
knew what the result would be until the piece was finished. Rehearsals for Blue Heaven didn’t
always go smoothly, however.
The Shaliko Company
was originally formed in 1972 as a permanent troupe and they worked together
for a year before presenting their first public performance. Even after that first company broke up,
Shapiro continued to work with a small cadre of artists who mostly all knew one
another and one another’s working methods, especially Shapiro’s. By the middle and late 1980s, the director
began casting actors from open auditions, usually one or two within a cast made
up largely of his ad hoc rep ensemble.
Among the cast of Blue
Heaven, though, were several actors who not only didn’t know Shapiro,
but who apparently weren’t comfortable with his method of working. The director acknowledged that several cast
members hadn’t been his own choices as Karen Malpede had written some roles for
specific actors: Herbie for Bartenieff; Dee for Sheila Dabney, and Sada for
Nagrin; other actors had been cast from auditions.
It was evident that
not all the actors were prepared to trust Shapiro, nor he them. The actors who were cast from open auditions
were joining a company that had been working together on and off for weeks and
even months.
Further, since
Shapiro wasn’t in sole control of the production—Malpede, of course, being the
authority on the script and Bartenieff,
as executive director of TNC, the co-producer of the show—problems with
elements of the production that were out of his hands, principally technical
aspects associated with the theater (for which Bartenieff was responsible),
often thwarted attempts to do meaningful work in rehearsals.
Traditionally-trained
actors, those who came out of conservatory or university acting programs, for
instance, sometimes seemed in rehearsals to be uncomfortable that Shapiro
didn’t give them conventional acting guidance.
During the work on Blue Heaven, stage manager Stoker
determined that “it was very frustrating for some of the actors because some of
them I doubt had ever worked in this way . . . .”
A few actors “found
it very disorienting just to be given the outer directions rather than the
discussions,” Stoker observed, and found that some of these seemed to ask
themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ in the early stages of the rehearsal. Still, among company members who
committed to Shapiro’s methods, the work progressed much the same way as it had
in Kafka sessions and resulted in honest, often profound performances.
In the introduction
to The Theatre of Images (see “The
Theatre of Mixed Means & The Theatre of Images,” 26 January
2020), Bonnie Marranca’s discussion of the avant-garde theater of the mid-1970s,
she described the type of acting espoused by Shapiro as characteristic of the
theater of images. She believed that the
actors thus become another medium for the director’s concept, a variation,
perhaps, on Gordon Craig’s Über-marionette, the completely effaced
actor. (Edward Gordon Craig, 1872-1966,
discussed his view of acting in “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” On the
Art of the Theatre.)
In Shapiro’s
productions, however, the actors were expected to adhere to a more Brechtian
approach: to express not their “innermost core,” but their thoughts and
experiences as they were reflected in the actions and circumstances of their
roles. His words, taken from notes for
the first rehearsal of Blue Heaven, were to “cross document our lives
with [the] characters’ lives, our props with theirs, our gestures with theirs,
our voices with theirs . . . .” (This is
the acting technique Shapiro called “testimony,” discussed in the blog post
referenced earlier.)
“What I’m trying to
do now is more like opera,” said Shapiro, distancing his work from conventional
Western Realism, “but I think that’s what theater is.” He called music “the mother art, from which
all performance derives” and attributed to music the cornerstones of
performance: “time keeping, structure, the revelation of hidden and unspeakable
mysteries, and, perhaps, for some, the keys to the locks of the mysteries.”
At the first
rehearsal of Blue Heaven, for instance, the director told his cast that
the “most important element” was the “music,” by which he meant not the live
band that would be part of the production, but the “rhythm, pitch, and tone” of
the language. In notes for the cast,
Shapiro said, “Play strong and hard, like a jazz band.”
One of Shapiro’s
principal goals, as I noted previously, was to make theater with the audience,
not just for it. “[T]he real work on [a
production] is done in front of people,” he pointed out, which means that the
cast doesn’t really know before previews—or opening night if there have been no
previews—“that this will all be shaped into something coherent.” Direct contact with the audience in the Heaven
Cafe was built into the performance, and Shapiro expected to develop this
audience-performer interplay during previews.
The preparation for
this contact, however, began in the earliest rehearsals. Shapiro didn’t close his company’s rehearsal
sessions to friends and guests and he encouraged the actors to stay at
rehearsals after their stage work was done so that there were always spectators
and the actors were never in a private world, isolated from observers.
Shapiro had even asked the actors who were “off-stage” to
remain in the cafe set and they often hung out along the east wall behind the
band platform, sitting on the floor leaning against the black drapes while
other scenes were being rehearsed. (While observing the work on Blue Heaven,
the director encouraged me to sit at different tables in the set rather than on
the periphery of the performance space as I had when I watched rehearsals for Kafka:
Father and Son.)
Another effect the
origin of which I missed was where the stylized performances came from. When I watched rehearsals for Kafka, I
was surprised to see that they seemed to be proceeding along lines not very
different from traditional (that is, Stanislavskian) directors’ work. It didn’t really look like the kind of work that
I’d seen in Shaliko performances.
Then I skipped
several sessions because the director had scheduled a series of technical
sessions such as the recording of some voices and loading in the set—and when I
came back for the first performance, there was all this acting behavior that I
never saw: rhythm—rhythmic movement, rhythmic speech. I couldn’t understand where it had come from,
where it happened.
These were the “musical
elements” of the performance, by which Shapiro didn’t mean the accompaniment that
Langheld’s combo played, but the music in the actors’ performances. Since I’d apparently missed the source of
this in Kafka, I was determined to see how it happened with Blue
Heaven.
I skipped a few Blue
Heaven rehearsals at the end because of my class and because Shapiro
scheduled technical rehearsals just before opening. Now, in most conventional American
productions, actors are often not called for tech rehearsals, or function
merely as bodies to be lit and voices against which to test sound levels.
If scenes are even
run, it’s usually only to check tech cues, exits and entrances, and the
placement of props. Techs commonly
proceed “from cue to cue,” meaning that dialogue and action are skipped unless
they trigger a technical cue. For actors—never
mind observers—these sessions are extremely enervating.
But when I came
back, I found the same thing that I saw at Kafka. Perhaps in a somewhat rudimentary form, but I
was watching a recognizable version of a Shaliko production rather than what
Shapiro had called “this sort of American Realistic” presentation. I had to ask the director about this after Blue
Heaven closed.
Shapiro affirmed:
“[T]those technical rehearsals . . . is where I do a lot of my work. . . . I do a lot of my work with actors in
techs. And I redo everything in
techs. You know, and I usually spend
about a week at it.”
Actor Triana, for
instance, confirmed that she unexpectedly found herself called upon actually to
act during the early technical rehearsals for Blue Heaven: “I was so
startled, I found something completely new for that moment.”
The tech rehearsals
are “when I actually composed the scenes,” Shapiro explained. “So while we’re waiting for them to redo the
light, and I finally see what I’m gonna see, that’s when I compose the
repetitions, the silences, all the elements that compose the scenes musically
and visually. Because those two things
have to go together.”
“It’s just like
setting the dance to the music. I have
to have the lighting to set the scene to.
I did it with an idea up front, but then I see what’s actually
achievable, when I’m actually there. And
I changed all those scenes totally. I
mean, I basically found those scenes in the lighting rehearsal.”
Shapiro always
scheduled a series of preview performances for his shows. They were essentially dress rehearsals before
an audience, but they were essential for his work on the performer-spectator
relationship. The director had been
building that into his shows since his earliest ones as a nascent professional,
from the 1967 Brother, You’re Next through 1996’s Seagull.
For Blue Heaven,
this was particularly significant because of the environmental mise-en-scène:
the actors badly needed to practice the interaction with the audience, and that
can only really happen under performance conditions. But the technical rehearsals were delayed
because things weren’t ready or available when Shapiro needed them. (The director put the blame for this on
Bartenieff as the co-producer in charge of the venue. Among other complaints, Shapiro said that the
cancellation of previews had been due to technical delays caused when
Bartenieff didn’t supply the promised crews four days in a row.)
As a consequence,
the previews were delayed and ultimately cancelled. That meant that the actors never got a chance
to work with the tech or the spectators until paying theatergoers and reviewers
were in the theater. The production essentially
wasn’t finished when it opened.
By this time,
tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the
other had escalated beyond
mollification. At the time I
interviewed Malpede in February 1992, she and Shapiro had had great mutual
respect. When I asked her about the
staging several times in early rehearsals, Malpede appeared pleased and even
enthusiastic. The director and
Bartenieff had worked together successfully three time before Blue Heaven (Collateral Damage, Kafka, and
Roadkill), plus the staged readings and the WBAI broadcast.
Before rehearsals
began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede
expressed excitement in my interview with her for all of the director’s
proposed plans for the production. But
at the end of the rehearsal period, recriminations (which I won’t recount now)
flew back and forth.
Among the kinder
things Malpede said about her former collaborator in a written statement she
sent me, she called Shapiro “a REHEARSAL MONSTER” (her typography). In
the chronology Shapiro compiled before his death, his comment in the entry for
1992 reads “Blue heaven and hell,” and the title he gave the computer file that
was his notes for the first Blue Heaven rehearsal was “Blue Hell.”
The relationship between
the playwright and the director broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as
director on 13 September, four
days before the official opening of the show, though he retained credit in the
program for the mise-en-scène used in the production. Malpede took over direction of the production
in practice, but no director was listed in the program.
The company split into three camps: Dabney and Nagrin lined
up with Malpede and Bartenieff; Paraiso and Triana supported Shapiro, as did
stage manager Stoker; Christen Clifford, Joseph Kellough, Lailah Bragin, and Beverly
Wideman were caught in the middle. Everyone’s
opinions were colored by personal loyalty.
When Malpede assumed the de
facto directorship of Blue Heaven, she immediately removed much of
Shapiro’s physicality, leaving the focus more on her words. My note on Monday, 14 September, the first
rehearsal after Shapiro was fired, was: “The atmosphere is much more down
tonight than last Friday. Is it just a
kind of emotional exhaustion from the turmoil of the past few days?”
I wasn’t able to see
the opening performance on the 17th, but a friend of mine went and reported
back to me. Rich told me that he’d liked the play in general, though his date was less
enthusiastic. Both of them found the
ideas too numerous and uncohesive—a problem I had with Malpede’s script from
the beginning, and a complaint you’ll see the reviewers also voiced—but that
bothered Rich less than it did his date.
Rich
didn’t notice any tentativeness on the part of the actors, but reported that he
had occasional problems hearing dialogue over effects such as the music and
sound, and he couldn’t see through the scrim masking Aria’s studio from his
table back near the band platform.
My friend also remarked on the humor; he was unsure if he was supposed
to laugh. One bit he mentioned was the
hanging of yellow ribbon and flags: a grip releases the ribbon from the door
after Herbie returns and wraps it around his neck; it snaps across the room to
the shutter of Sada’s booth. Then Herbie’s
entangled in the ribbon when he and Sada dance to “Blue Heaven” and they get
all wrapped up in yellow ribbon and flags.
I think Rich wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a serious comment on
the war and the displays of patriotism than were common during the period of
the combat, culminating in that tickertape parade, or if it was just slapstick
comedy by Herbie in his clown persona.
My friend also commented that a scene with Aria and Herbie when she’s talking
about Mendieta’s death and he’s talking about the Gulf war didn’t come together
in his mind. He didn’t put the two
instances of violence together (a complaint one reviewer also made).
I was at TNC on Friday,
the 18th (which was press opening). My
notes read:
Performance is very
careful—not tentative, but controlled.
It’s not a rehearsal but it isn’t a full-out show. The cast seems a little unsure what to do
about the audience. They need to accept
us as part of the environment and just deal with us. [In an earlier note that evening, I wrote: “Nicki
whispered ‘Excuse me’ on his way to the bandstand. I’d prefer he said it aloud without self-consciousness.”] They mustn’t be afraid to touch us or move
chairs or talk to us when necessary.
Mostly they need to let it all hang out.
I remarked that the audience seemed attentive, but added, “maybe
too much.” I even doubled-down, noting further:
“Very concentrated,” but I wondered, “Is it to hear over the music?”
A week later, on Friday, 25 September (the day the Newsday review came out), I saw the show
again and I noticed that few spectators seemed very aware of the film and video
projections. Most of them didn’t even
seem to know they were going on.
I also observed that
there was a noticeable lessening of the connections the actors had to the material. They were saying lines, but losing the
words. They weren’t really connecting to
each other, as if each character existed separately from the rest.
I noted several changes—the small part of Mary, the
patriotic paraphernalia seller, had been cut, for example, although I don’t
know how long before the 25th that had happened—suggesting that Malpede was
still working on the production, and this may have accounted for the lack of
connection if the actors were focusing on new routines.
Pretty much by any measure, TNC’s première of Blue Heaven
was a failure. The theatrical vision Shapiro had devised for
the production never came to realization.
Malpede never got to see her play on stage in a finished state; it was
little more than a workshop with tech.
If you take the perspective that even that form wasn’t what the
playwright had imagined, then she didn’t even get a workshop.
A nascent
professional relationship between Leonardo Shapiro and Karen Malpede that had
begun about a year earlier and produced three successful joint projects, not to
forget some early workshops of Blue Heaven, disintegrated
precipitously. With it went another
collaboration, the one with veteran actor George Bartenieff.
Shapiro’s personal
relationship with Rosalie Triana, which had started during the production of Blue
Heaven (and had a part in the disruption of the association with Malpede)
continued until his 1997 death. He
retired from New York theater, however, so whatever professional connection he
might have established with other members of the production team ended when he
pulled up roots and moved to the mountains of New Mexico near Taos (where he’d
spent about two years doing guerrilla theater between 1969 and 1971).
The production of Blue
Heaven itself got only three reviews—one of which didn’t even appear until
the show had closed—and they weren’t good.
(See below for some quotations from the press coverage.) The play has had no afterlife (as far as I
know), either on stage or in print. Because
the title-change had been at Shapiro’s behest, when Malpede returned to Blue
Heaven after the production closed, she retitled it Going to Iraq
again.
The first press notice for TNC’s Blue Heaven was Julius Novick’s “‘Blue Heaven,’ a Spirit
of Avant-Garde Past” in Long Island’s Newsday (Friday, 25 September). Novick called the
production “mainly a stale
imitation of the bold American avant-garde theater that flourished 20-odd years
ago.”
The Newsday reviewer compared Blue Heaven unfavorably to The Performance Group’s
Dionysus in 69, the adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae conceived
and directed by Richard Schechner at the Performing Garage in New York City’s
SoHo neighborhood in lower Manhattan in 1968; the work of the Living Theatre from
around 1968; and The Blacks by Jean Genet in 1961 as directed by Gene
Frankel at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village.
Novick quipped that there “is no total nudity, but a couple of
actresses shmoosh themselves with red and black paint, and one of them tries
painting on the wall with her bare breasts.”
He added: “In the spirit of the ’60s, Malpede is bound and determined to
be what used to be called ‘relevant.’”
Though Novick did
recognize that Malpede “is firmly opposed to violence, especially violence
directed at women,” he confessed, “It is hard to know exactly what the
defenestration of Ana Mendieta, the gulf war, and the denizens of the cafe have
to do with one another.”
“In one respect,
however,” found the review-writer, “‘Blue Heaven’ parts company with its
sources. The avant-garde theater of the
’60s was frequently attacked for de-emphasizing the spoken word, but Malpede
appears to fancy herself a maker of eloquent and powerful speeches. . . . Much of this stuff,” Novick judged, “is
delivered by the actors with an empty vociferousness that does nothing to
increase the impact.”
As for
“[m]itigating factors,” the Newsday writer found that “Gretchen Langheld’s jazz score . . . has a
calm, reflective authority. Lee Nagrin
sings and shouts and complains with a certain panache . . ., and Nicki Paraiso
underplays with striking dignity as the AIDS-man.“
He held back some
when it came to George Bartenieff, who “as Herbie has some funny moments, along
with many unfunny ones, as he impersonates various low comedians.”
Novick concluded” “The actors do not disgrace themselves, but they
cannot prevail against the besetting sins of ‘Blue Heaven,’ which were also the
besetting sins of the ’60s avant-gardism at less than its best: pretentiousness
and incoherence.”
In his New York Times notice, which
came out on Wednesday, 30 September, Mel Gussow observed that the Ana Medieta-Carl Andre story “is the
intriguing inspiration for Karen Malpede’s ‘Blue Heaven.’” Then he lamented, “Unfortunately, the play
has pretensions equal to its aspirations. Instead of focusing intensely on the artist’s
death and its repercussions, Ms. Malpede paints on a broad and diffuse canvas,
moving all the way from a consideration of avant-garde art in the 1960’s to
AIDS to the war in the Persian Gulf.”
“The play itself is
like an artifact of another theatrical time.” Gussow pointed out. Describing the environmental Heaven Cafe set,
the Timesman found (as I did), “The approach is reminiscent of Jim
Cartwright’s ‘Road.’”
Gussow also saw a
resemblance to “works that preceded” Road, referring to Lanford Wilson’s
Balm in Gilead, which débuted at La Mama E.T.C. in 1965 and then was
revived in New York City by the Circle Repertory Company and Chicago’s Steppenwolf
in 1984-85 at Circle Rep in Greenwich Village, “all to the disadvantage of ‘Blue
Heaven.’”
“Where Mr. Wilson’s
cafe crackled with life and language,” affirmed the Times reviewer, “Ms.
Malpede’s cafe is languorous. Monologues, especially those delivered by Lee
Nagrin . . ., seem to last an eternity. Almost every scene is attenuated . . .
. At the same time, George Bartenieff as
the cafe’s cook has to work overtime trying to be funny, mimicking Groucho,
Harpo and Dracula. . . .”
The play, Gussow
reported, “ostensibly deals with the mixed allegiances of [Aria]. With insufficient explanation, [the sculptor] is
eventually on her way to Iraq as a documentary film maker.”
“As author and
director,” concluded Gussow, “Ms. Malpede gathers ideas and images from diverse
sources, using film and video . . . while gratuitously referring to Robert
Wilson, Richard Foreman and others more adept than she is at theatrical
experimentation. It all adds up to a
long evening of artistic borrowing.”
The review-writer’s
one good word was: “On only one level does the play express a novel perspective
and that is in the jazz score by Gretchen Langheld.”
The last review to
be published, New York Native’s “Something Borrowed,” didn’t appear
until after Blue Heaven closed; the cover date was Monday, 19 October;
the play closed on the 11th. (The Native,
though, had a practice of post-dating its issues by about a week, so it
probably hit the newsstands around the 12th—the day after closing.)
In his review, L.
C. Cole reported (with a now familiar perspective): “Karen Malpede’s Blue
Heaven was a total environmental theater piece with music, containing most
of the multi-media trappings that heralded a work that wants simultaneously to
captivate and liberate its viewers.”
Cole also found,
like his colleagues, that “Malpede used this loose collection of people to toss
out many ideas about art and justice, and with the help of Leonardo Shapiro . .
., came up with many ways of presenting them.”
He mentioned Aria’s “sense of doom and futility,” Herbie’s deflection of
“the pain of their situation by cavorting like a vaudevillian clown,” and
AIDS-sufferer John’s singing “about his condition at the piano. Amputated limbs, cancerous uteruses, bombing
victims—a host of social ills found their theatrical exemplar in one form or
another.”
“But if the barrage
of images and sounds was unsettling,” the Native reviewer found, “it wasn’t always because our consciences
were being prodded or because the illustrations were so disturbingly apt. It was,” he complained, “often a matter of
not liking to be harangued on a point over which one is in total agreement. Greater rights and freedom for women,
compassion for the poor and sick, an end to all wars—such ideas are hardly fuel
for heated disagreement.”
The review-writer
thought that “Blue Heaven suffered secondarily from a meandering
storyline, which often covered the same ground in different guises, and,” he
added, “preachy writing that grated the more it tried to approximate
poetry. But its primary failure was in
matching visual style and message.”
The play’s “blunt
message played to the converted, who are no longer astonished by
post-avant-garde pranks and high-tech tricks,” Cole felt. “It was therefore puzzling (if not
disheartening) to watch a play which so often criticized modern artists for
their barren, derivative products, buil[d] its supreme moments out of the prop
bag and shtick gags of ten to thirty years ago.
If its creators intended to revitalize these old concepts, they
misguided their efforts, but my guess,” Cole judged, “is simply that they don’t
see as far as they pretend.”
“There was
nevertheless a fair display of talent on the stage,” the Native writer
acknowledged. “Highlights were Gretchen
Langheld’s torchy sax playing, Lee Nagrin’s grandiose sing-song style as Sada,
and the way Nicky [sic] Paraiso slyly underplayed his role as the man
with ‘AIDS.’
On the other hand,
Cole felt, ”Rosalie Triana’s Aria carried on as if she had the weight of the
world on her shoulders. George
Bartenieff’s Herbie had [s]ome good comic moments, but his non-sequetorial
slapsticking was often the most glaring example of what belonged to a different
era.”
As small as this
sample is, I still find the near-unanimity of the reviewers’ opinions
remarkable. Reading as many reviews as I
do when I prepare my play reports for Rick On Theater, I can tell you that
even among just three notices, to find that they virtually agree on the same
flaws, the same moments of excellence, the same writing problems, the same
acting issues is astonishing.
These three papers don’t cater to
the same readership, either: one’s a major daily broadsheet with a
national—even international—rep, another’s a local daily tabloid whose readers
mostly come from the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk and the Borough
of Queens, and the third’s a (now defunct) gay weekly based in Manhattan.
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