Leonardo Shapiro's 'Strangers': A Dramaturg's View – Part 3

 
A CONVERSATION WITH LEONARDO SHAPIRO
Re: Strangers
18 October 1990, New York, NY 

[At the end of Part 2 of “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers” (11 January), which comprises two memos I sent Leonardo Shapiro to report on my work dramaturging the anticipated 1991 production, I told the director that we needed a sit-down.  This interview below was that conversation.

[The transcript sort of starts in medias res.  (The director and I had talked at the very start of this collaboration, a session that I recorded in my journal notes posted as Part 1 of this series on 8 January.)  The story of Strangers is based on factual reports of two scrap dealers in Goiania, Brazil, who found an abandoned nuclear-medicine machine in 1987 and opened the container of cesium-137 powder. 

[(For a more detailed and complete discussion of Strangers in production, read “Shaliko’s Strangers,” posted on Rick On Theater on 3 and 6 March 2014; for an account of the radiation accident, see “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987” on ROT, 9 August 2020.)

[In Shapiro’s performance text, the two scavengers are conflated with the family of the scrap-metal dealer to whom they sell the cesium container.  Except for six-year-old Leide, no names are used for this narrative in the script, however; the characters are identified only as “Father,” “Brother,” “Mother,” and so on. 

[Having no notion of the deadly potential of the mysterious powder, the family spreads the radioactive core among their relatives, friends, and neighbors because everyone thinks it has magical powers since it glows blue in the dark.]

[RICK]:  To recap for the tape: The Brazilian story [see “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987”] is the center and the main performance text with the other parts around it; not necessarily in direct commentary on it, but in some way a commentary around it.  And all of the other things—when you say “us,” you mean our society, our technological society.

SHAPIRO:  A good answer is USA, in a pretty narrow sense, but you could make it in a wider sense.  If you make it wide enough then we are the same.  There is a sense in which I think there are differences.  And I guess they might be what you were saying; there are people who are acting and people who are being acted upon.  If you look at it in the global sense, we are acting and the Brazilians were being acted upon.

[RICK]:  We create the nuclear medical machine, we create the material that’s in it, and in a sense we caused them to take the thing for scrap because we’re the ones who need the scrap.

SHAPIRO:  But close up, we don’t think that we’re that; we think that somebody else is acting on us, which is what I guess you were saying.  I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.  Put that way, it sounds awfully abstract.  What bothers me about it is that I don’t want to end up with a fatalistic or mechanistic view of, “This is the way things are.  Everyone is acted upon by someone.”  It sounds like Aristotle’s . . . .

[RICK]:  I didn’t think that’s what it was.  I just saw that that was central to each dialogue scene.  There always seemed to be a force that was—not acting, but controlling.

SHAPIRO:  Well, I think there are a lot of ways toward that.  In a way, see, what I think more and more it’s about family.  That’s why I keep coming back to taking the things to be more central.  And in a way there probably is a sort of conclusion about children and parents and parental roles versus child roles, and I may, for my own psychological reasons, be identifying with the children and objectifying the people in the parental role in some way and that might be what you’re getting.  And that could be something that’s completely beyond my control or intention. 

[RICK]:  Of course, it also may not have been there as clearly in the performance as when I read the script.  You see, I don’t have the other tracks that you talk of in the interview; I don’t have the performance of the other tracks.  [I hadn’t seen the videotapes of the earlier performances yet.]

[Shapiro and I did an earlier interview which I didn’t record. The notes in Part 1 are my record of our previous conversations about this project.

[The performance of Strangers was assembled with four co-equal “tracks,” an analogy to the recording industry, and I was going to be concerned with the action (physical enactment) and vocal (text) tracks with considerable focus on the visual (images).  The fourth track was the instrumental, or music.]

SHAPIRO:  I don’t know how coherent it’ll get.  I mean, the more I think about it, the more I think that my best bet at coherence is making it . . . .  Never mind that; I was going to go on about what I really appreciate in production work is, but I’m afraid I won’t have a script. 

So the Brazil story is: they find this thing [an abandoned nuclear-medicine machine], this thing inspires their awe and joy, and also dreams.  And there’s a sort of long dream scene that I want to make much more truthful and that I really fucked up last time and I ended up doing something very theatrically effective but it was basically an up-tempo party scene.  It worked very well musically, it worked theatrically—it was full of surprises, it had some nice images, it had this falling blue stuff [symbolic of the cesium-137 in the machine] that was out of nowhere. 

[Matter of various descriptions falling from the flies was a motif of Shapiro’s productions: sand representing the desert in Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), Shapiro’s 1991 Gulf war protest performance; manuscript pages of “The Judgment” in Kafka: Father and Son (1985, 1990, 1992); and flowers symbolizing tenderness in 1992’s Blue Heaven.]

What I thought to do in that scene was to somehow dramatize everybody’s fantasy that I could then follow through and play off of in terms of continuity.  The mother was going to try to sing—and we did that.  She rubbed the stuff on her throat and she wanted to sing like opera.  And that’s sort of the clearest; the others were very vague. 

The sister—it was never quite clear that what she wanted was movie-star glamour and magazine—or to be some other magazine with a high-powered woman executive.  The cousin was pretty much sexual, because that was [Korean-born] Du-Yee [Chang] and he doesn’t [speak good English] but he’s good at heavy breathing and he’s very athletic; he’s worked with [Jerzy] Grotowski [1933-99] and all kinds of stuff. 

And then I had the brother and he had a sort of vague healer role; it wasn’t clear.  He and the father were the guys who ran the junk shop, the salvage shop where they got it [the cesium core of the machine].  Now I think I want to make him a healer figure from the beginning, and in the beginning establish him as doing fix-it stuff, not just salvage, but repair work, and to go from the idea of repair work to his vision of being more like a doctor.  And then he actually was doing things with the stuff to try to use its powers to heal. 

And then the father was sort of vaguely protective, and the child was playing with her toys, but I don’t know what the hell she was doing.  She was maybe trying to bring them to life.  I mean, I think she was sort of already living in that kind of fantasy world and she was delighted by it, but didn’t need it, in a way.  I mean, she wasn’t dissatisfied with the world she was in in the first place.  But, what she did with it was to try to enliven her toys. 

The thing is, I didn’t follow through on any of this because it got to seem awfully programmatic.  I ended up coming down to a sort of mimed crypto-death scene where I thought, “This seems too obligatory.”  What I ended up with finally was the mother and the daughter were very real and very clear, and they were also my best actors—Robbie [McCauley] and Cathy [Biro].  And Robbie became also identified with Hedda [Nussbaum] and Cathy became also identified with Lisa [Steinberg].  And because Robbie was my best actress, it talked so well, and we ended up using all this Hedda dialogue—because it was dialogue and ready made—much more than I intended to.

[The Nussbaum material was trial testimony, so it was already dialogue and first-person narrative; it needed only selecting and minor editing to fit into Strangers’ vocal track.  I didn’t work on any of that material, though I don’t know what might have developed as the project progressed.]

[RICK]:  According to the interview, you want to cut back on that.

SHAPIRO:  Well, I don’t want to use it just because it’s easy.  Now that I’m not in the pressure of rehearsal I wanted to . . . .  I mean, I’d love to go into rehearsal with a script this time, not find the script at the same time that I’m trying to find everything else. 

[Strangers was built by the Shaliko Company in rehearsal.  The process was improvisational and collaborative starting with the Goiania nuclear accident story.  (A student of Shapiro’s had brought that to him, initiating the group work on Strangers.)  It was developed and workshopped at the Yellow Springs Institute in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, “an international center for art and ideas,” in 1989.]

[RICK]:  When are you going into rehearsal again?  Relatively soon?

SHAPIRO:  Yes, relatively soon.  But the truth is, who knows.  The truth is, I haven’t raised the money yet.  I haven’t thought about this much because mostly I’m trying to raise the money.  I’m kind of sore at my board of directors. 

[RICK]:  I have no intention of trying to pressure you.  After all . . . .  I just feel like I haven’t really done anything for you. 

SHAPIRO:  I think if you don’t do anything but make me think about it, I will owe you a great debt of gratitude.  There’s nobody else here . . . .  Everybody else wants me to do other things.  Everybody I’m dealing with has other agendas for me; it has nothing to do with creative work. 

So anyway, I’m not sure I want to use a lot less of the Hedda [Nussbaum] stuff, but I don’t want to just use it because it’s there. 

[RICK]:  You want to give yourself an option.  You said you wanted to build up the Atlanta stuff.

SHAPIRO:  I thought that section was the weakest section.  So let me go back to where I was.  Even if it is obvious—which is what I sort of rebelled against last time—I want to strengthen each of these six continuing characters [from the Goiania story] so that they have a tag.  Even if it’s on a Brechtian tag level—and hopefully it’ll be on a better level than that—more perfect.  I realize that I have to do that work.  You see, the way it worked out was that the better actors were better defined.  I didn’t have enough clarity going in to give the other actors something to do to produce what I wanted. 

[RICK]:  Now, I recall that you’re going to be using essentially the same cast.

SHAPIRO:  Yeah, except for the father.  M– G– [I’m deleting his name]—I didn’t like working with him. 

[RICK]:  You realize that except for that one person, you’re going to have the same problem.  You’re going to have to resist the temptation to rely on the good actors or work with the bad actors.

SHAPIRO:  The business has to be much clearer. 

[RICK]:  Okay.  But the Brazilian thing is still going to remain essentially non-dialogue.  That takes it pretty much out of what I can do for you. 

[At this time, I wasn’t very cognizant of the “dramaturgy of image” or the “dramaturgy of performing objects,” as John Bell and Robert Massa wrote about, or what Richard Schechner called “performaturgy” (see “A History of Dramaturgy: The Modern Era,” 3 January 2023).  The work Shapiro wanted me to do on Strangers would have been perfect examples of those.  Unhappily, we never got that far.]

SHAPIRO:  Not necessarily.  The important thing is shaping the Brazilian plot.  If I’ve got the plot clear, then maybe I can make some best use of the other material.  So that’s what I was trying to do, tell you that story that I would like told. 

I think the ultimate thing has to do with family and the loss of family and the destruction of family.  I think that’s my guess as to what’s the story I’m telling, although I know that there are eight million other shows with that story. 

[The Goiania story was the center of the action of Strangers.  The other material—Nussbaum, Atlanta, the UFO abductees, Jonestown—was contrapuntal, sort of like Talmudic commentary on the Torah passage or jazz riffs on a main theme.  (The Central Park wilding incident was dropped from Strangers during the workshopping stage.)]

Anyway, they find the stuff, they’re turned on by it, and they have these very specific dreams that it arouses.  And that’s the sequence that I want to rework, where I want to be able to, in an imagistic way, represent all of those things in that scene that ends up in this big party scene.

[RICK]:  I’m just curious: does this material arouse the dreams, or do they already have the dreams, and this seems to be the thing that will make them come true?  Are the dreams already there?  Or does this stuff actually implant the dreams? 

SHAPIRO:  Well, I’m sure the dreams are already there. 

[RICK]:  I’m not sure it makes a difference, but there is a difference.  The dreams are always a part of their world, and this magical stuff that comes from the other world . . . .  They say. “Ah, this will make these dreams come true.”  Or whether that actually gives them the dreams, because the dreams that you’ve given them all belong, at least in part, to that other world.  Being a doctor . . .

SHAPIRO:  . . . Our world . . . .

[RICK]:  . . . in the scientific sense as opposed to being a natural healer, is our world—the modern, technological Western society.  A model or a high-powered executive woman is an our-world thing.  Only the child is . . . .  Making the toys come to life is . . . .

SHAPIRO:  And that’s what I believe.  And I do think that’s correct.  I think it’s as true of us as it is of them.  In other words, these are all images from the official world, the media world—whatever you want to call it: you know, the  world that’s been created by materialism and is these roles, and we see that this is what we’re supposed to do with our lives just the way they do. 

[There are echoes here of the philosophy of the Situationists (the “Society of the Spectacle”) and the personal beliefs (“the preinvented world”) of artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), both of whom were influences on Shapiro’s work and worldview.  See my posts “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3 February 2012, and “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March 2011.]

They go to the same movies we go to; they read the same magazines we read.  They don’t read them as often, but everywhere I’ve been, people’s aspirations are second- or third-hand American.  Even if you walk east from here, we have our own third world right here in this neighborhood, and it’s the same thing. 

[The Shaliko office was in the East Village at E. 10th St. and 2nd Ave.  East of that is Alphabet City (Aves. A, B, C, and D) or Loisaida (Lower East Side), the home to the newest, and often poorest, immigrants since the earliest days of New York City.]

[RICK]:  But if you have non-Western dreams, you don’t come to America. 

SHAPIRO:  But they’re not necessarily any more real for us than they certainly are for them.  Obviously, I guess my politics are pretty clear.  I mean, I wear it on my sleeve. 

. . . .

SHAPIRO:  So, I want to put in those images, both to identify them as individuals and to have something to use so that [unclear]  The piece is supposed to have a clear, easily tolerable plot; the audience is supposed to believe in the power of the story. 

The story is: they find the stuff, they get turned on and share the stuff, they have all these happy ideas about the stuff.  Then they start to get sick, the bad things happen, they go to the clinic, they’re diagnosed as being radioactive, they’re taken to the hospital, one at a time they die.  The girl is the last one to die. 

[Historically, Leide was one of the first two to die.  The radiotherapy machine was found on 13 September 1987 and the cesium was extracted later that day.  Leide and her mother died on 23 October, 40 days later.  On 27 and 28 October, two workers for Leide’s scrap-dealer father died, 44 and 45 days after exposure.  (The two scrapyard employees, who’d opened the cesium container and exposed the radioactive material, were folded into the characters in Strangers dubbed “Brother” and “Cousin.”)]

The scene that probably is confusing to the audience, her [Leide’s] death scene, is played as a nativity scene.  People bring her presents, like frankincense and myrrh, and it’s done musically.  I don’t know if the audience quite gets it or not, but they all do seem to know that she dies during that scene. 

I mean, I watched the audience; some of them actually cry when she goes away, so they must get it.  It’s done as a happy scene, in which she’s given presents, but at the same time her bed is rolled out of the action and she sort of fades away and then she’s sort of happily rattling her things as she disappears, and I think that the audience gets that she dies. 

So she dies, and she’s the protagonist, and that, in a way bothers me a little—only because she’s the one white person onstage, and she gets to be the one whose death counts.  But there’s nothing much I can do about it; she’s the actress that can play six-year-olds.  [Shapiro’s talking about Cathy Biro, the 23-year-old actress who played Leide and Lisa.] 

Of that group, she’s the best actress I have and she looks like a six-year-old.  So she dies, and then she appears as a ghost to her parents—to her mother, and talks about the balance between the angels and people.

[RICK]:  Where is that from?

SHAPIRO:  [Rainer Maria] Rilke [1875-1926].  It’s from the Duino Elegies [published, 1923].  As a matter of fact, the Duino Elegies were my first idea of a text for this whole piece. 

Originally, the angels were the most important for me, and I saw the UFO thing and the radioactive capsule and Jim Jones and all this stuff somewhat in terms of angels, which I thought of more as intermediaries than as actors-upon, but in any case . . . . 

[An interesting side note to this is that the Zuni Pueblo shalakos, the spirits for whom Shapiro named his company, are intermediaries between the gods and the Zuni people.  They come to the human realm to collect the people’s prayers and take them back to the gods—just as Shapiro believed that artists, metaphorically, go off to other worlds and return to share with their audiences what they learned there.]

And there’s other scraps of texts of the Rilke; anything that looks like poetry is probably from somewhere in the Rilke elegies.  We’re using the Stephen Mitchell translation.  Again, I’m just an opportunist.  Cathy knows German and can speak it decently. 

Before that, they die and there’s a funeral, and at the funeral the incident that I don’t think is clear in the action now—there’s a sort of substance of it.  It’s clear that there’s an incident, but the incident is that the people in the town are so afraid of the contamination from the radiation that they actually throw these cement crosses at them to try to stop them.  That’s sort of acted out in the shadows. 

Then she [Leide] appears to the mother—and that may be a dream or it may not be.  Then the last scene is this Ghost Dance—a musical number, which is really meant to be the dead’s dream of life.  It’s not meant to be literally a resurrection, but it’s supposed to be about the possibility of resurrection. 

[The Native American Ghost Dance is a 19th-century rite that Plains Indians believed would resurrect their dead ancestors.  The cult appeared in the 1890s—an earlier cult had flourished in the 1870s—under its prophet Wovoka (c. 1858-1932), a Paiute shaman in Nevada.

[Shapiro—who was born in Minnesota and grew up in Florida, the home of the Seminole Indians—was very attracted to and influenced by several Native American beliefs and practices and he incorporated many aspects of these cultures in his theater work.]

[RICK]:  May I make a probably obvious analogy to the cemetery scene in [Thornton Wilder’s 1938] Our Town?  The dead, who are dead—they’re not coming back, but still there’s the possibility.  They were dead, but they have visions of and memories of life.

SHAPIRO:  Right, but it’s a much more forward-looking thing.  They’re talking about to make life different.  It’s not just, “We liked it when we were there.  You don’t know what you’re missing”—and that kind of thing.

[RICK]:  I meant that it’s not resurrection.

SHAPIRO:  Yes.  And the most telling criticism . . . .  There’re two criticisms of the piece that really bothered me.  One was that it was so depressing that it left people . . . [end of tape]. 

And a lot of people saw this Ghost Dance as a fake happy ending, as an unearned happy ending.  And I was really ambivalent about whether I meant it as a literal resurrection. 

It’s important to me that the basic plot of the piece has to do with “they find the thing, they like the thing, the get sick, they die”—and then something about coming back to life, that it’s not over when they die; that’s not the end of the story.

[RICK]:  Now are you talking about a spiritual thing?  That it’s not over when you die, that there’s something more? 

SHAPIRO:  No, I don’t give a shit about another world.  No, no, that has no interest for me whatsoever.  I’m talking about this world. 

The idea of the Ghost Dance was that all the dead Indians, all the dead animals—especially the buffalo, but all the dead beings—all the dead plants would come back to life and then the next step is, depending on who you listen to, would defeat the white man and wipe him out, or would recreate the world in which everybody would live together. 

But the point is that the people who were totally destroyed, whose civilization was destroyed . . . .  They got cornered to the point after however many hundred years where the only technology that they had to fight against this technology of guns and smallpox and genocide was this artistic, spiritual—this dance.  And by means of this technology they try to restore the balance. 

Now somehow I’m trying to find some practical, immediate, not totally incomprehensible, fuzzy way to duplicate that effort. 

I see that we’re in exactly the same situation as the Indians, that we have become our own Indians, that we have destroyed the land, that we are now what they were then, and the only technology that can accomplish this reversal—or, as the Californians would say, this paradigm shift—is a spiritual technology, an artistic technology.  I think those are more or less the same thing. 

I had a long talk with Rachel Rosenthal [1926-2015; a French-born interdisciplinary and performance artist, teacher, actress, and animal rights activist] about this.  We were talking about why we do it, and there was this endless liberal rhetoric of, “You never know when you’re going to be able to actually help to change something.” 

Her faith, and I guess it’s the basis for the flaky California thinking, is that the consciousness moves in jumps, and that you can be right up to the edge of that jump and not know it.  And then the next year, the next something . . . .  And that does seem, as far as I can tell, to be somewhat accurate. 

I mean, you look at Eastern Europe last year—look at the difference between what happened to Solidarity [in Poland] in ’81 and what happened to Solidarity in ’89.  That’s unpredictable.  You don’t know that if you keep pushing . . . . 

[Solidarity (Solidarność), the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country, was founded in Poland in 1980.  In 1981, under its president, Lech Wałęsa (b. 1943), campaigned for a “Self-governing Republic,” leading the government to declare martial law in 1981.  Eight years later, Solidarity compelled the government to agree to the country’s first pluralistic election since 1947.  In 1990, Wałęsa was elected President of Poland.]

Look at what happened here in ’68: we thought that what was going to happen here in ’68 was what happened there in ’89.  We thought it, the French thought it, the Mexicans thought it, the Czechs thought it.  Maybe we were within ten days; maybe it could’ve . . . .  I mean, who the fuck knows.  I know this sounds incredibly unrealistic, but . . . . 

[U.S.: marked by several major historical events, often considered one of the most turbulent and traumatic years of the 20th century – Vietnam war and civil rights protests and demonstrations, some ending violently, occur frequently, Martin Luther King, Jr., national civil rights leader, and Robert F. Kennedy, popular presidential candidate (and younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy), are both assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson declines to run for a second full term and former Vice President Richard M. Nixon is elected president; France: students occupy the administrative offices of the University of Nanterre in March, starting a chain of demonstrations and strikes that lead France to the brink of revolution in May until President de Gaul calls new elections and averts armed conflict; Mexico: following a series of large demonstrations, around 10,000 university and high school students gather in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in October to protest the government’s actions when the national guard attacks the demonstrations in the Tlatelolco massacre, killing 300-400 and arresting 1,345; Czechoslovakia: the “Prague Spring” of January is suppressed by Soviet tanks in August.]

So, I guess the plot of the Brazilian story for me is, they find it, they have these dreams about it, they get sick, they die, and they dream of resurrection.  And somehow, we get to share in that dream of resurrection. 

We need to identify with this story, see that this story is about us as much as it’s about them, and that we are still alive and capable of affecting—somehow—this dream of resurrection—be infected by it.  That’s my intention for the piece. 

I want it to be a positive piece; I want people to go out there, out of the theater, having made some connection that they hadn’t made before—even if they are sort of sobered by the material and not going out singing the tunes. 

But they have to in some way, on some level, be somewhat empowered, either by new knowledge or by new connections or by being inspired by example that they can take some kind of action in their life—on whatever level.  I’m not talking about, “Go out there and vote for X, or go out there and create new drama, or whatever.”  That’s what I want to accomplish, that’s how I want the piece to feel. 

I want to make it much more choreographic.  I want to make the text on a much more integrated level, with that choreography.  I think the text over-dominated the piece the last time, by the way. 

Then we teched our show wrong.  We were in a space where you couldn’t hear.  I don’t know what it would have been like if . . . .  I didn’t know until we got into the Washington Square Church how bad those acoustics would be with the mikes. 

And my sound man kept thinking he could fix it, and that it would balance—that he could find a way to do it.  He never did.  Now, that won’t happen in the La MaMa Annex [renamed the Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2009].  I’ve worked in the Annex and know that space, and know its acoustics.  The mikes’ll be fine. 

I think I’ve made a basic decision: I’m not going to put any front light on the people on the mikes so that they will not be confused as being actors in a scene. 

I’m not sure about that, because some of the most effective and beautiful acting was at the mikes, and I’m not sure what I’m going to give up by doing that.  But I know that if I do that, I can take the focus where I want it, and I can create the obligation in me to make the other stuff worth watching all the time—even while you’re listening to the text.  I think that a lot of people had no idea . . . . 

Now, the first half of the story was clear to everybody, they understood.  It’s not clear, like some people thought, “Oh, they’re Indians, or they’re this, or they’re that, or they’re rural.”  In fact, they were people who were living in the city . . . .

[RICK]:  That was my first surprise when I read the newspapers articles.  I had gotten the impression from hearing the story that they were probably indigenous people.  They weren’t, they were city folk.  Working-class, but city people.  And it was a big city, not a little village.  [Goiania had a population in 1987 of about 1 million people, the 11th-largest city in Brazil.]

SHAPIRO:  Goiania, yeah.

[RICK]:  Capital of the state.

SHAPIRO:  But ultimately, I’m not sure that I care that much about that, and they got the whole first half.  They understood that these people found this thing, that they didn’t understand it—or that they understood it in a different way than we do.  See, that’s the other thing.  I’m really ambivalent about that. 

[RICK]:  I’m not sure that we’d know what it was, if we came across some nuclear-medicine machine.

SHAPIRO:  Well, we aren’t as easily pleased by . . . .  Anyway, I think they were with the story all the way through when they went to the clinic and they had the radiation exam.  And then, after that I don’t think it was so clear.  I think after that they got it only in spots. 

[RICK]:  Now, I need some idea where you want my assistance, what do you want me to do.  Essentially, you’ve got the story, and it’s a matter now of situating it in the text so that it makes the right reverberations. 

Since the text is essentially not verbal, writing it out would be of little help.  Is it a matter of rearranging some of the other material around that so it focuses it better?  Is that the kind of thing you’re looking for?  This, unfortunately, sounds like the kind of thing that can be best worked on in rehearsal.

SHAPIRO:  This is my problem.

[RICK]:  When you’re dealing with stuff that’s in great part non-verbal, where the performance text is not just the written text, it’s going to have to happen.  Till you get the actors actually moving around in space, and the space keeps changing and the actors keep changing.  You’re not dealing with the kind of thing where you have to know [. . . .] 

[As you might surmise, the tape ended here, though the conversation went on a little longer.  As you can see, at this point, I didn’t anticipate participating in rehearsal work (or any work with the actors).  Since we never got that far, I’ll never know if Shapiro had in mind that I would help him with that aspect of the production, or that our collaboration might have developed in that direction (into the areas I recently defined as “dramaturgy of image,” “dramaturgy of performing objects,” and “performaturgy” (see “A History of Dramaturgy: The Modern Era,” 3 January 2023);

[I remember already thinking in those terms, however—without putting those labels on it—contemplating ideas like costuming and symbolic objects which might strengthen or clarify the connections Shapiro wanted among the various parts of Strangers—working in the visual track, rather than the vocal one.  I didn’t record these thoughts, but I recall going over in my mind some techniques of kabuki staging, which I’d studied, that might by effective.  I never got to develop these thoughts or discuss them with the director before the project was canceled, however.

[The fourth and last part of “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg’s View” will be posted on Tuesday, 14 January.  It will include the notes I took while watching the videotape of two performances of the Shaliko Company’s workshop of the piece at the Washington Square Church in March 1990.

[There will also be a little surprise added.  I continued to think about Strangers (as well as some other of Shapiro’s productions) after he disbanded the company and even after he moved to New Mexico and later died.  I preserved some e-mails I sent years later to a friend, ruminating on this play, and I’m going to append them to the video notes.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT to see what they were.]