'Punch!' (Shaliko Company, 1987)

[I’ve written about a number of performances directed by Leonardo Shapiro, founder and artistic director of New York City’s Shaliko Company, since I started Rick On Theater—too many now to enumerate here.  I knew Leo for just about a decade before his death at just over 51—though our relationship was mostly professional.  

[I ended up publishing a profile of Leo and his company in TDR in 1993 (“Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony”), in preparation for which I shadowed him for a couple of months and interviewed him six times (plus two other times before that and one more afterwards).

[In 1987, Leo and Shaliko staged a very adult version of an original Punch-and-Judy puppet play.  It was only the second Shaliko production I saw, coming less than a year after I first met the director.  That happened at the 1986 Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore.  Leo had brought his production of The Yellow House, a play drawn from the letters of artist Vincent van Gogh, and I was covering the festival for Directors Notes, a stage directors’ newsletter, and TDR.  Leo was one of the artists I interviewed for the articles.

[I had loved Yellow House and began following Shaliko’s work.  Punch! was the company’s next show.  I was still impressed with Leo’s directing and the techniques of Shaliko.  I took a year’s teaching job in upstate New York after that, but as soon as I got back to the city in 1990, I contacted Leo.  He was just starting work on what he hoped would be his definitive production of Strangers, which had only been workshopped up to then, and he asked me to be his dramaturg; I said yes, of course. 

[That project aborted because Leo couldn’t find the funding, but I helped him in a minor capacity on his anti-Gulf War protest piece, Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars).  That project, staged at La MaMa in June 1991, featured a number of well-known downtown artists, both writers and performers, as contributors—plus Vanessa Redgrave. 

[Then Richard Schechner, the editor of TDR, who’d been one of my teachers at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies, called me and asked me to write the profile of Leo and Shaliko.  Leo, it seems, had recommended me and since I’d written for Richard and TDR before—most recently that 1986 TON report—Richard agreed. 

[I hung around Leo in the Shaliko office, at his classes for the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program he ran for Hartford, Connecticut’s Trinity College, and at rehearsals for two shows, the third mounting of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son and the première of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (which was retitled Going to Iraq after that production).

[Soon after the TDR article came out, Leo retired from New York theater and moved to New Mexico, where he’d spent 1969-71 doing guerilla theater, in 1993.  He wrote and then collaborated with a young Albuquerque company to produce Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to him both personally and artistically. 

[In July 1993, Leo was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer.  The Seagull premièred in Albuquerque in September 1996 and then traveled to Baltimore, where Shaliko first performed 23 years earlier, in November.  Leo couldn’t come east with his young cast; he was too ill, but he kept in contact with them by fax and e-mail.

[Leo Shapiro died on 22 January 1997, two weeks after his 51st birthday, at the home he built with his son, Spartacus, in Vallecito, New Mexico—up in the Sangre de Christo Mountains, sacred to the Taos Pueblo Indians whom he’d come to admire a quarter of a century earlier. 

[A memorial service was held at the La MaMa Annex on 1 April; I was invited to give the précis of Leo’s career.  Judy Dworin, chair of the Dance and Theater Department of Trinity College when Leo ran the Trinity/La MaMa Program (1986-92), established the Leo Shapiro Memorial Fund at the college.]

PUNCH!
The Shaliko Company (New York)
La MaMa E.T.C.
2-31 May 1987 

Political statements were in The Shaliko Company’s stars in 1987.  So were performances in mask.  Concurrent with Mystery History Bouffe Goof (see “Speaking Truth To Power” on Rick On Theater, posted on 17 August 2018), Leonardo Shapiro’s experimental theater company, based in New York City’s East Village, was mounting Punch!, adapted from an anonymous 1827 Punch-and-Judy puppet play. 

(John Payne Collier [1789-1883] published the text of a Punch-and-Judy show from 1827, illustrated by George Cruikshank [1792-1878] and transcribed largely from the performance of an Italian punchman called Giovanni Piccini [1745-1835; his first name was anglicized to George when he came to London in 1779].  It’s the earliest known script of a Punch-and-Judy puppet play in English.)

Created in rehearsal by production director Shapiro (1946-97) in collaboration with choreographer Nina Martin and actors Elena Nicholas (the professional name of Elena Prischepenko), Cristobal Carambo, and Michael Preston, the performance was “a physical theater piece created as an investigation of violence and escapism.”  

In Shapiro’s production, the play opened with ”The Star Spangled Banner” playing before the show (and the violence) starts.  Sometimes, a spectator stood for the anthem.

To demonstrate the theme “deconstruct[ing] the romance of violence, to make murder seem ugly and hard and not at all fun,” the Punch! company passed out realistic-looking toy pistols before the show’s opening.  The spectators accepted the guns “gleefully” (as one of the Edinburgh reviewers characterized it).  Once armed, these grown-ups delighted in shooting indiscriminately at one another. 

Shapiro described this sequence in an interview:

So, Michael [Preston] would change the cowboy-and-Indian play [in the original version] to “Kill the Niggers,” and he would get his whole half of the audience shouting “Kill the nigger” while they were shooting at Punch in the other half.  And one time in Scotland, we had this group of white South Africans that really got into it.  It was very disturbing.  I mean, there were times when we were unleashing forces that were a little beyond what we were able deal with. 

Revealed behind a screen made of current newspaper clippings of stories of violence and mayhem (at Edinburgh, Shapiro used coverage of the Hungerford massacre, which occurred about two weeks prior to the Punch! performances), the set, representing contemporary urban locales, was a human-sized puppet theater designed by Shapiro and painted in primary colors by Goro Fujii, a Japanese artist, installationist, and costume and set designer, and the actors wore brightly colored Commedia-like half-masks.  (Costumes for Punch! were designed by Debra Tennenbaum.)

(The Hungerford massacre was a series of random shootings in Hungerford, Berkshire, in England on 19 August 1987, when Michael Robert Ryan, an unemployed part-time antique dealer and handyman, fatally shot 16 people, including his own mother, and wounding 15 others, before committing suicide.  The shootings remain one of the worst firearms atrocities in UK history.)

The scenario of Shaliko’s adaptation of the Punch-and-Judy script, which ran a half an hour in performance (contrary to a remark by Shapiro quoted below, which was actually made when the production was still in development), was traditional: in a series of short scenes, Punch throws his baby out the window, beats Judy to death, does the same to other characters, assaults a policeman, tricks the executioner into hanging himself, and finally defeats the devil (who turns out to be a nuclear bomb).

The cast was made up of the three actors who switch characters (which include Punch, Judy, Scaramouch, and Polly, among other recognizable figures) randomly from scene to scene.  Lawrence R. Harris of Stages labeled the production “a pint-size theatre of cruelty,” citing “the high-pitched voices, the cartoon like [sic] sets, the loud costumes, the repetitive dialogue, and the exaggerated violence.”

The violence wasn’t cartoon-like or dance-like, but “sickeningly” realistic.  It was, though, accompanied by circus music from a calliope.  (The music was designed by Phil Benson with help from Michael Sansonia and Daniel Schreier, who also created the soundscape.) 

Harris described the wife-beating scenes as leaving Judy “moaning on the floor spitting blood and possibly teeth.”  In The Nation, Thomas M. Disch reported it as “an assault presented at great length and with all the veristic detail that Nina Martin’s fight choreography could bring to bear.”

The scenes were often reenacted, sometimes multiple times.  The one in which Punch beats his wife to death was first performed by Punch as a puppeteer using two dolls—with the identical dialogue as the later version. 

In the puppet shows within the performance, as the puppet-theater picture frame descended, Carambo as Punch picked up the Punch and Judy dolls to perform the episode when he “dropped [the baby] out at window.”  The doll Punch was GI Joe in a sleeveless olive-drab ‘T’ and fatigue pants and Judy was Barbie with Farrah Fawcett tresses and a pink mini.

After each scene was presented, Shapiro had the actors stand staring coldly at the audience from behind their Commedia half-masks as if silently indicting us for some terrible crime—the crime of complicity by our silence and inaction about the violence. 

Finally, Punch broke into a demonic giggle and the play continued with the next scene.

Masks, which the director included on a list of artistic and personal influences he typed up for me in 1992, had been an interest of Shapiro’s from very early—not least, to be sure, because of the Zuni shalakos, the Native American gods and their ceremonial representations (see “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010; I also have a post on “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011). 

Masked performance was part of the theatrical philosophies of many of Shapiro’s influences such as Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Arden (1930-2012), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and, of course, Peter Schumann (b. 1934) and the Bread and Puppet Theater.  Furthermore, one of Shapiro’s earliest training influences, Carlo Mazzone-Clementi (1920-2000), was a mask expert as well as a teacher and director of Commedia dell’Arte. 

Aside from the transformative nature of masks, to which both anthropologists and theater people testify, masks and puppets remove performance from the realm of the ordinary and raise it to the level of myth and ritual.  Masks remind us, theater critic Edwin Wilson asserts, “that we are in a theater, that the act going on before our eyes is not real in a literal sense, but is rather a symbolic or an artistic presentation.”  

Then there are the Brechtian aspects of masks—that they distance the actor from the character and the spectator from the actor—and their inherent magic, a subject that had fascinated Shapiro from his childhood.  (Frequent readers of ROT will recall that Brecht was one of Shapiro’s two principal inspirations; the other was Jerzy Grotowski.) 

Aside from the almost mystical effects masks are said to have on the wearer, a phenomenon to which many maskers such as Nobel laureate Dario Fo (1926-2016) have attested, there’s the very magical fact that masks are dead things, inanimate objects that take on the appearance of life.  Furthermore, as Fo affirmed, masks require actors to tell the truth, one of Shapiro’s most fiercely-followed principles.  Fo, whom Shapiro had consulted for Punch!—and whom he even asked to play the title role—explained:

Because the mask cancels the prime element—the face, with all the expressions we formulate and employ with such ease—used to give expression to any form of mystification.  When the face is removed from the equation, people are compelled to speak in a language free of formulas and of fixed stereotypes—in the language of the hands, of the arms and of the fingers.  No one is accustomed to lying with their body.  We never bother to check the gestures we make while speaking.

All these attributes of masked acting were certainly important to Shapiro, but possibly as important was the fact that from the audience’s standpoint, as philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) writes, “The mask is not so much pictorial as participatory.”  A former professor of religion and culture, Ronald L. Grimes (b. 1943) observes that “audiences may, in fact, be the real animator of masks and maskers.” 

As in puppetry, a closely allied art, we see that the audience must imbue the mask with life in order for there to be a show.  Psychoanalyst Eric Neutzel (b. 1950) maintains, “The audience projects something onto the object,” which, he declares, “doesn’t exist alone.”  “The audience is complicit,” responded master puppeteer Roman Paska (b. 1951), and Sears A. Eldredge (b. 1936), a writer on masks, explains, “The audience’s imaginations must be engaged to complete the transformation” from inanimate object to living character.  In Shapiro’s practice of making theater with the audience, not just for it, requiring the spectators themselves thus to vivify the performance doubtlessly attracted him. 

Other attributes of masks that align with Shapiro’s artistic interests include the fact that masks are works of visual art incorporated into the art of theater, an implication of the director’s efforts to amalgamate many arts into his performances, and the freedom masks allow for actors to engage in “testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/09/acting-testimony-role-vs-character.html) while the masks provide the necessary character expression. 

If masks immediately communicate character information to the audience, as J. L. Styan (1923-2002), an English writer on literature and theater, posits, actors are freer to express their own ideas or comment on the characters’ actions in the way that Shapiro—and Brecht—wanted: to speak to the audience directly “about what matters to them both in that moment” (emphasis original).  This phenomenon functions along the lines of what playwright, actor, teacher, and theater writer Michael Kirby (1931-97) calls “nonmatrixed representation” where the mask “represents something or someone” while the performer does not act or actively depict a character. 

In Punch!, for instance, with the actor’s Commedia half-mask and costume identifying Punch by an iconography familiar to Western audiences for over two centuries, Cristobal Carambo didn’t have to develop the character for the audience.  They already knew what to expect, so the actor could focus on making the statements he and the director wanted to make through the play—that is, play his “role” (see the second part of the above-referenced “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”)—without losing the duality Shapiro aimed for and which masks provide.

Except for a few interpolations (“Shoot the nigger!”—Carambo is Afro-Cuban—and “You look all right.  Here’s another!”—the latter an alleged quotation of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called Subway Vigilante who shot four black youths he thought were about to attack him on a New York City subway less than three years before Punch! was produced), the text of Punch! was taken verbatim from the pre-Victorian puppet play that delighted children for generations.  

Shaliko’s Punch!, however, was no children’s amusement.  As premièred at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where I saw it, from 2-31 May 1987 (and later presented at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, in August, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Scotland, in September), it was loud and aggressive, assaulting the audience’s senses and, sometimes, their sensibilities (but never their persons). 

According to cast member Michael Preston, who later toured as one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers from 1991 until 2000, the production was “relentless on our bodies”: “There was no let-up,” he said, and recounted that he’d injured his knee and that the repeated sharp gunshots had damaged Carambo’s hearing.  

Co-developer Nina Martin recounted that Shapiro had taken the cast and staff to Madison Square Garden “to witness professional wrestling” as preparation for the work. 

The Nation reviewer observed that “Elena Nichols as Judy is put through more onstage punishment than anyone since the Marine prisoners in The Brig back in 1963.”  Preston and Carambo “are also knocked about, slammed to the floor and put through a wide variety of wringers.”

A telling reaction was that of Marilyn Zalkan, whose introduction to Shaliko’s work had been Punch! months before she became a student in Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and about a year before she became Shaliko’s administrator.  

A music student with no experience in any kind of theater, much less the bold, physical, political work of an avant-garde company like Shaliko, Zalkan at first hated the show.  “It was just really shocking and scary,” she confessed, “and I was afraid that everyone was going to come up and talk to me—you know, the actors; the whole audience-participation thing scared me.” 

Then, after pondering the experience and learning something of the theatrical world out of which Shaliko and Shapiro arose, she revised her opinion:  “Months later, I sort of decided it was the best thing that I had ever seen.  I had never seen anything like it.”

In part, Zalkan was expressing what Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the art philosopher, means when she defines “beauty” as “expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some way.  “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes. 

This interpretation, which may owe something to Heraclitus’ view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.  

Upon seeing Punch!, Zalkan experienced a revelation:

That’s the first time that I really realized what theater’s supposed to do to an audience.  It’s supposed to convey some kind of idea and shock . . . .  I don’t know whether it’s shock value so much, but it’s supposed to really make people aware of something and create some kind of reaction.

Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness.”  One friend of artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful” (ellipses original), and Zalkan’s bifurcated response to Punch! indicates that recognition may come sometime after seeing the work, something for which Punch!’s critics may not have allowed.

Punch! was panned by the Village Voice and ignored by the New York Times (and all other New York City dailies), but got 22 “raves” elsewhere in the U.S. and Scotland.  Shapiro openly acknowledged that Punch! was “not likeable” and, describing it as the company’s “nastiest, ugliest” play, understood that some spectators wouldn’t appreciate it.  But, the director insisted, “That is beside the point.”  According to Langer, whom Shapiro read and occasionally quoted, works like Shaliko’s Punch!, among others, draw their strength from those elements which makes them “alive and therefore beautiful.” 

Punch!, for all its violence, obscene language, and confrontational tone, was just as powerful and moving as, say, The Yellow House (1986; see my post on 9 February 2018), a piece about van Gogh and Shaliko’s most aesthetically attractive production.  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” writes Langer in words that might easily have described Punch!, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal.”

Zalkan, who admitted to having actually been scared when she saw this play, put it very succinctly: “I think about Punch!, and Punch! is like real.  Punch! is about what life is about.”

It is noteworthy that McLuhan calls “good taste” “the first refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most obvious resource of the insecure” and notes, “It leaves out direct awareness of forms and situations.”  Richard Kostelanetz (b. 1940) also submits in his 1968 book, The Theatre of Mixed Means, that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful” and supporters of Shaliko contended that most critics and the site reporters from the National Endowment of the Arts did not apprehend this.

By extending the Commedia and puppetry of the original into television situation comedies and popular films, Shaliko’s Punch! exploited the “images of violence [that] become part of our imagination” by making the audiences reflect on the use of violence as escapist entertainment.  One of Shaliko’s recurring themes was the deconstruction of the romanticization of violence—which in popular entertainment is shown to have no real consequences and can even be seen as funny.

Shapiro saw violence—domestic, racial, sexual, class—as a ubiquitous presence in American life, from popular movies and television programs including Batman, shoot-’em-up Westerns, and police shows, where it’s used for escapism and entertainment, to military operations like the U.S. invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and the 1990-91 war against Iraq, where it had political, territorial, and commercial ends.  In an essay he wrote shortly after the Persian Gulf war, he states:

Twenty years ago, we stopped the Vietnam War by mobilizing America’s sensitivities against the stupid and futile waste of life.  In the last two years, we have, ourselves, murdered as many Americans on the streets and in our homes with handguns as were killed in Vietnam.  Our society has become a blind juggernaut (“a pitiful giant”) compulsively acting out oppression and abuse we refuse to acknowledge.  Instead of creating vital cultural forums to deal with our tsouris—the forums that created Euripides, the Kabuki, and Ibsen—we hide our pain under the puerile displays of violence [and] arrested sexuality of Terminator II or Thelma and Louise.

(Tsouris, more commonly spelled tsuris, is Yiddish for ‘troubles,’ ‘suffering,’ or ‘problems.’)

This is close to the sentiment expressed by poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) in “On Virgil” (1822) when he observes that “a Warlike State never can produce Art.  It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make.”  (Blake was on Shapiro’s list of influences.  I discuss Blake’s use of words and images together in his art in the section on him in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014.)

Of Punch!, Shapiro explained: “I was trying to subvert the easy identification with the hero that makes the other characters less real—which is . . . basically a revenge fantasy.” It’s, in part, another vision Shapiro shared with Blake, who saw both war and the execution of criminals as societally-sanctioned forms of murder. 

There’s more than a hint here, too, of Shapiro’s Situationist influence (see “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3 February 2012): the drive to prevent the audience from allowing an active hero, a Rambo or a Batman, or Thelma and Louise—or even a Hamlet or a Nora Helmer for that matter—to do their living for them. 

Furthermore, Shapiro said when he was planning the show, “It’s about . . . the way that we identify with violence and why it is that somebody can beat seven people to death in an hour and everybody thinks it’s a scream.”  This phenomenon’s a result, he thought, of the remoteness of theater, which he saw as the original art form, from film and television, which are “copies.”  The farther the copy gets from the original, the more cartoon-like and outrageous the action is, the less consequential it seems to the spectator. 

Audiences have become inured to violence because it’s become “dehumanized,” as illustrated by Michael Preston’s report that his film-oriented friends, looking for experiences “up on a screen that really didn’t touch them,” were uneasy with Shaliko productions because “[t]hey don’t like the hotness” of the encounter. 

Langer speaks of the “degrees of intensity” of the artwork, which directly corresponds to what both playwright Karen Malpede, who had worked with Shapiro on several projects, and Preston said was so disturbing in Shaliko’s work to some spectators, and we shall see that Shapiro referred to this aspect of the content as “depth of intention.” 

Theater, because it’s a more intimate experience, is more emotionally demanding and intellectually rigorous, but it has gotten out of the reach of most audiences not just financially, but psychologically because of its demands in contrast to the electronic media. 

“[T]his seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle so that audiences are less and less able to deal with any kind of emotional complexity, relational content, in fact with any of the great themes and subjects of art and literature,” Shapiro lamented; “instead [popular entertainment] focuses more and more narrowly on pseudo-paedomorphic revenge fantasies, with infinite and infinitesimal masturbatory variations.”  

In the director’s opinion, this desensitization and alienation is no accident; the makers of films and television programs know that their product is addictive and, just as the manufacturers of cigarettes manipulate the nicotine content, the Hollywood establishment manipulates the disconnect between action and its consequences. 

The effect of this is that spectators are no longer able to see themselves as “among [the] many real characters dealing with real communal problems.”  Unhappily, Shapiro had little hope that new audiences would have “the sophistication or tools to deal with” the manipulation: young people, he feared, “are less armed against it every year.”

But it was not only Rambo images with which Shapiro contended in Punch!.  Among other violent acts, Punch threw his baby out his apartment window, a vivid, grotesque evocation of the sacrifice of children which Shapiro saw as universal in our society and emblematic of much that is wrong with it. 

The director saw that this was a theme he had pursued since the start of Shaliko (1972), but it is, in reality, a theme that harks all the way back to “Song in the Blood,” the Jacques Prévert poem the Appleseed Circus dramatized at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1970, and even to 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, in which the young draftee is encouraged by his father to go off to fight in Vietnam so the father will not “lose my position in the community” (see “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009, and “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010). 

The theme even appeared in the plays in which Shapiro participated while at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he directed workshop productions of Jean Anouilh’s Medea (in which he also appeared as Creon) in November 1964 and The Drapes Come by Charles Dizenzo in May 1965.  (Medea’s murder of her children as punishment for their father, Jason, is well known; the latter play is an absurdist appraisal of the consequences of the alienating relationship of a mother and daughter.) 

With Shaliko, Shapiro evoked this theme in their very first production, Children of the Gods (1973), when Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia in order to get a favorable wind from the gods; and since the director saw that “issues about creativity and repression . . . often are symbolized as the sacrifice of children by parents,” it appeared in Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974) when the Party sacrifices the Young Comrade on the altar of political necessity, and again in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975; see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?” 6 September 2014) when Mrs. Alving sacrifices Oswald to preserve the secrets that eventually destroy her. 

(After his production of Ghosts, Shapiro expressed particular interest in staging Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, a play in which the sacrifice of a child is at the very center.  Shapiro never had the opportunity to direct the play.) 

He evoked the theme, too, in Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1976; see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020), The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar (1983), Mark Roszovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son (1985, 1990, 1992; see “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8 November 2015), and The Yellow House.  Literally, as in Children; psychologically, as in Kafka; or metaphorically, as in The Yellow House, the killing of children had been a common thread in Shaliko’s work and would form the central theme of 1990’s Strangers (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014). 

It also formed a theme in Shapiro’s life, from the alienation he felt from his own father, who left Shapiro’s mother with insufficient income to care for Leo and his older brother, Gary, while living well himself, to his disillusionment with New York Shakespeare Festival (now The Public Theater) founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), a man he regarded as his surrogate father, when the producer fired him in 1977.  (Shapiro’s relationship with Papp is touched on in “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021.)

There are clear echoes of his own background, too, in his admiration for such figures as van Gogh, artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-97), Vsevolod Meyerhold, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), and Tennessee Williams (1911-83), all of whom had difficult and even abusive relationships with their fathers that could be seen as resulting in loss-of-love issues. 

In 1988, largely because of Punch!, Shaliko lost its NEA Theater Program funding, followed by the loss or reduction of its grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and most of its support from corporations, foundations, and private sources. 

As Shapiro put it, “[W]hat the NEA panelists so deeply objected to is that we choose not to make theater as entertaining fiction, or to develop the skills for doing that, but are pursuing this independent line of inquiry.”  He could have been referring directly to Punch! 

As Peter Brook (b. 1925), renowned British stage director, noted, Shapiro’s kind of theater, “where a living confrontation can take place,” generates a kind of “dangerous electricity” that governments, even in societies in which other forms of expression like the press and the cinema are free, instinctively fear.

Shapiro, however, saw the matter of form versus content in simpler terms:

The notion that Shaliko was de-funded for lack of “professionalism” or “quality” can only be sustained by the argument that “quality” is an attribute of packaging—like  the thick glossy paper in an expensive art magazine.  If, however, quality has to do with depth of intention, craft . . ., originality, accuracy, or imagination—in short, if quality has to do with the artistic function of telling the truth and the “qualities” necessary to communicate it, rather than with the intention to sell a product and the “quality” necessary to trick the consumer—then the quality of Shaliko’s work must be recognized.

It’s because he and his company were finding “new and effective formulations” to investigate issues of society, violence, race, and sex in ways that turned out to be “personal and viscerally felt” by his audiences, Shapiro believed, that “the ruling class” became scared and responded with censorship and suppression. 

Though Shapiro believed the rejection was based on “the content and (political) nature of the work,” associates felt it was mostly due to the site reporters’ misunderstanding of the principles of Shaliko work, misinterpreting intentionally rough theater stressing process over product—what Bonnie Marranca (b. 1947), co-founder and editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, describes in her 1977 book, The Theatre of Images, as a “seams-showing quality of a work”—as ill-prepared and unprofessional. 

Richard Kostelanetz further observes that both critics and audiences are more willing to “acknowledge” familiar art than to consider something they don’t understand.  While Shaliko was operating under Langer’s precept of beauty, these critics, its supporters felt, were applying a more superficial criterion. 

Some suggestion that Shapiro and his supporters were at least in part correct may be gleaned from the contrast between the NEA evaluation of Shaliko’s work and the critical reception of Punch!, the show on which the Endowment had partly based its last decision.  The Nation’s Disch, for instance, described the production, clearly labeled a “work in progress” in the program, as “a remarkable spectacle that ranges from chucklesome to breathtaking, and from thought-provoking to off-putting” and predicted that it “has every chance of becoming a classic of the New Vaudeville.”  

On WBAI radio, a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station in New York City, Rick Harris pronounced himself “very impressed” with Shapiro and his company for a “very, very fine piece of work” which he declared “theatrically inventive.”  At the Edinburgh Festival in August 1987, The Scotsman reported that Shaliko and Punch!

connect the events of the old legend with unvarnished, day-to-day truths, but also reveal its deep roots in the subconscious and in popular culture. . . .  This is a harrowing brutal, sometimes gruesome piece, definitely not children’s entertainment, but always performed with awesome skill and always thoughtful and arresting.

After describing the production at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in September as “most skilful [sic]” and the cast as “brilliant, acrobatic and paradoxically charming,” the Glasgow Herald warned, “You won’t—if you ever have done so—watch a Punch and Judy show again with amusement after experiencing this production by La MaMa ETC and the Shaliko Company from New York.” 

Indeed, despite minor cavils about the occasional lag in timing or energy, the reviewers of Punch! both in New York (save the Voice) and in Edinburgh and Glasgow seemed to understand exactly what they were seeing—they all noted that the presentation was still in development—appreciate its point, and remark universally on the professionalism, skill, and inventiveness of Shapiro’s troupe. 

(Robert Massa wrote in the Village Voice’s brief notice:

Only Goro Fujii’s inventive life-size puppet set and the sculptural sound design by Daniel Schreier make the production bearable.  Shapiro has taken the traditional Punch and Judy plot . . . and given it to three live actors who arbitrarily switch roles over and over and reenact these events countless times through over-cute dialogue . . ., in grating nasal voices at a pitch that splits eardrums, leaping off-stage to growl in our faces.

(It likely wouldn’t have made any difference to Massa’s estimation, but I’m bound to point out that the dialogue—the review-writer quoted some lines—was directly from the 1827 text transcribed by Collier and the “nasal” voice was an approximation of the traditional squawking puppet voice, created in part by a device called a swazzle or swatchel which made Punch sound as if he were talking through a kazoo.)

Furthermore, a response to a charge that Shaliko was stuck back in the 1960s can be found in Rick Harris’s anecdote about his step-daughter.  Thinking Punch! was a children’s play, he brought the ten-year-old girl with him.  After Shapiro cautioned him about the violence—the press release had bluntly warned that Punch! was not for children—Harris sent her out.  After the performance, he, his wife, and her daughter went to the subway at Sheridan Square where they encountered “an ugly, violent, bloody scene of confrontation.” 

Harris pointed out the irony of this coincidence—sparing his step-daughter theatrical violence only to witness it live in the station—but it also demonstrates that Shaliko’s Punch!, far from dealing with “left-over sixties” issues, was confronting immediate and actual societal problems which ordinary citizens experience every day. 

Peter Wynn of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, who found Punch! “dazzlingly performed,” reported: “I found myself very nearly sickened by the violence of the show.”  In the Voice, Massa observed: “Puppets can get away with a level of cruelty live actors shouldn’t attempt,” and felt that the play “was assaulting” the audience.

Several critics on both sides of the Atlantic reported that some spectators fled the theater after early scenes of violence, though Shapiro undoubtedly recognized this action as commensurate with his intent.  He reported, “We lost half of the audience some nights when Punch beat Judy.” 

As one Edinburgh reviewer observed, however, “Those who walked out during the performance were not only rejecting an excellent production, they were turning away from the cruel reality of this world.”

Is it possible that the critics were, ironically, less “monoliterate,” to use Richard Kostelanetz’s term for culturally, artistically, and especially theatrically “illiterate,” than were the site-reporters and evaluators of the National Endowment for the Arts? 

Or, perhaps, the Endowment officials really didn’t like what Shaliko was telling them about American society—or were just afraid to support it in the face of the right-wing onslaught of the culture-warriors Shapiro called “Helms and Co.” 

(“Helms and Co.” was a label Shapiro borrowed from philosophy teacher Paul Mattick, Jr., who used it in his 1990 essay “Arts and the State” in The Nation which Shapiro read and quoted.  

(Shapiro used it to refer to late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms [1921-2008], former California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher [b. 1947], conservative columnist and commentator—and sometime presidential candidate—Patrick J. Buchanan [b. 1938], the American Family Association’s Reverend Donald Wildmon (b. 1938), Reverend Jerry Falwell [1933-2007] of the Liberty Foundation, Reverend Pat Robertson [b. 1930] of the Christian Coalition, and others who were campaigning against governmental arts support. 

(Mattick, at least by implication, also includes in this cabal the critics and writers who supported the efforts to curtail government arts support or on whom the activists drew for authority in their judgments and evaluations: conservative art critic Hilton Kramer [1928-2012], publisher of New Criterion and conservative political commentator Samuel Lipman [1934-94], then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato [b. 1937], former Illinois Congressman Philip M. Crane [1930-2014], columnist William Safire [1929-2009], and others, including organizations like Morality in Media [transformed into the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2015], a watchdog organization; the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; and the John M. Olin Foundation [dissolved in 2005] which provided funding and sinecures.)

The loss of the NEA Theater Program funding after Punch! hurt Shaliko financially, of course, but it enraged Shapiro morally.  “Isn’t the function of the artist supposed to be to tell the truth?” he pleaded, echoing Congress’s very admonition to the nascent NEA.  “How can you blame him when he does?”

In part because of the funding loss, but for reasons of scheduling and space availability as well, neither The Yellow House nor Mystery History Bouffe Goof, Shaliko pieces that Shapiro felt were still works in progress, was remounted at La MaMa after the production of Punch! had returned from Scotland. 

(I was working with the director on Strangers, which had previously only been staged at the Pennsylvania artists’ residency establishment, the Yellow Springs Institute, as a work in development and in a workshop production at the Washington Square Church in New York City, but the production, planned for La MaMa, was cancelled because the funding couldn’t be raised.)

As a response to Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro, published at least seven articles or interviews—some of them quite vehement—between April 1990 and January 1992 focusing, at least in part, on the NEA and the issue of arts funding and support.

In a letter to Robert Marx (b. 1950), a theater administrator who was serving as director of NEA Theater Program at the time of Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro argued:

[Punch!] is a controversial, densely layered, difficult and hopefully liberating work of theatrical art.  It is exactly the kind of dangerous experimental, labor[-]intensive, non-commercial work that needs and deserves to be subsidized in order to preserve and advance the integrity of theater as an art form in America.

[If I may, I’d like to make one personal comment here. 

[In his review in The Nation, Thomas M. Disch made a final acknowledgment to one of the crew members of the Shaliko production of Punch!.  He wrote that “credit should also be given in a department usually taken for granted: the stage manager Dana Rappaport and his [sic] assistants deal with a profusion of props and cues at a tempo that keeps them hopping as fast as the actors.”

[Dana was a student of mine in middle school, some ten years or so before Punch! when I taught theater at a Brooklyn private school.  I hadn’t seen her or heard from her (Disch got her gender wrong) since that time—until I saw her name in the program the night I saw the show at La MaMa.  I stuck around a few minutes after the performance ended and I reintroduced myself to Dana and said hello. 

[I guess we caught up a little—she was still on the job, of course—but it didn’t lead to anything more.  I didn’t see her again and I have no idea what she went on to.  Such is life!]