The Real-Time Event

 

[I’ve written a number of articles based on the theater ideas of Leonardo Shapiro, whom readers of Rick On Theater will probably know by now was a “downtown” experimental theater director whom I knew at the end of his life in the late ’80s and early ’90s.  One of the central ideas of Leo’s theater, put into practice in his productions with the company he started and ran, The Shaliko Company, was the Real-Time Event.  

[One of the two or three most important notions of Leo’s theatrical technique, it was present in almost all his Shaliko productions.  I hope my discussion makes clear what Leo meant by this term because the principal reason I was so interested in his work after I saw his production of The Yellow House in Baltimore at the Theatre of Nations in 1986, was that he had these ideas about which he’d thought for years that he was trying to make practical on a stage.  He wasn’t just putting on a show.  He had things he really wanted to accomplish. 

[That really impressed me.]

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), widely recognized as one of the major figures of 20th-century theater and the European avant-garde, disparaged “storytelling psychology [which] has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other.”

Each spectacle will by its very nature become a kind of event.  The spectator must have the sense that what is being performed in front of him is a scene from his own life, and an important scene at that.

In short, we ask of our audience an intimate and profound involvement. . . .  With each spectacle we put on, we are playing a serious game.  Unless we are determined to follow our principle wherever they may lead us, we do not feel the game is worth playing.

These statements are an excellent introduction to the “real-time event,” one of the central aspects of the theater of Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), the avant-garde director on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater.  Artaud was an important influence on Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), the Polish theater director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, actor training, and theatrical production were a significant influence on Shapiro.

Shapiro founded his experimental theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, in 1972.  Their first production was Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) Agamemnon and Euripides’ (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE) Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis which premiered in 1973. 

With Children of the Gods, Shaliko began exploring what Shapiro would call the “real-time event”—what actually happens at a performance while the audience is in the room—a concept obviously heavily dependent on the audience-performer relationship.  If the actors present themselves as people like the spectators, doing actual things in real time, then, Shapiro hoped, the audience would become part of the event by making connections between actions that previously appeared unrelated. 

Even before he formed his New York City company, the young director was quoting Grotowski: “The theatre is an act carried on HERE AND NOW in the actors organism, in front of other men . . . . ”  The rest of Grotowski’s statement asserts that “theatrical reality is instantaneous, not an illustration of life,” linking the audience and the performers in one actual experience.

To bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact was the goal Shapiro had for Shaliko’s work.  In many of Shapiro’s productions, he placed actors in or near the audience, turned the auditorium lights on during the performance, had actors address the spectators directly, and enlisted the audience’s participation in aspects of the performances.

Let me back up a little.  After finishing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing at New York University’s School of the Arts, he took off for the West Coast.  He stopped for lunch one day in Taos, New Mexico . . . and stayed for over a year-and-a-half.  He formed a guerrilla theater troupe that roamed the Four Corners.

He returned to New York City in March 1971 and started forming Shaliko.  He sought out the actors he had known at NYU and put Shaliko together in January 1972.  The troupe spent time “developing skills” through exercises and games.  Actor Christopher McCann (b. 1952), an early member of the ensemble, recalled that exercises heightened his sensitivity to the space in which they were working, and to the other actors.  It taught the actors that “there was more at work than just what you see.”

This echoes NYU circus-arts teacher Hovey Burgess’s belief that “[t]he actor has to be aware of the reality of what he is doing without knowing the result.”  Circus work had been a long-time interest of Shapiro’s and it was visible in much of his work with Shaliko till the end.

Circus performance is an immediate form: what the observer sees, as Burgess (b. 1940) pointed out, is what’s happening at that moment.  While conventional theater artists create illusions, Burgess believed, “Circus is more real.”

“The audience in the theatre must imagine objects and relationships,” said Burgess, referring to conventional Western performances.  “In the circus, there are real relationships to people and objects . . . .”  These ideas of immediacy and reality, which Burgess called “authentic,” played significant roles in Shaliko performance goals.

After a year, however, the demand to produce became “pretty intense.”  They explored several different potential pieces and settled on the Greeks.  It isn’t surprising that these Greek plays would attract Shapiro’s attention. 

“[T]he story of the House of Atreus spoke directly to us,” averred Shapiro; “it was amazingly credible, especially at its most extreme moments.  Our war [in Vietnam] was ending and our half million Orestes and Electra[s], ready for action, were coming home.”  (The Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973, one week before Children opened.)

Shapiro’s main goal was “to use the devices of the theater to heighten the experience of the present moment” in which the spectators and actors share in some immediate way the live performance event.  His aim was to make what was happening on stage as “authentic” as the life the audience was living off stage.

In rehearsals for Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (see my post on 11 and 14 May 2020), his last show in New York (1992), 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.”  

“[D]eveloping a piece with the audience,” Shapiro declared as if responding to the contention of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), the Russian actor, director, and theorist who’s probably the godfather of Western avant-garde theater, that the spectator is “a fourth creator” in the production, “is as important as developing a piece for the audience.”  

“We intend the audience not merely to observe,” said Meyerhold, “but to participate in a corporate creative act.”  (Meyerhold used “corporate” here, of course, to mean “collective”; it had nothing to do with business enterprises.)

According to Shapiro, the work with Shaliko

redefined the roles of the actors and the audience, vis à vis each other as well as vis à vis themselves: it not only changes how one actor relates to another actor, but how either of them might relate to the audience; it also changes how the members of the audience might relate to each other, so it creates a very different kind of dynamic. 

Indeed, the playwright Mac Wellman (b. 1945) posits a “Lockean-Rousseauian contract” between the performers and the spectators that Shapiro recognized as precisely analogous to the social contract which he understood to exist between a government and the governed (see my profile of Wellman, 4 February 2017).  In fact, the company clearly stated so in a promotional brochure a few years after its founding:

The Company sees itself as representing both the author and the audience.  In our work, we become the meeting ground for the challenge/response transaction between the text and our peers, and fashion this transaction into a structured dramatic form which invites participation.

The company maintained that their consideration of the connection between the performer and the spectator came from an “absolute respect for the intellectual and emotional maturity of the audience” and, in the terms of the implied contract, each party bears part of the responsibility for creating the performance and Shapiro was determined that the actors would not break this contract as he had seen that the state had broken that other social agreement with him. 

If the audience abides by the terms, together they and the actors will interact to produce a theatrical experience unique to that particular time and place.  Ideally, Shapiro explained to the young cast of his last show, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in Albuquerque in 1996, the process works as a kind of “transaction.” 

The actor speaks to the audience through the character, “establishing the basic relationship of performances, [the] human-human relationship” as opposed to a character-character or performer-performer connection, the director clarified. 

The actor, Shapiro continued, thus “teaches” the audience how to see the circumstances—then the audience reacts and that teaches the actor what’s working and on what level.  When the actor responds to the audience’s reaction by perhaps playing differently than he did at other performances before other spectators, the cycle starts again.

As Rose Mary Mechem, a journalist for Sports Illustrated and former theater student, attested in The Nation, Shaliko could be very successful at this tactic, however daunting it might have been:

For many people it is a threatening experience.  You go to the theatre, a paying guest, expecting a little diversion, and suddenly you’re asked to look alive, to participate, to commit yourself.  You are no longer in a sanctuary, safe and alone with your own thoughts.  Your brain has been mugged.  Your sense of individual freedom and privacy has been rudely assaulted.  But that, it turns out, is exactly what the evening is all about: you are asked to sit in judgment over the case . . . . 

It’s daunting from the performer’s perspective, too.  As actress Robbie McCauley (b. 1942), who had no trouble with the open-ended explorations into which Shapiro led his casts, experienced it, “That’s the part that’s scary. . . . .  It’s like being on a tightrope . . . because you’re with the audience and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Having reached out and transformed the mass of individual spectators, each with separate concerns and distractions, into an audience, it was Shaliko’s goal to make that audience part of the ensemble.  This technique takes time, of course; it can’t happen until the actors confront their audience and forge the contract.  Since that didn’t occur in the Shaliko process until after rehearsals, Shapiro demanded previews. 

Circumstances didn’t always permit that to happen as planned.  The actor-spectator interplay in the 1992 revival of Kafka: Father and Son by Russian playwright-director Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937) didn’t develop, for instance, until the second week of performances (report posted on 5 and 8 November 2015).  The psychical distance between the performers and the audience was closed later in the run, and audiences at the last performances were visibly affected by the experience. 

Shapiro’s concern with connecting The Shaliko Company’s performances with its audiences was not only a function of his connection with Grotowski, Brecht, Artaud, Meyerhold, and circus.  Shapiro also named among his influences French filmmaker-psychologist Guy Debord (1931-94) and the Situationists, a revolutionary art and political movement active between 1957 and 1972 (see my post on 3 February 2012). 

Application of a number of Situationist notions could be found in Shaliko work.  In terms of connecting performers with spectators, the Situationist parallel was very strong.  It went to the heart of Situationist philosophy, indeed to the very origins of the name.

In “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,” a 1957 essay, Debord described the life of the ordinary citizen as dull and predictable, dictated for him by a society which has become reduced to what he called a “Spectacle”: little more than a sham dressed in the trappings of living. 

To change this world, Debord and the Situationists proposed organizing “situations,” which he defined as “the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality,” a kind of installation-cum-Happening.  Debord’s idea was to get people involved in their own lives again. 

In popular culture, Debord alleged, the passive spectators are led to identify with the hero so that they will live through the fictional figure and not themselves become active.  Getting the spectators to take an active role in their own lives defeats this societal control mechanism, leading eventually, the Situationists hoped, to revolution and the downfall of the “Society of the Spectacle.” 

Theatrical performances which draw their audiences into a communal act in the hope that something transformative, even revolutionary, will result, rather than separate passive audience from active performer, are surely as Situationist as anything Debord had conceived.  As Shapiro stated it:

I’m actively trying to subvert the official view of reality and help people make different connections which would lead them to construct a different reality. . . . .  What I want to do is make people understand some of the connections between events that they don’t ordinarily understand—that are hidden from them by the official reality . . . .

“The work of the theatre,” wrote Julian Beck (1925-85), founder with his wife Judith Malina (1926-2015) of the Living Theatre—which introduced Shapiro to theater when he was a teenager—“has to do with activating the people by restoring the ability to think and feel freely . . . .” 

Artaud cautioned, however, that we must ask ourselves “whether we will be able to find an audience capable of giving us the necessary minimum of confidence and trust, capable, in short, of joining forces with us.  For, unlike writers or painters, we cannot do without an audience; indeed, the audience becomes an integral part of our undertaking.” 

The audience may not always cooperate, insisting on being emotionally manipulated or even dismissing the whole experience because it doesn’t conform to the way they presume a work of theater should affect them.  Audiences, Shapiro acknowledged,

may insist on imposing familiar fictions to prevent themselves from having to actually encounter these people or enter into a direct, immediate dialogue with them.  I can’t make them not do that.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

This was Shaliko’s on-going challenge and is almost precisely echoed in Mac Wellman’s notion of the “real-event.”  In contrast to the “non-event” of the conventional theater, Wellman defined this in terms analogous to the way Hovey Burgess described circus performances: “events proper, more or less intriguing, more or less revelatory of the human condition, more or less engrossing.” 

Wellman also connected this idea to Brecht when he wrote that the principal aim of theater is “to make something happen, show forth for what it is, in a given space.”  For Shapiro, as he explained to the young cast of Seagull, “the gel of performance . . . is a transaction . . . between you and the audience.”

The real-time technique is related, too, to Grotowskian theory, which posits that for the actor, who, in contrast to Meyerhold, is the “direct creator” of the performance analogous to the poet or the painter, “the immediate act . . . must exist during the performance.”  

As Grotowski explained to Shapiro and his classmates in a 1967 NYU workshop, the fundamental requirement of acting is responding honestly to the impulses the actors feel while they are performing.  “That is,” Shapiro interpreted Grotowski’s principle, “the theatre does not represent an event, it is an event of consciousness.” 

Shaliko actress Mary Zakrzewski, who played the Chief Commissioner who questioned the audience in Shaliko’s second production, Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974-75), confirmed the director’s assertion: “You start to develop a relationship with the audience.  They are very personal, real relationships,” she specified in language that echoes Burgess’s, “that are only there for an hour.”

The explorations of the real-time experience, the theater as thought-provoker, and the involvement of the audience in the performance event all had their most undiluted expression in the production of The Measures Taken, one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke (‘teaching plays’). 

To see if the work was clear, Shapiro decided to have the Chief Commissioner interrupt the action five times “within carefully specified slots during the production” to ask the spectators if the Young Comrade’s actions were right. 

“Since this is a learning play,” the Commissioner told the audience, “we are asking you to represent students, and from time to time during the production we will ask you questions about what you have seen.”  This procedure followed Brecht’s own instruction that “[w]herever he feels he can,” the Epic actor “breaks off” the performance “in order to give explanations.”

These sessions became a posing of “questions about ends and means,” alluding indirectly to issues like the then-current Patty Hearst (b. 1954) kidnapping (4 February 1974-18 September 1975) and the radical political activities of the Weather Underground. 

(For those who are too young to be familiar with these historical references to the ’60s and ’70s, Patricia “Patty” Hearst was taken from her Berkeley, California, apartment on 4 February 1974.  The Symbionese Liberation Army demanded her father, publisher Randolph A. Hearst [1915-2000], give millions to the poor.  

(Hearst was identified by the FBI as taking part in a San Francisco bank holdup on 15 April; on 18 September 1975, the FBI captured her and others in San Francisco and they were indicted on various charges.  She was convicted of bank robbery on 20 March 1976 but she was released from prison under executive clemency by President Jimmy Carter [b. 1924; in office: 1977-81] on 1 February 1979. 

(A radical group who had broken with the Students for a Democratic Society and called themselves the Weathermen changed their name in 1969 to the Weather Underground.  [The original name came from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which contains the words, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”]  The Weather Underground planted bombs to protest the continuing war in Vietnam.)

As one might imagine, some discussions worked better than others, but Rose Mary Mechem noted that the production did what Shapiro wanted:

The message in The Measures Taken is enigmatic.  The individual, viewing it, is at the mercy of his own subjective impressions.  The audience, as a collective, provides a kaleidoscope of insights, finding freshness in dogma, ambivalences hidden in rote, passion beneath rhetoric and humanity in revolution.  The didactic becomes the dialectic.

What the audience experienced depended, Shapiro noted, on the amount of responsibility they took “for making connections and doing something about them.”    “[T]here were nights when the discussions were so hot,” Shapiro recalled, “that there’d be as much time spent on the discussion as the performance.”

Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn (b. 1943, a longtime friend of Shapiro’s and supporter of Shaliko, deemed the presentation “a very powerful, very clear, lucid presentation of a very political play . . . which was certainly very clarifying.”  Papp, himself, praised Shaliko’s work on “Brecht’s difficult piece” for its “insight, artistry and commitment.”

Unrehearsed and unregulated, the real-time event could vary the length of the performance by as much as an hour either way, but without changing what Shapiro called its “score.”  The real-time event in this variable and aleatory way added an aspect of the Happening, a component of Shaliko’s performances that would remain, however subtle.

Because The Measures Taken was deliberately different at every performance, the cast confronted “the problems of spontaneity and form” every night.  “They had to learn to go back and forth instantly from rehearsed, choreographed sections to the completely unrehearsed, improvised sections in every performance,” the director explained.

Shaliko toured Pennsylvania with Measures, including several union halls and prisons.  “The audience discussions were totally different in the prisons than at the Public,” recalled Shapiro.  “They’re [i.e., the prisoners] really concerned with these issues in a very immediate way.  The questions of ends and means and radical activity and who got the gun: these are all questions they’re familiar with.  It isn’t theory to them.” 

The prisoners, Shapiro saw, understood that they had to find answers for themselves in order to survive.  “The show provided fable, catechism and forum to a population denied all access to reality. . . . .  Every night the audience went out arguing with each other.”

Though Shapiro’s use of real time eventually got more subtle than the direct address to the audience, and in later work he never returned to the overt use of it that appeared in early Shaliko productions, it was still a practice to which Shapiro came back again and again in his work and in discussions. 

Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) Ghosts (1975) was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience (report posted on 6 September 2014).  In Children and Measures, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children and students being indoctrinated in party practice in Measures—but in Ghosts, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors. 

This form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, a direct parallel to Grotowski’s practice, though sometimes the spectators of both Grotowski’s performances and Shapiro’s didn’t recognize their roles. 

In The Yellow House (1985), for instance, Shaliko’s play about painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), the audience was supposed to stand in for Theo van Gogh (1857-91), the painter’s brother, but the relationship was never acknowledged (report posted on 9 February 2018).  (In the first version, in fact, an actor portrayed Theo from a microphone behind the audience, who never saw him.  “I was very much after the idea of making the audience identify with Theo,” Shapiro said.) 

In Ghosts, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro saw the play as a séance, which helps explain his emphasis on scenes which were not so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some critics.

In a statement of the company’s purpose and goals, which alluded to his circus influence, he wrote: “Shaliko’s actors focus on the present, they improvise, they react to the moment with the concentration of a tight-rope walker, living the emotion of the present, not of a past evoked with artifice.”

Former Living Theatre actor George Bartenieff (b. 1933), who was a member of the cast of Blue Heaven and played Hermann Kafka, the father, in the 1992 revival, compared the experience to the Living’s production of The Brig (1963), in which he had appeared: “It’s like living the experience, not just pretending.” 

Shapiro stipulated, however, that while he’d still striven to make the “transaction between the actor and the audience a real event,” he’d no longer allowed the actors all the time they wanted; it had to happen “in the equivalent of dramatic time.”  He was fascinated by the difference between real and theatrical time, he said, and kept looking for ways “to make something a real event in the theatre.”

Also starting with Children, Shapiro, invoking the actor-audience contract, made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” his application of great Russian stage and film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) Theory of Attractions as Shapiro understood it from Meyerhold (see my article on 31 January 2010). 

As New Leader critic Albert Bermel (1927-2013) noted, “Around and above the playing area . . . stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses.  Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers,” with, as Shapiro put it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.” 

It is also another tenet of Mac Wellman’s poetic theater, paralleling Shaliko, that the performance contract draws the spectator and the performer together in an experience that “recapitulates . . . the actual creative moment” because it highlights choices and the “audience is always involved with choice per se; is always confronted with a delectiary of potential choices, aesthetic, ethical, and ultimately political.” 

In what Shapiro called “a wrestling match with the passivity of the audience,” Shaliko strove to “enter into a relationship” with its audience “and try to get them to play their parts.”  This precept can also be traced back to Grotowski and Shapiro’s earliest contacts with him.  At the time of the Theater Laboratory’s first New York visit (October-December 1969), Grotowski pointedly invoked Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa (1885-1947), his only acknowledged antecedent, who he said “treated acting as a human experience that exists not for the public, but vis-à-vis the public.”