The audience is the Gods, the actors are the Greeks: watch in comfort as civilization collapses in this environmental spectacle of sex, power and selfishness
That’s the text of a display ad in the New York Times on Friday, 11 May 1973, for The Shaliko Company’s début production, Children of the Gods.
Returning to New York in 1971 after the dissolution of his New Mexico guerrilla-theater troupe, the Appleseed (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution” on Rick On Theater on 1 October 2009 and “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009), Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) sought out the actors he’d known in the 1960s in New York University’s theater program.
Among Shapiro’s other associates at New York University had been director André Gregory (b. 1934), founder of the Manhattan Project; Omar Shapli (b. 1930), who started the improvisational group Section 10; and director-teacher Richard Schechner (b. 1934), who had begun his Performance Group during those years.
Gregory, Shapli, and Schechner had all started their companies after they had studied with Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), who’d conducted his first American workshop at NYU in 1967, and based them in one way or another on the techniques Grotowski taught.
Filled with ideas from Grotowski, and inspired by the examples of Gregory, Shapli, and Schechner, Shapiro, who never conceived of theater other than as a permanent collaboration among artists, put Shaliko together in January 1972 using former NYU students, including Candace Tovar (b. 1947), who was now his wife; Margaret Pine (b. 1948); Tom Crawley (1940-95); and Linda Putnam (b. 1944).
Along with having been at NYU with Shapiro, Crawley and Putnam had also been in the 1967 Grotowski workshop (as had Pine’s husband, actor Larry Pine, b. 1945), and both Tovar and Putnam had been in New Mexico with him.
The formation of The Shaliko Company was facilitated by a recently-conceived program at NYU. Called the Ensemble Theatre Project (or, sometimes, Program; unconnected to the Ensemble Studio Theatre company of New York), the venture was intended as a showcase for the work of small performing troupes, limited to ten members, spawned by the School of the Arts in which “the performers use talents and skills acquired at the School to seek what is new in theatre and dance.”
The program, launched in 1971, was “an in-house project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation with the goal of creating small, viable performance groups comprised of graduates of the NYU theatre and dance departments.” SOA Dean David J. Oppenheim (1922-2007) was pleased to see some students already working while they were still in school, as the cast of Brother, You’re Next (see my post on ROT on 26 January 2010) and the New York Free Theater (ROT, 4 April 2010) had done a few years earlier, so NYU set up a venture to raise money to seed small performing troupes.
The idea was that these companies would be a step for the graduates from training to career without wasting the six to eight years of dispiriting non-creativity, and that the companies themselves would spin off into their own artistic orbits. Shapiro became one of the NYU artists who availed themselves of the university’s largess—and it worked.
In its time, especially as an adjunct of a traditional academic institution, the ETP was innovative—but right in line with Shapiro’s own ideas about the arts and education. ETP’s founders conceived the project as “a movement away from the hired-hand notion of a company, and toward a community of artists” along the same path blazed by Gregory and Schechner—the precise philosophy voiced by Shapiro.
Some of the other fundamental reasons for the formation of the ETP were later reflected in Shapiro’s artistic policy for The Shaliko Company. For instance, the companies were expected to work as ensembles, developing their productions together rather than presenting the finished work of a playwright or choreographer.
Even before Shaliko moved into what Shapiro called “company-developed” productions like The Yellow House (1986; ROT, 9 February 2018) and Strangers (1990; ROT, 3 and 6 March 2014), the troupe selected and developed its projects communally.
Though the company eventually became merely an ad hoc collection of artists with whom Shapiro frequently worked, the early company was a group of young actors committed to exploring together the possibilities of performance as an expression of personal, artistic, and social concerns.
On the model of other troupes of the 1960s and early 1970s, Shaliko was an ensemble. Like Shapiro’s theatrical models and those that served as paradigms of social and intellectual symbioses like Black Mountain College (ROT, 20 June 2014), a cradle of what would become known as Postmodernism, and his own Windsor Mountain School, the progressive prep school in Lenox, Massachusetts, from which Shapiro graduated in 1963 (“Max and Gertrud Bondy,” ROT, 12 October 2011), Shaliko embodied a commitment not only to the art, but to the ensemble and to one another.
Beginning as what Shapiro called “a shared idea in October, 1971,” the troupe “gravitated toward group theatre because it offered continuity of work, freedom to experiment and explore, and commitment to craft rather than commerce.”
In the early months of its formation starting in late January 1972, The Shaliko Company spent time getting to know one another through games and exercises. The troupe stopped doing exercises for their own sakes, however, once they began working on productions.
During these early investigations, the troupe spent time “developing skills,” for which purpose Shapiro created an exercise “in mistaken imitation of the Beijing Opera” that he called “blind combat,” in which the actors wear blindfolds and circle one another wielding wooden swords. Out of this game eventually grew the company’s first project, Children of the Gods.
Once Shaliko began working on Children of the Gods, however, they ceased physical work for its own sake and engaged in games and exercises only “for specific purposes, hoping that they will develop into something we can use,” though not everything did, of course. “Things got worked on and dropped,” Shapiro said, “and a lot of stuff that got dropped was at the stage where it would’ve looked like exercise work, but it wasn’t for us.”
Shapiro described the process of arriving at the company’s first production:
We spent two months exploring our range. Seeing what we could do and how far we could push ourselves. Developing techniques that could use the new possibilities we were discovering. By March, we became more text-oriented and started trying out material. We went through texts rather quickly, using them as tools to further our own growth, pushing them to their limits, then moving on to richer material. . . . We were looking for a script that spoke directly to the needs we felt we shared with our audience, a script strong enough to take all we could put of ourselves into it and still maintain its own integrity. By June, we had discovered the Greeks.
Not surprisingly, considering Shapiro’s youthful aim to become a poet, among the earliest texts with which Shaliko experimented were poems. After testing Kenneth Koch’s (1925-2002) George Washington Crossing the Delaware, “a grade school skit, celebrating the American myth,” in February 1972 and discovering that it was “too thin” and “would not bear our weight,” the nascent Shaliko took up W. H. Auden’s (1907-73) ballad “Victor,” a 1937 narrative of how modern society produces lost souls—elements of which sentiment found their way into Strangers in 1990—and, in May, Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-97) “September on Jessore Road,” a long lyric poem from 1971 describing the devastating 1968 floods and famine in India and chastising the U.S. for using its wealth to bomb Southeast Asians instead of sending humanitarian assistance to desperate Indians.
At the same time that Shapiro and his new troupe were planning to work on Ginsberg’s poem, they also intended to begin work on another poetic theater piece, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s (1893-1930) Mystery-Bouffe. This is significant, even though the planned “street show” adaptation never occurred, because a decade-and-a-half later, Shaliko would develop a modern version of this play about revolution (“Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018). During the planned rehearsals of Mystery-Bouffe, the company wanted to develop an adaptation of William Golding’s (1911-93) The Inheritors but ultimately could not secure the rights.
Then, after a year, the demand to produce became “pretty intense” and, “blind combat” having evolved into the Trojan War, Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ (525-456 BCE) Agamemnon and Euripides’ (480?-406 BCE) Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia at Aulis, premiered in February 1973 at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project in Baltimore. In May, Shaliko presented it in New York as part of an NYU Ensemble Theatre Project festival.
Shaliko’s work on Children “took a year,” said Shapiro, “but I don’t remember how much time was spent working on the production and how much time was spent creating the ensemble.”
It is perhaps not surprising that these Greek plays would attract Shapiro’s attention. The Aeschylus, for instance, centers on the murder of Agamemnon, the troupe’s “first attempt to make something forbiddingly ugly in the theater,” said the director. Ever focusing on violence, “the romance” of which he wanted “to deconstruct”—as he would again 13 years later with Punch! (ROT, 4 September 2021), among other productions—Shapiro intended “to make murder seem ugly and hard and not at all fun.”
But it was Euripides’ works that are most in keeping with Shapiro’s temperament. Of all the classical figures whom Shapiro might have included among his influences, the only Greek he named was Euripides—perhaps because, like several of his other models and inspirations, the Greek tragedian was an iconoclast and a harsh critic of his own society who was unpopular in his lifetime, ending up an outcast and an exile.
The Greek tragedian’s characters express controversial views and question the traditional values of Athenian society, championing women’s rights and equitable treatment of foreigners, questioning the gods and, though Euripides had fought as a soldier himself, challenging Athens’ imperialism and the morality of its military campaigns.
The butt of jokes, rumors, and the comedians’ jibes, he was accused of blasphemy and treason; yet, in behavior Shapiro was bound to esteem, he refused to curry the favor of his countrymen despite increasing official repression that saw his friends and colleagues exiled or killed. Unappreciated by the Athenian establishment, Euripides did not win his first drama competition until 14 years after his debut, and won only four first prizes during his life (and a fifth posthumously).
Only after his death was his influence—and his value to Athens, from which he had fled before his death—recognized; today, he is regarded by many critics as the first modern playwright and the one with the greatest impact on later theatrical development. Such an artist who wrote against war when his nation was fighting against Sparta and invading Sicily is certainly a fitting choice for a company protesting war while its nation was fighting in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
“[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 was ending and our half million Orestes and Electra[s], ready for action, were coming home.” Using the Atreid saga to examine what happens when soldiers come home after ten years of waging war, Children was developed as “a redemption sacrifice to help heal the wounds of Vietnam.”
“We took this Greek material,” said director Shapiro, “to do a show about today—not by rewriting or changing the material, but by bringing ourselves to it. The actors have stepped naked into these Greek plays bringing themselves and their world into the classical chain of blood crimes. They (the actors) are the children of our time.”
In the end, Children of the Gods was an environmental theater collage of the four classic Greek plays. It doesn’t really have a plot in the conventional sense; there’s no real throughline with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Generally, it recounts the saga of the fall of the House of Atreus.
I won’t retell the many legends that make up the story of the Atreides, but just to sort out the characters of Children, I’ll say that Agamemnon and Menelaus were brothers and the sons of the founder of the house, Atreus, King of Mycenae. By the time of the plays, Menelaus was king in Sparta (and husband of Helen, the Greek beauty whose abduction started the whole Trojan War) and Agamemnon in Mycenae.
Agamemnon was married to Clytemnestra, whom he left alone in Mycenae when he went off to fight the Trojans, a war that lasted ten years. They had a son, Orestes, and two daughters, Electra and Iphigenia. Agamemnon was ordered to sacrifice Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis in order to secure a wind so his fleet could sail to Troy.
Agamemnon complied, angering Clytemnestra. While her husband was away at war, she took a lover, Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes, Atreus’ twin brother. Agamemnon, in turn, has brought back to Mycenae Cassandra, a priestess of Troy who has the gift of seeing the future—except that no one will believe her predictions.
When Agamemnon returned from Troy, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill him and Cassandra. In anger at their mother’s act, Electra and Orestes plot to murder her and Aegisthus in revenge. Clytemnestra curses her son, who is hounded ever after by the Furies.
Menelaus returns to Sparta with Helen and Electra, despite her part on the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, is largely unaffected by the fate of her doomed family.
In Shaliko’s interpretation of the myths, descendants of Atreus are worthy of punishment because of the long list of blood crimes they have committed, starting with the murders of Thyestes’ children by his twin, Atreus—who then feeds the children to Thyestes. To make sure the audience knows all this evil-doing, the program supplies a list of the major ones, including Helen’s betrayal of Menelaus and Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia.
The troupe began improvising and Shapiro lifted scenes from Aeschylus and Euripides “wantonly” to assemble the story they wanted to tell. For much of the rehearsal period, the director said, the company was not even sure what they were working on.
As warm-up, the cast sat and listened to each other reading classicist and poet Richmond Lattimore’s (1906-84) translation of The Iliad, an exercise that taught them the value of storytelling and an appreciation for “the beauty of open transmission between a reader/performer and his audience,” both of which would become integral elements of the Shaliko theatrical philosophy. Shapiro had an enduring interest in telling stories and he claimed that he married this concentration on narrative to his focus on poetry.
The young Shaliko actors felt they were rediscovering “the roots of drama” and saw their efforts as “very pure and sincere” in contrast to what they saw in the mainstream theater of the city. The twin kernels of Shapiro’s theater, narrative and poetry, grew as the company matured.
The company used improvisation and an “emphasis . . . less upon the lines than on physical action” to connect the various fragments, “skillfully shift[ing] from the story of Orestes and Electra to that of Agamemnon and Iphigenia.” Though playwright and actor Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), a friend from the NYU days who followed Shapiro’s work from the beginning, pronounced Children “incredibly exciting,” the Daily News critic opined that “something [was] lost in the translation, not to mention the condensing”; he nonetheless gave The Shaliko Company “A for effort” and encouraged the troupe to continue experimenting.
Coming directly out of exercises such as “blind combat” as it did, Children, which Shapiro described as “a violent and at times nasty show that took a sweet if tortured stand against violence,” was a punishingly physical production, beginning with blind combat.
“It was a very physical production,” declared the director in a 1992 interview in which we looked at photos of past Shaliko productions. “Incredibly physical.” He pointed out an actress “thrown all the way across the theater.” He exclaimed, “This is a person flying through the air being thrown by that person.”
“Everything,” Shapiro elucidated, “focused on the physical offering of the actor’s body. We were doing with the play what Iphigenia was doing in the play.” Indeed, the director pronounced what the cast was doing as “super-athletic and in fact dangerous.”
With Children of the Gods, Shaliko also began exploring what Shapiro called 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 (see my post, 6 July 2021).
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 as early as his days in New Mexico, the young director was quoting Grotowski: “The theatre is an act carried on HERE AND NOW in the actors [sic] 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.
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.” Shapiro’s use of this term is similar to that of Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90), Grotowski’s principal actor and interpreter, who provided two analogies to explain it: a glass with a candle burning inside it and the bed of a river. The glass, as the score, contains the flame, but the flame changes with each performance, responding to the moment, just as the riverbed channels the water, which is always “new and unknown.”
While the score remains constant, even rigid, but imperceptible, it is the flame or the river that the spectator sees, and which alters in response to the audience and the environment. Shapiro described how this applied to the murder of Clytemnestra in Children of the Gods:
[T]he thing was that it was a game. [Orestes and Electra] had to make her . . . be absolutely silent for, I think it was as long as it took to clap their hands three times. If she made any sound at all they had to let her go for another three claps. They could do anything they wanted to her—anything. . . . . One night, she actually got out of the theater and they chased her down Second Avenue and brought her back. Some nights the murder would take, you know, ten minutes, some nights it would take thirty seconds. It was all up to [Clytemnestra]; it was all up to her guts. She was just so stubborn that she really wouldn’t let go.
Another example of real time in Children came at the very beginning of the performance. The actors actually played blind combat as a real game. There was no way to know how long that would take, Shapiro emphasized. When someone was “killed” in the game, the actor started his or her opening monologue. When all the monologues were spoken, the scene started.
Shapiro had to rig the game, however, because he wanted Cassandra’s monologue early and the actress always was too good. She kept winning, the director explained, making the balance wrong. So Shapiro ended up having her wear anklets made up of bells so that she couldn’t be too good and the others could get her early enough to make Cassandra’s monologue like a prologue.
(When Shapiro told me this anecdote, I replied that it was ironic because he’d wanted to rely on real time, but had to rig the game so that it came out the way he needed. Shapiro’s response was that he wanted it to be real, but he wanted it to be his way.)
Though Shapiro’s use of real time eventually got more subtle, 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. 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.”
Also starting with Children, Shapiro, invoking the actor-audience contract, made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” his application of Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) theory of attractions (ROT, 31 January 2010) as Shapiro understood it from Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1942).
As New Leader critic Bermel 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.” 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, Grotowski pointedly invoked Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa, 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.”
As the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children of the Gods, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors, but in later productions, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors. This latter form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, though sometimes the spectators didn’t recognize their roles.
Furthermore, Shapiro essentially eschewed “character” in the Stanislavskian sense. “From the beginning of our work as a company,” explained Shapiro, “I was never interested in . . . character. We just threw that out and made everything based on . . . making sense and pursuing the objective.”
“Part of the conception of the actors’ job is role playing as opposed to character,” Shapiro expounded further, “playing the definition of their relationship with the audience and the story that is being told.”
On Shaliko’s work on Children of the Gods, the director affirmed that he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as characters, “but was fascinated by them as hereditary 3,000 year-old roles as fresh today as when their garments were first produced by exploited children laboring in Athenian sweat shops.”
For Shapiro, they were “[t]he greedy King, the unforgiving Queen, the sacrificed Virgin on the altar, the stormy Uncle, the wounded, disillusioned Young Hero, the Sister who has been unhinged by the thirst for revenge.” Shapiro called this form of “role-play” “psychodrama.” (I go into this Shaliko technique in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.)
Children of the Gods, which ran about 75 minutes (depending on the real-time elements), premièred at the Theatre Project in Baltimore from 15 to 25 February 1973. It transferred to the Ensemble Theatre Project in the Normandy Room at Central Plaza (111 2nd Avenue), New York University, New York City, from 10 to 26 May. (There was a single performance at New York City’s Town Hall in the Theatre District on the evening of 8 March. It was sponsored by the Cooper Union Forum, a program of free lectures and non-credit courses offered by the college.)
The cast comprised Mary Zakrzewski as Cassandra and Iphigenia, Tom Crawley as Agamemnon, Margaret Pine as Clytemnestra, Jordan Clarke as Aegisthus and Achilles, Bruce Cobb as Orestes, Candace Tovar as Electra, and Tony Swartz as Menelaus.
The costumes, like the play itself, were collages of mixed pieces (Agamemnon, for instance, wore a life vest)—perhaps bricolage is a more accurate word here. All the actors had their characters’ names inscribed in one way or another on their costumes; actors who doubled roles changed the costume bits with the names displayed.
The setting for Children was a 24' by 8' rectangle of two-inch rubber matting for Argos, surrounded by a four-foot-wide perimeter. Aulis was a 24' by 32' runway of the same black rubber matting. There was no actual “scenery,” nothing built, no furniture. The “furniture” was, say, a sheepskin rug that an actor laid on or sat on. There was no chair or table or anything three-dimensional.
Both areas were on the floor of the performing space (that is, no raised platform) and were in place all the time. Sometimes the action shifted from one area to the other; Agamemnon’s arrival from Troy after the war was the first scene, for instance, then the action moved to Aulis and his sacrifice of Iphigenia before the war was the second scene, a flashback. Sometimes scenes took place in both spaces at once.
There was scaffolding to create platforms for the audience to sit on, looking down from above. The scaffolding, against the walls on all four sides of the room, was wrapped in newspaper so spectators don’t see it as scaffolding. It looked very sort of primeval, Shapiro felt, because of the shapes that it made: very thick, organic, clumsy.
The New Leader’s Bermel credits Norvid Ross with the set design, but he’s the only review-writer who names a scenographer. (The Village Voice review mentions “a designer” without giving a name.) The press releases also don’t say anything about a designer, but they also don’t name any of the cast, either.
Knowing Shapiro as I do, I suspect he had a technical adviser who oversaw the set’s construction, but that the director devised the concept—especially the scaffolding, which was a favorite technique of Shapiro’s in Shaliko’s early years. The director worked that way often over the 20 years The Shaliko Company existed.
On the platforms above, in a complete rectangular arena configuration like an elevated boxing ring, the audience lay on long pillows the director had made at a factory in Brooklyn. Beneath the scaffolding were the actors’ home bases, little alcoves. There the off-stage actors could be seen relaxing between scenes, changing their costumes, touching up their hair, or speaking lines out to the main acting area.
So the audience is looking down and the actors are on this rubber-matted floor. And because the actors are the Greeks and the spectators are the gods, the actors do everything for the audience in the hope that the gods are looking and that the Greeks will get their favor and the Greeks are competing with each other for the gods’ favor.
I didn’t see Children of the Gods (I was still in the army in Berlin at the time), though I have seen still photos of the Theatre Project and Normandy Room performances. A couple of reviews described the performances in some detail, so I’m going to do something I rarely do: I’m going to quote extensively from them—I’ll let the reviewers tell you what they saw.
In the Village Voice, Julius Novick reports, “The performers describe their work as a ‘collage.’” He continues:
The dialogue seems to stick fairly closely to Aeschylus and Euripides, with an occasional “okay” or “motherfucker” thrown in for good luck . . . . The action switched back and forth between Aulis, where Iphigenia is sacrificed by Agamemnon, and Argos (10 and more years later, after the Trojan War), where Agamemnon and Cassandra are killed by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are killed by Orestes and Electra. Often action talks place in both locales simultaneously.
The playing area is an oblong arena spread with mats; the audience surrounds this area on all four sides, sitting on large cushions and looking steeply down at the action. (According to the press release, “The actors are the Greeks, the audience is the Gods,” but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been told.) As we come in, the lights are dim; various performers are moving in the arena, while others are ululating softly in corners.
The lights come up on Cassandra, in Argos, speaking the agony that precedes her death, while two men with clubs move around her miming a combat, and other performers moan and whisper on the sidelines. Clytemnestra comes out to welcome Agamemnon home from the wars, writhing lasciviously on a large sheepskin as she does so. This is a very physical production. Agamemnon embraces a boy before sending him off with an important message. Clytemnestra carresses [sic] Electra as she as she tells of the murder (I cannot just now recall which murder). Aegisthus rapes Electra (a detail Aeschylus omitted), spits on her (ditto), and tells her the story of his father Thyestes, and then goes back and hugs Clytemnestra. Achilles runs around the perimeter of the arena and does calisthenics as he delivers an expository speech. Menelaus cuddles Agamemnon while persuading him to sacrifice Iphigenia. Iphigenia jumps into her father’s arms. Orestes, revealing his identity to Electra, does a somersault as he tears off his mask, after which Electra jumps onto his shoulder. As Agamemnon talks to Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes embrace in a distinctly unfraternal (and distinctly unsororal) manner. And brother and sister work themselves up to their task of murder by means of cartwheels and splits.
Then, in The New Leader, Albert Bermel gives this account:
The evening is aggressively theatrical. 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. The latter, for quick identification, have their names stitched on pants or shirts or, in Agamemnon’s case, on a lifejacket. When they are not on stage, they can be observed in cavelike cubby holes under the scaffolding, dragging on cigarettes, changing costumes, remaking their hair styles, draining coffee from styrofoam cups, and shouting choral lines into the arena.
They warm up with one of those coming-to-birth exercises: Wearing red bindfolds, circling one another warily and waving wooden swords to feel their way, they give out wailing sounds. Blue lights furnish a familiarly eerie glow, and a mood of acute déjà vu settles, but is swiftly shattered. Once the players get rid of the blindfolds and fumbly preparations, they turn out to be, of all things, comedians. Having chosen the stern material of the classics they are damned if they’re going to handle it solemnly.
Electra . . . murmurs to Orestes . . ., you better take Aegisthus’ head and hide it so mother doesn’t see it till she’s dead.” Iphigenia . . . flies up on the shoulders of Agamemnon . . .; her face is now on a level with the gods and she proceeds to chat with them about her pending execution. Clytemnestra . . . begs her husband for the truth, though every time he opens his mouth she cuts in to tell him he’s lying.
On a stage combining a conceptual gymnasium and a sports stadium with a battlefield, the actors do not spare their bodies. Two of them rush toward each other; at the moment when you expect them to thud together with an almighty crashing of bones—they do. Achilles . . . races around and around like a quarter-miler and handsprings over two actresses while delivering a soliloquy. Aegisthus . . . hurls Electra to the ground, dives on top of her and pummels wickedly at her ribs and chest. Orestes thrashes about in his madness, banging his head, back and heels against what is audibly a hard floor.
After 75 minutes of such nonstop punishment, the cast is still able to get to its feet and smile graciously at the applause. No wonder the number of performances is limited. Throw in one matinee a week and they would all be drawing workmen’s compensation.
The criticism was mixed, but leaning toward the positive, and even the negative reviews were generous—possibly because Shaliko was new company making its début in a notoriously unforgiving business. (It may also have been Shapiro’s and Shaliko’s good luck that no one named Simon, Kerr, or Kalb, they of the censorious bent, was assigned to cover the show.)
Shapiro acknowledged that Children of the Gods was commercially unsuccessful, but he asserted that it had created a strong impression on his peers and had an influence on theatrical technique that was still spreading.
Of the Baltimore performances, John P. Sullivan wrote in Performance magazine:
Improvisational theatre can only be successful when the actors are well-disciplined and able to recognize the value of theatrical mannerism and a good script. Because most of the groups who have experimented with improvisational theatre have not been able to cope with this requirement, most of them have failed.
The Shalako [sic] Company . . . provides a refreshing bright light in the field of improvisational theatre. This group has been able to deal with the hazards that have destroyed so many other groups.
Sullivan added: “The greatest problem in improvisational theatre us that it usually fails if the audience is aware that the actor is improvising.” The reviewer pronounced, “The audience is seldom aware that there is improvisation going on in the performance of the Shalako Company.”
“In their staging, Shalako Company strips away all distractions,” Sullivan reported. He had one reservation, though, concerning the role of the audience as the gods, as Shapiro laid it out: “I am not sure that the audience was conscious of any such role,” he decided, but added he doubted “that that particular illusion is necessary.” In conclusion, Sullivan affirmed that “the acting is quite competent.”
In the Baltimore Sun, R. H. Gardner caviled that “I have found the results [of improvisationally-created plays] generally disappointing, owing to the anarchy it tends to breed. A notable exception is ‘Children of the Gods.’”
In the presentation of the Greek tragedies collected into Children, Gardner found that “the emphasis is less upon the lines than the physical action.”
Specifically what the Shalako [sic] troupe has done is to use certain key incidents in the plays—the arrival of Agamemnon, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the murder of Clytemnestra—as themes for dancing, tumbling, fighting, etc. But because they have exercised great restraint in the development of this choreography . . . the production avoids the meaningless motion typical of the genre. On the contrary, it has a definite form; and since the physical action usually enhances the action of the lines, the effect is often a dramatically powerful one.
The Sun review-writer concluded, “The result is not simply a rehash of the fall of the house of Atreus . . . but an entirely new work—for which the Shalako Company is to be commended.” At the end of his column, Gardner advised that “all who do not mind sitting on elevated scaffolds, in lieu of conventional seats, would be wise to attend.”
Of the New York mounting, Patrick Pacheco stated in the entertainment magazine After Dark:
What is often boringly yet respectfully treated, the Greek classics, this imaginative and talented troupe managed to make exciting and dynamic. Using untested and new techniques in live theater which center on the event of the performance . . ., the Shaliko Company proves that vitality and creativity of “experimental” theater.
In The New Leader, Albert Bermel declared:
Suddenly the House of Atreus is flourishing again, and open to visitors. The old foundations stand, but the upper floors have undergone renovations. Hauled out of various closets, the skeletons . . . have been dusted down and reanimated; they now glow with novelty, as they should.
Bermel echoes the sentiment that Shaliko is standout among improvisational troupes:
There are people who berate improvisational actors for their self-indulgence. The Shaliko troupe, however, confirms that hardly anything is more enjoyable than watching performers who enjoy what they do. All it takes is confidence of the most brazen kind; a text on which to embroider crazy variations to their hearts’ content; a director/orchestrator like Leonardo Shapiro who knows how to spin several incidents along at the same time; a willingness to risk getting crippled; and work, work, work.
The Associated Press’s Mary Campbell averred that Shaliko’s Children of the Gods “worked with great effectiveness” by acting out the story straightforwardly so that “it isn’t hard to follow and it is very effective,” Campbell repeated.
In the Village Voice, Julius Novick characterized Shaliko’s Children as “deficient in intelligence and lacks any perceptible point; . . . but it is not bad fun—for a while at least.” Upon describing the physical action of the play, Novick remarked, “Whatever may have been the intention, there is in practice no good reason for most of this.”
“Mostly they seem to be in earnest; sometimes they seem to be trying to burlesque their material,” complained the Voice reviewer. “Not infrequently, I was unsure of how they meant certain moments to be taken, and I wondered if they knew.” Novick continued:
“Children of the Gods” is really, when you come right down to it, a rather preposterous enterprise; but its preposterousness is its charm, and its strength. The legendary creatures of tragedy, still speaking their mighty speeches and doing their terrible deeds, are turned . . . into a bunch of ingenious, energetic, barefoot, simply . . . clad, nice American kids. The performers have the familiar arrogance of American actors; instead of subjecting themselves to the characters they play, they subject the reality of the characters to their own personal realities. But they are so up-front about this, they do it so completely and without hypocrisy, that it becomes acceptable.
I’m going to break in here and make a comment. What Novick is complaining about in that last passage, concerning the characters’ realities and the performers’ own, is the Shaliko technique of “testimony.” I’ve tried to write about this (in the already-referenced “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”), though I don’t know how successful I was explaining the concept.
Novick wasn’t the only person who had trouble with this notion, which is derived from a Jerzy Grotowski theory. The principal exemplar of its practice was Ryszard Cieślak—but he was extraordinary and no one else could quite accomplish was he accomplished.
Novick went on with his critique:
In most cases, [the Shaliko actors] do not even attempt a delivery that would match the elevation of the language; they bring the words down to their own level, speak them colloquially, and by doing so they manage to put some real emotion behind them. . . . Speeches are not boomed out into the air; these people really talk to each other, and when they are not talking to each other, they really talk to the audience, addressing lines to individual spectators and looking them in the eye.
The reviewer from the Voice compared the environment of Children to the setting Grotowski created for The Constant Prince and quipped that “you can bet that this is no coincidence.” I have no doubt that it isn’t. Leonardo Shapiro was a devoted student of Jerzy Grotowski, crediting him with being one of his two principal artistic models (the other was Brecht).
The Constant Prince, one of Grotowski’s most iconic productions, dating from 1967, was performed in New York City in December 1969. It’s uncertain if Shapiro could have seen that performance as he wasn’t in New York at the time—but he wasn’t far away and could very well have made a point of coming here to see it.
Even if he hadn’t seen the production by the time he mounted Children, he would certainly have made every effort to learn everything he could about it. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that The Constant Prince had been a model for Children.
Novick also commented that Grotowski’s apparent influence on Shapiro was not thoroughgoing: “But the spirit of the Shaliko Company is not the gloomy, angst-ridden, ponderous Grotowskian spirit; this is a lively, bouncy, refreshingly unpretentious group of—I have to say it again—nice kids.”
In the end, Novick concluded:
“Children of the Gods” is ultimately a little tiresome, because what is done is so arbitrary; there is so little mind in it, so little purpose and point of view. (There may be—there probably are—all sorts of profound and significant intentions in the hearts of the director and the performers; but since these intentions never become manifest in what is seen and done onstage, for all practical purposes they might as well not exist.) The difference between the Greek heroes and the American kids who perform them is potentially an interesting one, raising all sorts of possibilities for irony, but it is never really used. Still, the Shaliko Company is attractive and, perhaps, gifted, and they certainly do throw themselves into their work. After all, can Sir John Gielgud turn somersaults? The question now, is to figure out what to do with the somersaults, how to make dramatic metaphors of them, how to integrate them into some kind of meaningful theatrical structure.
In the New York Times, Mel Gussow prophesied that trying to “condense [the four Greek tragedies of Children] all into 70 minutes . . . is an over-ambitious, if not impossible, undertaking.” “There are occasional notes of silliness and of pomposity,” Gussow found. “But despite the obvious deficiencies, this work has an interest.
“The actors,” felt the Timesman, “view the characters from their own perspective . . . .” Gussow clarified: “This Atreus is about rejected youth.”
The Times reviewer observed:
To a large extent, “Children of the Gods” is a sporting event. The characters wear their names on their costumes as if they wore team numbers . . . .
They throw themselves through the air like javelins. Achilles triumphantly jogs around the stage as if it were a board track. When an actor is not performing in a particular scene, he sits on the sidelines—benched.
“At times,” Gussow found, “the action is distracting but it does add a certain rhythm—and even a cohesion—to the production.” In addition, he noted, “The actors can, for the most part, handle the lofty language . . . with as much ease as they perform their gymnastics.”
Dubbing Children “an ambitious environmental theater experience,” the Daily News’ Michael Iachetta deemed that there was “something lost in the translation, not to mention the condensing.”
Complaining about the “not-very-soft mattresses” on the scaffolding, Iachetta found the “story is confusingly told through forward action in different time tracks so that dead characters appear on stage alive after they have been murdered.”
“‘Children’ tries to deliver too much too soon but gets A for effort,” judged the Daily News reviewer. “Shaliko should be encouraged to try again.”
Well, Mr. Iachetta:
it did. It kept trying for 19 more years. It never made it big—came close once or twice
(Woyzeck in 1976,
starring Joe Chaikin; The Yellow House, 1986)—but it
made some terrific theater. Oh, and by
the way: Shaliko kept on trying to deliver too much too soon. That was the thing about Leo Shapiro: his
reach always exceeded his grasp. He
never learned; that was just the kind of guy he was.
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